My parents packed the car, left my siblings and me in the care of college students, and drove to St. Louis. Dad clipped on a name tag proclaiming him a “Pro Writer.” In the elevator on the way to their hotel room, my parents met an older man wearing rumpled clothing: A. E. van Vogt, a writer Dad revered. Sincere and down-to-earth, he glanced at my father’s name tag and said he’d read “Population Implosion” and admired it a great deal. This was exhilarating for a deeply insecure man whose greatest fear was being recognized for what he was—a country boy come to town—a fear shared by all rural people, and one I know very well.
In St. Louis strangers asked for his autograph. Women flirted openly. None of the men wore ties, and Dad left his in the hotel room. He met other writers with long hair and beards. Surrounded by the outrageous styles of the hippies, Mom no longer worried that the wives of doctors and professors might judge her clothing.
My parents went to St. Louis with the confidence of people who were naive to their own na?veté, and returned astonished. They had never questioned the lives they led or the motivations for their decisions; they merely followed the patterns of the time. They hated Communists, loved JFK, and flew the flag on national holidays. A gigantic Douay-Rheims Bible sat on a dais in the dining room. The goal of life was to make money and children.
A photograph from Worldcon 1969 shows my father in a gray pin-striped suit coat and a white turtleneck sweater. One arm is folded across his chest, the other propped before him, his empty hand posed as if holding an invisible object. His expression is unusual for its frowning discomfort, eyes staring upward. Dad’s hair is quite short and he is clean-shaven. My mother faces him in a sleeveless cocktail dress, her hair in a perm that puffs around her head. Both appear ill at ease.
Ten months later, photographed at their next SF convention in 1970, my parents have undergone a drastic change. Around their necks are silk kerchiefs loosely held by metal clasps. Both wear rock-star sunglasses. Dad has a full beard and long hair. He’s dressed in blue jeans, a thick leather belt, and a loose shirt with epaulets and flap pockets. Mom’s hair is cropped into a pixie cut. She wears a blouse, jeans, and sandals. Each has a broad smile, their bodies in open, relaxed postures. Starved for a sense of social belonging, my parents had found a community that embraced them—science fiction fandom.
Local people occasionally commented that Dad was turning into a hippie, eliciting one of his many pre-thought responses: “Hippies don’t shave. I’m raising a beard.” Mom’s new haircut alarmed me. In the Bible Belt of eastern Kentucky, I was taught at school that a woman’s hair was her glory and she should never cut it off. No other woman in Haldeman wore her hair short.
The Bible vanished from the dining room, replaced by an equally large copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Dad gave our property the official address of The Funny Farm, putting it on legal documents, stationery, and bank checks. Entering the public world of science fiction fandom offered Dad a chance to leave identity behind—as a businessman, family man, and dutiful citizen.
For decades American literary circles ignored science fiction, placing it at the very bottom of the popular genres. This gave the writers a great deal of freedom, which they used to explore sexual themes in a more overt fashion than other books could. The science fiction market had dried up as pornography ignited, and many writers moved to porn. Among science fiction fans, there was no stigma attached to writing porn. As a result, Dad’s pornography was accepted, and John Cleve transformed to a fully formed role he could embody.
From his papers I learned that Dad’s experiments with a literary mask had begun at age fourteen, when he baled hay for fifty cents an hour and bought a pulp magazine featuring Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. He wrote two Sheena stories and submitted them without success under the name Anson J. O’Rourke, utilizing his initials. In childhood he was known as Jay, Little Andy, and A.J., which instilled in him the malleability of identity.