Artists Are Vampires.

Journal, 11/9/1980.

Poring over my journals and letters and manuscripts going back to when I was 14 has been — I guess not unexpectedly because why else would I be doing it? — revelatory in ways big and small. I think the most striking sort of overall discovery is that words I use now, habits of mind, views and opinions I hold deeply, things which I might have otherwise, without a lot of analysis, insisted I’d learned or developed over the course of 60 years, actually show up regularly and more or less fully-formed in my writing at 25, or 19, or 16.

This entry from 1980, when I was a sophomore at Miami University studying acting and directing, pulled me up short this morning. Not the first bit — that feeling of lostness is something I mention over and over in my journals from all ages. I mean the second paragraph, where I write that my closest friend and I are in the middle of a tense, painful episode, and even as it’s happening I’m mulling over its potential as “material.” It struck me as incredibly cold and also I recognize that I’m doing that all the time, every day.

It’s something I’ve heard lots of artists describe, that sense of there being two mental tracks running simultaneously all the time: one on which you experience your life, and two, the one where you’re observing and evaluating it as a “story.” But for some (obviously self-serving) reason I never really saw the stark reality that that process infiltrates every relationship I’ve ever had in my life. And I didn’t realize I was already so cold-blooded at 19.

Going Through Some Stuff.

Work these days consists mostly of poring over journals and correspondence, drawings, drafts, and manuscripts from the first half of the 1980s. And then feeling a bit nauseous and sad the rest of the day. Maybe the nausea is a side effect of the vaccine, I don’t know. But the sadness is not, not a medical side effect is what I mean, but I did start crying out of the blue on my walk home after I got the shot.

The big overall impression I get from this look back at my early twenties is how insanely precarious life was: practically and financially, artistically, emotionally and psychologically, physically. Jesus Christ. It’s just falling in love with every man who says hello, suicidal breakups, crazy druggy days and nights, losing jobs every other week and job hunting and quitting jobs and moving, and getting sick getting sick, making art and questioning it TO DEATH. And all that stuff is just the background for a wild life of incredible freedom and fun, ecstasy, abandon in a neighborhood that is vibrating with it all day every day.

Looking at all the ephemera from that time is disorienting and to say the least emotionally complicated. It’s a lot to process, but process I will! For my birthday, Chan gave me a week’s retreat in a cabin in the Adirondacks to write. Work here at home is going well and steadily, but it’ll be great to be alone with it for a chunk of time.

An Elegant Line.

My reference to “an elegant line” is about one of my teachers at Parsons, where I studied fine arts — Harvey, whose last name I’ve forgotten — having said in a critique of one of my drawings that I had “an elegant line.” I was deeply insulted, shaken. I took it to mean that I was producing kitsch, not art, and from that moment on I was determined that all my lines would be inelegant. It’s like a phobia, back then and even still, my fear of being good enough at something to fake it. It was like every time I sat down to make art, of any kind, I had to reinvent the wheel. I couldn’t just paint, I had to invent painting first.

These journal entries are from the year after my year at Parsons. I had dropped out of school because I wanted to be an artist not an art student, but I was careening from one idea to the next, one style to another, a different medium every week or two, feeling like I’d figured it out, realizing I hadn’t, and over and over. (If I’d actually made every piece of conceptual art I described in my journal that fall, I’d … have made a lot of pieces of conceptual art.) I spent much of the previous fall sick, culminating in a bout of pneumonia, one shitty low-paying job after another, barely scraping by even in the cheap 80s East Village, and I was exhausted.

I was ideologically opposed to making money with my art. Not just a young idealistic desire to put artistic before commercial considerations, but a moral line in the sand. And yet I complained constantly about having to do other work to pay the bills. I don’t remember seeing the dilemma built into that.

These years were consequential years. I began to get a sense of myself as an artist, what was important, what was not, and I fell deeply in love about 25 times, mostly with men I’d spent one night with and never saw again and then I fell in love for real and it nearly killed me.

(The period of 1982-84, at least as I’m mapping it out now, will be the climax of my book, when all the threads come together: my first serious love and heartbreak, the arrest and trial for child molestation in my hometown of the man with whom I had my first sexual experience at 16, and the active years of the serial killer Larry Eyler in and around that part of Indiana.)

So … I will be 60 on Monday. I have reached that age “when the real anxiety comes, about the passing of time, about age and death and accomplishment, when I can’t say ‘I’m young’ anymore.” I want to go back and tell my 21-year-old self that he’s right to be vigilant about the elegant line. And also, calm the fuck down man.

Pride/Shame -- My Thoughts on It's a Sin.

(Probably don’t read this if you plan to watch the series. If you haven’t seen it, do. It’s gripping.)

I’ve seen lots of rapturous reviews of It’s A Sin in social media, and I’ve seen some very strong criticism. It’s unavoidable that a series whose subject is the AIDS plague years would arouse strong feelings and opinions among the men and women who lived through those years in those communities.

Most of the negative critique seems to center around the scene near the end, after the death of Ritchie, who, in the first episode fled his homophobic family to come to London (all the characters do that) and who early on dismissed the seriousness of the risk of getting infected and the risk of infecting others. The scene is between Ritchie’s mother and his best girlfriend, Jill. Jill says:

 “Actually, it is your fault, Mrs. Tozer — all of this is your fault… Right from the start. I don’t know what happened to you, to make that house so loveless, that’s why Ritchie grew up so ashamed of himself — and then he killed people! He was ashamed, he kept on being ashamed, he kept shame going by having sex with men, infecting them, and then running away. Cuz that’s what shame does, Valerie, it makes him think he deserves it. The wards are full of men who think they deserve it. They are dying, and a little bit of them thinks ‘Yes, this is right, I brought this on myself, it’s my fault because the sex that I love is killing me.’“

The monologue is a gut punch when you’ve spent your life arguing that promiscuity was not killing us, sex was not killing us, we were not killing ourselves. Governmental neglect and societal indifference and antipathy were killing us.

A common slogan on posters and other ACT UP media was “Homophobia kills.” Meaning that a homophobic government was ignoring the pandemic because it was queers who were dying. A homophobic society didn’t care that we were dying, because it was our own fault, and we deserved it. But this series asserts something deeper and more insidious: homophobia causes gay men to feel shame, and shame makes them hate themselves, which causes them to believe their lives are worthless. They internalize society’s view of them, and that causes their promiscuity and carelessness about sex. That’s a lot to swallow when you have cut your gay political teeth on the idea that openly celebrating our sexuality is the most potent political weapon we can exercise, the most important act of resistance. 

(And of course there’s a convincing argument to be made that the conservative turn of the post-90s gay rights movement, toward marriage, children, military service, assimilation, and away from sexual freedom is a community-wide shame reaction to the plague years. It’s A Sin is very much a post-90s work of art, a product of this era.)

Here’s what I think. Can we allow for the possibility that we experience, and perceive, our promiscuity as both things: freedom, joy, celebration and a grinding compulsive need to replace our self-hatred, even if it’s just for a few minutes, with the feeling of worth and control that being attractive to someone brings? For me, in my life, promiscuity was both these things at different times and often at the same time.

Pride and shame are two sides of the same coin. Can anyone honestly say that when they came out all the bad feelings just went “poof!” For me, coming out, being out, feeling pride, protesting homophobia, all these things are part of a lifelong project to chip away at the shame. We insist on joy because we’ve been told all our lives that our desire is disgusting. We live in a world that hates us. That was true when I was a child, true in 1979 when I came out, true in 1981, and it’s still true. How would we not feel shame?

