It Never Ends.

So now Biden’s necessary and popular child care plan is on the ropes because conservative Democrats might oppose it. Their reason is that the plan contains a provision saying that you can’t have the taxpayers’ money if you discriminate against LGBT people.

These “Christians” with their so-called “faith” that compels them to kick me to the curb and then demand that I pay them to do it — I am weary to the bone of them and my anger toward them. And maybe even more infuriating — because with religious bigots there’s at least a sort of coherence, an evil but predictable logic to their mission — is gay conservatives who’ve been, ever since the Supreme Court ruled that gays are okay as long as they ape heterosexual norms, have been telling us that the gay liberation movement is over, we should all pack up and move on, we won.

This kind of moralistic, legalistic “religion,” and governmental, societal, cultural deference to it, is so deeply engrained in the idea of America that even the people who are directly persecuted can’t see how insidious and corrosive it is. Andrew Sullivan, one of the generation of gay men the Reagan government and its collaborators decimated by religion-motivated neglect and mistreatment, even he will look you in the face and tell you this bigotry is justified in the name of “religious freedom.” I want to fucking vomit.

It. Is. Not. Over. It will never be over. These people are black mold, you think you’ve cleaned it up but it will return and return and return and if you turn your back it will kill you.

In the Beginning.

For National Coming Out Day today, here’s an excerpt from the book I’m writing:

❦

I didn’t, that I know of, meet my cousin Lucretia until I was eleven or twelve. I grew up thinking of her as my only first cousin, the daughter of my father’s late sister, Jane. My mother’s sisters both had children but they lived in California and we never saw them. The only cousin we knew as young kids was my mother’s first cousin, Cathy, who was close to my brother’s age -- Mom’s Aunt Alice had her last child when she was in her forties.

Jane, four years older than Dad, married a cocky young lawyer, John, in 1949, had one child, Lucretia, and died in 1959 of a blood infection after a hospital stay that lasted eight months in the middle of which my mother and father got married. Jane was in law school when she became ill. Lucretia was three years old when her mother died. John remarried quickly to a woman named Janice who bore five sons before they divorced. By the time I met John years later, he was a prominent judge in St. Paul and married to his third wife, Judy. After Christmas of my freshman year of high school, Michael and I took the bus with Grandma Lenore from Greencastle back to St. Paul to spend a week with the Kirbys in a Minnesota winter so cold the insides of my nostrils turned to ice when I breathed. Trailways took us as far as Chicago where we ran for blocks through snow and near-zero temperatures through downtown Chicago in the dark to the Greyhound station. The station was bright and cold and full of people sleeping on benches. Grandma admonished us firmly not to use the restrooms without telling her, and when our bus to St. Paul arrived, she grabbed her luggage and our arms, ran to the gate, and pushed herself and Michael and me into the front of the line of dozens of people who’d been standing there waiting for who knows how long.

Lu, who was five or six years older than us, introduced us to snowmobiling and tequila, and took us to a party where we smoked marijuana for the first time, sitting in a circle in someone’s basement passing a joint, the whole crowd chanting “Hold it! Hold it!” after I inhaled. I worshiped my cousin Lu.

I don’t remember why or how or even exactly when, but Lu started spending Christmases with our family. The first time I remember, which might have been the first time, she was on her way home from a student trip to England and she brought souvenir candy from Stratford-on-Avon, a bag of “scone mix,” and the Iron Butterfly record, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. She brought gifts for everyone, incense and Chinese brass incense burners for me and Michael, the smell of which made me nauseous for several days but I didn’t tell a soul. All of it was exotic and cosmopolitan for Indiana in the early 1970s, even the three-year-old Iron Butterfly album, even Lu, tall and broad-shouldered with long brown hair (that she told us she ironed), dressed plainly in jeans and a sweater. She spoke in a direct, forthright tone of voice, and she read Herman Hesse and Ayn Rand. She wrote poetry. My father said she had “class,” his highest compliment, a word that to him meant educated, worldly, sophisticated: everything that Indiana could never be. Grandma Lenore shook her head and lamented Lu’s “long stride.”

