I wasn’t totally convinced of the need for my presence: the videotape was self-explanatory and, besides, as I was being reminded all the time, there wasn’t any AIDS around.
But I couldn’t resist this lady and I was curious to see how the community would react. I went with Olivia to one screening of the videotape at the Red Cross center in Kingsport. The audience was the Red Cross staff, a few policemen and a group of morticians. When the tape was over I was asked whether there was any risk from body fluids from AIDS patients going down into the sewer system? I had no scientific answer for that. Danger to whom? To the rats? I think I said, “I don’t think so.” Another time Olivia and I showed the video at a meeting of the Unitarian church. This time there were no questions.
Olivia now talked about setting up dates for the two of us to be interviewed on a local radio show and on television. I didn’t want to seem against anything as public-spirited as what she was suggesting. But a part of me wished to retain my anonymity in this small town, a difficult proposition even without radio or television or newspaper exposure. I was noncommittal.
I did confide to Olivia my curiosity about the gay population in Johnson City. What were its dimensions? How informed were they about AIDS? What were they doing in response to the epidemic?
“You know,” Olivia said promptly, “we ought to show this video to the gay community. We ought to show it at the Connection. Thank you for reminding me! Why didn’t I think of that?”
I wondered what I was getting myself into as I watched Olivia pick up her daybook, put on her glasses, and use my phone to dial the number of the young man who was the manager of the Connection, the town’s gay bar.
I asked Olivia if she thought he might take this as an intrusion. Perhaps we should write a letter? “Why, Abraham,” she said to me as she waited for him to come on the line, “I knew him when he was a little tyke! We don’t need no letter.”
“Honey, what are you doing about AIDS?” I heard her ask over the phone.
I felt for the man at the other end.
After a pause Olivia continued, “I think we have just the thing for you!” She promptly set up an evening date a week hence for the two of us to screen the video at the Connection and then have a question-and-answer session. She would drop posters by, she told him. “There,” she said when she hung up. “It’s all settled.”
THE CONNECTION WAS the only bar of its kind for miles around. It had been written up, I was told, in gay magazines and travel guides; its very existence in a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt was extraordinary. The bar maintained a low profile. Oh, yes, this was the post-Stonewall-riots era, but gay men in the Tri-Cities and environs were still very much in the closet, unwilling to risk exposure.
Periodically, the Johnson City Press would report on some minor incident that reminded citizens of the existence of a gay community: an alleged advance by a gay man that had resulted in a retaliatory assault. Or vandalism on the car of a patron of the Connection.
These incidents, minor though they were, and the tone with which they were reported by the newspaper, served as a reminder to the gay community that this was not the Village, or Castro, but a place where Jerry Falwell’s pronouncement that homosexuals would “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven” was taken as a self-evident truth.
The Connection was on West Walnut, a long street that ran east from ETSU all the way to South Roan, ending a few blocks from Allen’s service station. The strip began with Poor Richard’s Deli—a popular place for the hospital lunch crowd. Farther down were a record shop, two other delis, a pizza joint, and three barnlike dance halls that changed names and owners with regularity but were packed every night with the same young, boisterous ETSU crowd. It was at one of these places, then called the Sea Horse, that Rajani and I in our first year in Johnson City had learned to two-step and even mastered a line dance: the Cotton-Eyed Joe. Farther down West Walnut was a Giant’s supermarket, the Firehouse Barbecue, the old courthouse and, finally, the Connection. It sat next to a taco shop and a fishing tackle store.
West Walnut was one of the “tree streets”: Maple, Pine, Locust, Poplar, Chestnut, Holly and Magnolia. It was the only one of the tree streets that was semicommercial. The other tree streets had magnificent two- and three-story colonial houses shaded with giant overhanging arbors in keeping with their names. Many of these houses now sported bright pastel siding with Greek alphabets stenciled on the roof: they were fraternity houses. Other houses had what looked like multiple fire escapes and a profusion of mailboxes on the porch—they had been split into apartments. The few remaining original residents, true Johnson City Brahmins, complained about the parties, the late-night rebel yells, and the mufflerless cars that dragged from stop sign to stop sign at two in the morning when the bars closed. They bravely tried to carry on as usual.
