Alfred Chester

Among the NYU freshman in the spring of 1946 was Alfred Chester, who later would become known for his experimental writing. He was an 18-year-old middle class kid from Flatbush, the son of a furrier. He had attended an Orthodox yeshiva but was not at all religious, according to Edward Field, who was not a close friend in school but took on the role of keeper of the flame for Chester's literary reputation after Chester's death in 1971.

A bad wig made Chester stand out from his classmates. He once had curly blond hair but a series of x-ray treatments for a childhood ailment had left him bald. Otherwise he was an unprepossessing figure with crooked teeth and a pudgy body. Cynthia Ozick wrote that his wit made him a favorite with the young women of her set, but Chester was gay and one of the first of his group to discover the gay bars. He claimed to have the phone number of Truman Capote, whose early short stories were in vogue with the budding literati.

In her New Yorker article, reprinted in her collection Fame and Folly, Ozick remembers how her freshman English teacher had set her against Chester as a rival, pretty much ignoring the rest of the class, who were mostly vets. The teacher, Mr. Emerson, did not believe there were any real women writers. He called the male members of the class by their last names, but always added Miss when calling on women. Ozick wrote that he had the air of someone embittered by his own lack of literary success. He dismissed Walt Whitman as a "plumber" and extolled Brideshead Revisited, a current best seller, sometimes reading it in class.

Outside of the classroom Ozick and Chester were friends who explored the Village together, They remained sporadically in touch after college. In her essay, Ozick, an otherwise intelligent woman, puts forth the theory that her friend was not really gay but a victim of his lack of confidence over his appearance and needed only to have met the right woman. She seems to think a chubby, bald man with a bad wig and tobacco-stained teeth would find acceptance easier to come by in the gay world. In adulthood Chester was quite open about his sexual orientation and in later life even wrote a gay pornographic novel under a pseudonym. He died in Israel in 1971 after bouts of mental illness and heavy drug use. There is more about his life and work here at Wikipedia.