Young Man From The Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall

by Alan Helms

An insider’s account of gay high society in pre-Stonewall New York City—now back in print

Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he soon became an object of desire in a gay underground scene frequented by, among many others, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich. In this unusually vivid and sensitive account, Helms describes the business of being a sex object and its psychological and physical toll.

Genres: LGBT, Memoir, Nonfiction, Gay, History, Autobiography, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 1995

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up to avoid feeling like I'm being mingy out of severe sour grapes

Beloved Boston cultural institution Alan Helms had a wildly exciting past! See the film! Admire his art collection, appreciate his cultured and elegant way of speaking, his breadth of cultural knowledge, and his charming sweetness.

What does a young, abused man from flyover country do the moment he realizes he's queer? RUN! Get to New York City as soon as possible. He got to Columbia University in 1955, leaving behind a life in Indianapolis, Indiana, that could charitably be described as "uncongenial." A father who thought his son was a bitter disappointment...how many of us queer boys can relate to that...a mother whose situation wasn't a lot better than his, a younger brother whose close brush with death was the single moment in his childhood when peace reigned. None of this is a recipe for a healthy adulthood...and add in the author's understandable, if off-putting, self-absorption and you get a difficult-to-empathize-with narrator.

But he was So. Beautiful. Look at that face on the cover! Hoo-ee!

And the awfulness of that...wow...to be so pretty and so readily available and so snobby, who can claim to be surprised that he wasn't a pleasant person? His sexual awakening came at the price of being raped. His family life prepared him for a life of abuse. He dived into it in the glamorous world of closeted gay life pre-Stonewall. Pretty sexually available intelligent boys found innumerable lovers, and the author wasn't about to say no. (I totally relate to this and would've done precisely the same in his shoes. Damn the bad luck of not being pretty!) So a decade and a half passed in what I imagine was a golden haze...this book's largest part. It's a bit less charming to me than it might be to a younger reader. I look at the wreckage he glosses over and think, "there's the real story."

Yes, sleeping with famous Hollywood stars and titled Eurotrash is all very well. But the people you stood up, the ones whose parties weren't quite glam enough that you said you'd attend, and so on and so forth? How did you sleep, look in the mirror, launch yourself at the next big fish in your hifalutin' pond without thinking about them?

The Fall took place when he was thirtyish, and some semblance of human feeling broke the ice he'd cultivated to keep his agony at bay and under the surface of a freezing cold lake he called his heart. Escape to Boston and the tender mercies of a shrink who began the process of waking the author up from his frozen state. Then it happened: His body aged. He wasn't the hot young muffin anymore; he wasn't even visible to the hot young muffins. That had to be a bad, bad day.

Now, let me not try to hide my glee here. This event has occurred in my life, too. I can not imagine how much worse it was for a formerly gorgeous creature, feted and celebrated and wined and dined, to be cut off from that gushing geyser of distractions. Luckily for his sanity, Helms had a brain and a deep love of the life of the mind that he'd never left behind or neglected. While learning what he'd never known, that feelings are best felt in the moment and not in retrospect, I'm sure he left more carnage behind in his wake. But the fact that no one ever killed him means that he learned enough to at leas fake his way through professional, if not personal, relationships. So hope still shines for him to pull his head out of his ass and recognize that, in his swan-paddle through youth, he got into some ugly emotional habits that would be wise for him to shed before he's patted in the face with a shovel and 120 cubic feet of dirt dropped on him.

I guess it shows that I don't like the man too much. Yes, part of it is envy: I would've LOVED to live among those glittering parties and glamorous people, and I'm jealous that he won nature's looks lottery. But more of it is the sense that grew and grew as I read his (ampersand-laden) memoir that he wasn't sharing his journey with me.

He was bragging that it happened.

I suppose I would too, and that is a disappointing self-revelation that elicits deep sadness in my shallows. Read the book, o ye queer boys over 50 to relive a lovely, dead time when we were few but fabulous; QUILTBAG youth, especially young and pretty ones, definitely think about your history; y'all straight folks, mm, on balance I'd say not unless your Gay BFF approves it for your personal tastes.

