![]()
Call me Artie. Your story about visiting Lynchburg, Virginia, the "scariest place on Earth," made me laugh. I grew up in Marion, Virginia, about a hundred miles away, and Lynchburg was our beacon of culture and enlightenment!
This was long before Stonewall. I graduated from high school in 1951 (don't do the math: I know how old that makes me!). But we knew all about gay people; every town had its resident "queer," and there were private men-only parties where guys from 100 miles around would gather.
In Marion, the parties were held at the home of the high school drama teacher. One of the regular guests was John Anderson (not the presidential candidate): about 40, with a slim, slight build, a little moustache, a hairy chest, and rather big down there, but a complete bottom. In those days, young guys were always the "trade," so it was quite a kick watching Mr. Anderson reverse the roles, bottoming for twinks and Cute Young Things.
Mr. Anderson was the mayor and the editor of the local newspaper, plus he had a wife and daughter at home. You may wonder, wasn't it dangerous, in Virginia in the late 1940s, with gay sex being a crime? You see, if anyone told on Mr. Anderson, he would report on them, so we were all safe.
It wasn't just about sex. We were a circle of brothers, a bulwark against the homophobia of the outside world. We joked, gossipped, and told stories about dates from hell and celebrity hookups, just like you did in West Hollywood parties years later. Mr. Anderson liked to tell the one about his first three-way:
New Orleans, June 1925New Orleans in the Jazz Age! What could be more exciting for a teenager with an adventurous spirit, a famous father, and a stepmother who was trying to buy his love with endless gifts of clothes and cash?
Robert (never Bob) was fascinated by the new social and sexual freedom of the 1920s. Women had the right to vote, and could drive autos, smoke, and wear pants with barely an eyebrow raised. Men wore perfume and marcelled their hair, and called it the latest style. Black, white, Creole, Italian, Jew: all races mixed with equality and passion. There were proponents of free love, birth control, anarchy, Bolshevism, vegetarianism, and Buddhism.
Robert's father was Sherwood Anderson, the literary flaneur whose
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is still required reading in schools. Their apartment in the Pontalba Building, off Jackson Square, was a bona fide literary salon, a gathering-place for writers and artists of all sorts, from Carl Sandburg to F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the writer who most fascinated him was Bill Faulkner.
William Faulkner is famous today for Southern Gothic classics like
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and
Absalom, Absalom!, but in the spring of 1925 he had only published poetry, and only in college magazines. He was working on his first novel under Sherwood Anderson's tutelage.
![]()
He was 28 years old, a short, small man, not a Charles Atlas "physical culture" type, soft-spoken, rather fey; yet his dark eyes and intense energy were immensely attractive. Robert assumed that he was queer. He wondered what queers did in the bedroom, and resolved to find out.
When Faulkner first moved to New Orleans in November 1924, he stayed with the Andersons, but by March 1925 he had fallen in love with Bill Spratling, a 23-year old instructor of architecture at Tulane. He moved into Spratling's apartment in Pirate's Alley, about a block away [now it's the home of Faulkner House Books], where they held court with a large group of artists, writers, bon vivants, and intellectuals, most of them queer men or women.
Robert barged his way into some of their soirees, and was disappointed to find no sex going on, just a lot of drinking, piano-playing, and discussions of Valentino, Kandinsky, Thomas Mann, and "Rhapsody in Blue."
Maybe if he caught them alone, they would be in the middle of an act, and he would be invited to watch -- or join in.
The rest of the story, with nude photos and explicit sexual situations, is on
Tales of West Hollywood.