I think depicting gay men who don’t feel shame, who don’t to some extent think terrible things about themselves, hate themselves sometimes, would be a misrepresentation, but as a community we do it all the time, refuse to acknowledge our shame, our damage, our pain. The relentless rainbows and unicorns PRIDE! message might be politically necessary, but it can compound our shame. Constantly being told that we should be proud and not ashamed makes us ashamed of our shame.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth.

One thing I can’t really make sense of is that this monologue, this “thesis statement,” comes not from one of the gay men characters — who would presumably speak with more authority on the subject — but from the straight woman friend. To be honest, I’m not sure how to parse that narrative choice.

Thoughts On a Damaged Photograph.

This is one of a set of snapshots of my mother and father’s wedding in the summer of 1958. I think Mom said that it was a photo of the wedding day lunch, which maybe was a more traditional affair than it is now, or possibly more traditional there than it is everywhere? I don’t know. It was taken in the kitchen of the DeMeyer farmhouse on Grange Hall Road in Gurnee, Illinois. The road is now much bigger and busier and has a different name, and the house, though still standing, has been converted into municipal offices and is unrecognizable. I don’t know how this photo was separated from the set, but I ended up with it in my 20s. I loved it and probably just asked to have it.

When I left Brian in 1990, I moved from our apartment on Ashland in Ft. Greene to an apartment on Warren Street in Boerum Hill on the other side of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I had never lived alone in New York but I had just negotiated a large raise in my hourly rate as a temp proofreader, and I could afford the tiny one-bedroom apartment in what was then a very poor neighborhood. The apartment was on the top floor of a row house, freshly painted, no frills but clean. My landlord was only a little older than me, had long wavy hair, muscles, and crooked teeth, and coming and going I often saw him cleaning or repairing the building and another building he owned nearby. He wore very short black leather shorts and a cropped tight white t-shirt when he worked outside.

The outside wall of my long, narrow kitchen was exposed brick. Next to a small table where I ate my meals, I hung several small framed photographs and pieces of art that were special to me so I could look at them while I ate, this photo among them.

Days after I signed the lease, my graveyard shift “perma-temp” gig at Weil Gotshal collapsed with everything else that collapsed at the end of the 80s, and I could no longer afford the rent. Luckily, my old friend Joan needed a roommate in her apartment on 10th and 1st — I had lived there with Joan years earlier, when I was at Parsons — so I broke my lease in Brooklyn and moved back to the East Village.

When I took down the art from the brick wall, the frame on this photo felt damp in the back, and then I saw that the wall itself was wet, possibly with condensation or maybe the brick wasn’t sealed so moisture came through the wall when it rained. Water had seeped into the frame, behind the glass, and when I tried to remove the photo, no matter how carefully or slowly I worked, most of its surface came off with the glass.

On the left you can see Diane, one of my mother’s best girlfriends in high school, who was a bridesmaid, with her husband at the time. In the left foreground is probably Don, my mother’s little brother and next to him would be Mom’s much younger sister, Nicki, who was called Susan then. If you look closely you can see Mom at the head of the table, framed by the window, and farther right the front of my grandmother Elsie’s face, and then at the far right a fragment of my mother’s best friend and maid of honor, Carole. On the table are what look like a platter of fried chicken and a plate of large rolls. The table is set with what were their best dishes, probably my grandparents’ wedding China. It could just be the awkwardness of being caught off guard for a snapshot, or the stiffness of the formal clothes and serious occasion, but no one looks comfortable, no one is smiling in this photo. All of these things were of course much clearer to see before the photo was damaged.

This is the only photo I know of taken inside that house. I feel sick to my stomach every time I see it, contemplating the loss. But Mom never shared good memories associated with that house; she only talked about violent arguments and days-long bitter silences between my grandmother Elsie and grandfather Emil DeMeyer. And between Emil and my mother’s older sister Carol. It was not a happy family.

The Man Who's Not in My Family Tree

Pretty sure all my friends have heard me go on about my grandfather Edward Cheslik, who my father believes was a homosexual and who was certainly an alcoholic and an unreliable husband and father, as far as that goes. My father told me these things when I came out to my parents at 20 (if you accept my telling) or 18 (if you believe my mother). And when I say “told me” that’s short for “told my mother and she told me.”

This story, or these stories, or I should say the gaps in this story, are, I’m realizing, the driving force of my life’s work. In my twenties, I wrote a song called My Family Tree, the subject of which was not knowing anything about the man my grandfather loved. (My father has since changed the way he tells it — he used to say that his father disappeared several times, his mother tracked him down, and she always found him living with a particular man, but recently Dad told me that it was not the same man but always a different man. Though there’s no way to be sure, I’m inclined to go with the first version because my father often alters facts in stories in later tellings. But to be sure it is possible the revision is correct.)

The geography of my father’s childhood tracks his abandonment by his father. Lenore found Ed in Albert Lea, she packed up and moved the family to Albert Lea. Lenore found Ed in Waukegan, she packed up the family and moved to Waukegan — where my father met my mother and where I was born. Even a series of earlier moves within Winona, where they lived when my dad was little and where the Chesliks go back several generations, seem to have been prompted by a series of frustratingly undescribed “scandals.”

For a long time, that was enough to know. Or I should say it was enough to not know. Just the knowledge that my grandfather was probably queer, the sense of a forebear, was potent and moving to me. More recently I’m less satisfied. As I’ve studied more and more lives of gay people and seen how almost every biography is full of holes — holes created specifically, explicitly, by the imperative to preserve secrecy in order to avoid public shame, ostracization, injury, death: correspondence burned, personal papers burned, everything containing any hint of intimate or domestic life, any sign of love, destroyed, lost to history — I’ve become more angry, more unsettled, more heartbroken. Because it’s not just a family history lost but the history of a people.

I mean to tell Edward’s story in this book I’m writing, and I want more to tell.

My grandfather and my grandmother Lenore were divorced I think in the very late 1950s or early 1960s. My mother said that Ed held me as a baby, and then, after many shorter disappearances, disappeared for good. In 1965, he was found dead under a tractor trailer in Tucson where he had crawled for warmth and shelter. He was what they used to call a “transient” — homeless. He must have been carrying identification because the small article in the Arizona Daily Star about his death named him, and the coroner phoned his “next of kin,” his sister Sylvia in Minnesota. Silvia flew, alone, to Arizona to identify and claim the body of her brother. She and the minister were the only people at the funeral service. Edward Paul Cheslik was buried in Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson.

Now I yearn for the seemingly impossible. Who was the man he left his family to be with? Or was it men? Where did they meet, and how? What could it possibly have been like to be a homosexual in small town Minnesota in the 1920s? 1930s? Where was Ed during the period after his final disappearance until his death a few years later? There are 1800 highway miles between Waukegan, Illinois and Tucson, Arizona. Why Tucson? Where did he stop along the way? For how long? How did he get by?

I found a woman on Ancestry.com, in that list they give you of “2nd/3rd cousin, shared DNA,” who had written a short remembrance of her grandmother Silvia Cheslik Luxem, Ed’s sister. I sent her a note asking if she had heard any family stories of Ed. She wrote back right away, having contacted an aunt who was Silvia’s daughter. The aunt remembered Ed and Lenore and that Ed had disappeared and the family never spoke of it, and she remembered meeting my father when he was a teenager and he showed her his model airplanes. Just reading these fragments of a stranger’s memory of my father and his family this morning I found myself suddenly crying, though it amounts to nothing much.

