The Farewell Symphony (58 page)

And then my sister went up to the coflln. My stepmother whispered in my ear, "Oh, God, she's taking his hand. Now she's sobbing and kissing him on the lips and saying things to him."

I didn't dare look, since that would entail seeing the head, that waxed thing. Later I sidled over to my sister, put an arm around her and gave her a cup of coffee. She said, "I told him that I thought he was a bastard. He'd ne\er gi\en me what I wanted. He'd always preferred other girls to me—remember that Miss Toledo he met and liked so much?—he always threw her up to me, especially when I was so roly-poly at fourteen or fifteen. He used to walk around nude when we were alone and once he touched my breasts and told me seductive things and I cried and said, 'No, Daddy, it's wrong, you know it's wrong,' but of course I liked the attention and felt guilty that I liked it and I was half-attracted to him. After all, he was the only man who'd ever shown any interest in me."

"I always wanted to have sex with him," I said.

"You say that because you know it was impossible. But incest, real incest, especially between members of the opposite sexes, is very upsetting. I think it's why I was frigid with Dick and I still have trouble getting close to women."

"Did you take his hand?"

My sister blushed and started to cry. "Yes. I put a ring on his finger. I wanted him to be buried with something of mine."

"Which finger?"

"The wedding-ring finger."

I hugged her. I had to sign my name as a chief pallbearer under my father's name. Wc had the same name, separated only by a Roman numeral.

On the plane back to New York the next day I kept smelling the odor of rotting human flesh. I looked at the rowdy businessmen around me who were drinking and laughing and showing their bare fleshy calves when they crossed their legs (how my father would have disapproved of their short, ankle-length socks, he who wore garters just below the knee). 1 tliought they were dying, they smelled of the rot, it was in their clothes, ail this dead or dying meat was propped up in chairs and twitching with galvanic energy; but their conversation was profanely petty, full of joking greed and jockeying for position that showed they weren't aware of death. They kept marinating their meat in beer. 1 thought of the meat-packing district in New York where the carcasses—peeled, legless, branded with a purple mark—swung out of the trucks into refrigerated rooms.

Somebody at my gym became ill. He'd been a big guy, always snapping towels at buttocks in the dressing room, and he'd had a real mouth on him, but ^ [_ ^ \/ E N fi^en he came down with something the doctors

couldn't diagnose. Slightly raised brownish-purple spots appeared on his skin. One doctor said they resembled a disease that only old Italian and Jewish men got. The poor guy at the gym just seemed to deflate in front of our eyes. All the steroids and food that had made his body so immense melted away, as though a butcher were rendering fat from a prize pig. He stopped joking, then he stopped talking, then he stopped coming. Someone said he had ''gay-related immunodeficiency" (GRID). That was in 1981. It seemed too horrible to be true, a disease aimed specifically at gay men and contracted through gay sex.

As a gay writer I had received my share of hate mail, including an anonymous letter that had told me I would end up wearing a sack on my side since I was putting my anus to unnatural uses condemned by God. This new disease seemed all of a piece with the hate promulgated by ; know-nothing American fundamentalists.

I didn't know anyone other than the guy at the gym who had the new 1 disease but I'd heard of a whole household on Fire Island coming down with it, five guys who'd shared the same cottage for several summers. They weren't friends of mine but friends of friends and, in the spirit of

scientific skepticism, I icept asking, "What else have they shared? Needles? Polluted well water? A bad shipment of poppers?"

Larry Kramer, a writer I'd known for five or six years, invited eighty or so gay men to hear Dr. Friedman-Kien, a doctor at New York University, discuss the new disease. Then, a few months later, Larry asked me and a handful of other gay men over to his luxurious apartment at the foot of Fifth Avenue to set up an organization to fight gay cancer. I felt flattered to be included at such a statesmanlike event but I was frightened by it, as though thinking too much about it might lead to my becoming infected. Larry thought up the name of our group, Gay Men's Health Crisis, after another friend, Paul Rapoport, said, 'Gay men certainly have a health crisis.' Larry leapt on the phrase and said, 'That's the name of our organization!'

