Battling the fear of commitment
Eric Hyett loved men his own age -- or perhaps a bit older -- and long-term relationships.
Now, he had neither.
And, to his mild surprise, he found himself enjoying this footloose interlude -- living the life of a single, gay urban hipster.
"[It] is a great experience," he would say later. "I highly recommend it."
It was February 2002, and the 31-year-old Brookline native was living on Avenue A in New York City, thriving at the center of a large circle of successful gay friends who took their late-night club scene as seriously as their day jobs in skyscraper boardrooms and brokerage houses.
His latest relationship had fizzled, painfully. Reconnecting with someone special had become a back-burner project.
Still, part of him persisted.
He posted a personal ad on one of the nation's largest gay websites. Color photographs showed him smiling through sunglasses and holding a football. In others, he stretched bare-chested across a bed.
Visitors to the site learned that he was 5-foot-10, weighed 160 pounds, and worked out four times a week. His favorite book? "One Hundred Years of Solitude." His favorite food? Sushi.
He whimsically sketched out the first three dates with his mystery mate. They would watch French movies, sip champagne, ski all day, watch football on TV, cook a meal together, and spend the night.
"I've been everywhere & would love to go back with you," Eric told his profile readers.
A couple of miles away, sitting in his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, 24-year-old Joshua Glazer scanned the ad and liked what he saw.
The guy in the ad looked cute and sounded down to earth. Josh loved the picture of Eric holding a football.
This, he thought, is the kind of guy for me.
Just after 10 p.m. on Feb. 1, 2002, he pecked out a hopeful message to the man in the photos.
"Hey, loved your profile, it cracked me up," Josh wrote. "Feel [free] to check out mine."
As Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, dawned, Eric was looking forward to another high-energy weekend.
He was meeting a group of friends at New York's Roxy, a gay nightclub, that evening. And on Sunday, the New England Patriots, his hometown team, were playing in Super Bowl XXXVI. Eric looked forward to a football bash in Brooklyn.
But before the parties began, he decided to take Joshua up on his offer. Eric scanned the website for the profile.
If Eric's Internet persona was sexually charged and hip, Josh's was disarmingly homespun.
In one photo, he smiles thinly with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his blue jeans. A stuffed Bullwinkle, the cartoon moose, accompanies him in another.
"I'm looking to meet people I have actually have stuff in common with," Josh wrote in his website profile. "And just because your gay doesnt mean we have something in common. . . . I'm not big into the sceen, dont get me wrong, I enjoy going out, just not everynight.
"I'm looking for someone i just feel at ease with and want to spend time with. And ultimately, yeah, a boyfriend would be great, it's just hard to find that real special someone."
Eric read past the misspellings and the stilted grammar of electronic discourse. He decided to write back.
"Hey Joshua! i liked your pix & profile. Looks like we have a bunch of things in common: sushi, close jewish families, celebrity sightings @ the gym."
And after teasing him about his spelling errors, he gave Josh his telephone number.
'I knew something was off'
Unlike Eric, who by now had been open about his sexuality for 13 years, life as an openly gay man was still a relative novelty for Josh Glazer.
He had grown up the oldest of two sons of a Long Island businessman and his homemaker wife in a tight-knit Jewish family very different from the Hyetts of Brookline. If Eric and his younger brother Brian remember eating by candlelight and holding hands with their parents as they discussed the day's events, Josh recalls loud, but loving, family arguments over evening meals.
"Forks were optional," Josh joked.
As a boy, he had struggled to control his weight and to overcome a learning disability. His parents hired tutors for him -- and, with their help, he won admission in 1995 to the University of Miami.
By then, Josh had been dreaming of older men. He found it strange, but did not dwell on it. In high school, he had dated, and had a steady girlfriend for two years.
"But I always knew something was off," he would later recall.
During his first week in college, another freshman, Yona Kweskin, saw Josh walking across campus toward her. When he offered to walk her back to her dorm room, she immediately sensed that she wasn't being hit on by another oversexed freshman.
This boy just wanted to be friends, she knew. There was something charming about him.
