Bananas

,To keep your interest up while I write something fresh, here's something I e-mailed a couple of friends a month ago.

In college there was a fairly active intramural sports program, in which I never participated. Basketball was the primary sport. A group of my classmates formed a team which they called the Bananas. Several of the members were fairly close acquaintances of mine, a couple of others were guys I was really attracted to, and others were people I had little contact with and didn't care about, although I knew who they were.

At some point in the time around graduation, the acquaintance I was closest to ("Dan") invited me to join the group for their Bananas Reunion at "Dave's" family's cottage on the lake in upstate New York in early September. Dave was the one I was second most attracted to in the group. The guy I was most attracted to couldn't make it because he had started work, but most of them were going on to law school or med school, so they were still free.

Dan drove me out there, and the scenery in New York was probably the most beautiful I had seen. The weather was ideal. We swam, water skied, went into town for lunch with Dave's family. Just to be with people I liked under such circumstances and to realize that they liked me was, to borrow a phrase from John Denver, almost heaven. I don't know if I consciously wanted some physical contact of the arm-around-the-shoulder type. I certainly did not want sex with any of them. I'm sure I would have liked it to continue longer in the "I wish this could go on forever" sort of way. But when the couple of days came to an end, my feeling was joy at having been there, not sorrow that it was over.

It had taken four years of college for them to get to know me well enough to want me to join them at their reunion, even though I had been on good terms with several from freshman year. But I was quite shy, and I was always cautious to avoid outing myself, so it can't have been easy for them to get to know me. Unfortunately, after that there was no similar situation of a circle of friends with whom I could be a hanger-on until 20 years later (and that's a story for another occasion), and since the Bananas did not get together after that, no close long term friendship developed from it. Dan and I have been in sporadic touch, as have "John" and his wife (who really seems to care about me).

This may seem like pretty thin gruel, but that reunion is something I have always remembered as a beautiful time; and the realization that I had eventually become well enough liked by those guys that they wanted to include me in their group brought its own satisfaction.

Back then orientation was not something people asked each other about, as a rule, and there was less of a tendency to assume that straight-acting people without girlfriends were gay. For example, in my sophomore year, someone asked my roommate, "Do you think Naturgesetz is queer?" and he answered, "No, he's just not interested in girls."