In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much about the university—not even that it was an all-boys university—until I got there. It was a new world for me. I had lived most of my life until then in a family of girls. Now there was a family of boys.
I didn’t live on campus. I lived with my aunt, my uncle, and an adored older female cousin in Brooklyn. At around that time, Our Ma, inspired by her sister and eldest daughter, was planning on moving from Brooklyn, where I grew up, to Atlanta. A new start. She was just over fifty then. She made it clear that there were certain rules I had to follow if I was going to stay with my aunt’s family. I had to pay rent, twenty dollars a week. “Nobody lives for free,” Our Ma said.
At first, my aunt objected to the mandate: I was just a schoolkid. But Our Ma was adamant; it was either that or I would come and live with her and my little brother in Georgia. There were several reasons that my mother put her foot down. One was Daddy. As long as she’d known him, he’d lived rent-free with his mother, whose economic smarts my mother revered. “Mrs. Williams could throw a handful of peas in a pot and feed a whole army,” Our Ma said. Mrs. Williams had a husband and two other children—two girls—but, for her, Daddy always came first.
Our Ma did not want me to be some version of my father, a guy who could love women less and get more from them because of that—not if she had anything to do with it. And she did have something to do with it, with everything. She was raised in a society—a West Indian society—that did not put much of a premium on women’s bodies, where any kind of intimacy was a joke. People made fun of you for expressing longing, or, if you were a man, for being involved with just one woman, or for showing affection to your children.
For a long stretch of his life, Daddy had two women to nurture him—Mrs. Williams and my mother—but Our Ma had only one enormous love: others. She believed in community, and wanted us all to belong to it, even Daddy, despite the fact that he was living at his mother’s house and had been born into a family that laughed at her goodness.
Our Ma may have had a devalued body, in the world she came from, but she fought for and retained her right to put her foot down. And, when she put it down, the world was different. After she put her foot down, I went to school and went to work. Every week I paid my aunt rent. In my room in her house, I had a desk, piles of books, and a typewriter. I tried to write. I was going to write.
Life at Columbia was strange. All those boys. I could smell them. So many of them in their bodies, careless with their scent. They lifted their arms up and, kingdom come, the air was different. The gay ones were less apt to reek. That would be impolite, and already life had proved to be impolite, having produced queer bodies in 1981, for instance. We gay boys were only a decade or so removed from Stonewall and two decades removed from being blackmailed or jailed for “solicitation,” so caution and madness were in our bones. Sometimes we committed great acts of love or rage in private, while the only public trespass we allowed ourselves was to throw glittering hard words into the air, hoping they would not rebound and chop us off at the knees.
I had never seen so many rich, or rich to me, people in one place before. I was amazed, first, by their hair. For years, Our Ma had made her, and our, living as a hairdresser. Her clients were all Black women. So many words and worries in their hair. The Columbia boys’ hair was so lustrous and well nourished. They had good teeth and healthy bodies and strong nipples that were on display on sunny days when, sitting on the campus steps, they removed their shirts, and not one of them, among the straight ones, at least, looked ashamed. They’d grown up playing tennis or squash in Connecticut, or Rhode Island, or farther north. In the summer, they went to the Cape. Their families knew one another and this was a source of casual pride among them, not of bitter jokes or distancing resentments.
Manhattan had always belonged to my father. He used to take me and my little brother to foreign movies and then to eat foreign food. He was deeply unconcerned about the staring white people wondering what we were doing in a tearoom, say, on the Upper East Side. We ate blintzes in Germantown, and caught Liv Ullmann in “The Emigrants.” Then Daddy took us home to Crown Heights, and, for a while, it felt like Sweden.
At Columbia, I didn’t have to pretend that I was somewhere else; Iwassomewhere else. All of it—the grand buildings, the wave upon wave of stone steps—was like a stage set for becoming. But becoming what? Daddy had given me Manhattan, and now I took to it without him. He had no active role in this New York—in my New York—and perhaps that in itself was an act of becoming for me.
Everything was so queer, or I wanted it to be. I don’t mean queer like camp—a loyal adherence to the artificial—but queer like my mind, which was interested in all that was misshapen. In this new, unfamiliar place, I felt freer to go on about the things that excited me, just as I had with my older sisters when I was a boy, before they put an end to all that—because what was I turning into, some kind of faggot?
In my family, I never answered the what-are-you-some-kind-of-faggot question, because I couldn’t trust anyone with the answer. There’s not a fag who grew up in East New York or Crown Heights in the nineteen-sixties and seventies who would have trusted the inhabitants of those worlds with the knowledge that he was gay.
In the West Indian community, Our Ma knew one sort-of-out guy. He never said that he was gay, but he communicated it through his fastidious love of women and the fact that he lived in Manhattan. He loved my mother—they were distant cousins, I think—and when he came to visit I heard family members, neighbors, and the like refer to him as an “auntie man.” To them, he wasn’t just a queen. He was every queen they had ever known and despised, been disgusted and amused by, secretly had and then spat upon, dismissed and jeered at. Because that’s how prejudice works: you are one thing that represents all bad things to others. Didn’t the elders describe racism that way? But gay was not a skin color. It was a state of being, a consciousness that took your race—or anything else that life had given you—and made it different. My ability, as an auntie man, to love those who considered me a pariah, or some kind of wicked novelty act, told me that fags were made of different stuff—but what stuff?