The year following that trip to Minnesota, Lu’s Christmas gift to me was a book of blank white pages; its dust cover read, “The Nothing Book: Wanna Make Something Of It?”. In the center of the first page, I carefully inscribed, “A Collection of Thoughts” and on the next page:

December 27, 1976

Since this was an “indirect” gift from my cousin, I will start out with one of my thoughts while talking with her and then go into some of her thoughts. This is one of my “verbally expressed” thoughts.

“If people can’t take me for what I am, then I don’t want them to take me at all.” 

A few pages later I transcribed one of Lu’s poems:

Young man with your quick
ready hand.
Sketching flashes of life,
That too often move by …
missing my glance.
You stop them in an instant.
Freeze them with your hand.
I look very quickly but …
You’ve ingrained them in
my mind.

Then a little Lord Byron, Langston Hughes, a fragment of lyrics from Seasons in the Sun which had been a big AM radio hit a year or two back, a handful of unattributed proverbs in the tradition of Grandma Lenore’s scrapbooks, but by January 7, I was chafing against the format, moved to express feelings more directly — on Tamara Burkett’s Dear John letter (I gave her a houseplant for Christmas, she gave me a concise handwritten note telling me that she liked me but not enough): “I wish she had a reason -- that girl’s got real hang-ups such a shallow personality at least we don’t hate each other -- I hate it when it ends that way.”

And I started keeping a regular diary. The Nothing Book became my founding document, nearly scriptural, the physical object, with its crumbling dust jacket, a phylactery. I became an artist in its pages, admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, panicked and cut the pages out with an Exacto knife and burned them, then, weeks later, braver, came out again, scribbling pages and pages of bottled-up sexual fantasies about the boys and teachers at school. Everything important that I believe and desire, the moral principles that guide me still, my feelings about love, everything I yearn for, all had their first utterance in that book that I wrote in from Christmas of 1976 to the end of my junior year of high school.

Michael, Jack, Kay, Lucretia, and Grandma Lenore — Christmas 1973.

"Not only my flesh, but my heart also, was involved in the emotion which it stirred."

Queer history has been so thoroughly and systematically not just skipped over in the history books but deleted from the primary sources that you’re lucky if someone, even someone queer, knows about Harvey Milk let alone anything queer that happened pre-Stonewall.

Speaking of Stonewall, Stonewall was an unquestionably important event in our movement for rights and liberation, but it does not, despite its tagline, mark the beginning of the modern queer liberation movement. I would put that marker a hundred years earlier when a handful of poets and scholars and scientists (it was pretty common for someone to be all three back then) in England and Germany and, more tentatively, in the U.S., spurred by their study of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance, started to let their feelings of same-sex desire come to the surface and then to find each other and compare notes.

John Addington Symonds, whose birthday is today, wrote his Memoirs around 1890. It’s the first known gay autobiography, and it’s very moving. His account of what we would now call “coming out to myself” is immediately recognizable from over a hundred years’ distance. This stuff should be, is to me, scripture:

“It was my primary object when I began these autobiographical notes to describe as accurately and candidly as I was able a type of character, which I do not at all believe to be exceptional, but which for various intelligible reasons has never yet been properly analyzed. I wanted to supply material for the ethical psychologist and the student of mental pathology, by portraying a man of no mean talents, of no abnormal depravity, whose life has been perplexed from first to last by passion — natural, instinctive, healthy in his own particular case — but morbid and abominable from the point of view of the society in which he lives — persistent passion for the male sex.

“This was my primary object. It seemed to me, being a man of letters, possessing the pen of a ready writer and the practised impartiality of a critic accustomed to weigh evidence, that it was my duty to put on record the facts and phases of this aberrant inclination in myself — so that fellow-sufferers from the like malady, men innocent as I have been, yet haunted as I have been by a sense of guilt and dread of punishment, men injured in their character and health by the debasing influences of a furtive and lawless love, men deprived of the best pleasures which reciprocated passion yields to mortals, men driven in upon ungratified desires and degraded by humiliating outbursts of ungovernable appetite, should feel that they are not alone, and should discover at the same time how a career of some distinction, of considerable energy and perseverance, may be pursued by one who bends and sweats beneath a burden heavy enough to drag him down to pariahdom. Nor this only. I hoped that the unflinching revelation of my moral nature, connected with the history of my intellectual development and the details of my physical disorders, might render the scientific handling of similar cases more enlightened than it is at present, and might arouse some sympathy even in the breast of Themis for not ignoble victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age. No one who shall have read these memoirs, and shall possess even a remote conception of my literary labour, will be able to assert that the author was a vulgar and depraved sensualist. He may be revolted; he may turn with loathing from the spectacle. But he must acknowledge that it possesses the dignity of tragic suffering. . . .