We decided we should have three goals—to raise money for research; to visit the ill and perform chores for them; and to pamphlet the bars with safe-sex information. Unfortunately, our biggest idea for raising money was to give a dance at the Paradise Garage. No one thought of approaching the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. We'd spent so many years huddling in the ghetto that it never occurred to us to turn to the federal government. And as for safe sex, all we could advise was, "Know the names of your partners" and "Limit their numbers." In moralistic America we thought that promiscuity and anonymity must somehow be to blame. No one was prepared to believe that gay cancer could be contracted through a single exposure. Anyway, could you be "exposed" to cancer and contract it like the measles?

I had long had my doubts about our goals and values. In an article I'd written, which had come out one year before the first rumors about AIDS, I'd aired my problems about reconciling my "socialism" (which amounted to litde more than a belief in sharing wealth and providing social services to the needy) with the well heeled hedonism of the urban gay men I was studying. I'd also predicted that gay men, who were now perceived as the most promiscuous element in society, would someday go "beyond" sexuality to find newer, richer forms of association.

I had just begun to read Michel Foucault and I interpreted his writing to mean that since we had a word, homosexuality (or, for that matter, the word sexuality itself), we assumed that those words must refer to real things, to a unified and constant phenomenon, whereas in fact this very act of nomination was only an arbitrary way of creating entities by naming them.

But if I had my doubts about gay clone sexuality and consumerism

The Farewell Symphony

(which seemed to be two systems for creating an ehte hierarchy that excluded me and most other gay men—those who weren't white as well as the old, the poor, the ugly), I was equally afraid of seeming puritanical. 1 thought that if I was unhappy on Fire Island it was because I was past forty. Certainly in preceding years I'd relished my romantic sexual encounters with strangers under the moon in the pine forest—the most poetic moments of my life—and if they'd brought me no happiness I felt, as an artist, that my only concern should be beauty, so often twinned with melancholy. And to the extent I thought about politics at all I believed in campaigning for life and liberty but not the pursuit of happiness, too elusive, surely, ever to serve as the basis for policy.

As for the new disease, I thought that it would never attain epidemic proportions. By 1983, two years into its histoiy there were still fewer than two thousand cases. And no one knew what caused it. Some people said that "viral overload" must be the cause, yet I knew that since the mid-1960s (almost twenty years) I'd gone to the doctor with hundreds of cases of gonorrhea—mostly rectal, occasionally penile, once in the throat— one case of syphilis, dozens of cases of amoebas, one case of hepatitis, and yet I was flourishing.

Other people said the disease was caused by poppers, those sudden blasts of amyl nitrate we inhaled on the dance floor or during sex, but again I'd been sniffing them for twenty years with no apparent damage done (I'd first been given poppers in 1964 by a black heterosexual woman friend who sniffed them just before orgasm), nor could I imagine that a chemical inhalant which caused the blood to rush to the heart would also spread a fatal disease. And what about all those people who used poppers to stimulate their hearts—had diey contracted cancer?

Could the disease be contained in sperm itself? If so, then we were aU lost, since we were bathed, daily, in a sea of sperm.

My own conviction was that it wouldn't touch me or the people I loved. I certainly was opposed to the idea of limiting my sexual encounters or knowing my partners' names—what good would that do? True, when people came down with a venereal disease they were supposed to call up their partners, but I was from an older generation devoid of community spirit and once a month I threw out my trick chits (on which I'd marked names and phone numbers). Anyway, we were all big boys used to dosing ourselves and mopping up our own problems.

Of course we'd never played for such high stakes before—death.

Dr. Fricdman-Kien thought we should all stop having sex for a while, until the exact nature of the disease and its transmission became clear, but everyone except Larry laughed at him. Obviously the good doctor knew nothing about gay life. We'd fought hard for sexual freedom, which was virtually the beginning and end of our idea of freedom it.self Hadn't gay liberation begun with the defense of a gay bar? A cruising spot? And hadn't our progress been measured by the number of bars and bathhouses and sex clubs that had sprung up in the last decade? We felt that straights hated us because we were getting so much, because among gays sex was easy to come by and seldom used just as a reward for work, fidelity, responsibility. Should two thousand cases of gay cancer convince us to exchange (jur freedom for chastity? Straight doctors, straight politicians, straight cops were all too ready to order us to give up our pleasures, that sticky semen-glue that bound us together, but we weren't going to be dispersed by scare tactics.