Most people research their genealogies, construct their family trees, based on marriage records, but of course there’s none of that. I know about Ed’s marriage, but that’s such a small part of his story.  Maybe one of the big questions I need to answer as I write this book is — what is the nature of a story that has been mostly erased, the only people who might have had direct memories of it all dead, about a man whose family for the most part wanted to forget and nobody living much cares about?

I just want to give Edward Cheslik’s life the dignity of being remembered, and I don’t know how to do that.

It's Not Christmas Till Christmas.

We’re three days into the Little Drummer Boy Challenge and Whamageddon (so far, so good) which I think really just stand in for our collective impulse to run from all the the terrible Christmas songs and execrable recordings of good Christmas songs that saturate our manmade environment for 6 weeks every year — though this year most of us are getting a break from it because we’re not leaving home. OR SHOULDN’T BE.

I don’t have any strong feelings about the Wham! song. It’s fluff and doesn’t pretend to be anything but. I don’t mind it nearly as much as, I don’t know, Christine Aguilera bushwhacking her way through O Holy Night. The LDBC I take much more seriously. There literally is no song worse than that song, and there are a thousand self-serious covers of it out there, from Boyz II Men to Bad Religion, waiting to assault you. It is endless and, for such a messagey song, it has no message. I hate it.

I do have strong feelings about Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and I avoid it more scrupulously than either of the official challenge songs because the revised version that everyone sings now completely misses, or I should say avoids, the whole point of the song, which is the whole point of the season, which is that, no matter how bad things might be right now, if you have faith, the darkness will end. There will be light again. You don’t have to be Christian or even religious to feel the power of that metaphor.

Reportedly, Frank Sinatra loved the song but didn’t want to sing something so sad — the obvious question being that if he loved the song why did he murder it? — and had it re-written. (It’s fitting that Sinatra is the culprit here. Much later, he stole New York, New York from Liza Minelli, who, also, like her mom, did it better. To say the least.)

I was heartened to come across this article this morning. Maybe this year, because the words of the song, as in its original wartime context, can be read absolutely literally, it’s possible to appreciate again the power of this song, its honesty about our sorrowful circumstances, the pain we feel being so long separated from so many of our loved ones, a pain without which the hope in the song (“someday soon we all will be together”), the faith, the promise of light after the long dark night has no meaning.

It is, no question, the best Christmas song ever written. But you will never hear it even if you spend from now to Christmas Eve in a mall. You will hear some bullshit that sounds like it about a million times. If you want, you can do what I do: every time someone starts singing it, sing along (either out loud or in your head — read the room) but sing the original lyrics.

5/26/82.

I found another journal!

There have been huge gaps, sometimes of many years, in my journal-keeping, particularly frustrating because they often occur at times when the most is going on in my life. But this one is a real find — a lot is happening.

Armelia McQueen died today (or yesterday?), which sent me looking for the Playbills that I saved from my first trip to New York in 1979. The second Broadway show I saw was Ain’t Misbehavin’. For years, decades, I used to tell people that I’d seen the original cast with Nell Carter, and I truly believed that I had, but several years ago I was looking at the Playbill I’d saved and I realized that I’d seen a replacement cast over a year after the show had opened. So … I love Armelia McQueen, my college friends and I wore that cast album out so I’m very familiar with her voice, but I wanted to see if by chance she was still in the Broadway production when I saw it. She was not.

But as I was digging, I found a stack of pages tied with a shoelace, and it turned out to be my journal from spring of 1982 to June 1983, for some reason stored separately from the other journals. It’s the period of time when I’m becoming more and more impatient with studying fine arts at Parsons, contemplating and then deciding to leave school and just be an artist in the city.

I spent that summer back in Greencastle, Indiana, working at a menial job on the graveyard shift at IBM and living cheap to save up a little cushion (back then, $100 was a sizable cushion). But before that, in Indiana for Christmas, I met this guy Paul. I don’t remember a lot about him, except that he was visiting my friend Nancy, that the night we met we played footsy under the table at dinner or a bar where we’d gone out with a group of friends, that he was very handsome, and I think a music student, and that I was obsessed with him for a disproportionate length of time considering we saw each other twice.

We slept together that night, and I fell deep into a crazy obsession, which was par for the course for me back then. That was before I learned that lust and love are two different things. He gave me crabs, which took a while to get rid of. Then, I saw him again that spring, and he gave me crabs again! As far as I remember I didn’t see him again.

I don’t remember any of the stuff I’ve written here about Chicago. Scott was my best friend in college, and I don’t think he even knew Paul.

His last name was unusual enough that I found him quickly with a Google search. He worked as an actor for many years in Chicago and Los Angeles. At some point, he met a man and together they started a successful catering company. He died of AIDS in 1995.

July 20, 1998.

I mean I know those years actually happened (though as I read my journal from that period I would say a good half of the gigs I mention I have no recollection of) but I don’t know how we did it, day after day after day. Man were we busy. A couple weeks before this entry, one of our cats had died, another was on death’s door with a failing liver, we were in the middle of the process of pitching a variety show to execs at Comedy Central, preparing to move to Nashville, and we were playing several shows a week, most of them out of town, while still working full-time at a law firm.

That period of time felt very much like the beginning of something big, but it was, looking back, the beginning of the end.

Four years later, after it really did end, therapy and meditation and a lot of hard core self-examination helped me reconnect with my love of the work and loosen my intense attachment to the idea that it must lead to fame and fortune. Every once in a while in the last 10 years or so, the various successes of LIzZie will arouse that old familiar feeling of inevitability, that you just have to bear down harder and harder and it will happen. It’s not true, it’s not productive, and it eventually destroys the work, so I have my guard up against its return. But now, reading this and being reminded just how extreme that feeling was back then, how it controlled every aspect of our lives, I realize I don’t have to worry. I will never be that crazy again, it would kill me, not just the cats.

It actually IS a journey.

My intention recently is to focus on my work to divert my mind from election news. Obviously, I don't always succeed, but I have managed to stick with it for at least a few hours every day for the last few weeks

The work right now consists mostly of reading my old journals. The last few days it's the period (late 1997 - spring 1999) when Jay and I were floundering in New York and moved to Nashville, which was a time of grinding uncertainty about the future, low lows and high highs. My journals are dense with anxiety about the direction of our career, endless speculation and hypothetical scenarios, picking apart every decision, every plan, every dream and aspiration. So the reading is every bit as emotionally taxing as the news. At least it is productive.

One thing we did during that time was rent an RV and take a road trip to Austin for SXSW. We took along two people, Suzanne, our neighbor and dear friend who performed with us many times and often took care of our four cats when we were away. And our friend Brian, who was a student at the time, a filmmaker and lighting designer who did lights for our shows at HERE. And we took all four cats with us. (That’s Honey on my lap in the photo.)

The trip was magical and joyful and weird and a lot of fun. (On the other hand, SXSW itself was mostly kind of awful — ah, those lows and highs.) Brian shot lots of video and made a film. This clip is from the drive down when we stopped at Suzanne’s parents’ home in Charlottesville for a night. A couple minutes in, there’s a bit of us singing one of my favorite songs we ever sang, “Far Side Banks of Jordan.” Terry Smith wrote the song, but Johnny and June made it famous. Sorry for the poor quality video, it’s from a very old VHS.

I don’t miss those days at all. But I miss those days.

