“Billy . . .?” I said. Then, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said: “How’re you doing?”
“Pretty bad,” he said, matter of factly. His voice was decidedly slurred, and I wondered if the swelling in his jaws was the packing of some internal bandage. But I don’t think so.
I kept on walking, because for the last year, that’s what I did when I saw Billy.
But later that evening, I was in one of the neighborhood gay bars—Cats. I’d come down to talk with a gay friend, Joe, a recent Jesuit novice, who’d left his calling and whom I’d helped get a job in publishing. We’d been catching up on his adventures and mine, when the door opened and three young men came in, Billy among them. He saw us, grinned, came over, draped one matchstick arm around Joe’s neck and one arm around mine. “Hey,” Billy said, with the same slur from the afternoon, “you guys know each other? Joe’s my special friend here.”
Which Joe confirmed by a grin and a hug.
“Just a second. I’ll see you in a minute.” And Billy was off to say something to the other hustlers he’d come in with.
Again, I had no idea of the protocol for such situations. “Billy’s a good kid,” I told Joe. “How long have you known him?”
“Oh, about three weeks.”
“Mmm,” I said. Then I said: “You know, of course, he’s got AIDS. At least he told me he did, sometime back.”
“I kind of . . .” Joe nodded. “Suspected it. He doesn’t say the word. But he talks about it.”
That didn’t make me feel much better.
But Joe said: “We don’t really do anything, anyway. We lie around and hold each other. He says he likes it and it makes him feel good. But that’s all.”
At which point Billy was back, arms again around our shoulders, bony head thrust between. “Joe says he’ll take care of me whenever I get real sick,” Billy announced, straight off. “He’s a special guy. Like you.”
“That’s good,” I said.
Joe, at any rate, was smiling. Billy reached behind him and pulled a stool up between us. As he sat, his baggy Bermudas rode up his gaunt thighs till his uncircumcised genitals hung loose. Reaching down with one finger he hooked the plaid edge back even more. “It’s amazing,” he said, and I realized I was getting used to his slur, “most of my johns haven’t deserted me. But that’s because I always gave ‘em a good time, I guess.” (Though I had never been his john, looking at him now it was a little hard to believe.) Gazing down, Billy apostrophized himself: “You bought me a lot of dope. Made me some money—some friends. Gave me a good time.” Shifting to the side, he pulled his shorts leg down now. “Got me into a lot of trouble, too!” He looked back up, grinning at us with swollen jaw and bony face.
And, for the first time in the years I’d known him, to my distress, I felt sexual excitement rise toward Billy. I had another drink—I bought him and Joe respectively a ginger ale and a beer. I shook hands with them both, wished them well—and went home.
October’s weeks of Bermuda-shorts weather are brief.
A month and a half later, when I happened to get Joe on the phone at work, I asked how Billy was. He told me: “A little while after I saw you at the bar, when it started to get cold, Billy showed up sick at my place. I kept him there for a week of spectacular diarrhea! Really, the guy was exploding shit—or water, mostly, after a while. Then he said he wanted to leave—I didn’t think he could leave. But he went off somewhere. I haven’t seen him since.”
No one has seen Billy since—for a year now.
You and I know Billy is dead.
Nor is Billy the only one in these tales to die:
Carla was killed in an accident during a rainstorm, when a metal piece fell from a building cornice and struck her down as she was hurrying to bring her lover an umbrella in a Brooklyn subway station. While I rode the subway, I saw the Daily News headline across the aisle, “Lawyer Slain in Brooklyn,” and only a day later learned that the lawyer was my friend—and it was as stunning, and as horrid, and certainly more tragic and interruptive in the lives of her friends than this intrusion of its awful and arbitrary fact is here.
I spoke at Carla’s memorial service. And, whatever I have said of her—here—she was an easy person to praise.
Billy’s death?
I called a number of hospitals—so did Joe. As far as we could learn, Billy did not die in any of them, though his name was on record at two: outpatient treatment for a junior ulcer at one and a stay for pneumocistis pneumonia in the other. But unless he went very far afield, he probably wouldn’t have been admitted. And Billy was bonded to that central city neighborhood—sometimes called the 42nd Street Area, sometimes the theater district, and occasionally the Minnesota Strip—through his very familiarity with it, by his knowledge of the surge and ebb of its drug traffic, because so much of what he knew was how to eke from it the limited life it allowed.
Well, why, in our clean, well-lighted space this evening, do we need this story? Why do we need to add to these others this tale of a moment’s fugitive desire en route to an untraceable death behind some burned-out building or in an out-of-service bus gate at the Port or beneath a bench in an Eighth Avenue Subway station?
It was four years ago I first realized that, among my personal friends and acquaintances, AIDS had become the biggest single killer, beating out cancer, heart disease, and suicide combined. Certainly Billy is not typical of my friends—nor is his death typical at all of theirs.
Why not, then, tell of a cleaner, more uplifting death? Well, I tell it because such deaths are not clean and uplifting.
I tell it because the story troubles me—the purpose of all these tales: it troubles me because it is as atypical as it is.
