My Story

Guilty on all counts.

It was an exhausting seven day trial in 1992. Two days and eight hours on the witness stand in a stuffy New Hampshire courtroom. A judge brought in from Puerto Rico due to the notoriety of the case. Other student witnesses for the prosecution substantiating the defendant Larry Lane Bateman’s predatory ways, old nemeses with no kind words for me, a former student witness for the defense who swore he sought out sex and seduced his teacher Mr. Bateman.

Where and when did this all start?

For Bateman, many years earlier at his first teaching position and throughout all his career. For me, as Doc Bateman’s 15-year-old Speech student in 1978, I felt affirmed by Mr. Bateman. Unlike the other male teachers who didn’t take kindly to my pushy parents about my grades, Mr. Bateman was kind, supportive in his feedback and gave me high grades. He said was an excellent public speaker and encouraged me to join the theatre club, Viking Masquers. I did and he cast me in fun, memorable roles.

I’d had a banner sophomore year playing lacrosse. But things at home were deteriorating. The following year I began chatting with “Doc” Bateman (as he was affectionately called by his adoring students) during lunch when he had hall duty at North Shore High School.

I shared with him the chaos at home, sleepless nights as my parents took out all their rage and unresolved issues on each other with verbal and physical violence.

“How about an ‘away from school video project?’ Doc Bateman asked.

I was intrigued, proud to be chosen.

“But keep it between us. Don’t want other students to think I’m playing favs.”

I don’t want to trigger anyone who is reading this article (I do in the memoir), so I won’t go into great detail. Yes there was a video project at his home: my character is a student my own age whose sexual identity has been revealed at school. He returns home and is devastated, gets naked and into the tub and slits his wrists (in this case, using tea leaves as an illusion). Doc Bateman videotaped the whole thing.

Later, the wine came out as did the marijuana and porn of guys my age having sex. I’d never seen such things and to say I was in stimulation overload is about right. Add amyl nitrate (poppers) and I was Doc Bateman’s for the taking. And take he did.

Of course this was not nor could it ever have been a level playing field. I didn’t want to lose my friend who seemed to understand me like no one else. I wanted to please him. I posed for sexually explicit Polaroids. We’d meet a few more times: always the same: pot, porn, alcohol, poppers, more. I thought I loved him. I imagined us living the rest of our lives together.

“I’m sorry Michael, I cannot continue a relationship with you,” Doc said the following month.

I was destroyed. Doc Bateman encouraged me to seek people my own age. Of course we’d still be teacher-student and he said he cared about meI was 16-years-old and I didn’t know how to process these intense emotions. By then, I’d discovered that alcohol and weed acted as a salve to bad feelings, albeit temporarily. I discovered gay bars on Long Island and the following year Manhattan nightlife, including places where I was indeed adored, wanted and desired: hustler bars. I loved the free drinks, free dinners, drugs, clothes, travel and overall adoration. But it wasn’t free.

I slept with producers, business titans, drug dealers, even nightclub impresario Studio 54’s Steve Rubell. The message Larry Lane Bateman and other adult care givers gave me as a kid and teen: your worth is as a sex object. But I’m not blaming anyone; I made these decisions as an adult and am responsible for them.

Soon enough I’d burn out on NYC, the hustler and party scene and wind up in Tampa, homeless and destitute. I genuinely worried I’d wind up in a dumpster in the very near future.

But fate had other plans for me.

On Independence Day 1983, with about $20 to my name, I’d meet Frank Caven at the Old Plantation on Kennedy Boulevard. We had what each other wanted and needed but with an over 40-year age difference (me 20, Frank 64) there were challenges. Still I closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

I was the first young man in Frank’s life who wanted an education, not a car or a bar.

As our relationship grew and deepened, I wanted to find a way for us to have a legal bond and suggested that Frank adopt me as an adult. Not uncommon at the time as an alternative to gay marriage which was years from becoming legal. He happily agreed and the judge said, in a courtroom full of kids, balloons and cakes, “I’ll grant the adoption but no need to sit on my lap,” to mystified chuckles.

Let’s fast forward. I ran one of Frank’s bars in DC while he convalesced from a stroke.

There was much intrigue in his gay bar empire and I was a moron and over my head. I returned to Dallas and finished my senior year at Southern Methodist University. Frank and I were estranged by the time he passed away, my graduation week. I was hired into Neiman Marcus’s Buyer Development Program.

One day I returned to my apartment from Neiman Marcus to a thick package in the mailbox. Inside a cassette video tape and a smaller envelope with Polaroids.

The sexually explicit Polaroids my teacher had taken of me nearly ten years earlier.

