My queer uncle Ted
I was in my first semester at Shimer College when his letter arrived. I had turned eighteen in December and had traveled from home in Washington State to a tiny Great Books college on the western edge of Illinois. I walked from the post box toward my room in New Men’s Dorm. It was January on the plains and the ground was frozen in the parking lot. I opened the envelope.
My favorite uncle had sent me a love letter. John Theodore Ellis was my mother’s younger brother and her favorite. I was her favorite son and as I grew up she sometimes mistakenly called me by his name. Ted spent a year in the Air Force after college and then studied at California Maritime Academy in Vallejo while I was growing up in nearby Cupertino. He graduated first in his class in 1959 and, in his valedictory speech, reproached the administration of the academy for its many shortcomings. (This caustic and detailed speech would in fact be remembered by his classmates more than six decades later. Battalion Commander J.T., as his classmates called him, had been a god-like figure to his fellow midshipmen. Some of them had been trying to locate him for years, and only succeeded in the months before his death in 2015.)
As he traveled to ports around the world Ted brought gifts for my brother and sister and me. In 1962 he gave me a portable Sony tape recorder that he’d purchased in Japan. When he visited he told us fascinating and funny bedtime stories featuring a character named Gubaditch. (Or was it Goobaditch?) He spent a couple of weeks taking care of us when our parents took a vacation to Hawaii in the early sixties. On that occasion he managed to ruin the transmission of my father’s VW beetle: he didn’t realize that it had a four-speed transmission, and had used second gear instead of first to start the car. He was a dazzling and exotic presence in our young lives.
Ted insisted that I destroy his love letter after I had read it, and I complied. I tore it into pieces and flushed them down the toilet at my dorm. He had to be careful of his privacy, of course, and this was long before gay liberation. He had invited me to join him in New Hampshire late in the coming summer. I had no hesitation about accepting.
That semester at Shimer was packed with reading the Federalist Papers, James Joyce, and the Book of Job. I learned about non-Euclidian geometry and that ontogeny repeats phylogeny. I fell in love with a guy named Bob—still my friend more than fifty years later—and had a crush on another guy named Michael. Lola seduced me on a ski trip and I spent quite a few nights in her red Ford van and in her farmhouse bed. I was busy with schoolwork and sex. I returned to Bellingham at the end of May, attended my high-school senior prom and graduation ceremony (I’d finished the requirements six months early) and in August made plans to visit Ted.
He wanted me to shave my beard, which was a scrawny messy thing, because he was a military man and wouldn’t tolerate the hippie appearance I’d been affecting. Maybe he wanted me to be his ephebe; I don’t know. But Ted made his desires non-negotiable, in this matter and others. I was just eighteen and not in a position to complain. And I was hot for him to fuck me.
My mother drove me across the Canadian border, just a few miles from Bellingham, and I stuck out my thumb along Highway 1, headed east to Montreal. From there I could turn south into Vermont and New Hampshire. I don’t remember much about the trip except that people were kind and picked me up in the wilds of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Everyone spoke French in Montreal, and I learned the word for salt.
Ted lived in a modest house near Plymouth, New Hampshire. It was green all around and we worked in the garden and listened to Sibelius on the hi-fi. When he wanted to fuck he’d ask me if I “wanted to fight.” We never fought, but he fucked me with my legs in the air, the doors and windows open in the late summer afternoons. He used Corn Huskers lotion for lube on his cock. For more than a month we lived together, drove around the countryside in his Falcon wagon, picked ripe cattails to decorate the house, listened to music, and fucked regularly. It was paradise for an eighteen-year-old guy. Early in September Ted turned thirty-nine. To celebrate we drove out Cape Cod to Provincetown and stayed in a hotel and fucked some more. He must have been proud to have his boy with him.
After our month together I flew home to Washington because I had college to attend and other adventures ahead of me. Ted and I stayed in touch off and on over the years, but were never particularly close. We never fucked again, although we met at family gatherings on both coasts. Ted was brilliant but difficult and demanding. If you were allowed to visit his house—a privilege granted to young men only except on rare exceptions—he told you what you were going to drink. Mostly it was vodka. I know he had sexual relations with men throughout his life, and I’m sure he fell in love, but I don’t know what love meant for him when he wrote that letter. Ted was not the sort to live with another man for long. He collected art and had homes in New England and the south. He loved his black Labrador dogs more than anything.
Many years later I told my mother that I’d had an affair with her brother. She was initially upset, telling me that she would have protected me, as though Ted were some kind of predator and I wasn’t a randy teenager in need of cock. I told her I was fine and happy.
When he was close to the end of his life Ted asked me to be the executor of his estate and to take care of the few things he cared about. He’d lived long and been everywhere but only wanted to be in New Hampshire when the end came. My mother and I distributed his ashes in a forest near the family farm outside of Plymouth.