“In the spring of 1865 we were living in lodgings in Albion Street, Hyde Park. I had been one evening to the Century Club, which then met near St Martin le Grand in rooms, I think, of the Alpine Club. Walking home before midnight, I took a little passage which led from Trafalgar into Leicester Square, passing some barracks. This passage has since then been suppressed. I was in evening dress. At the entrance of the alley a young grenadier came up and spoke to me. I was too innocent, strange as this may seem, to guess what he meant. But I liked the man's looks, felt drawn toward him, and did not refuse his company. So there I was, the slight nervous man of fashion in my dress clothes, walking side by side with a strapping fellow in scarlet uniform, strongly attracted by his physical magnetism. From a few commonplace remarks he broke abruptly into proposals, mentioned a house we could go to, and made it quite plain for what purpose. I quickened my pace, and hurrying through the passage broke away from him with a passionate mixture of repulsion and fascination.

“What he offered was not what I wanted at the moment, but the thought of it stirred me deeply. The thrill of contact with the man taught me something new about myself. I can well recall the lingering regret, and the quick sense of deliverance from danger, with which I saw him fall back, after following and pleading with me for about a hundred yards. The longing left was partly a fresh seeking after comradeship and partly an animal desire the like of which I had not before experienced. The memory of this incident abode with me, and often rose to haunt my fancy. Yet it did not disturb my tranquillity during the ensuing summer, which we spent at Clifton and Sutton Court. Toward autumn we settled into our London house, 47 Norfolk Square, Hyde Park. Here it happened that a second seemingly fortuitous occurrence intensified the recrudescence of my trouble. I went out for a solitary walk on one of those warm moist unhealthy afternoons when the weather oppresses and yet irritates our nervous sensibilities. Since the date of my marriage I had ceased to be assailed by what I called "the wolf" — that undefined craving coloured with a vague but poignant hankering after males. I lulled myself with the belief that it would not leap on me again to wreck my happiness and disturb my studious habits. However, wandering that day for exercise through the sordid streets between my home and Regent's Park, I felt the burden of a ponderous malaise. To shake it off was impossible. I did not recognise it as a symptom of the moral malady from which I had resolutely striven to free myself. Was I not protected by my troth-pledge to a noble woman, by my recent entrance upon the natural career of married life? While returning from this fateful constitutional, at a certain corner, which I well remember, my eyes were caught by a rude graffito scrawled with slate-pencil upon slate. It was of so concentrated, so stimulative, so penetrative a character — so thoroughly the voice of vice and passion in the proletariat — that it pierced the very marrow of my soul. "Prick to prick, so sweet"; with an emphatic diagram of phallic meeting, glued together, gushing. I must have seen a score such graffiti in my time. But they had not hitherto appealed to me. Now the wolf leapt out: my malaise of the moment was converted into a clairvoyant and tyrannical appetite for the thing which I had rejected five months earlier in the alley by the barracks. The vague and morbid craving of the previous years defined itself as a precise hunger after sensual pleasure, whereof I had not dreamed before save in repulsive visions of the night.

“. . . Inborn instincts, warped by my will and forced to take a bias contrary to my peculiar nature, reasserted themselves with violence. I did not recognise the phenomenon as a temptation. It appeared to me, just what it was, the resurrection of a chronic torment which had been some months in abeyance. Looking back upon the incident now, I know that obscene graffito was the sign and symbol of a paramount and permanent craving of my physical and psychical nature. It connected my childish reveries with the mixed passions and audacious comradeship of my maturity. Not only my flesh, but my heart also, was involved in the emotion which it stirred.”

"I tried it and I liked it."