I stared at them. Who is this boy, I wondered? Is he having fun? I searched my memory. It’s blurry because of the weed, alcohol and poppers. Yes, I did it because I wanted to please my teacher.

“Call me Lane,” I remembered he’d said.

I envisioned we’d live together forever, I recalled.

Back at Neiman Marcus, I worked every last nerve of my bosses and colleagues: alcohol relapses, bipolar episodes, over medicated, under medicated. Just a few miles away Oaklawn, Dallas’s LGBTQ community where I was once at Frank’s side and a player; now just an assistant buyer catering to the players of Dallas high society.

I decided I needed to put Dallas behind me. A geographic cure, they say in A.A., mine to be found at The Limited in Columbus Ohio. I packed up my white Rabbit convertible for a one-way trip east.

No surprise, I lasted about a month before another alcoholic breakdown. HR offered me time off to get myself together; my doctor suggested a local Columbus out psychologist Howard Fradkin. For the first time in my non-Frank life I was able to afford the co-pays and I started therapy. I’d known for quite a while something was very wrong.

In our fourth session together (the first three were about my history and family traumas where I sat close to the door — ready to bolt — and had difficulty making eye contact with Howard), I took a deep breath and groaned, “Oh. My. God. He took advantage of me, he wasn’t my friend.”

The ceiling of my therapist’s office flew off and a searing white light pounded my face. I could no longer escape the reality I’d been running from for so long by killing the feelings of shame with alcohol and drugs. I now fully knew what this man this did and how he took advantage of my youth, innocence and naïveté.

And my new life began.

My new life also included a new partner Tom. A year younger than me, we were on a level playing field. Despite my shame and fears, he did not abandon when I told him about my past.

My therapist Howard had me read some literature about male sex abuse survivors. It was affirming to see I’m not alone.

Early on we discussed the Polaroids and porn Bateman sent me. We decided to table any decision for at least six months. But I thought about it every day. I knew students at Phillips Exeter Academy were at risk with Bateman on campus.

My new life also included a new partner Tom. A year younger than me, we were on a level playing field. Despite my shame and fears, he did not abandon when I told him about my past.

My therapist Howard had me read some literature about male sex abuse survivors. It was affirming to see I’m not alone.

Early on we discussed the Polaroids and porn Bateman sent me. We decided to table any decision for at least six months. But I thought about it every day. I knew students at Phillips Exeter Academy were at risk with Bateman on campus.

I knew he was grooming male students and probably perping them. He couldn’t help himself. His dissertation, which evidently North Shore High School or Phillips Exeter Academy didn’t bother to read, is about male teachers seducing male students.

Eventually I consulted a family attorney. She asked: “What do you want?” I said: “I don’t want him to do to others what he did to me.”

“Ok, here’s how,” and she laid out the ground work.

She secured an immunity from the New Hampshire authorities. I traveled to NH to make an affidavit. A search warrant was secured and Bateman’s Phillip’s Exeter Academy campus apartment was searched. All manner of porn was found, including evidence of on-campus activities and illicit photography and videos. The case was moved to the federal level and I testified before a grand jury.

Which brings us to the trial. Other students besides myself testified including an Exeter student, who was 16 at the time Bateman abused him and like me, eager to please his teacher. The witnesses for the defense said I was a drug addict, hustler, crazy and not to be believed. The witnesses for the prosecution included a former classmate who corroborated that I told her in 1979 that “something happened” at Doc Bateman’s house. And me, I testified for eight hours over two days. I testified truthfully and as the prosecutor noted in closing arguments was much more “forthcoming” than Bateman. During questioning, Bateman’s attorney unsuccessfully tried to rile me up. His bad as I stayed cool and kept my eye on the outcome. Even disgustingly waving around the sexually explicit Polaroids to shame and embarrass me didn’t unnerve me.

The outcome was inevitable. The jury saw the outrageousness of Bateman’s perpetration of me when I was a teen, I was a credible witness and most of the jury came up to me afterward, wished me the best and thanked me for my courage.

I thought the most challenging part of it was over.

If only.

The next day I flew to NYC to be interviewed by Vanity Fair’s Jesse Kornbluth.

Meet Jesse Kornbluth Advocate for a Pedophile Serial Child Molester

Here is the article, “Exeter’s Passion play.”

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1992/12/exeters-passion-play

It’s not my favorite.

Why?

First, it opens with an incredibly dumb question: Was Bateman a danger to his students, or only to himself?

Even the most simplest of minds knows the answer to this inane question. A serial child pedophile molester, of course he was a danger to his students. The question is an affront to Bateman’s victims.

Later, Kornbluth asks: Was a young informant with a grudge bringing a private matter into a public scandal? Another incredibly dumb and ignorant question. Of course the vile manipulation by a trusted teacher of a 16-year-old student is not a private matter. Sending explicit Polaroids of the abuse is not a private matter.