The Connection was a warehouselike building, painted sky blue. It had no windows in the front. Entry was through an inconspicuous door at one corner. The gravel parking lot fronted West Walnut and afforded no privacy, and so patrons tended to park on the other tree streets and walk over. The residents of the tree streets were adept at distinguishing the cars of bar patrons and were willing to express their disapproval from time to time with brickbats thrown at a windshield or by slashing tires.
If the victim lodged a police complaint, this was duly reported in the newspaper along with the victim’s name and car make and with a phrase such as “parked in the vicinity of the Connection” or similar wording that implied the victim was culpable. The newspaper’s reporting was in general unimaginative; still, this was too deliberate an occurrence on their pages to be passed off as mere sloppiness.
I was jittery the evening I was to go to the Connection. It was one thing to be taking care of gay men in a clinic; it was a different matter altogether to go to a gay bar. Ours was a town where under the column “A.M. Authority” the newspaper printed a list of hospital admissions and discharges; it listed the realty transfers, the building permits and who among your neighbors had filed for bankruptcy. Under “Sessions Court” and “Charges Placed” it named those arrested the night before for driving under the influence, or public intoxication or arraigned or sentenced for any other reason; once a week, while you had your breakfast, you could scan all the filings for divorce in Washington, Carter and Unicoi counties. To be seen entering or leaving the Connection or to be there when the police had cause to visit was as embarrassing as posting a picture of yourself with your pants down onto a billboard on John Exum Parkway.
In Boston, when I first started to take care of gay men, their sexuality, their gayness, was very much on my mind and colored my dealings with them. I approached them delicately, wanting to be politically correct. I suppose I was fearful that I might inadvertently give offense by saying something crass, or otherwise reveal my ingrained societal homophobia, my lack of sophistication, my foreignness. As if to affirm this, many gay men when I first saw them, much like Tony Cappellucci in Boston, had an edge of militancy at the first encounter, almost as if they expected you to manifest disapproval or to reject them, as if they could see through your white coat and your politeness and lay bare your prejudice.
In retrospect, when I entered a clinic room to see a gay patient, I seemed to have been carrying a shield to protect myself and I cautiously operated from behind this shield. Was I subconsciously fearful of being tempted? Or was I fearful of being raped if I gave out the wrong signals?
This was, of course, altogether too absurd a posture, even if it was subconscious, to uphold for very long. And when I saw the same patient more than once, got to know him well, both patient and I ceased posturing.
As I got to know more gay men, I became curious about their life stories, keen to compare their stories with mine. There was an obvious parallel: Society considered them alien and much of their life was spent faking conformity; in my case my green card labeled me a “resident alien.” New immigrants expend a great deal o
f effort trying to fit in: learning the language, losing the accent, picking up the rituals of Monday Night Football and Happy Hour. Gay men, in order to avoid conflict, had also become experts at blending in, camouflaging themselves, but at a great cost to their spirit. By contrast, my adaptation had been voluntary, even joyful: from the time I was born I lacked a country I could speak of as home. My survival had depended on a chameleonlike adaptability, taking on the rituals of the place I found myself to be in: Africa, India, Boston, Johnson City. I felt as if I was always reinventing myself, discovering who I was. My latest reincarnation, here in Johnson City, was my happiest so far.
Just when many gay men had decided to give up the camouflage, to come out of the closet, AIDS had arrived on the scene, resurrecting the metaphors of shame and guilt, adding greater complexity to the process of coming out. Most gay men whom I got to know in the clinic were forthcoming with their stories, as eager to tell them as I was to listen.
In the debate on whether homosexuality was a learned behavior or present at birth—nurture versus nature—I favored the latter. Nature over nurture. The recent (much ballyhooed finding) of a “gene” or at least a genetic link for homosexual behavior is consistent with the stories I’ve heard: So many gay men have told me how from the moment they were aware of their sexuality, they knew it was directed at men, not women. James, a person with AIDS, a man possessed of great dignity, helped me understand this.