It happened the way love happens—while you’re least expecting it though wanting everything. I had been at Columbia for a semester or so when I fell in with a small group of guys, most of whom, like me, were studying art history. The most interesting of them was from Orange County, California, the son of a single mother who worked as a nurse at Disneyland. He had pale skin that flushed easily, curly dark-blond hair, and beautiful hands—thick Daddy hands, but gestural, femme like that. He was a brilliant reader of philosophy, and made me want to read more seriously and widely.
Roland Bartheshad landed with a boom on Columbia’s academic planet years before and he was beloved by that group of guys. My smart friend read him and imitated his aphoristic style—a new way of being an “author.” But, for me, Barthes’s writing was like the finest embroidery stitched in the air: only the author could see it. And what did all this talk about the “other” actually mean?
One reason those queens loved Barthes, I think, without entirely understanding structuralism as a discipline, was that he was so elusive about being queer. They were, too. Despite Stonewall and other political advances, my new friends were barely out of the closet (and some never left it). They had grown up in parts of America that, in 1981, were still ideologically 1956.
We had an intense philological relationship, my blond friend and I. I remember how delicately he handled the paperback copy ofToni Morrison’s“Sula” I lent him, and how interested he was to hear about my father and how he had been spoiled by his mother, just as Milkman Dead had in Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”
We passed books back and forth, back and forth, and the words in them made the ground more solid beneath our feet. I kept trying with Barthes because I loved my friend and found something I recognized in the emotional language in “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes” and “A Lover’s Discourse.” Actually, in the former book, it was really just a photograph and the line introducing it that got me. The picture, black-and-white, showed a young Barthes being held in his mother’s arms. He was too big to be carried, but his mother managed him with no sign of complaint or surprise. The four words—“The demand for love”—expressed a world: this was me, and all of us, with Our Mas. What soul doesn’t want to be carried, held, well past the carrying age?
In “A Lover’s Discourse,” I was taken by Barthes’s interpretation of the “cry of love”: “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” Indeed, I wanted my bookish friend to take me into his mind, to discover stories with me, to elevate me with his thought, and to join me in my disco of community. In that imagined disco, there was a select crowd, largely queer. The hall was small, and honestly what it looked like was a home. At my disco of community, the d.j. played Chaka Khan,Prince,Philip Glass’s“Einstein on the Beach,” Jane Olivor singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” the Voices of East Harlem declaring, “Right On Be Free,”Dionne Warwickasking us to take a “Message to Michael,”Bowie, of course, singing “Station to Station,” Labelle describing how ‘‘Going Down Makes Me Shiver,” and Elton, Elton singing so many things. All these songs were, of course, one song—a song of wishing—and they filled the room so mightily it was as if God were stepping tall around our dance hall. God could be your own queer self, too, and you could even do the Latin hustle with Her, surrounded by all the other folks and things you loved that made you feel panic-stricken because wasn’t love a panic?
My book buddy had a boyfriend. Let’s call him LES. He had grown up in a block of buildings known as “affordable housing” on the Lower East Side, with his white single mother, a social worker. LES did not know his father, who was Black. He was the only other person of color in that group of gay boys at Columbia, and, given the cultural loneliness I presumed he felt and Our Ma’s fidelity to spiritual strays, I felt obliged to love him. For a long time I thought I did because I thought I should.
We were not attracted to each other sexually. From the first, our connection and uneasiness were familial, not romantic. LES was interested in class, not as a way of eradicating his race but as a way of catapulting himself out of his background. At Columbia, he wanted not to be his origin story; he was all about the arrival myth. He outdid the white boys at being a white boy. Brusque in manner, he embraced capitalism’s lack of charity: there was room for only one class, and that class was acquisitive and brutal in its grab for the world—more was more. This was in the era of Lacoste shirts, chinos, and L. L. Bean leather bags and boots. Somehow, LES’s Lacoste shirt collars stood up straighter and stiffer than any of those other guys’.
Like Daddy, LES had been coddled for most of his life. His mother gave her son what she had and more than she had. He lived in one of the nice dorms on the newly built East Campus, and one of the signs of his wealth, or his performance of wealth, was the beauty of his space. I remember his dark, calming room, his elegant pillowcases. I had grown up getting scolded if I had the temerity to answer anyone with “What?,” but LES quarrelled openly with his mother and his female friends. He wanted to break through softness, which he associated with women. We sometimes went together to parties at St. A’s, a largely rich-boy frat, whose members had good hair and all sorts of permission. LES, tall, tawny-riny, as Our Ma would describe him, stood out at those parties, not so much to the guys in blue blazers, white shirts, and chinos who were horsing around and drinking too much, but to me. Because of his joy. He was genuinely happy there, in a world he aspired to, and when you aspire does the quality of what you’re reaching for matter? The dream is the point.
I valued LES’s generosity, his taking me to parties where I could eat, but I couldn’t share his aspirations. Still, I understood why people were attracted to him. LES was brilliant at playing the man. He took choice away from you. When I was spending too much time with my inner girl, mooning over a boy who’d left me sitting alone in a bar with melting ice cubes, LES would drag me off to another bar or to a gay party held in one of the great halls at Columbia. At those parties: loads of talk; nothing would happen. Then LES and I would jump in a cab and head to Uncle Charlie’s or one of the other white gay bars downtown, where the air was full of patchouli and synth.