The sex predator three-part mind-fuck to their victims is: 1) you’re lying, 2) it never happened, 3) you’re crazy. Jesse Kornbluth follows this playbook throughout.

The article attempts to create a mystery where there is none; knowingly falsely alludes that Bateman didn’t own a video camera while teaching at my Long Island high school (of course he did, there were video cameras in the 1970’s and part of his MO teaching Speech class and drama auditions); represented the same source as two different people; didn’t include evidence of Bateman’s ongoing crimes and perps of students at Phillips Exeter Academy, his final teaching position.

And it portrayed me as a dastardly hustler and that poor Larry Lane Bateman the hapless pedophile had been victimized by me. A Washington newspaper columnist at the time wrote: “…probably the most heartfelt and sympathetic portrayal of a convicted child pornography trafficker yet to appear in print.” Further, “not a kind or empathetic word for the man who claimed to have been abused by Bateman as a teenager…if Bateman’s cache of pornography featured little girls, rather than little boys, it is unthinkable that he would have become the object of a sympathetic profile in the likes of Vanity Fair.”

So why would Mr. Kornbluth write with such compassion and concern for a pedophile child molester serial sex offender? You’d have to ask him. (I sought a podcast to ask him that very question a year ago and learned he is in a nursing home in Manhattan; he died last spring.)

I suspect deep down Mr. Kornbluth believed I was not a victim as a 16-year-old and had the capacity of consent to Bateman’s maneuvers.

For the record, it was not nor ever could be a level playing field, even though I did participate and get seduced by the overwhelming stimulation of Bateman’s pot, porn, alcohol and amyl nitrate (poppers).

Still, re-reading the article after over 30 years, I see that Kornbluth threw me some crumbs and my voice is heard a bit despite the sensationalistic noise.

And the Vanity Fair article, whether I like it or not, will always be a part of my story.

Please know, the picture of me from the article (see other side) shows a determined young man who 48 hours earlier was on a New Hampshire courtroom witness stand being ineffectively berated by Bateman’s attorney and respectfully questioned by the prosecution.

For myself, the public exposure of the more colorful aspects of my past was a small price to pay to put Larry Lane Bateman out of business — and is the most important accomplishment of my life.

As for how male victims are viewed, I’d write an op-ed “The Imperfect Victimhood of Male Sex Abuse Survivors” in the New Hampshire Union Leader in 2024:

“This I can assert joyously: Life can improve after abuse. The challenge for the male survivor is to find and accept the compassion they deserve, even if it is missing from those who might be expected to step forward. And for everyone else, there’s an obligation: to explore our own thinking until we can fully accept the reality of male sexual abuse and deal with its consequences.”

About my last telephone conversation with Jesse Kornbluth. I told him he’d promised a balanced article and it felt balanced in Lane’s favor. He didn’t respond but said, “How about we talk again in five years? Same with Lane. See how you’re both doing.”

That would be 1997, five years later. I never got the call. If he’d called, Kornbluth would have learned that I’d earned a Master of Science in Education, worked in mental health, including in a sex offender treatment program; in 1995 co-founded the US’s first LGBTQ themed restaurant Out On Main; awarded the Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign.

Tom and I had a civil union in Vermont. The internet was up and running then, so he could have learned any of this. Whether he did or didn’t, it certainly didn’t follow the narrative of his Exeter article where he withheld that I was a college graduate and had successfully held two management positions in retail organizations. He was vested in me being a hustler, liar, con artist and predator.

During our interview, he casually mentioned that he was temporarily holding onto a pornography collection in his NYC apartment for a friend from the Hamptons. Was he trying to bait me to turn him into the authorities? I mean, what is wrong with this guy? Halfway through the interview, he told me that his definition of a victim is someone who gets clobbered over the head on the street by a mugger. At that point I considered ending the interview. But naive me thought I could educate him. I even sent him literature on male survivors. Falling on deaf ears of course.

Jesse Kornbluth had no mind left at the end of his life and spent his final months in a psych ward in a nursing home. Obituaries lauded Kornbluth’s prolific writing and he was indeed erudite. The NY Times noted many of his magazine profiles were from his high-end social circle: “He did not gush, but he was not a takedown artist, either.”

Except when it comes to this male survivor of sexual abuse. Which in his mind I was really a volunteer and as a teen was capable of consent and an older person’s actions are done on a level playing field. Why does he have that belief? We’ll never know. What does that say about him. It’s obvious.

Hey Jesse, The NY Times didn’t single out your advocacy and concern for the poor victimized pedophile Larry Lane Bateman.

But I’m still here, motherfucker, and I get the last word.