I was writing today about an incident that revolved around a journalism class I took in high school. The class was an English elective and whoever took it became responsible for publishing — editing, writing, taking photos, typing the copy, and laying everything out using a machine with rollers that coat the back of paper with wax to send to the shop class that printed it using giant offset printers — the school newspaper for that semester. I was the editor.

My high school was as clique-ish as the next but I never fit neatly into any of them. I was alternately a theater kid, a pothead, a brain, a troublemaker, a teacher’s pet. I smoked a lot of pot in high school but I was conflicted about it and would give it up for periods of time, like say when we were rehearsing a play, then start again. Smoking marijuana had a deeper stigma than it does now but because it was such a serious transgression it could stay hidden in plain sight. Homosexuality was like that too, most people didn’t know what they were looking at. The risk of being caught was lower while the consequences were more serious. Now everybody is all up in everybody else’s subculture and you can’t hide anything.

I don’t remember getting any real resistance from faculty to my non-judgmental survey of students’ attitudes toward marijuana. (I did have to include a sidebar expressing a negative view.) I used the school mimeograph machine to print the blank surveys and I kept the filled-out sheets with their purple typed questions and answers scrawled in pencil for years but don’t have them anymore. I remember being really impressed by how openly and thoughtfully most of the kids answered the questions. And we ran out of copies of “the pot edition” much more quickly than usual.

And Another Thing.

On the rare occasions during my early teenage years when I found myself alone at home, I would get out my mother’s makeup. I kind of knew how to do it because I’d been in plays by that point. I was not so daring, or stupid, as to put on my mother’s clothes, but there was a sort of shimmery green bedspread that I liked to wrap around myself like a sarong.

I have to say at 13 I was kind of a pretty girl.

Those Eyes.

My grandmother’s eyes would light up with a girlish “what could I do?” expression and she’d say, “Oh, your grandfather was handsome!” But I knew that because I’d seen photographs.

City People.

This is a draft of a song from my musical, Jack.

I haven’t decided for sure what her name will be — I keep going back and forth on this, but at the moment I’m pretty sure I’m going to change most of the names of characters based on real people — but this is sung by the grandmother to her grandson, Jack. (Picture Jack and his grandmother doing a little Garland/Astaire soft-shoe during that instrumental break.)

There are two kinds of people in this world: city people, and everyone else. Jack knew early on which one he was.

I’ve used lots of copyrighted images in this video, mostly without permission. These videos are my work sketches, sort of like mood boards, to help me visualize the songs, and meant only to be shared with friends. I don’t claim any rights to this work, except to the underlying song.

Summer of 1981, Fishkill, New York.

This summer is the 40th anniversary of my move to New York. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was August. I had planned to spend the summer before I moved here in Bloomington, Indiana, living with a high school friend and working to save what money I could, but after pounding the pavement for a week or so, and still no job, discouraged and sweaty, I went into the Indiana University library to cool off, picked up the New York Times to read, reflexively flipped to the “want ads,” and saw a tiny listing reading something like, “Counselors Wanted at boys’ camp in Upstate New York, Call the Fresh Air Fund, etc.” So I called.

They were looking to fill the position of “Nature Counselor” at the camp for boys ages 13-15. At that time, in addition to sending underprivileged (do they still use that word?) New York City kids to live for a week or two with rural families, the Fresh Air Fun also ran four summer camps near Fishkill, New York: one for disabled kids, one for girls, and two for boys (divided into ages 10-12 and 13-15, as I remember). Either they were desperate to fill the position (it was all very last-minute) or I bluffed well, but they offered me the job on the phone, on the spot. My minimal qualifications (I don’t know, an 8th grade leaf collection, a nature merit badge in Boy Scouts, just being from Indiana?) were more than enough. These kids had never seen a tree that wasn’t in a park.

Needless to say the experience was life-changing, not just the part about spending a summer in the woods with very poor, very street-savvy teenage boys who were not afraid of much but they were afraid of the dark, and the forest, and any noise they couldn’t identify, which there are a lot of in the dark in the forest. It was physically and emotionally exhausting work and the perfect preparation for my new life in New York.