LES’s attractiveness had everything to do with action. Before you could say, “Shall we do this?” or “Should we consider that?,” he was holding your arm and leading you into the Spike. He had an enviable right to himself and what he wanted, like any free white man but in a colored person’s body. And the guys who were drawn to him were drawn to both aspects of him, or to what he projected about both: the presumed authority of one, and theWhat is he?Who is he? of the other.
LES had drifted apart from my book buddy. His new love worked with him at the reserves desk at Butler Library. I met LES after his shift one day—it was spring, early spring—and, as we walked down the path that led from the library toward the Alma Mater statue, he told me about his co-worker.
Columbia was like a small town within a city then. Even if you didn’t know someone by name, you knew him by sight. Days after LES told me of his love, I met him. I was on my way to the library when LES and he were leaving. I recognized him at once. Or I recognized the back of his neck. We were both enrolled in a class on Italian Renaissance painting. A lecture course, it started at some ungodly hour, which meant that I got there very late. Although I wanted to do well, I didn’t care about doing well in the things I didn’t care about much—that would have felt like a lie, and wasn’t this moment in life, making Manhattan my home, building a family of my own, about telling the truth for once, and at last? Still, I took the Italian Renaissance painting class because I was my mother’s son and what would it mean to the world if I shirked my responsibilities?
To be honest, I had a lot of Daddy in me, too. Remember those times when Daddy took me and my brother to Yorkville to eat cabbage soup or any other place where people were puzzled by our presence and Daddy paid those pale question marks no never mind? I saw that and it went straight into my blood: I wanted to be like that, a man who paid no never mind to other minds. I had no business being in an Italian Renaissance painting class, but fuck that: Italian Renaissance painting was mine, if only I could get there on time.
I never did. And, when I search my mind now, first I hear things, especially theclick click clickof the slides in the projector, and then there are images flashing, showing us Mantegna, scrolling through history; I can see, too, how one boy always looked up at me when I made my entrance; maybe he couldn’t help it, since I had to pass the screen to get to my seat, casting a shadow on Masaccio’s Jesus and all that perspective.
I couldn’t tell if I was bothering him; he looked intrigued by the fact that I could be so late and appear not to be worried about it. I sat behind him and got settled. His neck was long and erect; he sat upright. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that he had three newly sharpened pencils and a pen lined up by his notebook. His notebook was filled with his strong, clear handwriting.
My envy of his orderliness was an old feeling, my irreverence turned on its ear. The truth is, I have always admired people who seem to get it right. In elementary school, I knew a girl named Edna. She was thin and wore glasses. I admired everything about her. I loved looking at the dark hair on her skinny yellow arms and her clean homework pages. When we ate our homemade lunches together, she had such restraint: she’d eat half her sandwich and save the rest for later. At Columbia, sitting in that class on Italian Renaissance painting, I could tell that that boy was a version of Edna. Despite my defiance, I wished that I wasn’t always late for class, that I wasn’t still the guy who was sloppy with his homework and gobbled up his lunch in two bites.
On the afternoon that LES introduced us, the boy from Italian Renaissance painting was wearing a cotton button-down shirt, jeans, and loafers without socks. (He rarely wore socks, no matter the weather.) He had an angular face, and light-colored eyes that were framed by tortoiseshell glasses. He had dark hair and his eyelids slanted a little. He didn’t smile. I was smoking a cigarette. He asked for one. I said, “If you’re nice!,” and he said, “I’m nice!” His slight body—we all weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds then—shivered a little at my implication.
I suppose other things happened after I gave him a cigarette, but I don’t remember what. I doubt we talked about Italian Renaissance painting as we walked down the gravel path away from the library—that would have meant leaving LES out—but surely there was talk, miles of it in an instant, like a fast train that kept picking up speed, passing scene after blurry scene as we raced toward a destination we didn’t know, couldn’t know, on that first day, a day that contained all our days together and the days after that, because your soul knows everything about a new love before you do.
I do remember how taken I was by his mind, which didn’t so much impose order on things as see the order that was already there. Raised in Connecticut in a Catholic household, he had faith—and perhaps that faith would extend to me beyond this moment of possibility? Let me tell you more about this moment, and moments that preceded it, because they all live together: First, you are standing by yourself in the world, and it’s fine. Then you blink and find yourself sitting in the palm of someone’s hand. That person peers down at you with the look of a connoisseur gazing at a curiosity, until suddenly a shy surprise fills both of you and alters the world as you know it. This might be too much to put on one meeting, but it’s all true.
We parted. Spring gave way to the end of the semester and exams and all that. I failed Italian Renaissance painting. By the time the school year ended, LES and my new friend were romantically and sexually involved, and life was turning, turning.