Journals.

I spent a few weeks researching the serial killer Larry Eyler, reading and listening to whatever I could find on the internet. Next I want to read the transcripts of his 1989 murder trial in Chicago. I have to do that in person at the courthouse, and that visit will be part of a much larger trip to Indiana and Illinois for research, interviews, etc. It might be a while before I can do that, so I’ve moved on to other tasks.

This week I am locating and compiling all my journals. All of them. My journal-keeping has been sporadic, regular and comprehensive for certain periods of time and then nothing for long stretches. But I started at 15 and I’m nearly 60, so even sporadic adds up to a lot. The old ones are on paper, many of the newer ones are digital. For many years I’ve been frustrated that a few months worth of entries from 2000-2001 are in WordPerfect files, too old to open in newer versions of Word, and I thought they were probably lost to me. But the internet is full of miracles, and today I found a website where I was able to convert them online.

They are from a time that seems almost like fiction or a dream. Jay Byrd and I were still living in Nashville after two years, but our moorings were coming loose. We’d lost our apartment, two of them in fact in rapid succession. We’d bought a camper and parked it in a friend’s driveway, and we were living in it, planning a months-long trip to the West Coast, a trip neither of us had ever taken. We would set off in January, and I’m not sure how or when but this “trip” would turn into two years of living permanently on the road (“permanently” being a deeply ironic word for anything that happened in that time), and those would be our last years together.

But first, apparently though I can’t remember now the logistics, we took a shorter trip in December to Indiana, played a bunch of shows, and spent Christmas with my family. I assume we had the trailer with us, probably left it at my parents’ house while we rattled around Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Here are two entries that capture well what our life was like then. When I was reading them just now, at first I didn’t remember any of it but then it started to come back. We had hundreds of remarkable experiences and encounters like this in those days. The circumstances of our life and our career were incredibly challenging, and people took care of us, lifted us up, took us in, everywhere we went. I’ll never forget that or stop being grateful for it:

December 15, 2000

I don’t know if it’s the weather, the time of year, the circumstances of my life right now or what, but I feel raw. All this snow is so beautiful, I find just looking at the landscape as we drive by, deeply moving. The trees dusted with snow, the stark white fields, even the gray highway slush because it recalls so many memories: walking in New York after the snow has been on the streets for a couple days; those black rubber snow boots with the big metal buckles which we were so embarrassed to wear to school when we were little kids.

This day seems to go so deeply into my memories of winter, my notion even of what winter is. The sky that’s as white as the fields so there’s no horizon, the only thing showing any perspective in the landscape being the barns and brown stands of trees getting grayer, smaller, and paler into the distance. And that brown that strikes me as so rich, but only because there’s no other color anywhere, only gray and white.

We’re on our way to Ft. Atkinson Wisconsin today for a show. We have a phone interview on a gay radio program before the show. The program is in Chicago, so the radio spot will promote our Sunday concert there. I’m looking forward to the show tonight mainly because it’s in a listening room with a cover charge, so everyone in the room will be there to see us. I’m having a hard time lately with playing in cafes, etc., with an accidental audience. Like last night, we played at Lula’s in South Bend. When we walked out and started, we had everyone’s rapt attention for 2 songs, then half of them went back to talking, reading, studying, and ignoring us. I was furious, and had trouble focusing enough to perform. In situations like that sometimes what happens is I withdraw, Jay goes into overdrive to try to win the audience and he’s good at it, so then I feel like I’m left out and I start to resent Jay and feel like he’s taking over ... all of this happening in my head on stage!

December 16, 2000

Ft. Atkinson and the Café Carpe were the perfect antidote to South Bend. We had a wonderful audience in a warm, quiet room. Our audience consisted of one large party who all came together, so thank god for them. They were Will Fellows and his friends. Will wrote the book Farm Boys, of which a New York fan is writing a stage adaptation. This New York fan, Dean Gray, wants to use some of our music, or we may write some new material specifically for the production. At any rate, Dean told Will about us and Will saw on our web site that we were performing in Ft. Atkinson which is close to where he lives, so he arranged for a group of friends to meet for dinner and our show. Thus, our audience. I think both Jay and I were aware the whole time we were performing of the fact that if this party hadn’t shown up, and the weather has been pretty treacherous so they may not have, we would have been performing for a lot of empty tables and Ernie, a local laborer who comes to every show and falls asleep halfway through. It was a little like performing for the Rotary Club, only because they were all white men, between about 35 and 60, sitting at one long table. The sing-along portions sounded like the bass section of the glee club.

Our hosts were Bill and Kitty who own and run the Café Carpe (it’s the French for carp, the fish, not the Latin carpe, as in “carpe diem,” Bill explained to us. Because we asked. We wondered why he didn’t pronounce the “e” at the end. A river runs behind the café, and periodically it has to be purged of carp. I didn’t exactly follow Bill’s explanation of how and why, but for some reason there is an overpopulation problem with the carp. The species was introduced here by the European settlers. Bill and Kitty named their café after the fish because they enjoy the poetry of the European fish doing essentially the same thing to the river that the European people have done to the land, i.e., overpopulating and destroying or running off the local natives. When we arrived, Kitty showed us our “quarters” upstairs. Up a winding staircase and through a maze of rooms was a little apartment that I think they used to live in with their kids Satchel, who is 16, and Savannah, who is 10. They have moved to another apartment I think she said across the street. She said this second floor above the restaurant used to be two or three apartments, which explained the maze of rooms. Kitty had made up a bed for us in a cozy little room with a huge rubber tree overhanging the bed and a bookshelf full of books.

Bill made us salads for dinner before the show. Then we went upstairs to do an on-air phone interview with a Chicago radio show. When we came back down to set up the stage, Will’s party had arrived, so we didn’t do a proper sound check. Satchel helped us set up microphones and we set some rough levels, then went back upstairs to change. While we were setting up microphones, Satchel asked me, “Which one of you has to change before the show?” I said, “We both change, but I’m still wearing pants when we come back down.”

Afterwards we had Christmas cookies (they had had a cookie-baking party and there were still boxes and boxes of cookies around to be eaten, because, as Kitty explained, the process was more the point of the party than having a purpose for the cookies) and I had decaf and Jay had hot buttered rum because he has a cold. I also had a piece of carrot cake. All evening we had been seeing these perfectly square pieces of cake being served on white plates. Their neatness and regularity intrigued us enough to ask for a piece (not that the fact of cake in and of itself isn’t reason enough to want a piece). It was the best carrot cake I’ve ever had, and I told Kitty that this morning and she copied down the recipe for me. Bill came over and sat with us as we ate (pushing cookies). That’s when he told us the fish story.

When we came downstairs in the morning, Kitty was making coffee. We sat at the long bar while she made us scrambled eggs and toast, and Savannah poured us juice. Then Kitty sat down with us and told us the story of Ernie, who has a disability that affects his speech. He wandered in one day looking for country music, found it, and has come back for every show since. He answers personal ads in the local weekly paper, and he solicited Bill and Kitty’s help in writing one of his own to place. His social worker told Kitty that he’s been engaged in this pursuit for a mate ever since his wife died 16 years ago.

I wonder how it’s even possible that people like Bill and Kitty exist who have so much love in their hearts that they can treat perfect strangers like family. That they can make the 20 odd hours of our moving through their life feel to us like coming home. And then I wonder how it’s come to be that everyone is not like this, because it seems so natural, feels so essential.