As a college undergraduate, Josh dreamed that what he had seen at home would someday be his. A close marriage. A loving family. To him, it seemed like the ultimate prize.
He battled his sexuality for a long time. He really didn't want to be gay.
After college graduation, at age 22, he had sex with a man for the first time. He had hoped that he would not enjoy it. But he did. He dated a series of men but hated his closeted life. He wondered how he would find a lasting relationship.
And he wondered how he would tell his parents that he was gay. They still peppered him with questions about who he was socializing with. His mother, Joan Glazer, kept trying to fix him up with women in whom he had no interest.
"If you don't want to go out with her, I guess you're gay," his mother told him more than once.
One day, during a shopping excursion, Josh decided to stop fighting back.
"Fine," he recalls saying. "I guess you're right."
"So you are?" his mother said. "I thought so."
No histrionics followed, nothing like the tempest that greeted Eric when he came out to his parents as a college sophomore.
His mother, in fact, wished he had done it sooner. Her son was one of the world's worst liars.
"I knew he was lying," Joan Glazer said. "And I knew it hurt him."
Now hugely relieved, Josh began telling friends. They could see how transformed and happy he was. Few were surprised by his news.
When Josh told his friend Yona that he had something important to say to her, she made him wait until a commercial interrupted her favorite TV show.
"Obviously," she told him. "I've known it for years."
A courtship begins
By Super Bowl weekend 2002, Josh had had three short-term relationships. A couple of them had lasted long enough that he felt comfortable calling his partner his "boyfriend." When the breakups came, he soon shifted his attention to someone else.
And now, with Eric's telephone number on his desk, he wondered whether he should reach beyond the electronic images and witty words on a computer screen.
Eric wondered, too: Was Josh too young for him? Would his close Long Island family object? But he loved Josh's photographs; his height-weight ratio was just as Eric liked it. Josh's desire for a relationship seemed genuine.
By Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, the two began a telephone courtship. And Eric had invited Josh to join him and his friends for a party at the Roxy. But Josh, not interested in a night on the town, demurred.
"If you want call me when you get back tonight, so we could break the ice tonight," Josh wrote.
Eric replied: "[I] will give you a call when I'm finished reveling -- all the red bull in the world can't keep me out much past 4 a.m. -- so i'll give you a ring & see what trouble you've managed to get yourself into ... or if you're just a sensible boy, in bed, asleep (alone!?)"
The next day was Super Bowl Sunday. By now, the two were intrigued enough to want to meet face-to-face.
Josh, home with his parents for the weekend, took the train back into the city.
Minutes after Adam Vinatieri's field goal sailed through the uprights in New Orleans to give the Patriots their first Super Bowl triumph, Eric found himself stuck in traffic in Brooklyn. They decided to rendezvous at Eric's second-story loft apartment in the East Village.
As he approached Eric's door, Josh was nervous and excited. He wondered whether Eric in the flesh would jibe with the photographs he had found so attractive.
"I was happy," Josh later said. "He looked just like his picture, and he sounded and acted how I thought he would be."
Eric's first impression was a mixture of elation and trepidation.
"He was adorable," Eric said. "I immediately thought, 'OK, this is a really cute young person. He's way too young for me.' And immediately all my defenses started going off at that point of why this wouldn't possibly work out."
Josh spent that night with Eric, and returned every night for the rest of that week. For him, it was love at first sight. He saw something in Eric -- an infectious intelligence and passion for life -- that he didn't want to live without.
For Eric, it was the beginning of a tempestuous time, as he see-sawed between a longing for commitment and a fear of not getting it right. His anxiety had more to do with timing and personal history than the still-fresh scars of his parents' divorce. He wanted to take his time working his way toward his next long-term relationship because he wanted it to last.
Josh seemed to him too eager, too ready for a total commitment.
"Josh found me and grabbed on like a little parasite and did not let go," Eric said. "And I tried to shake him for, what? Six months? Three months? ... He would not let go no matter what happened."
Within a week of their first meeting, Eric introduced Josh to his brother, Brian, who was in town with some friends. Josh was impressed with how at ease Brian was in Eric's world, and how close the brothers were.