He contacted me first. In the upper left-hand corner of the envelope his letter came in, he’d written his name above the logo and return address of the yacht club he was working for that summer, in Niantic. The letter was written in his strong hand and I won’t quote it verbatim. If I did, I’d have to stop and put my pen down and let hope fly across the page—the hope that this will matter to you, and to others who know nothing of this kind of science fiction, of first a letter filled with anticipation and then, a decade later, no more letters except the one that I am writing here to the living who want to hear about ourAIDSdead, the better to understand who they were. I’m reluctant to give you his name. To name anything is to limit it, and for now I want him still to be limitless and alive, alive, alive.
In any case, his letter said that he was very happy, that he had waited a long time to have a friend like LES, and that was part of his happiness. At the end, he said how much he looked forward to getting to know me in the future, and how we could or should meet when he came down to the city to see LES sometime that summer. I remember that I was twenty-one when I received his note. I’d be twenty-two that August.
I was still living in Brooklyn with my aunt and uncle when I got his note. I was as thin as any man over six feet tall should be. But the truth is that I don’t really remember my body. In “I Remember,”Joe Brainardwrites quite a bit about his cock—looking at it, touching it, trying to make it appear bigger in his trousers—but I don’t remember looking at my cock in those years. When would I have had a chance to be alone with it? I had always lived with women in small spaces. There is no privacy in poverty.
Which is to say that I don’t remember when my body was first looked upon not as a problem, when someone’s desire moved him to hold those parts of me that gave him pleasure and presumably gave me pleasure, too. I don’t remember because, by the time any of that occurred, too much had already happened.
Still, I remember his letter. The way it took my weekend loneliness away. It weighed whatever a single piece of semi-heavy-stock paper with ink on it would weigh. That was one weight. The other was the weight, the beautiful gravitas, of his sense of responsibility and his hope: he looked forward to getting to know me in the future. The future.
During my first semester at Columbia, I’d taken Introduction to Religion, taught by the esteemed religious historianElaine Pagels. It was a big class, and packed. One day, after class, Professor Pagels asked Mr. Als to come and see her in her office. (In those days, professors addressed you by your surname.) In her office, Professor Pagels said that she liked a paper I’d written, and that she wanted to pass on two books she thought might be especially interesting to me:Simone Weil’s“Waiting for God” and James Cone’s “God of the Oppressed.” Weil and Cone, Professor Pagels said, were real writers, too.
Real writers. In the weeks that followed, I read everything I could by and about Weil, a Parisian anorexic who was raised as an agnostic Jew and became a practicing Catholic but would not be baptized, in part because she didn’t feel worthy of the sacrament, and then I read Cone, who had grown up in a small segregated town in Arkansas. Painful things had happened to both of these writers because of illness or racism. And yet, in their writing, both had a profound interest in connecting, or at least in the idea of connecting, which, of course, lies at the heart of friendship and is the beginning of community.
That boy’s letter affected me as much as Weil’s and Cone’s writing did, because, basically, he was asking the same questions they were asking: How do we make a friendship? How do we make a family? Do you believe in love, and know how to honor it? I read his letter once, and then twenty times. I wrote my own questions alongside every one of his: Was it possible to be gay and be together? Be Israelites together and refuse the sacrament, just because we were so joyful at having found each other? If we were gay and together with LES or whomever else, would that make us a gay community, and what would that mean in the world?
I remember him coming down from Connecticut to see LES. I remember the smell of the August night in New York when we met up at LES’s mother’s apartment. Trees shaded the paths as I entered a maze of high-rises whose short windows had bars over them. Nearby, there was a pool, and I could smell the chlorine. Night swimmers glistened in the dim light. Manhattan was so different from Brooklyn. One of my sisters lived in a version of these buildings in Brownsville, but there they were called “the projects,” and at the pool that was near my sister’s place I had found shit in the water.
LES opened the door. I don’t remember if the friend from Connecticut was standing beside LES, but I remember the feeling of parents. The sense that people who were together, as LES and he were now, were parents. I had seen that in the street, in the movies, and so on—couples doing things together!—but I didn’t know what that felt like; the idea cowed me.
We had a good gay conversation piece to start things off with: my hair. Before I arrived, I’d described to LES on the phone how a barber, ignoring what I had asked for, had fucked my head up to such a degree that I’d had him shave everything off. This was in the days when only lunatics or scary white punks had shaved heads. But it’s not so bad, the Connecticut boy said, after I took my cap off. He looked at me again. Honestly, it’s not bad.
He didn’t laugh, or even smile. He just stood by what he said, in his white cotton shirt. Also: he didn’t touch my head. He didn’t even make a gesture toward it. I had seen the seemingly in-a-trance eyes of the white person extending a hand to touch what you would never dream of touching on them, since it was not yours. Later, I would tell him the story of how, on a trip to visit family in Barbados, I had seen a white girl, a preadolescent child with Bo Derek braids, complain to her mother that a Black Bajan girl with cornrows she had spotted on the beach had stolen her hairdo. I don’t remember what he said about that story, and I don’t know if he ever read Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” in which Brainard says, “I remember feeling sorry for black people, not because I thought they were persecuted, but because I thought they were ugly.”
What got into people? What compelled Brainard to say that? What made that girl in Barbados assume she could claim ownership when she was the appropriator? Those are the kinds of questions, rhetorical and otherwise, that I felt comfortable posing with the boy from Connecticut once we began to spend real time together, because he hadn’t started our relationship by touching my head. He was a human who understood that I was one, too.