Nearly every time I pass Port Authority to this day, I remember arriving there alone with a huge duffel bag and my dulcimer (because of course poor Black city boys are dying to learn “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” on a dulcimer). I’d been up all night, arrived on a Greyhound bus in the morning, and had to walk from there to an office somewhere in the far west of Hell’s Kitchen with all my stuff. When I stopped at a crosswalk about halfway there, my hand, the one that was carrying my dulcimer, went completely limp and I dropped the case. I had to wait for about 15 minutes till I got my grip back.

Pretty much everything about New York was terrifying and hard at first, and I was in heaven, knowing I had finally arrived home.

The cabins where we slept, one counselor with about 8 or 10 boys in each cablin. But since I was one of the specialty counselors, I got to sleep in a cabin with all adults.

The staff. I regret having no photos of the kids. They were insanely challenging boys but smart and hilarious, very observant, often insightful and affectionate.

Circling Back.

So. A year ago last March, I was getting ready for a first table reading of the musical I’d been working on for a couple years. I had a date, a room, a cast, a draft. And then the world changed. I put my musical on the back burner and decided to begin writing a book because I had an idea I was excited about and I could write a book at home by myself.

In the last year, I’ve made great progress on the book. It’s big and gets bigger as it slowly takes shape in my mind and on the page. I’ve written about 150 manuscript pages and I’ve only dealt with less than 1/4 of the material. Now, I have a lot of research to do requiring travel to various towns and libraries and courthouses, and that should be possible before too long.

It occurred to me this week that another thing that will be possible before too long is a table reading of my new musical. So I’ve been listening to the songs and revising the script all week. The book and musical are not exactly the same story, but there’s significant overlap. I’ve changed names and fictionalized quite a bit in the play whereas the parts of the book that are autobiographical have not been altered — except in the way that one’s memory is always making revisions. So I decided to remove one thread of the story from the musical which is dealt with more directly in the book and which I struggled mightily to integrate into the musical, probably unnecessarily.

I wonder now if I’ve made a big mess of it, but that’s what table readings are for — to find out how big a mess you’ve made.

This song is sung by Augusta Cheney who is the sister of Horatio Alger, the nineteenth century writer of books for boys, who was lionized by 20th century conservatives for his “rags to riches” stories, all of them variations on a narrative established in his first book “Ragged Dick” of a homeless but smart and ambitious street kid who rises in the world through dumb luck and the mentorship of an older man who takes an interest in him. Alger’s first career as a minister was cut short when he, as the young pastor of a Unitarian church in Brewster Mass., was accused of sexually molesting boys in his congregation and run out of town. The church covered up the scandal, Alger moved to New York City, and he began his long literary career. In his will, he stipulated that his sister Augusta destroy all his personal papers, correspondence, and manuscripts, which she did. Modern historians consider this a great loss and Augusta Cheney somewhat of a villain. In this song, she defends herself.

Terra Nova.

This song came up in my shuffle on the plane on the way home from Indiana yesterday, after a visit — the first in a year and a half — with my sister and her husband and her three boys (my nephews, who are no longer boys but all young men now), my brother and his partner of nearly 30 years, my oldest dear friend Martha, and my dad who is 87, and that a capella coda that Carly Simon sings has been in my head ever since, the best kind of earworm.

In high school, I listened to this album over and over and over and, though I didn’t and still do not know what the song is about — something about the Pilgrims and an ex-lover and a voyage somewhere you’ve never been to but that is home? — I was moved by it and I am still. I’m sure back then my deep feelings were at least partly due to James Taylor’s eyes looking back at me from the album cover.

I still love this record best of all the James Taylor albums, and this song is my favorite among many favorites.

Like others I’m sure, as a kid I loved that James Taylor and Carly Simon were married. Shortly after I moved to New York, I saw him and their two children on the Upper West Side, all of them looking willowy and beautiful. And then a year or two later, they were divorced. I’ve long imagined their final argument:

Carly (at the end of her rope): And please stop pronouncing “the” like “thee.”

James: Why?

Carly: Because it’s irritating.

James (crestfallen): But it’s my thing.

Carly:

James:

It's hot.

It’s very hot today. New York has always had a reputation for miserable, muggy summers, but this is early for a string of 90° days.