Today it’s back to Indiana again, to Goshen, about a five hour drive. Last night we had freezing rain, but this morning it warmed up enough to melt. The highways are clear. But it’s wet, so there’s a danger that the temperature will drop and every surface will freeze again. We hope not. We’ve seen our share of overturned trucks and mangled cars on the side of the road this month. I asked Jay if he would ever consider living in a place that had winters like this. He said that it would be good for writing. I was thinking the same thing when I asked. I love this part of the country. I think it would be a great place for us to be, with the beautiful lush green summers and the long cold snowy winters. The thought of that inevitable yearly contemplative season for writing and thinking and meditating makes me swoon. Someday. I get through the anxiety and fear of our life as traveling musicians by holding onto my faith that we will spend some portion of the later part of our life together in a more focused and peaceful environment where we can write and sing and make our art without the shrill nagging of poverty.

It's a Book!

After months of toggling between a sort of panicked mental reeling and total despair, having less idea every day since the advent of the pandemic and sharing the apartment all day with my now working at home husband, not to mention the shutdown of live theater, i.e. the world in which my art lives, of what the fuck to do with myself, a state of mind that for all intents and purposes from the outside I’m sure is indistinguishable from mere whining and moping, a couple nights ago I felt a simple, clear shift. I finally relaxed into the idea (the fact?) that this is not temporary but the new condition of my life.

I decided to go back to structuring my day to spend the better portion of the afternoon doing something productive toward a larger project: writing or researching or thinking or planning. Working. I will stake out the bedroom/office every afternoon and relinquish the living room to the inner workings of the financial industry. Save my marriage, preserve what’s left of my sanity, make art. Win, win, win.

And since I still have paralyzing questions about the future of theater, and because writing is something I can do alone at home every day, and because working on something that is finished when it’s written, rather than something where the writing is just the beginning, removes my apprehension about writing for theater, I am going to write a book.

I’ve had this story in my head for quite a while. (My musical Jack sprouted from the same ground but is much more limited in scope.) It’s a multi-generation saga radiating out from memoir to tell the stories of my grandfather Ed Cheslik who, homeless in Tucson, died under a tractor trailer where he’d crawled looking for shelter; Larry Eyler, the gay serial killer who murdered 21 teenagers and young men in the early 1980s mostly in and around the county where I went to high school; and finally the 40-year-old man with whom I had my first sexual experience, a service he provided to gay teenagers for decades in that small town in Indiana, mostly right under the noses of anyone not too repulsed to care. Which was practically no one until 1983 when he was arrested and convicted of child molestation in a lurid trial at the Putnam County courthouse.

Anyway … I found in my research today two items that thrilled me and I wanted to share.

Mrs. John Kirby is my father’s older sister, Jane. She married John Kirby, who, until I read this item on the society page of the Winona Republican-Herald, I didn’t know had studied acting. He went on to have a long career as a lawyer and judge in St. Paul. My father never liked him. John and Jane must have been very recently married at the time of this article. They had a daughter Lucretia a few years later and then in 1957 Jane became very ill with some kind of infection, spent nearly a year in the hospital, and died in 1958, a little over two years before I was born. She was in law school at the time.

That’s Ed, my grandfather, posing for an ad in the Winona Daily News, 1947. Ed and my grandmother Lenore owned and operated Eddie’s Tavern in Winona, Minnesota for several years. Two years after this ad ran the same paper announced that Ed and Lenore had sold Eddie’s Tavern. My dad would have been 16, and I believe this is when the family moved to Waukegan, Illinois under a cloud of scandal. (Waukegan is where he met my mother and where I was born.) I don’t know the details of the scandal — pulling teeth is way easier than getting my father to elaborate — but the gist is that Ed was caught somehow somewhere fooling around with another man. Finding him here behind the bar in his long white apron smiling with his hand on his hip made me very happy today.

Dreams.

I was sitting on a patch of grass next to an airport runway with a small group of friends watching planes take off and land. A very large white plane came down the runway with a downturned snout like the Concord but a much fatter fuselage, massive wings, and a sort of fishtail mechanism on the back that swayed from side to side to turn the plane. It was so pure white it sparkled in the sun and we were all mesmerized by it. After it took off, it turned and circled back, got lower and lower and then crashed nearby in a cloud of dust and debris and smoke. A moment later it exploded with a boom and a bigger cloud rose. It was gorgeous and some of the group got out their phones to take pictures. My only thought was “Damn! I can’t believe I didn’t bring my phone.”

Later we had a party at an old Victorian house with big rooms and a yard. At first it was just my friends but soon there were hundreds of people in the house and yard, and live music, food everywhere, vats of soft ice cream, cookies so undercooked they turned liquid when you tried to pick them up. We were drinking gin and tonics and we smoked lots of pot. My friend Kristin arrived late and brought whippets. When she handed me one, I made a big show of saying to the room, “I haven’t done whippets since I was in college!” and immediately I felt embarrassed. My friend Martha, in a minidress and blue pantyhose, was dancing alone in the middle of the room; she made a big flourish at the end of the song and finished on the floor with her skirt hiked up too high. She came and sat next to me on the couch and worried she was a little too stoned but I told her she wasn’t and she put her head on my shoulder and I stroked her hair and told her not to panic, I’d take care of her.

Somebody Needs to Do This Mashup.

Listen to the first two words of each of these three songs first. (Then listen to the rest.) They’re harmonized differently, and the melodies are not exactly the same, but pretty dang close.

Ever since I heard the Jennifer Hudson tune I’ve been wishing I had the mixing skills to do a mashup of it with “Stay.” But now, there are three! Somebody please do this!

It will redeem the King George character in Hamilton for me, and all will be right in the world..

Thoughts on Tulsa and History.

Something good (Jesus Christ we need something, anything, good!) to come out of this horror show contemporary American life has become is that everyone is talking about history. There’s exasperation in it, but I’ll admit also to a certain amount of satisfaction for those of us who love and study history.

Most people don’t know about Tulsa and Tuskegee. Don’t know about the Upstairs Lounge. Don’t know about Wounded Knee. That is because history has been erased and hidden. By people who don’t want us to know it.

I think there are people who at some point in their lives have had an epiphany about history and their knowledge of it — a realization that a vast amount of it has been deliberately and systematically kept from them — and there are people who have not. It feels like a bright light is suddenly focused on the fact that this is an intentional project carried out over centuries. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy because it’s not as if history had a secret meeting and decided — which is not to say that pieces of it have not involved conspiracies; sometimes in the dark of night, like the removal of dead bodies from Greenwood, and sometimes in broad daylight, like the Texas State Board of Education’s influence on textbook publishers — but if history is not a conspiracy it operates like one.

You realize that the writing of history is always, completely, myth-making, a process which has many motivations but in the end they just add up to the old saw that history is written by the victors. Not just written by the victors, but written by the victors in order to keep the vanquished vanquished. Hundreds, thousands, of people over time have made hundreds, thousands of decisions to tell a story this way and not that way, to tell this story and not that story, to exaggerate this one, hide that one, tell this truth, tell that lie. Out of a fear of justice, if not retribution. Because knowing our history makes us angry. And powerful. And demanding.

Learning, in a college class when we read the Martin Sherman play Bent, that homosexual men were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps was that moment for me. Once I knew that, my life of reading and listening and learning has been a lifelong project of uncovering more, about gay history, about Black history, women’s history, and on and on. Can learning about Tulsa be that moment for America?

Fucking Plato.