Understand: I recount these stories not as the “strangest” things that have ever happened to me. Purposely I am not going into particulars, here, about the well-dressed sixty-year-old gentleman in the 96th Street men’s room who asked for my shit to eat, or the American tourist who picked me up in Athens who could only make love to me if I wore a wristwatch with a metal band, and that band low on the arm, or the young Italian who had me hammer his stretched scrotum to a piece of pine planking with half-a-dozen ten-penny nails.
What I’m trying to remind you is, simply enough, that these are all part of a gay experience—my gay experience. I can’t claim them as characteristic of some hypostatized universal gay experience involving the range of gay women and gay men, black and white, middle-class and working-class. They are not even characteristic of my own. Perhaps they could occur only in the margins of the experience of one sexually active black, American, urban gay male, in the last decades of the twentieth century. But, in terms of that experience, they are a good deal more informative than Sunday brunches and Judy Garland records, in that they are parts of a sexual experience—with men and with women—which, as a gay male, I would not trade for the world with anyone else’s.
You must understand, there are sexual experiences—with both men and women—I would happily give up. As I once told Carla, I have been held down by two men and raped. When I was seven or eight I was sexually abused, very painfully, by a girl a few years older than I at my first summer camp. Both experiences, believe me, I could easily have lived without.
The tales recounted here—as they touch on the sexual, however troublingly—belong to a range of sexual occurrences, the vast majority of which have never and can never make their way into language, the range that gives me my particular outlook on human sexuality, an outlook certainly different from many other people’s; and those experiences have done more to dissolve any notions I ever held of normal and abnormal than all my readings on gender, perversion, and social construction put together.
But “the gay experience” has always resided largely outside of language—because all sexuality, even all experience, in part resides there. Simple aversion—at whatever social level—is enough to divert our accounts from much of what occurs. But even to seek the averse is to dive
rt our accounts from the characteristic. And because of this economy, in anything that I can recognize as a socially and politically meaningful discussion of sex, the triplicity of aversion, perversion, and diversion cannot, as far as I know, be avoided—here, tonight, anywhere . . .
To make such a statement about the realm of sexuality is another way of saying that what has been let into language has always been highly coded. That coding represents a kind of police action that, even while it is decried in the arena of politics, often goes, among us in the academic area of Gay Studies, unnoticed.
This is why I have tried to bring up these specific and troubling tales, to help cast into the light the smallest fragment of the context of—no, not Gay Studies in general, but simply the context of the talk that I am now in the process of giving. And if, when we take as our object of study, say, some lines by Shakespeare or Whitman to a boy, citing the contestation of other, homophobic scholars, or when we examine some profession of love to another woman in a letter by Emily Dickinson or Eleanor Roosevelt or Willa Cather, contested equally by still other homophobic scholars, or the coded narratives of Melville’s wide world of navigation, of Oscar Wilde’s or Dorothy Strachey’s London, of Thomas Mann’s circumscribed tourist town of Venice, or Djuna Barnes’s wonderfully sophisticated Paris—if we take these tales and assume that we are not dealing with a code that, in every case, excludes a context at least as complex and worrisome as the one I have here gone to such narrative lengths to suggest, then, I maintain, we are betraying our object of study through a misguided sense of our own freedom, by an adoration too uncritical of that wonderfully positive tale we all, perhaps, adore.
What I hope worries you, what I hope troubles your sense of the appropriateness of these tales for the here and now of what, certainly, most of us will experience as a liberating academic occasion, is what suggests that, even with the surge of linguistic freedom that has obtained since ‘68 and with the movement toward political freedom that has been in motion since the Stonewall riots of ‘69, what is accepted into language at any level is always a highly coded, heavily policed affair. Though strictures relax or tighten at different places and in different periods, the relaxation never means that the policing or coding has somehow been escaped.
The sexual experience is still largely outside language—at least as it (language) is constituted at any number of levels.
Ludmilla Jordanova’s book Sexual Visions (University of Wisconsin, 1989) is a stunningly fine and informed study of gender images in science and medicine over the last three hundred years. It was recommended to me by a number of astute readers. I have since recommended it to a number of others perusing like topics of concern.
In its preface, however, Jordanova takes to task Paula Weideger’s book, History’s Mistress (Viking Penguin, 1985), which reprints a selection of extracts from an 1885 book by a gynecologist, Ploss, Woman: a Historical, Gynecological and Anthropological Compendium. Writes Jordanova of Weideger: “Her fictional scenario is supposed to make the point that the thirty-two photographs of breasts in the 1935 English edition are included for prurient reasons. Yet the way she makes the point, her chosen title, and the whole presentation of her book, serve to heighten any sense of titillation in readers and buyers.”
Jordanova then goes on to advise, most wisely, a careful study of such works and their circumstances in order to understand the objects they represent.