On days like this I always remember that when we were young we didn’t have air conditioning in the city. No one I knew had it. It was miserable, but we tolerated it like so many other fucked up things in the city because it was the price of living here. We sat out on stoops in the evening and drank tall boys in paper bags. We ate cheap Mexican food on the sidewalk, went out dancing all night, to the movies in the afternoon when we were desperate to cool off for a couple hours. We slept naked on bare mattresses in front of windows with box fans rattling and blasting hot air across us all night long. We didn’t get much sleep. Now there are a thousand festivals of all kinds in the city all summer long and it’s crowded with tourists, but in the 1980s, the city emptied out in July and August when everybody who could afford it left for Fire Island, or the Hamptons, or Cape Cod or wherever they went, I don’t know I stayed. We had the place to ourselves, free of rich people.

I don’t know if this is true, but I always thought the reason we didn’t have air conditioners was because the electrical outlets in the tenement buildings we all lived in weren’t wired for it. But we couldn’t have afforded the higher utility bills all summer anyway, we lived so close to and usually over the edge of our means. I guess some time in the late 90s, they must have started making air conditioners that used regular voltage, who knows?, but I remember when my partner Jay and I went to the P.C. Richards on 14th St. and bought a cheap little window unit on an installment plan for our tiny street level studio apartment that we shared with four cats who were every bit as relieved as we were to feel that cool air. But we were just as broke as ever so we only turned it on when the temperature got into the 90s, which used to be pretty much limited to August.

Maybe I’m spoiled, maybe I’m fussier now that I’m older, maybe I’m having less fun to distract me (because summers in New York were if nothing else fun), but I can’t imagine living without a.c. now in the city. Or I can imagine which is why I know I would not tolerate it. Many of our older neighbors in the co-op, who bought their apartments in the 1950s and live on fixed incomes, have not installed air conditioners. They tough it out. On really hot days, they go to “cooling centers,” public spaces like schools and community rooms, where they hang out during the heat of the day. And, I imagine, go home at night to sleep naked in front of box fans rattling in their windows.

On This Day.

On this day in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that state laws against homosexual sex were unconstitutional. I was 42 years old when it became legal for me to have sex in the United States of America. (I recommend the book Flagrant Conduct, about the Lawrence case. It’s a real page-turner.)

When I was born, 1961, “the infamous crime against nature” was a felony in every state. Over the next 42 years, a handful of states repealed their sodomy laws or reduced the penalties, but in 2003 same-sex sodomy was still a crime in 13 states, in some states still carrying long prison sentences and hard labor.

Lawrence vs. Texas reversed the 1986 S.C. ruling in Bowers vs. Hardwick which had upheld laws against gay sex. 1986. I was 25.

I place these events in my own timeline not to make it all about me, but to, 1, say that these are laws that shape lives, and 2, to convey how recent, and to my mind tenuous, is this so-called rapid shift in attitudes toward queer people that we keep hearing about. The Republican Party, as it exists today, doesn’t just want Roe vs. Wade reversed, not only are they gunning for the Voting Rights Act, they’re coming after all the 1950s and 60s civil rights laws, and the New Deal, and Obergefell (gay marriage) and Lawrence vs. Texas while they’re at it. (Sixteen states still have sodomy laws on the books which they still occasionally find sneaky ways to enforce, and which would go back into full effect if Lawrence were overturned.) For minorities whose ability to live their lives unmolested has so often depended on court rulings, the current religious conservative makeup of the Supreme Court is terrifying.

I don’t say all this to wallow in despair (though I struggle with my share of that lately) but to say that it’s a long war with an uncertain outcome. But that’s no reason not to keep fighting. In fact, it’s the reason TO keep fighting.

The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Of course Blue is one of my favorite albums but it sounds stupid to say that. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which is 50 years old this week, exists somewhere outside of any trivial list I or anyone might make, any bestowing of a subjective distinction or rank.

When I hear it, or any of its songs, the thought is never far of the first time I heard it, or rather listened to it, with a boy named Richard in his dorm room at DePauw University, where I ended up one winter night my sophomore year of college when I was home for the Christmas break. I went to school in Oxford, Ohio at Miami University. DePauw was the small liberal arts college in the town where my family lived, where I’d gone to high school.