Early this year, I planned a reading of the musical I’m working on, the one called Jack. I‘d booked the room, cast the roles, and it was going to take place on April 14. Of course it didn’t happen. Even though the event was just a table read, not an audience thing, I was so looking forward to sharing this new work with a roomful of actors.

Back when I was writing songs for bands or for Y’all, I knew that if I wrote a new song and I thought it was good, we’d work it up and put it in the set. And when I wrote songs for theater, even in cases where there was no venue on the horizon there were always collaborators to respond in real time to the new stuff. But most of Jack no one but me has read or heard.

I’ve always been apprehensive to the point of superstition about exposing unfinished work — it just feels too fragile. But these are unusual times. It’s driving me crazy sitting on all these new songs for months, so I started making little videos of selected songs. The videos at first were solely about the fact that it’s easier to get people to click on a video than an audio file, but once I started to put images together the process became a way to get to know the songs more deeply.

In this song, Fucking Plato, 16-year-old Jack goes to the library to look up who he is. It feels like a perfect song for Pride month. The whole show is gay gay gay, but this song is the gayest.

"Where the Wild Things Are Gay"

Tomorrow is Judy Garland’s birthday. It is also Maurice Sendak’s birthday. I’m not exactly torn, but I did want to share this little piece I wrote about Where the Wild Things Are, so I’ll do it today so it doesn’t get lost. I tried very hard to get this published, because I thought it was good and completely original, but I got no bites. It did, however, get cited (as an unpublished manuscript) in a couple of scholarly books on children’s literature, which I’m proud of. I’ve entertained thoughts of rewriting it without all the footnotes, as more of a magazine-style essay. Maybe some day.

Anyway, here it is:

Where the Wild Things Are Gay

A young boy is at odds with his parents. He feels like he doesn’t belong. When he tries to express his true nature, he is punished, banished, abandoned by his family. He runs away to a place where he can be himself, a place where there are others like him. At first, the others are threatening, but they recognize that the boy is one of them. They welcome him into their lush, exotic world of all-night dancing and howling at the moon. The boy is ecstatic but eventually becomes tired and homesick. He says goodbye to his new friends, who are sad to see him go, and he returns home to make peace with his family. Most homosexual men who came out any time since the turn of the 20th century will recognize this as the “coming out story.” It is also the plot of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

The coming out story that gay men tell contains certain basic elements which changed little from the 1930s, when Sendak was growing up, to the 1960s, when Where the Wild Things Are was published. They include a) a feeling in early childhood of being “somehow different” usually accompanied by feelings of shame and fear, b) later, usually in puberty, more specific feelings of same-sex desire, c) some attempt to express these desires, which causes conflict with parents and community, d) leaving or being ejected from home, e) finding acceptance in a new “acquired family,” and f) some attempt to reconcile the new life with the old. This story, which has by its repetition through generations taken on the quality of myth, parallels the trajectory of Max’s story.

Julia Mickenberg, in “Jews in American Children’s Literature,” writes that early in his career

Sendak was told by publishers that his characters weren’t “American” enough, and he was urged to study popular children’s books: what he saw were kids who looked nothing like him, in a world far removed from his own childhood experiences: “The books were filled with blond children with little turned-up  noses, who all bounced about in poppy fields. And my drawings were of naughty, bug-eyed immigrant kids who looked like me,” he told a reporter for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in September 2002 (Mickenberg 16).

If we can say that Sendak put his Jewishness into the character of Max, can we also speculate that his queerness is there as well? “… I am trying to draw the way children feel – or rather, the way I know I felt as a child,” says Sendak in a 1966 New Yorker profile (Hentoff 39). By this logic, I propose a reading of Where the Wild Things Are as a fairy tale for homosexual boys. 

The coming out saga starts in early childhood. Gay men who grew up in the early twentieth century often remember tentative erotic experiences as early as five or six years old. These memories are often associated with discomfort, pain, confusion, and the knowledge that these new feelings cannot be shared with parents. The similarity of these childhood memories quickly becomes obvious in compilations of oral histories such as Keith Vacha’s Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men and Nancy and Casey Adair’s Word is Out: “At about seven or eight years old I was very well aware of my differences; I knew I preferred male companions to female” (Vacha 121). “I remember the pain of being different” (Vacha 12). “I just knew somehow that I was terribly different, an outcast” (Adair 55). Sometimes the feelings are more explicit: “I was looking through some old pictures about a month ago and found one of me at the age of seven. I was sitting in a canoe with a banner across me like a Miss America. It’s the nelliest thing you ever saw. I thought, ‘My God, how can a kid at seven know what he’s going to be?’ But I must have. I can remember when I was about six or seven being groped by a guy who ran a construction crew. Then I remember falling madly in love with a kid in grade school. God, he hurt my feelings! I kissed him once and he started calling me a sissy” (Vacha 170). Sendak’s pictures depicting Max’s misbehavior suggest that it arises from sexual energy, as pointed out by Roderick McGillis in The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature: “Freudians might well gaze knowingly at the nail Max hammers and the crack that it penetrates in the wall. In fact, for those who look for this sort of thing, the book is replete with images of phallic aggressiveness: the strong vertical lines of erect trees, bedposts, Max’s scepter, his ship’s mast, and the horns of some of the Wild Things” (McGillis 80).

Child psychologist and fairy tale theorist Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, writes that a story for children must

give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality—and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child’s predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his future” (Bettelheim 5).

But in 1964 when Where the Wild Things Are came out, a boy’s nascent recognition that he was sexually attracted to other boys would likely have aroused revulsion in his parents rather than a desire to help the child integrate that part of his personality. Patricia Cohen, in a 2008 New York Times interview with Sendak, noted that his life has been scrutinized in hundreds of interviews in his long career and asked if there is anything he has never been asked. He answered, “Well, that I’m gay. All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never knew.” Being out to friends and colleagues but not to family was common not only among homosexuals of Sendak’s generation but until at least as recently as the generation coming out in the sixties, the time of Where the Wild Things Are (Adair 95, 107, 128, 180).

Though children are now, for better or worse, exposed to many images of homosexuals and homosexuality in the popular media, in the mid-sixties there were few, and they were negative. Homosexuality was the monster so horrible it was kept hidden from children, and even from adults except to warn or alarm them. A child who was sophisticated or curious enough to read his parents’ magazines would have come away terrified if he recognized himself as one of the freaks described in such articles as “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease?” (Christian Century 1099), “Homosexuals Need Help” (“Society should not be misled by propaganda efforts of organized homosexual groups trying to gain ‘acceptability’ for homosexuality, a psychotherapist warns”) (Science News-Letter 102), or a 1964 Time article about two men in North Carolina who were sentenced to long prison terms for committing a single homosexual act between consenting adults. The article notes that one of the men’s sentences was “twice as long as the one North Carolina gives an armed robber, three times longer than a train robber’s, 30 times longer than a drunken driver’s” (Time 1964). The following year Time published the only slightly more encouraging, “Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured” (Time 1965). A breakthrough 1964 article in The New York Times, “Speaking Frankly On a Once Taboo Subject,” said that though it was not known how many homosexuals there were in the United States, what was “far more important is that many – perhaps most – are desperately unhappy about it. … They avoid normal sexual activity because they have developed overwhelming fears of their sexual capability and enjoyment with members of the opposite sex. Having been thus cut off from the normal channels for romantic and sexual gratification, homosexuals seek it with members of their own sex. Nevertheless, although basic sexual urges may thus be fulfilled to varying degrees, a feeling of complete attainment of romantic longings probably never occurs” (Times 106).