[Michael Andersen-Andrade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in hopes of gaining a glimpse into a certain stage of my father's life, who, like the author, was a very handsome man from the provinces (in my father's case, Ogden, Utah), who moved to Manhattan in the late 40's and lived the life of a closeted homosexual until he decamped to Hollywood in the late 50's. Unlike the author, my father married and had children, but was temperamentally, psychologically and morally unsuited for either marriage or fatherhood, and my mother left him after discovering him in the arms of another man. He was a successful producer and director in mid-century Manhattan, and it's possible he may have encountered Alan Helms professionally or socially. I was a child not of the provinces but rather a product of that same mid-century Manhattan, but I knew I was gay from the very beginning and was fortunate enough to come of age at the dawn of the gay liberation movement so I was spared the closet but did witness some of the glamour of that gilded Manhattan from a child's perspective. Alan Helms' tortured but star studded youth was both unique but also universal enough that many gay men will see themselves mirrored in his long struggle from self-hatred to self-acceptance, and I highly recommend this book for all gay men who are making or have made the same journey.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this book and am still processing my thoughts about it.

Like the main character I am also from a small midwestern town and came to the big apple as a young man.

But unlike my arrival in the mid eigthies, this protagonist arrived in the mid 50's when gay's were still closeted and celebs still mixed with hoi polloi in secret little bars, clubs and parties.

Also this protagonist was uncommonly handsome and winning. This led him to meeting the likes of Noel Coward, Tab Hunter, Elain Stritch, Leonard Bernstein and a host of other celebreties in the top tiers of New York's social elite.

Also unlike this protagonist I didn't come from an abusive home with an alcoholic father. I found the battling of this man's personal demons intermixed with his doings with the social idols of the day compelling.

A good friend of mine did come from an abusive houshold. He's used his good looks and charm to gain him access to social circles his midwestern upbringing would not normally entitled him to. The parallels here were oddly fascinating as well.

Overall an interesting read. This man obviously knew many of the brighter lights of the day but we don't really see that much of those lights. They serve as a background to this one man's struggle to accept himself and find happiness.

Definately NOT a tell-all and definately NOT a bright sunshiney work about the good ole days. Those with an affinity for celebrity and those that like to hear about NYC in a bygone era will be satisfied if not sated.

[hanja mcG · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to leave it @ 4 stars bc the name dropping became annoying for me. The ending gave me tingles tho!

[Mark Falcoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It turns out that one of my Princeton classmates was a lover of Alan Helms--I didn't know it until I read the book. He gave the guy a fictitious name, but I suspected the truth and went to meet Alan Helms at a reading when he came to Washington DC. He confirmed my suspicion. I was amazed! Here was one of my best friends in college, and I had no idea that he was gay or even had a fantastic love life in New York and Fire Island (whose very existence I was unaware of). It gives you an idea of how things have changed since the 1950s.
This book is a work of art and literature as well as a personal testimony. For those who can"t imagine what gay life was like in the US before Stonewall, this is the book to read.
I found the elderly Alan Helms (actually he is only four years older than myself) handsome, charming and charismatic. I suspect half his male students and all of his female students fell in love with him

[Brett Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled across this book upon it being referenced in another work on gay history. Part One revolves almost completely about growing up gay in Indiana in the 30s and 40s, which I’ve never actually read about before now. Being from Indiana, I found it to be perspective shifting when considering my own life and my family’s stories about Indiana at that same time. Underlying take away for me is that the deep seeded gay angst of so many “provincial” gay men has always been present, no matter society’s level of acceptance. The inner work of unpacking that angst is a life long journey and I’m grateful for the author’s witness to that work.

[Matthew Steiger · Rating 2 out of 5]

You end up feeling bad for the author because he is so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can't live in the moment. If he was such a great beauty and model why aren't there any photos? He makes it really hard to like him or even sympathize with him. You want to like the book but I just ended up feeling bad for him.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helms' memoir recounts his life as a young midwesterner who was able in the post-war period to escape to New York City where he found a thriving gay community. While there is much hand-ringing in the book about the difficulty of being one of the beautiful young men of the period, and lots of name dropping, it allows readers to see what gay culture was like in NYC & Boston in the 1950s & 1960s.