Brian knew his brother was pushing Josh away. "Hang in there," Brian advised Josh. "He's worth it."
Soon, the men began negotiating the number of nights they would spend together each week. Josh wanted seven. Eric wanted four. They began spending five nights a week together. Then six.
One unusually cold spring night in New York, the two sat in Eric's apartment watching television. A freezing rain fell outside. Eric wished aloud for a Chipwich, a chocolate-chip cookie ice-cream sandwich. Josh promptly got up off the couch, left the apartment, and came back with three of them.
It was a simple act of selflessness that struck a chord.
I have never been loved like that, Eric thought. No one had ever cared enough to do something like that.
Eric, as both men recall it, turned to Josh and asked: "Is this a one-time thing, or is this who you are?"
"No, this is who I am," Josh replied.
"What else am I possibly looking for?" Eric said.
Soon, Josh was spending nearly every night with Eric. And now Eric, too, was in love.
That fall, the men attended a late-night Halloween party at the Exit nightclub. They talked nearly until dawn and then went home to sleep.
When they awoke that morning, Eric turned to Josh in bed next to him.
"Josh, would you want to spend the rest of your life with me?"
"Yeah, I do," Josh said.
Audio: Josh and Eric realize they're in love
Repairing a rift, settling in By the spring of 2003, Eric and Josh were packing for southern California.
Eric would soon be taking a lucrative job with an information services company in Costa Mesa. Before they left, they conducted a simple private ceremony in their New York home in which they pledged their love for each other.
They purchased $19 silver engagement rings from a street vendor in the East Village and slipped them on each other's ring fingers. They hoped to soon exchange them for the platinum wedding rings they had already picked out at Tiffany's.
Now Eric had a new home, a new relationship, and a new job. And he had repaired the biggest personal rift of his life: His six-year separation from his father.
Eric and Norman Hyett had barely spoken since 1997. Once a year, father and son would see each other. But their attempted reconciliations never took hold.
Eric was particularly pained by Norman's complaint that his marriage had been chronically unhappy.
Norman, Eric believed, was rewriting history and rejecting the family en masse -- its value system, its verve, its funny and tender rituals.
"[My father] seemed to say that all of it had been a lie," Eric said. "It caused me a lot of anger but also just a lot of grief to realize that he had such an extreme negative view of what had been in my mind an extremely positive family for a long time."
First Brian, then Josh implored him to move beyond his anger.
Brian, who had gone seven months in 1999 without speaking to his father, warned that Eric would suffer for the rest of his life if he failed to "fix this with Dad."
Finally, as he moved toward a civil union with Josh, Eric softened his stance. He didn't want to celebrate such a major milestone while still estranged from his father. He needed, and felt he deserved, Norman's support.
They talked on the phone. Eric grew less angry, Norman less defensive.
As a boy, Eric loved to help his father do repairs and chores around their Brookline home. Now, it was Eric who needed handyman help with an air-conditioning unit.
"Dad, would you do this with me?" Eric remembers asking.
"I'd really like to see you," Norman replied.
As 2004 unfurled, Eric and Josh settled into the rhythms of life as a committed couple, living in their two-story rental home, high on a steep hillside overlooking Laguna Beach and the Pacific Ocean.
They have sporty cars, enjoy the gay nightlife 50 minutes away in Los Angeles, dote on their dog, Flo, and dream of someday adopting children of their own.
In conversation, they call each other by pet names. To Eric, Josh is "Tiger." Josh calls Eric "Babe."
Josh has begun a wedding planning business, whose first customer wonders why he has to fight for what she, as a bride, will easily celebrate. While he readily acknowledges that Eric is the family's major breadwinner, Josh resists the straight world's husband-and-wife labels for their relationship.
"We realized that Eric and I have different priorities," Josh said. "Eric was already pretty high up in the corporate game and really wanted to play that. . . . I don't want to work 40 hours a week. My responsibilities shifted toward the house."