The funny thing is, he didn’t have to be human, given the way he looked; he resembled the youngMontgomery Clift, especially in the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun.” You’d think he would have plopped himself down on a stool in a gay bar, held out for the highest bidder, and called it a day. But he didn’t. I don’t know why he didn’t. Don’t know why he made good on the promise in his letter to get to know me better when he returned to Columbia in the fall. Don’t know many things where he’s concerned.
The summer he was away, I spent a fair amount of time on the Lower East Side, some of it with LES, who still wore his Lacoste collars high. Preppy chic wasn’t much of a thing in that neighborhood, though. The dominant style in the East Village that summer had a lot to do with disavowing labels, and opting for the black-and-white New Wave or No Wave look that Patti Smith served on the cover of her first album, “Horses,” or the sunglasses and rude-boy hats some of the Specials donned on the cover of their 1979 album, the one with “A Message to You, Rudy,” which I loved because a girl I knew swore it was one of the best songs ever.
The girls I admired as they walked along Third Street, Eighth Street, and sometimes even as far north as Fourteenth Street lived in shitty hot apartments with brick walls, but what did that matter when they slipped on a “nothing” black dress like the ones the beautiful but solitary post-neorealist Monica Vitti wore in the movies? These girls had come to New York to be New Yorkers: thin and angry and creative and loving. They filled the world with potential heartache or fun as they walked up Second Avenue in their spike heels, their black purses containing more money than boys ever had, because boys couldn’t hold on to a dime. Later, after the clubs closed, and they were done with men for the night, they sometimes ended up at Kiev, on the corner of Seventh Street, pulling off their gloves and eating split-pea soup together—hold the bread—and ignoring the bums at the next table. I saw them from the other side of the window as I walked south to take the subway home to Brooklyn, where, the next morning, I was greeted by derisive Black-girl laughter and gossip about where I’d been, and how white I was getting to be in the white world.
I’ve heard that laughter my whole life. It’s in my body and has never found a way out. It would like to kill me, and, at times, has made me want to die, if only to escape the feeling of powerlessness, abandonment, and despair it engenders. The best description of that laughter I’ve ever read is in Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay collection, “Laughter”:
Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity.
Maybe the Black girls back in Brooklyn wanted to pity me, but that would only have detracted from the disdain for “faggots” that bonded them. Speaking of which,James Baldwinheard a similar laughter, in a different key, in 1949, which he wrote about in an essay titled “Equal in Paris.” Baldwin had been in Paris for a little over a year when an American acquaintance moved into the grim hotel where he was living. When the American friend had left his previous residence, another grim hotel, he’d taken with him, in a fit of pique, a bedsheet, which he presented to Baldwin. The young writer, disgusted by the condition of his own sheets, placed the relatively clean linen on his bed. For this “theft,” Baldwin was arrested and spent eight days in jail. I’ve read this essay a number of times, and, while I never remember, precisely, how Baldwin gets out of jail, I always remember the ending of the piece, because I understand it:
On the 27th I went again to trial and, as had been predicted, the case against us was dismissed. The story of thedrap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom. . . . I was chilled by their merriment. . . . It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.
That laughter helped shape Baldwin, just as the laughter I experienced at home and, later, in some gay bars in New York shaped me, but I could barely stand the shape: when a female relative asked, rhetorically, if I was white, or directly or indirectly called me a faggot, or laughed at me, my heart broke a million times over. I could not bear the derision I heard in the world, or at home, when something interested me or made me feel tender or curious. In retrospect, I can see that whenever I talked excitedly, openly, about those things my interlocutor was, more often than not, just waiting to jump on my vulnerability, like a kid jumping in a puddle.
That summer, before the boy from Connecticut came back, I worked as a telemarketer for a company in midtown. A friend from my years at LaGuardia High School had got me the job. I don’t remember what we sold, but I do remember that my friend and I—we’d done improv together in school, and were as clever as any Nichols and May—treated the experience as a kind of acting exercise. On different days we assumed different identities. One day, I might be a relentlessly cheerful American with lots of blond in my voice; the next, a laid-back European ne’er-do-well. On Fridays, when we got paid, we’d go to a hamburger joint near Grand Central and order up a storm: burgers and onion rings and one lemonade after another. Sometimes we’d go downtown together after work and fuck around on Astor Place or go to Azuma, a Japanese emporium filled with delectable junk. It was around that time that I saw the shirt.
It was in the window at Cheap Jack’s, an East Village thrift store. The shirt had three-quarter sleeves and a button-down collar. Its main design was a version ofMondrian’s“Broadway Boogie Woogie”—all geometric lines and primary colors. Buying that shirt and tucking it into the black flared high-waters I wore with black lace-ups and white socks made me feel that I was the artist I hadn’t yet become. My outfit also made me feel that I was part of something, and I think that “something” was the whole queer world I saw and loved in downtown Manhattan, including the girls in their dresses carrying the kind of old-timey gloves my sisters wore for real. This new world was real to me, too.