Without any preparation or the slightest hint of what was about to happen, I had just walked into a world of men like me, & I simultaneously experienced two overwhelming, diametrically opposed responses: ‘My moral universe has just been turned upside down,” & “thank God, I no longer alone.” The dread of a new fear, the euphoria of an immense relief. 65

The summer after my junior year in 1958, I remained New York doing test shots & putting together a modelling portfolio; otherwise, I spent my time exploring the gay world. It was such a different world, & now such a vanished one, that's not easy to explain. Intensely secretive & hidden, it went on mostly at night behind the unmarked doors of bars & in apartments where the shades were always drawn. The 415 bar on Amsterdam Avenue was typical: you walked in, saw a few locals talking with the bartender, & and figured you'd made a mistake. But through an unmarked door in the back & Down a flight of stairs, you entered a cavernous basement teeming with hundreds of gay men who were dancing & laughing & cruising & kissing & drinking & and passing out in the johns. No wonder that during my two years with Dick I'd not had the slightest suspicion such a world existed. It was determined to remain as hidden as possible. 74

There were gay men walking the streets of Manhattan in those days who had been rendered incapable of sex or had their memories obliterated by electricity. For some, it would take years to put their mind back together again; for others, the effort was hopeless. Of all the enemies we had, psychiatrist were among the most dangerous. And our parents, of course. I never met anyone who was out to his parents; you had to be crazy to do such a thing.
There was no place in the public where it felt safe to be gay. Even inside the world you weren't secure, since bars & parties were raided all the time. 74

Except for the drag queens, bless their sassy, revolutionary hearts. But they always got beaten up & arrested & thrown in jail, over & over again. ‘Such masochists,’ we said. ‘They’re really sick.’
Whenever our world came into conflict with the straight world, group loyalties crumbled. Threatened with arrest or blackmail, thrown out of a party, chased down of midnight street by a gang of fagbashers, each gay man for himself, running for fear, lost in a panic to save his own skin. We didn't have much political awareness, partly no doubt because our enemies were so often invisible: cultural opinion, legal precedent, psychiatric theory, social convention, religious stricture-nothing you could insult or demean or punch in the face in return. The most pernicious enemy of all, & the most invisible, was our own self hatred.75

We were disposable, the scum of the earth, living crimes against nature… I don't remember that we talked about the sense of shame the straight world bred in us, but it was pervasive in our lives, & I don't know anyone of my gay generation who's ever been able to shake it. I certainly haven’t. 76

If you were a presentable young gay man with manners & a good suit, there wasn't anywhere you couldn't go in the world of art & entertainment, & those world easily opened up other vistas. Because I was gay, I had much more social mobility I've been straight. As for the gay world, it was much smaller & more concentrated than than now…78

Sam Sloman-aka Sally Sloan, your Aunt Sally, your mother & the Sobo heiress (his father invented Sobo Glue)-what's the Elsa Maxwell of New York case Society in the ‘50s & ‘60s. 80

But all objects of desire cause pain because they exist only in the mind of the desirer. There's always a fatal gap between the real person catalyzes the desire & the effective person conceived by the desirer. 105

Arthur Laurents cast me as the young woodsman in a production of A Clearing in the Woods, his own place starring Celeste Holm…106

I also loved the baths for the strange democracy that reigned there, or rather the inverted oligarchy in which stockboy & student took precedence over lawyer & banker. Like any post-hunter & gatherer world, the baths had their own hierarchy that created exclusionary values that created haves & have nots, but youth & face & body & sexual equipment were the determining factors, & does that sense of exhilaration that comes from entering a topsy-turvy world where customary values are inverted-Fire Island Pines, Mykonos, Alice’s Wonderland, the Lenten carnival…138-139

‘It takes two to make a truth,’ bob quoted one day from Nietzsche (meaning that nothing is fully real or significant until it's been shared)…147

So many gay men had turned into grotesque mirror images of the worst in American straight men: the insensitivity & intolerance, the swaggering macho bullshit, the failure of imagination, the immense self absorption. Bars & disco were now full of mirrors, & men dance with their reflections as if cruising themselves…161

[Mediaman · Rating 1 out of 5]

A really bad book in which an insecure literature professor (who doesn't write well) looks back at his youth, spending most of the pages either praising himself or condemning his family. It's pathetic. I've never read a book that was so vain, arrogant, and filled with self-flattery. Will Smith's book did more to promote a huge ego; this one is just the sad story of mentally ill man who thinks turning hundreds of tricks with gay guys makes him the king of the world.