Yes, a wise suggestion. But the problem with such a suggestion is that such works—especially in 1935, if not 1885—belonged to a category which tried as carefully and as ruthlessly as possible to exclude the specifically sexual component from all the language around them. Some years ago, I talked to a handful of men, fifteen to thirty years older than I, who recalled using such books as pornography in their youth. What made such works both accessible and pornographic was precisely that the sexual was excluded from any overt mention: it is not absurd to assume that art works, medical works, and legal works occupied such a position all through the nineteenth and the first three- quarters of the twentieth century—especially given that 150 years’ proscription on pornography per se. But the problematics of dealing with sexual research in periods when much of sexual discourse was all but nonverbal is as much a problem for the historian of heterosexuality as it is for the historian of Gay Studies.
Because both today and in earlier times what of the sexual that was allowed into language is notably more than what was allowed in during that period of extraordinary official proscription any of us over forty can still remember, we must not assume that “everything” is ever articulated; we are still dealing with topics that were always circumscribed by a greater or lesser linguistic coding and a greater or lesser social policing. Because Alexander Kojeve and Jerome Carcopino have discussed the double writing of the Emperor Julian and Cicero, and because Robert Martin has traced a like process going on in Melville’s tales of the sea, we must not forget that double codes as well as single codes still exclude, still police. They simply do it at two stages for two audiences—even if one of those audiences is gay. And what is excluded by the code, that code functions specifically by excluding. And because the whole analytical bastion of psychoanalysis lies there to talk about repression both in the areas of the socially articulated and the socially unarticulated, we must not fall into any easy uncritical alignment of the socially excluded with the unconscious and the socially articulated with the conscious. Repressions takes place at a wholly other economic order.
It is often hard for those of us who are historians of texts and documents to realize that there are many things that are directly important for understanding hard-edged events of history, that have simply never made it into texts or documents—not because of unconscious repression but because a great many people did not want them to be known. And this is particularly true about almost all areas of sex.
Though our academic object as textual explicators must begin with what is articulated in a given text, we must always reserve a margin to deal with what is excluded from articulation, no matter the apparent inclusiveness.
That goes just as much for my tales this evening as it does for Musil’s Young Torless or Gide’s The Immoralist. It goes just as much for Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. It goes just as much for the text collected by a sociologist from a gay informant, female or male, who is being questioned about the realities of gay history.
In 1987 I published an autobiography a good deal of whose motivation was to retrieve various historical articulations in just this context, as I had observed it between the years 1957 and 1965. The advent of AIDS made, I feel, absolutely imperative an inflated level of sexual honesty that dwarfs the therapeutic exhortations for sexual openness that can be seen as the fallout of a certain industrial progress in methods of birth control coupled with Freud’s, if not Reich’s, sexual ethics, and enhanced with the political strategy, dating from Stonewall, of “coming out” (a strategy devised specifically to render the sexual blackmailer without power) . . . a code, a police action if you will, that controls a good deal of what I say here.
It seems to me that when one begins to consider the range of diversities throughout the sexual landscape, then even the unquestioned “normalcy” of the heterosexual male, whose sexual fantasies are almost wholly circumscribed by photographs of . . . female movie stars! suddenly looks—well, I will not say, “less normal.” But I will say that it takes on a mode of sexual and social specificity that marks it in the way every other one of these tales is marked, i.e., as perverse.
Similarly, the heterosexual woman whose fantasies entail a man who is wholly faithful to her, and whom, only while he is wholly faithful, does she find sexually attractive, but whom upon showing any sexual interest in another woman—heaven forfend that it be another man—immediately is rendered sexually unacceptable to her; well—like the male above, her sexual condition seems only a particular form of a socially prescribed perversion—one that I could even, for a while, s
ee myself getting behind. Certainly, it would be no more difficult than getting off on someone licking my sneakers. (And it would be, for me, a lot easier than getting off on female movie stars—or most male ones, for that matter.) But both strike me, as do all the other situations I have described tonight, as socially constituted and perverse. And in this case, for all my sympathy, neither perversion happens to be mine.
Similarly, when one surveys the range of fetishes, at a certain point one begins to see that the sexualizing of a hand, a glove, a foot, a shoe, a breast, a brassiere, a buttock, a pair of panties, a jock strap, a sailor’s uniform, a policeman’s uniform, a riding crop, a cigar, a swastika, or the genitals themselves—whether the possessor be a man or a woman—all work essentially by the same mechanism. All are generalizable and proscribable. All, if you will, are fetishes.
But even as we recover ourselves—at this moment of general inclu- siveness—I hope for at least a few moments I have been able to maneuver some of you this evening into thinking: “Is this what Gay Identity is supposed to be? What does all this sneaker licking, drunken undergraduate mischief, and another sob-story of a hapless drug user have to do with my sexuality—my gay identity?” For certainly raising that question was precisely my intention. I said these tales were to trouble. And the troubling answer I would pose is fundamentally as simple as any of the tales themselves:
Quite possibly not much.
The point to the notion of Gay Identity is that, in terms of a transcendent reality concerned with sexuality per se (a universal similarity, a shared necessary condition, a defining aspect, a generalizable and inescapable essence common to all men and women called “gay”), I believe Gay Identity has no more existence than a single, essential, transcendental sexual difference. Which is to say, I think the notion of Gay Identity represents the happily only partial congruence of two strategies, which have to do with a patriarchal society in which the dominant sexual ideology is heterosexist.