Josh takes care of the dog and the garden. He does the cooking, the grocery shopping, and the cleaning. "I'm not allowed to dust in front of [Eric]," Josh said. "It's a little too gay."
In Josh, Eric sees a kindness and a generosity of spirit that reminds him of his parents at their best. And he sees something else, too: a caretaker, the role Eric had assumed in nearly every previous serious relationship.
He knows Josh's career choice is feminine, in the old-fashioned sense, and that his role in the household is to be supportive.
"And yet the joy of it is that Josh is a guy and he's actually a pretty masculine guy," Eric said. "And that's really fun for me. It's been kind of amazing to have somebody who wants to do those things and take care of me in that way. I never had somebody take care of me like that. Ever."
The best man
As the same-sex marriage debate in Massachusetts simmered and then exploded into a national story, few followed it with the intensity of Eric and Josh.
Last winter, with marriage within reach, they scuttled plans for a civil union in Vermont, a step they saw as less profound and validating.
Without marriage, Josh knew, he would never be considered Eric's spouse.
"Otherwise, he's what? My friend? I want him to be legally related," Josh said over a mid-February dinner in Laguna Beach. "It's not just like he's my boyfriend for the rest of my life.
"And the benefits are important. I want to go to the doctor's office and write 'spouse.' I don't want to write 'single' on my tax return. I don't want to do any of that. Because I'm not."
Eric said once he and Josh are married, he intends to list Josh as his spouse with the human resources department of his company.
"Once I have that [marriage license]," he said, sitting in their small dining room off a deck with breathtaking Pacific vistas, "no one is ever taking it away from me."
As Eric speaks, Josh's parents, Ira and Joan Glazer, are resting at a nearby resort hotel, having flown in earlier that day from Kansas City.
The next night, over a dinner of wine and salmon at a crowded restaurant just up the Pacific Coast Highway, it is clear that Eric enjoys a relaxed and friendly relationship with the couple he already considers his "in-laws."
He smiles when Ira says he marvels at Eric's ability to put up with Josh's "nonsense." The son who drives badly, who can never find his keys, is now chiefly Eric's responsibility.
And Eric's demeanor barely changes when Ira, a staunch Republican, says President Bush's opposition to same-sex marriage will not send him fleeing to another candidate this fall. To Eric, Bush is anathema.
Ira views Eric and Josh as already married.
"They are as good a couple as you're ever going to find," Ira says over the dining-room din. "Their relationship doesn't change because somebody agrees that they can get married or not married."
For Joan Glazer, the family's firm Democrat, the critical issue is her son's happiness.
"And all I want is for my child to be happy. But would I have loved it better for Eric to be Erica? I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say yes."
What she wants now is to celebrate her son's union with Eric.
"A lot of my friends' kids are getting married," she said. "And I'm buying engagement gifts for everyone. And nobody's buying engagement gifts for my kid. Or wedding gifts. ... You want your child to be like everybody else and have all the joys."
And that's what Josh and Eric had already decided they wanted for themselves, too.
By the time the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made it clear that gay couples must be allowed to marry in the Commonwealth beginning on May 17, Eric's brother, Brian, and Amy Lowenthal had been engaged for months.
Brian and Amy had booked their hotel ballroom, readied their guest list, and pondered the proper language for their invitations.
This was to be their wedding year, their special moment in the spotlight.
From his home on the hill above Laguna Beach, Eric picked up the phone to deliver the news to his brother, 3,000 miles away in Brighton.
Eric hoped Brian would understand but knew he might feel displaced. And he did.
Fraternal fireworks flew. There was an exchange of angry emails and phone calls.
Almost immediately, Amy played the role of mediator, helping Brian recognize that for his brother, a special window of opportunity had opened. And, before politics and public opinion could close it, she argued, it was time to act.
"Amy really stepped up, and I felt that she was so on my side," Eric said.
As the brothers worked things through, angry words softened. And then evaporated.
"I want to stand with him in May and really stand with him -- 100 percent," Brian said. "That's who I want to be. . . . Life is too short, and Eric and I have lost too much to lose anything else over this."
Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com.