When a German news magazine called me and asked me to comment on the disease, I said, "It's caused by mustaches. If every gay man shaved, it would be cured tomorrow."

After I hung up, my new lover, Ned, said, "Don't make a fool of yourself You have no business making pronouncements, especially not frivolous ones, when people are dying."

I'd met Ned through one of Max's acolytes, Angus, a Boston poet who wrote about his childhood and his friends in Max's characteristic syllabic verse and with his riddling, punning insolence. Angus was good looking, well educated, rich, but he was consumed by indecision—whether to work or not, whether to setde down with a lover or play the field, whether to move to New York or remain in Boston. In the meanwhile he wrote his poems.

Angus had called me up at Christmas time in 1981 and said, "Have I got a boy for you!" He'd already told me twice about this guy, who'd moved from Boston to New York to study design, who was "pretty as an angel" and from the "ultimate High WASP family," though his parents had rejected him and thrown him out of the house.

Now he was working as a houseboy for a rich older man who had a duplex in Chelsea. We went over there, Angus and I, for a drink before heading off to see Torch Song Trilogy. Ned's boss was on a Caribbean cruise, as it turned out, and Ned was cooking dinner for two friends who were about to arrive. I suppose it was appropriate that the first time I saw Ned he was preparing dinner for friends.

The Farewell Symphony

He asked me if I knew how long a leg of lamb should cook and I said something confused—I was dazzled by diis young man beside me. He had a very high-pitched voice, not a girl's voice but a boy's, a choir boy's, as though this startling characteristic should be taken as a pledge that he would ne\er age, a statement instantly contradicted by his hair, which was already white, although he could not have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old at the time. Since his hair was both blond and white, not at all receding, densely planted and standing up here and there in spiky cowlicks, I kept doing a double take to make sure that what I took to be white wasn't actually platinum.

He wasn't sensual; in fact, he was tall and gangly, but his air of innocence called for defilement, which after all is a form of sensuality (even if rather speciahzed).

But that came later if at all, my thoughts about sex with him. For now, all I could think about was marriage, linking my name to his, this angelic boy with the refined accent, the choir boy's voice, the slighdy goofy look, as though he were a comic-book character who'd just had a flower pot drop on his head and was now seeing stars, lurching around and humming a slowed-down love waltz before collapsing in potter\' shards—to be instantly mended in the very next frame.

When we left the cozy apartment with the lit fire and odorless hothouse flowers in every vase, Angus said, "So?"

"So what?" I said, almost irritated. "So I like him, so what's the big deal, since he's much too good for me?"

"I'll call him. We'O see," Angus said with his air of the sly boots who's just licked up all the cream. "I think he liked you. But remember a boy like that v^dll cost you about fifteen thousand dollars a year"

"That doesn't sound like ven,' much." I laughed. "He should raise his rates."

I had broken up with Fox sLx months earlier at the Riviera Cafe. I'd carefully explained why it was best for him, for our friendship, for our development as writers—and suddenly he'd drenched me with a glass of water and stormed off, leaving me in a puddle, dripping. The smiling waiter brought me a hand towel and I, too, smiled, glad that it was all over, the petty squabbling and endless jealous interrogations.

Except I hadn't much liked the grand silence that had followed. Now there was no one to grill me, watch me, call me, attempt to trip me up. There was no one to collate my present remarks with some long ago but carefuUy presei~ved comment I'd once made on the same subject. Now if

I came home early or late, slept alone or with two other men, there was no Fox to trot around the barnyard by the light of the moon.

Worse, he'd found another lover right away, a young curator of a fashionable new museum, and everyone spoke of them as a smart couple about town. Fox began to rise in the world. He worked for a couple of years as an assistant to my new editor and then moved on to a paperback house where he edited his own line of new fiction.