Tea, Sympathy, Lies ... and More Lies
Two stories, one fiction and one non-fiction, on the lies we tell others and more damaging, the ones we tell ourselves.
It really hurts when a writer I know dies.
Good writers touch something universal inside us, an emotion or fear we didn’t know was there but once they described it, you realize it’s been there all along. They’ve exposed themselves, so to speak, and when they do it well, we realize it’s okay to expose ourselves as well. It creates a unique intimacy between writer and reader. It makes the world less lonely.
So when I read on Instagram recently that Edward M. Cohen — a human I have known only through his words — passed away on November 5, 2023 from colon cancer, it stung.
On March 9, 2022 I published Cohen’s essay, Tea and Sympathy and Lies. We chatted via email about it. It has been published before, but in this case, I didn’t care. In the short piece, Cohen transported me to the early 1950s where he as a man with “homosexual tendencies” auditioned to play a gay character. Nothing about it was okay. Cohen writes:
In 1953, “Tea and Sympathy” opened on Broadway to raves and controversy, mainly because it tackled a taboo subject, homosexuality. But it did so in an acceptable way because the hero turned out to be straight, after all. So everybody could breathe a sigh of relief. In the end, he learns the truth about himself with the help of a beautiful older woman. That was the way the fifties handled gay life.
I was a 19 year old wannabe actor, suffering with what was then called “homosexual tendencies” so I desperately wanted to play the hero, on stage and in life.
Read the full piece on Esoterica.
In Yorktown, Her Name is Sharon is a work of short fiction by Brian Mosher, another writer I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. In this story, a baseball player meets a priest at a brothel. Piqued your curiosity, didn’t it? Except this isn’t a joke but meditation on love and trust and why some people struggle with both.
There are things you expect when you step inside a whorehouse or a brothel. Or, as Helene liked to call her place, a House of Entertainment. You expect women, obviously. Whisky and gin. You expect to leave with less money than you came in with. And, of course, you expect to have sex, in whatever style you prefer. Personally, I don’t go in for anything out of the ordinary, but I understand there are those who do.
Among the things you don’t expect to find in such places is a priest. Though, to be fair, I found him in the gambling room, not in the parlor with the working girls. Still, it was unexpected.
Another thing you don’t expect is for the owner of the establishment—the Madame, if you like—to introduce you to her five-year-old daughter. And to tell you that you’re the father.