Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

We made it through the first act of the play by that name based on the 1967 film with Hepburn, Tracy, and Poitier.  We thought it embarrassingly outdated, and a plot so contrived--anyone not meant to be in the ensuing conversation left the scene conveniently enough if only to fetch another handkerchief.  Perhaps there are still  large parts of the country where ordinary polite middle class white people might be outraged that their daughter was thinking of marrying an African-American.  It was 1947 or 48 when my sister brought a black man to Sunday dinner, our black cook who served the meal had a hizzy fit and left the room, and mother had a melt down--this was in the American middle west.  I had taken up having sex with a black football star at our high school a needy guy who was prevented from dating white girls and was willing to settle for relief in the back seat of my car, and over the years we struck up a friendship of sorts.  When a daughter went on a semester study trip to Kenya I encouraged her to get a Maasai boyfriend for her stay.  They were so gorgeous and it would all be so unsensational an experience unlike in the States.  My oldest sister lived with a black male for the last ten years of his life, and I got to know him quite well since they came to visit at my seashore place often.  He was someone who has used the GI Bill to make it into the executive class at IBM, quite a social distance from his mother who was a domestic, as I discovered at his funeral.  His silence on his family was indicative of the artificial comity of our relationship.  There was the same wall between the footballer and myself during our many teenaged conversations.  We never brought up the fact that his fellow students who were so friendly and admiring of him never ever invited him to parties.  Once when we were in college, still sexual partners oddly enough ("can't break the habit,"said with a laugh) when there were black girls everywhere on campus, he took me and a white friend to a --to me strange-- encampment so to speak out in the woods near Cedar Rapids where there was food and drink for sale and a jazz band playing.  I never thought of it at the time, but I suppose that Negroes could not go into jazz clubs in those days.  He and I never talked about the social and political facts of our two races just as we never talked about the fact that I was a queer going down on him whenever he wanted it.  Once a black student came to my house in Brookline and afterward while cutting through on a path to the Roman Catholic Church was apprehended and arrested by a typical Irish cop who saw black and saw crime.  It was dreadfully embarrassing; I got a liberal lawyer who got him off, of course, although the arrest stuck at municipal court level to protect the cop, so the acquittal was at superior court.  The student and I could say nothing; he forbade it.  His anger at me for living in a fancy white suburb came out clear, but what was I to do?  I have not talked, I mean really talked, to a black person for years now.  My trainer at the gym who is Puerto Rican and volunteers at a center for children where the clientele is largely black urges me to take up reading there to the smaller youngsters whose home life is pretty bleak.  But a white friend of mine cautions me that the mothers are all suspicious of the motives of older white males and I am not ready to put my gayness out there and reel it back in with false charges of sexual molestation