I opened Facebook the day after I watched Maestro and saw that a friend must have watched it the night before as well.  Her response surprised me.

“There is no soul,” she wrote. “No pulse to it. What woman in her right mind would concede her life to a gay man?”

I had to laugh. Besides the music, particularly the Mahler, what I loved most about Maestro was its deeply honest, layered look at a relationship I recognize from my own life. A relationship that saved me from self-loathing and taught me true love.

 Back in the olden days when I was young, misogyny was unguarded, and discrimination against women was prevalent – it was everywhere and out in the open. Straight men and women alike extincted the Ugly Girl, ignored the misfit, discarded the nonconforming woman. If we were not Helen Gurley Brown emaciated and/or Gymnastics Barbie adorable, we had difficulty making friends, attracting lovers, finding jobs.  Our fellow women could not afford to like those of us who were less than perfectly feminine, attractive to men, passive in accepting our rightful place.  Women were motivated by the need to bag their men; to be the friend of the Ugly Girl was to risk the stigma of association.  No woman wanted to be ignored by the men she sought to impress.

In that distant pre-Stonewall 60’s past, gay men, too, found themselves too often alone and friendless. Many sought beards, female partners who would protect them from the prying sensibilities of those who would out them. Being outed could put gay men in the same position as the non-standard issue female: at odds with the ability to find suitable jobs, housing, friends. Relationships with strong women – women who could stand beside them and anchor their respectability. – were a way to buffer the implied slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. They may not have offered sex to the women they courted, but they often gave more valuable gifts in abundance.  Gifts of attentiveness, admiration, validation, companionship. Many of us who were on the outside of social acceptability in the straight world found comfort and peace among the homosexual or bisexual men who needed us as much as we needed them.

As a naive As a naïve innocent from upstate New York, I arrived on the dating scene with at best a tentative self-image, and I soon saw that I had been identified as one who would do very nicely as a doting beard.  I was clever, nonjudgmental, erudite, and empathetic. I knew I was needy as hell, but I sublimated by giving until I was empty, and I was easily sated.  I got the affection I craved but never demanded, and my needs were met.

Maestro took me back to the year I was 17 and my very first real boyfriend Mark, a lovely gay Native American from outside Santa Fe. A boy who was, in every way that counted then, my perfect match.

We met in the scene shop at the University of New Mexico, where we both majored in drama. 

Stagecraft and scene design were required freshman classes, and on that first day, because I had never ever held any kind of a construction tool in my hands, and because I was without a single acquaintance in the class, I was feeling out of my depth and alone. Then a slightly chubby, deeply tanned young man asked me why I was wearing a key on a chain around my neck.  The nonsequitur startled me a bit but made me smile.

“I lose things,” I answered frankly.  “I’ll get locked out of the dorm if I can’t find my room key.”

The boy laughed and looked through me before he said, “You know, in Mexico, if you wear a key like that, you are letting the world know you are for sale.” He grinned.

I blushed.  “Oh. I guess that would assume anyone would be interested to buy this,” I indicated my bulky body and stifled a self-deprecating giggle.

Mark laughed. Then he aimed his dark brown cow eyes directly into my soul. “You would undoubtedly attract only the best of buyers,” he said.  “No sleazy airheads who are looking for a kewpie doll but anyone looking for a real woman.”

I was instantly smitten.  Remember, it was a different time!

For the next nearly two years, Mark and I were inseparable. Being with him made me infinitely happy.  Partly because of the superficial ways in which he satisfied my fantasies. Squiring me around in his fancy sports car – we even ran away together over spring break to escape the boredom and would have landed in NY if the car had not thrown a rod. Taking me to plays and films. Teaching me how to order alcohol. Introducing me to the kinds of excitement I could not have found in my insular hometown, like state fair rides and huevos ranchero and group peyote trips.  But it also made me happy that I made him just as happy as he made me.

Like the Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegro that Bradley Cooper and Carrie Mulligan portrayed, Mark and I finished one another’s sentences, guessed what each other was thinking, provided a blanket of support, love and acceptance neither of us had experienced before.

Even Mark’s mother adored me, invited me often to visit their large reservation home outside Santa Fe, where she was a tribal elder. She introduced me to Georgia O’Keefe.  Not O’Keefe’s work.  O’Keefe.  She would sit up with us late into the nights I was there, laughing at our stories, entertaining us with her own.  We were family.

Mark and I were melded.  We were the reconstructed humans in Plato’s Symposium, reconstituted as two halves of a single being. The fact that we didn’t have a lot of sexual intimacy was reassuring to both of us then.  I still believed that good girls didn’t, and he was grateful that I had no expectations. At the time, I was naïve enough to be unbothered when he took lovers and disappeared for days at a time.  He always returned to me. To our idyll. 

Knowing what I know now, I am sure I would have been jealous had Mark fallen in love with the men he bedded.  But I also know that I would have learned to live with the pain, would have found a way to sublimate my anxiety about it.  Our relationship was worth it to me.  If Mark had been bisexual, I might have proposed that we marry and start a family just like the idealized Lenny and Felicia.  He was not.  And in the end, his inability to commit for life was what ended our relationship.

In our second year together, Mark fell in love.  With a wonderful man. Our relationship would not fit in with the kind of arrangement they necessarily made with one another.  Mark never said as much, but I knew. I moved on.  We lost touch.

That was fifty+ years ago. . . .

I recently searched for Mark on Ancestry and found his obituary. I was overcome with a sadness I hardly expected.  And I realized that the fact that I searched for him at all was proof he still lives in the deepest corner of my heart, where I hold my parents and others I have lost.  He remains my first and deepest love. 

My Maestro.