When I returned to my neighborhood by train after a late night out, my shirt reeked of cigarette smoke and was sticky with dance sweat. I was foul—at last!—with experience. I always carried a book on the train. Sometimes, on my way from the subway to my aunt’s apartment, I’d stop by an all-night diner for breakfast: toast soaked in butter, the fattiest bacon, greasiest eggs—delicious. The lady who waited on me at the diner didn’t laugh at me. While I sipped a glass of her delicious sweetened iced tea and struggled with “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,” she’d ask me what I was reading. When I tried to explain, she’d cut me off sweetly with “Baby, tell me the story part.”
Let me tell you the story of the dress. I wore it years before I bought that shirt. I was fourteen, and I had been invited to a Halloween party by a high-school friend who lived in Manhattan. I decided to go as the bearded lady. By then, I already knew I was a lady, but I needed something to hide that. With a beard as camouflage, I could get away with wearing my stage makeup, which I enjoyed—the girlish fact of it.
I remember my mother making a long skirt out of some tulle, and then attaching the skirt to a green bodice with gold straps. She designed the whole thing. I suppose Our Ma could justify making the dress—which I put on over a thick sweater, to further butch it up—because it was connected to my education. I was going to school to be an actor, which was a kind of artist, a profession she revered.
Our Ma was an artist who wasn’t given half a chance to become one. She was aLinda Ronstadtwho didn’t sing, aPaule Marshallwho hadn’t written a novel, anAlice Neelwho hadn’t picked up a brush—she was all of those women to me. She had whatRilkecalled an “infinite capacity” to be herself through other people’s needs. That was how it seemed to me.To me:a selfish claim that doesn’t allow for who she was to herself. I want her to own herself, just as I want all the dead to own themselves. My mother, the unrealized artist who loved artists because artists expressed themselves, was making my dress in the name of art, which is to say, also in my name.
But, before we get to the dress specifically, let me just say that for years now I’ve carried around in my head the enormous weight, I mean the powerful reality—same difference—that the feminist writerTillie Olsendiscusses in her 1965 essay “Silences in Literature.” Olsen talks about how the grind of having to earn a living, the drag of figuring out home care for young kids, has worn female writers down. Silenced them after one book or two. Just as racism and degradation have silenced a number of writers of color. Olsen describes her own workdays, raising four children while dreaming of writing, and watching that dream die. “What demanded to be written,” Olsen writes, “seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me . . . always denied.”
My mother stitching away in the other room—what had been denied her in this life? As a girl, she’d loved to dance; maybe she’d dreamedMaria Tallchiefdreams, and maybe now I was her Maria Tallchief in that tulle, her chance to be a prima ballerina, instead of a member of the withholding cadre of women she’d been born into, women whose job it was to disapprove.
I don’t remember when my father arrived at our place that day, but I do remember the air changing when he did. He took off his great peacoat and hat without saying anything, and put his ever-present newspaper on a chair in the hallway. I remember overhearing him say to my mother, angrily, “Well, why can’t he go as the bearded man?” I remember Our Ma defending my costume, and I remember putting on the longest coat I had to cover that dress up before we hit the streets. Then my father put his jacket and hat back on, and walked me to the subway, because my mother said that he should, to protect me from hooligans. I remember walking along with my father, and the world between us was silent.
As I rode the subway, I experienced the loneliness I sometimes felt when going from one part of my life to another. I remember expecting something to happen. I was on the lookout for a potential ambush of violent men. When I got to the party, I missed everything I’d left behind, including my mother. I remember smoking pot for the first time, and waves of paranoia squeezing me in my dress. I remember taking off the dress and wiping off my makeup, and putting on my jeans so that I could get on the subway in the cold, black air. But what I feel now most of all is that I’ve never taken that dress off, never left behind me the way my mother helped me to create myself and herself. Nor can I forget my father’s constant drama of aggrievement, his implication that the world would have been a better place for him if his son, and the boy’s mother, and their dress, weren’t part of it.
“There is speech and there are verbal symbols.” That’s fromTennessee Williams’s1944 story “Oriflamme.” In it, the female protagonist, Anna, struggles to express her inner life. At one point, she puts on a red dress, which is a kind of flag—a declaration of being. Society at large is not ready for Anna in her red dress; they don’t want to see her, but she’s there. I admired the story, because it said so much—indirectly—about being an artist: you put that dress on, and people either laugh at you or ignore you, but you put the dress on anyway, and you live. When I wore my dress or, later, my Mondrian shirt, people told me I wasn’t a man, but no one could tell me I wasn’t an artist. This was my flag. And I hoisted it in Brooklyn and in the East Village, so that other artists would find me, and love me as much as I loved them. I had so much ambition for togetherness, and so much drive to be an artist and be alone.
It wasn’t too long after we returned to Columbia that fall that LES broke up with the boy from Connecticut. I don’t recall there being a reason, but the steadfastness of love can be as crushing to some souls as its absence. Steadfast love sits in a corner and enjoys the daily things, a cup of tea in the afternoon, a cigarette it shouldn’t indulge in before lunch or dinner. It likes to look at you. And LES didn’t always like to be seen. It was too much for him. Where was all that lovely distance, scented with yearning? The white space, fortified by letters and phone calls and I-can’t-waits? Now love was an imposition, irritating and enormous in its demands, because it could not be controlled, lied to, or otherwise manipulated so that LES could win whatever he assumed the rest of the boys were winning.