If gay kids did not pick up the message that they were criminal, sick, evil, and destined to spend their lives miserable and alone, they picked up no message at all. Even Dr. Spock, whose popular books on childcare encouraged post-WWII parents to take a softer, more tolerant approach toward their children, and who addressed at length the sensitive topic of child sexuality, did not mention even the possibility of same-sex orientation in children. It is not surprising that a homosexual child would begin to recognize that he is an alien in his own family.

The next leg of the coming out journey occurs at adolescence or young adulthood when the boy makes some attempt to express his sexual desire and is thrown out or leaves home. When Max puts on his wolf suit and brings out his wild side, he is sent to his room without supper. Even recent studies, in a time of increased tolerance and understanding, show that teen runaways are disproportionately homosexual. A study on the impact of Lawrence v. Texas (the 2003 Supreme Court decision which effectively invalidated laws against sodomy in the United States) in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology notes that “[i]n major urban centers like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, up to half of all of [teenagers who live on the street] may self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Nationally, between eleven and forty percent of homeless youth are thought to be LGBT. … [M]ost homeless LGBT youth have been kicked out of or have run away from home…” (Wardenski 1363). Of course, not all gay boys are thrown or forced out of their homes. Many, like Max, leave of their own accord. One of the subjects of Word is Out says that he “decided the best thing I could do would be to leave so as not to disgrace my family, and they wouldn’t have to deal with it” (Adair 5).

At the culmination, the climax, of the coming out myth, the boy seeks and discovers, in a bar, or at a peace rally or protest march, maybe a gay pride parade, that there are others like him. The despair of abandonment changes to a flush of freedom to be himself for the first time in his life. “I … went to this bar – when I was about eighteen – and I learned that it was a bar full of people all of whom liked to have sex with each other. It really opened my eyes. I said, ‘Wow! Look at all these people relating to each other, and they’re having fun… this is for me! I’m one of these people” (Adair 69). Max is giddy, delighted to be leaving home. His frown disappears as soon as the trees start growing in his room, and his grin grows from impish to content by the time he’s on a boat headed across the ocean. And the wild things are thrilled to see him. Even before he subdues them with his eyes, they are smiling expectantly. The text tells us they are roaring “their terrible roars,” but they’re smiling ear to ear. Max’s conquering of the wild things reads more like seduction than subjugation. The wild things are playful and coy, never really threatening.

Though Where the Wild Things Are is known now as one of the most popular and praised children’s books ever published, it was controversial at first. Librarians and parents were afraid the monsters would traumatize young readers. Bruno Bettelheim articulated these fears in a review of the book in Ladies’ Home Journal:

What [Sendak] failed to understand is the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper, and this by the first and foremost giver of food and security—his mother. The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. … We’re never going to get a child to believe that he’s really in control of his fantasies if, at the very beginning, the stage is set to show him that if you look clearly at your fantasies and are open about them, you’ll be deserted (Ladies’ 48).

Bettelheim is right that children fear desertion; but, what better antidote than reassurance that there is a place where he won’t be deserted for expressing himself fully? (Later, Bettelheim, after writing The Uses of Enchantment in which he formulated his ideas about the psychological function of fairy tales for children, changed his mind about Where the Wild Things Are.) The fear that the monsters will scare children, expressed in these early reviews, is a parent’s fear. Kenneth Kidd, in  his essay “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist,” suggests, by way of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that Sendak’s way around this parental fear is through the role of an “eccentric, gifted uncle”:

… I suggest that authors for boys especially tend to adopt an avuncular sort of relation to their young subjects and readers, presenting themselves as lay boyologists or character builders.  “Forget the Name of the Father,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick urges us. “Think about your uncles and aunts” (Sedgwick 59).  In Sedgwick’s reading, the “avunculate” or the social formation of aunt and uncle (which may or may not involve blood relation) can provide relief from and alternative wisdom to the traditionally nuclear family, especially for queer kids (Kidd 225).

Sendak has often spoken of himself as an adult who, unlike parents, understands what it is like to be a child.

The traditional psychological interpretation, as expressed by Sarah Gilead in “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction” says that Max conjures up the dream of the wild things in order to confront and befriend them as they represent his anti-social anger. In the end, Gilead says, “the dissolution of the dreamworld implies that the dreamer has introjected the messages conveyed and can now achieve intrapsychic and communal integration” (Gilead 280). I do not mean to discount this more universally appealing interpretation of the story: that Max takes his journey in order to make peace with his inner monsters. But by following the trajectory of the coming out myth, Sendak has created a tale that can advise and comfort young gay boys. Bettelheim says that “as with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments of his life. The child will extract different meanings from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment” (Bettelheim 12). Max’s tale would have been a great comfort to a child negotiating a world of contingent approval and conditional love, to know of the possibility of a secret erotic world of wild pleasure where love and approval might be chaotic, dark, and exhausting, but not conditional, not contingent on conformity to a heterosexual ideal. At the end of the story, Max goes home reassured that, no matter how much he may feel at odds with his family, there is another family, his family of wild things like him who dance and howl with joy in a land far away but reachable. Returning home, he stands at the prow of his boat looking serious, calm, and satisfied.

Notwithstanding his mother’s gesture of forgiveness (his supper waiting for him upon his return), there is no reason to assume that, in the end, Max has left behind his wild friends in favor of home and heteronormativity. Perhaps he will always feel a tension between two worlds, as many gay men have felt torn between their biological and acquired families. Max is home, for now, but he’s still wearing his wolf suit. And the moon shining through the window suggests that it was not “just a dream,” that the world of wild things will always be available.

Works Cited

Adair, Nancy, and Casey Adair. Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco: New Glide Publications, 1978. Print.

Bettelheim, Bruno. Rev. of Where the Wild Things Are, by Bruno Bettelheim. Ladies’ Home Journal Mar. 1969: 48. Print.

- - -. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Print.

Bieber, Irving. “Speaking Frankly on a Once Taboo Subject.” The New York Times 23 Aug. 1964: n. pag. Print.

Cohen, Patricia. “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2008. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/‌2008/‌09/‌10/‌arts/‌design/‌10sendak.html?_r=2&sq=sendak&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print>.

Gilead, Sarah. “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” PMLA 106.2 (1991): 277-293. Print.

Hentoff, Nat. “Profiles—Among the Wild Things.” The New Yorker 22 Jan. 1966: 39-40, 66, 70. Print.

“Homosexuals Need Help.” Science News-Letter 13 Feb. 1965: 102. Print.

Kidd, Kenneth. “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Ed. Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“The Law: Out of the Briar Patch.” Time. Time, 25 Dec. 1964. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,830980,00.html>.

McGillis, Roderick. The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Print.

Mickenberg, Julia. "Jews in American Children's Literature," Jews in American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2007

Overholser, Winfred, M.D. “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease.” The Christian Century 11 Sept. 1963: 1099-1101. Print.

“Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured.” Time. Time, 12 Feb. 1965. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,840542,00.html>.

Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.

Vacha, Keith. Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1985. Print.

Wardenski, Joseph J. “A Minor Exception: The Impact of Lawrence v. Texas on LGBT Youth.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95.4: 1363-1410. Print.

Then, Again.

The corner of Ashland and DeKalb. We passed this sign nearly every day on the way to catch the D train. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Denise sent me another batch of photos she and John took during their visit to New York in the mid-80s. Brian and I were living in Ft. Greene, at the time.