I had become friends with a piano student named Nancy, who was wildly funny and wildly talented and just wild, and somehow through her had met Richard, a soft-spoken boy with thick, dark hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a soft, expensive-looking yellow sweater, a vocal performance student in the music school, though no one I talk to now who was part of that group of friends remembers how we met Nancy, who is dead now so we can’t ask her, and they don’t remember Richard at all. A week or two into January, when I was back at school, Richard drove to Oxford to visit me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — I’ve probably pushed it out of my memory because I’m ashamed to have treated him, or anyone, so badly — but in Ohio everything felt different, or I should say I felt differently about Richard. He left brokenhearted.

But before all that, we were alone in his dorm room together very late one very cold night until very early, sitting on two chairs facing each other, his stocking feet between mine, listening to Blue. He knew every word, as I do now. Before that night I used to say, if anyone asked, that I didn’t care for Joni Mitchell because “all her songs sound alike.” I’m nearly as ashamed of that as I am of dumping Richard.

The Richard in The Last Time I Saw Richard is nothing like my gentle, effeminate college boy in the yellow sweater. But still.

1990, Lizzie, Outweek, Pride.

The beginning of Pride season, combined with Sarah Schulman’s new book about ACT UP and my current writing/rabbit hole, had me thinking about Outweek. Life, for a few years there, revolved around Outweek, the magazine that kept us all up to date on the epidemic, queer life, ACT UP and Queer Nation and WHAM and all the other AIDS and queer activism, as well as arts and culture in fin de siècle plague-era New York. I can’t think of another example of any media that so shaped my life and world view. Everyone I knew devoured it every week.

I loved Outweek so much that this nasty little diatribe by a pseudonymous lesbian music “critic” about the very first version of what is now LIZZIE in 1990 didn’t put me off the magazine as much as it put me off pseudonymous lesbian music “critics.” And pseudonymous non-lesbian music “critics.”

This is probably self-evident, but it’s not a super great idea to send a letter to a magazine protesting a negative review. They will win. They have a magazine. (But the thing about Outweek is that it felt like our magazine, everybody’s magazine, and in many ways it was. The “Letters” section was long and probably the most read.)

Anyway, I should say that — though it retains its spirit and volume, the story, the core idea and some of the songs, its queerness and wild feminism, its reason for being — 1990’s Lizzie Borden: An American Musical is not 2021’s LIZZIE. It was 45 minutes long, started with the murders, and contained 4 songs. It was rough and some of the criticism in this review is legitimate. That was the beauty of the downtown experimental theater scene, that you could work stuff out on stage in front of a supportive audience that understood that creating serious, provocative, original work is a process. There would be no LIZZIE, in the full-length, narratively coherent, every beat completely thought through, professionalized form it takes today if we hadn’t had the freedom and support of that community.

I miss how wild you could be back then though. I miss the low commercial stakes that allowed artists to take crazy aesthetic risks.

LIZZIE in Barcelona, coming in fall 2021.

1979-1983.

I’m writing now about the time between summer of 1979 and the middle of 1983 — roughly my two years at Miami University and my first 2 years in New York. This period of my life is the most heavily documented. (Well, that’s not strictly true — the late 90s and a few other random times are chronicled pretty extensively but for this particular project I’m stopping at, roughly, 1990.)

My high school diary is what sent me on this trail to begin with, and it contains some of the most compelling material for me, but it’s often very sketchy and selective regarding events. That’s typical of most of my journal-writing: much of it revolves around questions in my head, and people, places, and things are there sporadically but they are not the main thrust. All that is to say that my childhood and high school years are lightly documented and so were easier to write about because I was writing about memory, which is always accessible even if spotty and unreliable. But from the early 80s, I have piles of journals, drafts of plays and stories and essays, manuscripts, drawings, and various hybrids of all of the above. And whereas the years from 0-18 largely revolved around waiting, the following few years are dense with new experiences, exposure to new people and ideas, a massively hectic life in a city that never stops giving you something to do or contemplate, and men men men art art art. Things moved fast. It’s a lot to absorb and synthesize. Rabbit holes abound.

1982. I was 21. You know how it is.

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.