Unfortunately, Helms spends too much time on his family, condemning his drunk father and crazy mother, while slamming his siblings. He goes out of his way to constantly go back to how terrible they are. Everything is done in an attempt to make himself look good.

The rest of the book is simply him bragging about how handsome the New York City elitists think he is, how many famous people wanted to bed him, how many random hookups he had, and how suddenly it all went away in his late 30s when his hair started falling out and he moved to Boston. There are few actual stories here--it's mostly listing monotonous things he did like high society parties or overseas trips. The writer doesn't appear to have much money or even much of a personality, and he's simply a trophy boy that believes the rich and famous think he's special or unique. He's not--he simply is another body they can use for a night. The problem is that Helms manages to give so few details about his gay sexual escapades that it's downright boring.

Then there is the constant namedropping of people he "knew." One page lists almost 40 names of some of the biggest stars or political leaders of his time (the 1950s, when he was a hot body that everyone seemed to want) and instead of giving us any idea of which celebrities he actually knew well he simply writes, "Some became close friends and a few became lovers." Rock Hudson? Nat King Cole? Rex Harrison? Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud? Adlai Stevenson? Dalia Lama? Why would he name all these people and make us guess who he went to bed with?

We do know a few he failed to bed. Robert Redford (though Helms tried to seduce him) and Leonard Berstein (who wanted the young man but Helms wasn't interested). Otherwise he skips through a couple dozen people he fell in love with but nothing is compelling. He never puts a number on how many he had sex with, but it seems to be in the thousands. And once he starts to age, he finds guys in bathhouses to boost his ego.

In the end he glosses over his major issues: lots of drugs, drinking, rage, and a number of suicide attempts. He brags near the end about finding peace with AlAnon, but why wasn't he in AA or NA or SA? The guy had serious addictions and when one of his lovers it always resulted in him hitting the bottle or the pills.

The book then oddly ends 20 years before it was published, with a few pages tossed in about a later visit to his family. None of it is logical or congruent beyond the author trying to get some sense of happiness. But he never truly finds it because he's looking in all the wrong places. His unattractive aging body isn't going to provide contentment, it's what's inside a man that nourishes his soul.

There is nothing redemptive about this book. All it does is reveal how mentally ill some sex addicts are. There are many in the gay community that want to distance homosexuality from mental illness, but this guy was crazy and paints himself as the most wanted lover in the history of gay NYC. He tries to blame society in a few spots but it becomes clear that he is the issues, with his lack of self-awareness and his dependence on random sex. His vanity and arrogance is undeserved, and he should spend time focusing on his own self-hatred instead of blaming others in his family and the world.

[Ilya]

I picked this up after reading it mentioned in Dwight Garner's review of the re-issue of "Tramps Like Us."

Helms' story is more dramatic than TLU, less captivating, and has a lot of value as gay social history.

Helms has a tough childhood in Indiana, a tender romance at Columbia in the 1950's, followed by a bad breakup, and then becomes a much sought-after it-boy in Manhattan. It is this last phase, and the consequences thereof, that make up the meat of the memoir. Helms befriends Noel Coward, Elaine Stritch, Stephen Sondheim, Luchino Visconti, and many more. But this is not an amusing remeniscence of famous-people-I-have-known.

Helms rolls into a decades-long life of narcotics, alcohol, no-strings-no-love sex, and deep insecurity. It's not just the prevailing homophobia of the time that torments him (quite a few friends kill themselves), but also his stunning good looks ("the most famous piece of ass of my generation" is Edmund White's book blurb.) With so much attention on his body, the narrator is unable to develop a sense of his soul.

Although not devastatingly handsome, I do sympathize.

But this is also the root of the book's problems. Every few chapters, Helms announces a breakthrough. For instance, he takes a Yugoslavian freighter to Europe and finds a better life there. He begins analysis with the psychiatrist/writer Robert Coles, finally facing his ills. He starts a new relationship, better than the ones before. No matter. No breakthrough is lasting, no improvement can be sustained. Even at after the book is done, appended to the afterword, is a *second* afterword in which the author informs the reader that following this book's initial warm reception, he became an alcoholic for three years.