I remember the anguish on the Connecticut boy’s face as he told me that, a month or two after we returned to school that fall, LES had stopped returning his calls, and that when he did manage to reach LES on the phone he was always on his way out, and said he’d call him back, but didn’t.
That fall, the Connecticut boy and I talked about LES, of course, but not for long; I could only get so close to his despair. He wouldn’t allow me to become a version of my mother, listening and listening and trying to effect change at my own expense. Because, to him, I wasn’t my mother (or his); I was a man, and that was what he wanted me to be.
I remember our first excursion in the city, or nearly our first. We met on St. Marks Place; he wanted to buy some records. That afternoon, he had on chinos with a sharp crease, a pressed button-down shirt—he ironed all his clothes carefully; of course he did—and black loafers. There were his pale ankles as he walked up the stairs to the record store. That straight back and neck I knew from Italian Renaissance painting looked different now as he flipped through used or discounted albums. “Let It Bleed.”Nico.Donna Summer.Lou Reed.Bob Dylan’sfirst Jesus record. Lots ofElvis Costello. He loved voices. I don’t remember what he ended up buying that afternoon, but I remember how proud he was of his brown-paper-bagged purchases as we walked west. My sidelong glance as we walked, talking about nothing, or a great many things, was a physical manifestation of what I felt: sidelong, about new love. If he loved me back, then what? Could I love him more than I loved his letter and the things it did to my imagination?
I said that I wanted him to meet a woman I was becoming friends with. She worked at McGregor’s (later it became Boy Bar), between Second and Third Avenues, across the street from the St. Marks Baths, and even though I averted my gaze from the Baths every time I passed it—all those men going in and out, my fear of them and my interest in going in and out with them—I tried to appear cooler and more authoritative than I was, as my friend from Connecticut and I sat down at an outside table. We were in my gay Manhattan now, and I wanted to show him the ropes. So many ropes in New York then, all trying to hold together a crumbling, economically depressed, drug-filled, violent world.
My woman friend came out of the bar’s open doors. She was carrying a tray of drinks, and she looked as she always looked whenever she did anything: flawless and annoyed. (She didn’t like to do anything.) I’d called her Mrs. Vreeland from the first because she was always immaculate and she made pronouncements like “Europe stinks. I am depressed. Bye,” which was what she wrote to me from abroad once. A Latvian American woman from New Jersey, she heightened things, in the way a born star can, and she could just as easily ruin things—a day, an event—simply by switching her mood from elation to dissatisfaction. A big component of her charm was her essential don’t-care-ness, with a lipstick touch.
Drinks and introductions all around. And across the street those men were coming and going, coming and going, just as—it’s clear to me now—I was both coming and going with my friend from Connecticut, because look at what I’d engineered on our first date: I’d interrupted the flow of my getting to know him, and his getting to know me, by introducing him to another person. Hadn’t he written me a letter, and telephoned me, and met me downtown, and showed an interest in me? And I had broken our covenant by shifting the scene away from any potential intimacy.
Daddy did the same thing to me. All those weekends in the city, and the bliss of walking down Fifth Avenue with my hand in his, my little brother on the other side of him, the joy of being together, only to be disrupted by his tics, his violence, and left hoping for a better time next time. Once the visit was done and Daddy had let go of my hand and deposited me at my mother’s door and walked away, anxious, no doubt, to be in his own room, alone but catered to, reading his newspapers and finding disasters in every one of them—once all that had happened, I burned with want. Burned and burned in the void. We are all the people who came before us, those whom we can never seem to turn away from, even if they have turned us away.
Still, when my friend and I had finished our drinks outside, I followed him onto the dark, empty dance floor inside. I don’t remember what songs were played, but I remember that, as we danced, coming together and then apart, he was still holding on to his records.
That semester, at school, we took another course together, over at Barnard—Brian O’Doherty’s The Art Film. The course focussed on artists whose work included short films—Joseph Cornell,Maya Deren, and others. We also saw documentaries made by visual poets like the Maysles brothers, their “Grey Gardens.” My new friend loved the class; he was a big movie buff. Our first assignment was to write a scenario about an artist; my script was called “The Trouble with Saskia,” and it began with a scene in whichRembrandtis trying to paint his wife, Saskia. Saskia fidgets. Finally, Rembrandt puts his brush down, walks over to Saskia, and slaps her. The day that my script was discussed was one of the rare occasions when my friend wasn’t in class; he had a cold. Later, he telephoned to find out what he had missed. When I told him that I’d got an A on my piece, he said, “I knew it!” I have never forgotten the sound of his voice in that instant: excitement tinged with envy and the feeling that I was a writer, and he wasn’t, and that was just one of the ways that we were learning that we were different together.
My new friend, my first true and truly beloved. His feeling about life was, basically, Why burn down the house before you’ve built it? He wanted to live in that house every day. To build a house and put his records in it. From what he told me during our first days, months, and then a year, his folks were not a couple whose relationship took place on the phone, like Daddy and Our Ma. His mother didn’t hold the receiver as if it were a quarrelsome baby squirming to break free of her love. His folks, in fact, lived in the same house, and it was their house, not welfare’s, or somebody else’s. His father, a quiet Wasp from Indiana, was an engineer, and his mother was an Irish Catholic who, in addition to working in the Connecticut school system, kept house and raised her good-looking children in the faith.