Denise on the Brooklyn Bridge. (Photo by John Wynne.)

John on the Brooklyn Bridge. (Photo by Denise Hawrysio..)

This is, I think, the landlord’s dog, who killed our cat Sparky. The dog lived in the back yard. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Me in our apartment at 231 Ashland Place. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Brian in our apartment at 231 Ashland Place. (Photo by John Wynne.)

I love this photo. I don’t know the location. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Then.

This week an old friend unexpectedly said hello on Facebook and sent me images of some photos she’d run across as she was looking through old albums while isolated at home in London. Apparently I’m not the only one that the cancelation of our normal life, and fear of the future, has sent searching the archives. They were taken by her and her partner John in New York and London in the 1980s.

These fragments feel almost overwhelmingly precious now because they are fragmentary, because, for most of us, there is so little evidence. And even more so because Denise has lost the negatives, so her prints are all that’s left except these scans, photographs of photographs. Now with social media and cameras in our phones we see images of ourselves immediately and everywhere, no waiting, and we assume this material will survive as a comprehensive record. But images of vacations, special occasions, maybe a random assortment of everyday scenes is the most that most of us have of that time in the past, the only visual record there ever was. Denise and John are artists, so these snapshots are more than snapshots. But they are snapshots.

(My favorite thing about these images is the occasional fleeting, natural smiles. Now, we are so used to being photographed, we’re so used to seeing images of ourselves, we’ve honed our poses, our expressions, even children, for the camera. Smiles (or some other memetic expression like duck-face) are compulsory. They didn’t used to be. As self-conscious as we’ve become, in a way, pre-social media, we were more self-conscious around cameras because the appearance of one was unusual. Often we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so our self-consciousness showed up in photos as something maybe a little awkward, a little vulnerable, whereas now our self-consciousness is perpetual and we’ve learned how to protect ourselves from appearing vulnerable in photos.)

Most of these shots are New York (I recognize the facade of Mike’s Bar & Grill, the restaurant where I waited tables), at least one is London, I think. Denise and John visited us in Ft. Greene, and we visited them in London. Both these visits happened between 1985 and 1989. I no longer remember the dates or the order or sequence. Does it matter?

Everyone seems to want to know how this pandemic is like AIDS, how these times are like the 1980s. Of course there are resonances, but most of the time I don’t know what to make of them. I don’t know what’s important or illuminating. Mostly, this present time feels completely different from then. As terrifying as the plague years were, as angry as we were much of the time, what I remember most clearly is joy, laughter, wild creativity, and freedom. Mostly freedom. Looking through that lens, I don’t know what to make of what’s happening now.

Denise and Brian, Post Office. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Denise and Brian, bodega. (Photo by John Wynne.)

My boyfriend Brian, top middle, on his right is John, Denise’s partner. I’m sitting in front of John, next to Denise. The other two look very familiar but I can’t place them. except that I think they were Italian. (After I posted this, Denise wrote to tell me that the two men on the left are her dear friends, Martin Klug and Jacque Vignault. Not Italian at all. So much for my memory.) (Photo by John Wynne.)

Steven and Denise, Mike’s American Bar & Grill (10th Ave. and 46th St.). (Photo by John Wynne.)

I think this is the “kitchen” in our Ft. Greene apartment. The landlord had wedged a sink and stove into the tiny room over the stairs, with the fridge just outside it in the bedroom. (In these Brooklyn brownstones that were originally single-family homes, this small room would have been called the “dressing room.”) (Photo by Denise Hawrysio.)

“New York City?!”

My husband and I are holed up in a rented house on the coast of Maine. We’ve been here since last Thursday and plan to stay until early May, inasmuch as anyone can know right now what they’ll be doing in early May. 

Two weeks ago we started to think, “We can work anywhere there’s internet, why don’t we get away for a few weeks, some place nice?” The day after we booked the house and rental car, I saw an article, I think in the Times but it could have been the Post, about year-round residents in the Hamptons clashing with people arriving from the city to hunker down in their summer homes, and a queasy feeling in the pit in my stomach started to grow. Over the course of the week between making plans and leaving, the articles starting pouring in and stacking up. People not far from the town in Maine where we were headed were threatening to blow up the bridge from the mainland, police in Rhode Island were pulling over cars with New York plates. Each article was more and more breathless and alarming than the last: hordes of rich, entitled New Yorkers were streaming like cockroaches out to the hinterlands to spread the virus. Lock your doors.

Truth be told, my husband had been working at home for two weeks and we were starting to get on each other’s nerves, each trying to carve out space to work undistracted by the other in our one-bedroom apartment. But everybody is dealing with the same tension right now, so exactly no one was going to be sympathetic. Even before the flurry of anti-New Yorker media, I had more or less decided I would lay low on social media about our whereabouts because, I told myself, it was just kind of dickish to be like, “Hey look at this beautiful spot,” while so many people we know don’t have the opportunity or means to leave the city.

I was even reluctant to share our plans with close friends, but you’ve got to let your friends and family know your whereabouts, especially in such uncertain, risky times. Everyone we told said, “That’s such a good idea, I’m glad you’re getting away,” — still, I was feeling more anxious by the hour.

I couldn’t really work out how much of my distress was real guilt (were we doing something selfish and harmful?) and how much was a narcissistic fear of being thought poorly of, by my friends and my wider circle of acquaintances on social media. The initial impulse behind leaving was based on our own comfort; it wasn’t consciously connected to a desire to reduce our risk of exposure to the virus. We just wanted to be some place with a little more room, a little outdoor space, to not exactly take a vacation but treat ourselves after the cancellation of basically everything we’d looked forward to in the last year. But with some thought it became obvious that we would be reducing our own risk, and, if we had already been exposed to the virus, reducing our chances of passing it along. On a walk one evening last week on the sidewalk outside our co-op, a group of children all about five or six, came at us on scooters three abreast with their parents a few steps behind, leaving no room for us to pass. It was clarifying: New York is too dense for anyone to hope to keep six feet apart.

In the city, we live in a building with thousands of other people, all sharing the same elevators, hallways, doorknobs, and laundry room. Here, we are quarantined for 14 days and have not seen a soul but the couple we rented the house from and only from a distance of at least 10 feet. We didn’t touch anything on the way up. So, now that we’re here, my mental conflict has eased up. I’m sure we made the right decision — for the public good and for our own comfort. But the moral certitude meter these days is off the charts. The exhortation on social media and on handwritten signs in apartment windows, “STAY THE FUCK HOME!” means, ostensibly, don’t go to parties or gather in the park or leave your apartment for anything but groceries, but it started to feel like a threat aimed right at us. Not far down the coast a day or two ago, an armed mob of vigilantes cut down a tree and dragged it across the driveway of some temporary residents to make sure they didn’t leave their house.

As late as yesterday I was still being very cagey about our whereabouts except with close friends and family, but then I read this short piece by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker and finally felt like I had permission to get over myself and relax. When they come for us with torches and pitchforks — either on Twitter or down the driveway — I will at least be fairly confident of my innocence.

I want to say for centuries, but I know at least for the entirety of my memory, New York has been vilified by … who? farmers, country mice, real Americans? … as a hotbed of disease, a moral sewer, a breeding ground for pestilence. It’s nothing new.

There is a delicious irony in the implication that someone from New York, a city with half a million Mexican immigrants, couldn’t possibly know anything about Mexican cuisine, but that’s a topic for another day.