Again — I sympathize. Helms' life is not to be envied. But in time the reader learns to mistrust every sign of improvement. The twists and turns of his misery become tedious. The author is stuck looking in the mirror, contemplating his thinning hair. Shaving it all off, making a new start with a new look, never enters his mind. He has not learned his own value, has not accepted himself, and perhaps never will. Brutal to contemplate.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Helms autobiography narrates the tale of a young, brilliant, and attractive man who moved to New York City in 1955 after escaping a difficult upbringing in the Midwest. Helms was denied a Rhodes scholarship due to his sexual orientation, and following that he quickly rose to fame in the gay underground scene that was frequented by Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich, among many others. Helms outlines the business of being a sex object and its psychological and bodily toll in this extraordinarily detailed and empathetic depiction.

I found the book riveting and beautifully written. a documentation of the LGBT community that, throughout the past 25 years of liberation and the previous 15 years of AIDS, had all but vanished. Even as I realized the differences between Helms and myself I also noted resonances with parts of my life in this personal memoir. Helms sped through the fast lanes lined with famous people, but he knew how to take a step back and gain some perspective. Stunningly humorous, captivating, pitiful, extremely literary, and excruciating to read. In this disrespectful environment, Helms seems to be a gay Everyman whose search for self-awareness, respect, and satisfaction is similar to that of many other disenfranchised persons.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book when it was first published but remembering nothing, I got another copy. The author had a miserable dysfunctional childhood in Indiana but was smart enough to be accepted to Columbia U in NYC and his life changed. He came out and then entered the Gay A crowd and for 4-5 years he was one of the most desired gay men in NYC. He made friends with celebrities and was all around miserable with the idea of staying desirable. He had enough sense left to leave the scene and ultimately became a PHD and a college professor. He was still miserable but at least became a productive citizen. This book is not a fun read, with run on sentences and long, rambling thoughts. I hope he found happiness someway.

[Hunter Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging writing style and larger-than-life story of a long journey to self love and self discovery. Fun to learn of life in NYC, FIP, Ptown, etc. Troubling to reminded of hardships and loss so frequently experienced among the community in that time.

[John Treat · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insufferably narcissistic from page one. A tired, clichéd, and ultimately oddly homophobic book.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glad to have read this book, though it was a frustrating task - mostly because the author is a very unhappy man. It's tough to sympathize with someone who seems to have a lot going for him, yet continues to self-destruct at every opportunity. Helms is best when he is documenting gay life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, the book focuses on his own narcisstic needs and they are many. At times, you want to throw the book into another room because the author is ranting about his looks, his needs, his neuroses and other not very important issues. At some point, the reader realizes that the author would have been a mess whether he was straight or gay. The book promotes the idea that Alan Helms was the "it" boy of his generation, yet there is little solid evidence to bolster this claim. For example, there is the cover photo, which does not show us a classic beauty at all, and the photo on the back inside depicting the author in his late 50s. (I bet it took him forever to decide which picture to use.) There are no other photos of the author and that's a shame, because then maybe the reader could get a better idea of what the author was going on about. Another annoyance: Who decided to replace "and" with "&" throughout the book? And if anyone can find a more accomplished name-dropper, I'd like to know who it is. Read this book as a cautionary tale, and be thankful it is not you.

[Lee Rene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Helms crafted an elegant, moving memoir of a handsome, brilliant young man from a provential town. Helms details his own story, a hick who becomes the golden boy of an ivy league university and the darling of New York's gay scene prior to the Stonewall Riots and gay liberation. It is a unique glimpse into a life that no longer exists,a beautiful youth seduced by celebrity, drugs and wealth. Stunning book!

[Bobby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good read throughout but it really got powerful near the end as the author begins to age and and his view of the charmed life he's lead matures. It's a lesson hard learned, we can run as far as we want in life but once we slow down and finally take a seat the same skin we left in has arrived with us still intact.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, beautiful-just a snapshot of a time when being gay wasn't acceptable and extremely honest. One of my best friends suggested I read it and it's one of my favorite books of all time.

[Lynda Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find reading about gay life in the 50's and early 60's to be absolutely fascinating. What I wanted more than anything though were pictures. I want to see pics of this golden boytoy!!

[Thomas Keane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of real-life Dancer From the Dance

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book, very powerful, especially towards the end.