I’ve created a blog for Ted’s photographs, writings, and other paralipomena at http://arion1930.b*******.com
J. Theodore Ellis, celestial navigator (1930 – 2015)
My favorite uncle had sent me a love letter. John Theodore Ellis was my mother’s younger brother and her favorite. I was her favorite son and as I grew up she sometimes mistakenly called me by his name. Ted spent a year in the Air Force after college and then studied at California Maritime Academy in Vallejo while I was growing up in nearby Cupertino. He graduated first in his class in 1959 and, in his valedictory speech, reproached the administration of the academy for its many shortcomings. (This caustic and detailed speech would in fact be remembered by his classmates more than six decades later. Battalion Commander J.T., as his classmates called him, had been a god-like figure to his fellow midshipmen. Some of them had been trying to locate him for years, and only succeeded in the months before his death in 2015.)
As he traveled to ports around the world Ted brought gifts for my brother and sister and me. In 1962 he gave me a portable Sony tape recorder that he’d purchased in Japan. When he visited he told us fascinating and funny bedtime stories featuring a character named Gubaditch. (Or was it Goobaditch?) He spent a couple of weeks taking care of us when our parents took a vacation to Hawaii in the early sixties. On that occasion he managed to ruin the transmission of my father’s VW beetle: he didn’t realize that it had a four-speed transmission, and had used second gear instead of first to start the car. He was a dazzling and exotic presence in our young lives.
Ted insisted that I destroy his love letter after I had read it, and I complied. I tore it into pieces and flushed them down the toilet at my dorm. He had to be careful of his privacy, of course, and this was long before gay liberation. He had invited me to join him in New Hampshire late in the coming summer. I had no hesitation about accepting.
That semester at Shimer was packed with reading the Federalist Papers, James Joyce, and the Book of Job. I learned about non-Euclidian geometry and that ontogeny repeats phylogeny. I fell in love with a guy named Bob—still my friend more than fifty years later—and had a crush on another guy named Michael. Lola seduced me on a ski trip and I spent quite a few nights in her red Ford van and in her farmhouse bed. I was busy with schoolwork and sex. I returned to Bellingham at the end of May, attended my high-school senior prom and graduation ceremony (I’d finished the requirements six months early) and in August made plans to visit Ted.
He wanted me to shave my beard, which was a scrawny messy thing, because he was a military man and wouldn’t tolerate the hippie appearance I’d been affecting. Maybe he wanted me to be his ephebe; I don’t know. But Ted made his desires non-negotiable, in this matter and others. I was just eighteen and not in a position to complain. And I was hot for him to fuck me.
My mother drove me across the Canadian border, just a few miles from Bellingham, and I stuck out my thumb along Highway 1, headed east to Montreal. From there I could turn south into Vermont and New Hampshire. I don’t remember much about the trip except that people were kind and picked me up in the wilds of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Everyone spoke French in Montreal, and I learned the word for salt.
Ted lived in a modest house near Plymouth, New Hampshire. It was green all around and we worked in the garden and listened to Sibelius on the hi-fi. When he wanted to fuck he’d ask me if I “wanted to fight.” We never fought, but he fucked me with my legs in the air, the doors and windows open in the late summer afternoons. He used Corn Huskers lotion for lube on his cock. For more than a month we lived together, drove around the countryside in his Falcon wagon, picked ripe cattails to decorate the house, listened to music, and fucked regularly. It was paradise for an eighteen-year-old guy. Early in September Ted turned thirty-nine. To celebrate we drove out Cape Cod to Provincetown and stayed in a hotel and fucked some more. He must have been proud to have his boy with him.
After our month together I flew home to Washington because I had college to attend and other adventures ahead of me. Ted and I stayed in touch off and on over the years, but were never particularly close. We never fucked again, although we met at family gatherings on both coasts. Ted was brilliant but difficult and demanding. If you were allowed to visit his house—a privilege granted to young men only except on rare exceptions—he told you what you were going to drink. Mostly it was vodka. I know he had sexual relations with men throughout his life, and I’m sure he fell in love, but I don’t know what love meant for him when he wrote that letter. Ted was not the sort to live with another man for long. He collected art and had homes in New England and the south. He loved his black Labrador dogs more than anything.
Many years later I told my mother that I’d had an affair with her brother. She was initially upset, telling me that she would have protected me, as though Ted were some kind of predator and I wasn’t a randy teenager in need of cock. I told her I was fine and happy.
When he was close to the end of his life Ted asked me to be the executor of his estate and to take care of the few things he cared about. He’d lived long and been everywhere but only wanted to be in New Hampshire when the end came. My mother and I distributed his ashes in a forest near the family farm outside of Plymouth.
I’ve created a blog for Ted’s photographs, writings, and other paralipomena at http://arion1930.b*******.com
J. Theodore Ellis, celestial navigator (1930 – 2015)
2年前