When I was ten or so, I lived in an apartment building in Flatbush. I had a next-door friend, a white girl who read books, like me. One day, she took me on a tour of her home, and when I saw her parents’ bedroom I said, “That’s nice. Where does your father sleep?” The girl looked at me quizzically. She said, “Here.” After that, I wondered about families. That is, how did they make a home that was real? How did parents make a bed together? Sometimes, on special nights, my brother and I slept with our mother, but the closeness, the promise and reality of love in that sleepy warmth, evaporated during the day. Being solely responsible for her children’s well-being, Our Ma had to leave the bed and get on with the business of living and listening to our father, on the other end of the line, whining and carping, wondering when she might turn up to make his bed.
And here my friend was, saying, Why burn the house down? And, What’s up with your imagination? Love can be real. Real love in a potentially real house. One way he got me to approach the door of that house was by not pointing it out: he just built the house and left the door open. He walked around the house first. As I remember it, he was hard on his shoes—he walked like the Taurean that he was: with a sense of purpose, and inevitability. When he walked through his house of love, the floors shook. He wanted that house to know he was in it.Come and share, come and share.
Here’s what I found by standing on the threshold of the house he built, window by window, and the chimney flue, too: a man who could be with me in silence. A man who could be and wanted to be by my side and not say a word as I explored this new world of trust. Silence was trust that didn’t have to explain itself; it was also knowing someone. I had spent so much time lying. Lying to everyone I knew in Brooklyn about who I was or wanted to be. I lied to survive all those people.
Then life got fuller and bigger, with rainbows! rainbows! rainbows! everywhere, even as we walked toward his death. Our language, our love of it, the talking and laughter, the shared books and gorgeous and petty observations I offered up about people I didn’t like (my bitchery amused him but he never joined in—he was focussed on me) were the whole world that first year and a half or two years while we were at Columbia together.
He had a scar on one of his knees, the result of a car accident in high school. He told me that story when I finally went to Connecticut to visit; one of his lovely, funny sisters was getting married, and I was his date. We were finished with college by then. It must have been 1984, or 1985, who can remember. We had been friends for several years. At that point, he was in love and living with a man in an apartment on the Upper East Side, near where the train tracks emerge from under Park Avenue. I spent some time in that apartment. We’d all go out, and instead of going home without him I’d go to his home and sleep in the living room, sleep fitfully, because of their closed door.
He picked me up at the train. We were delighted to see each other. His sister’s wedding would take place in a nearly completely white town. There are many ways to come out. Before he took me to meet his parents in their nice, modest home, he took me on a drive and showed me a number of things: his high school, the shore where he and his friends sometimes hung out, other places. I remember night rolling in and his legs in his bluejeans and his loafered foot on the car’s accelerator. I remember being turned on by his confidence behind the wheel.
He had told me a story about how once, when he was little, his mother drove him and his siblings to pick up their brother from his paper route. This was around 1969, when there was much strife and mayhem in the Connecticut branches of theBlack Panther Party. His mother told her children to make sure to lock their car doors, because “those Panthers were loose.” And he remembered thinking then,Oh, let them in, let them in.
The point was his smile. The point was that here was a human, and this human was saying, Press your smile and all else against me, and this human was saying, I’m glad I’m from Connecticut and you’re from Brooklyn, and isn’t it amazing that we can drink Manhattans in Manhattan? The point was that he was interested in my interest inProustand in the accuracy of William Gass’s observations. The point was that he wanted to be a living presence in my imagination, was intent on making room for himself in my thoughts. I remember him saying once—God, this is just coming back to me now—I remember him saying once after he got sick, in 1989 or 1990, I was with him in the hospital and I was trying to take his clothes so that I could wash them at my place, and he exclaimed, “You’re a young man!” He saw in my posture all the women he would never know, including my mother, who was dead by then, and my sisters, but what he also saw and was calling me out on was a fact: I was a man, and I turned him on just as I was.
Love had teeth. They grabbed me by the modified Afro and wouldn’t let me go. I didn’t want him to let me go, not then, and not now. I want to say that one of those teeth was chipped in the front, but I can’t remember. What I do know is that, Yankee stoic until the end, he had his four wisdom teeth pulled in one go. His former lover presented them to me in a Tiffany watch box at his funeral. (When the West Indian elders dreamed of teeth—“Dem teet fall out dem head”—it meant that somebody would die, or was dead. He’s already dead, but he comes back, he comes back.)
For some time after he died, I kept those teeth on a little altar I made for him, in my first real New York apartment. A careless rich Black girl was staying with me the fall after he died; she was between apartments, having just left her female lover. Back then, I thought it was my job to take in every Black girl in the world, especially those who seemed in distress. One night, as this woman talked about her tiresome ex-lover, she lit a cigarette off one of the candles I had burning by the altar. Then, distractedly, since she was interested only in her own story, she put her cigarette out on the box that contained his teeth. I remember saying nothing, because I didn’t feel I had a right to, because who was I? Plus, I wanted to believe that she wouldn’t do such a thing; I wanted to believe that she was family, and with family you can forgive anything, even having the teeth you love singed by carelessness, all in the hope that your silence will result in togetherness. ♦