“One of my first memories is when I was three or four. My oldest brother was a jock and when he came back from football practice, he would take off his jock strap and fling it under the bed. And while he was in the shower, I would crawl under the bed, not knowing what I was doing or why, but drawn to that jock strap. I would pick it up, find it exciting, sniff it. I was not aware of sex—that wasn’t a word that had even been spoken to me. But I knew what I felt and I also knew by instinct that what I was feeling was forbidden. Later, as I grew up, I always hung around my mother and sisters. Not because I was a sissy—which I was—but because I knew I was terribly attracted to men. It was difficult being around them when I was so drawn to them. I was terrified of gym class because I thought I might get aroused and give myself away. So I stayed with the girls.
“My brothers in their preteens were terribly attracted to the girls who were our neighbors. But they were at the age when to be around the girls made them mute and flustered. So they hung around each other and did boy things, and played down their attraction. Well, I was the same way with men. And to overcome my attraction I conducted myself as a good southern girl until I left home.”
“Then what happened?”
At this point James flashed me a marvelous, coquettish smile and batted his eyelids: “Why then I became a southern queen!”
I understood this awakening of sexuality, this pretrembling of a carnal life in a child. I have a memory as a five-year-old of taking a bath and imagining my kindergarten teacher taking a bath with me. I knew nothing about what this vision meant; it seemed purely cerebral and lacking a physical aspect to it. But I could imagine her sitting opposite me in the bathtub; I imagined putting soap on her body—a body whose parts I could not picture. And I knew, just as James knew, that this image was intensely private, not one that I should convey to my mother. It seemed my fantasy life as a child—the sexual part anyway—began with that building block of a woman; it was added to, it became more refined and deliberate, but the gender was firmly established before I had words for it.
I TOLD RAJANI where I was going that evening. She was taken aback. “This is above and beyond the call of duty, isn’t it?” I had to agree. She went on: “This is a small town. It’s dangerous.”
“But you know why I’m going.”
“But will anyone else if they see you there? You can easily get labeled. It’s bad enough that it is a small town; we are a very visible Indian community and it’s tough to miss someone like you.”
“It’s too late. I can’t let Olivia down.”
Had Rajani reacted differently, seen this as no big deal, a part of the job, I would have felt better. Her concern and worry added to my nervousness.
My only visit to a gay bar in Boston was by complete accident. Some friends were visiting Boston from Tennessee and we had gone to a restaurant for dinner and then to a couple of bars. There were four men and two women in our party. We were more than a little high and quite boisterous as we walked near the Westin Hotel and close to the Boston Library.
We passed a disco that had always been shuttered when I went by in the daytime. Now there was wonderful music coming from it, music that made me want to dance.
On impulse—it was my idea, as my friends have never ceased to remind me—we decided to go in. The two men at the door who were collecting cover charges appeared a bit flustered by our group. They hesitated. When we pushed the six-dollars-apiece cover charge into their hands they let us in.
Inside, the music shook the floor. Psychedelic lighting made it feel as if we had stepped onto another planet. Rajani was pregnant with Steven and not inclined to dance. I grabbed my friend Madhu’s hand and led her to the dance floor. The rest of our group found a table near the bar.
We were dancing for several minutes. I remember I was an uninhibited dancing machine, fueled on alcohol, flailing my arms and throwing my whole body into the music.
Madhu leaned over and yelled in my ear over the music, “Abe, this is a gay bar!”
“What?”
“I’m telling you! Look around!”
Sure enough, all the couples on the dance floor were men.
We sidled off the floor, trying to be as inconspicuous as we could, and we joined the rest of our party. They were totally unaware of what Madhu and I had discovered. When we told them, it was their turn to look around and notice the couples on the dance floor.
We left as discreetly as we could. It had been wonderful in the disco. But we were embarrassed by our mistake. And once we knew it was a gay bar, we felt that we might be annoying the regulars with our presence. Some years later, it became the in thing for heterosexuals to go to gay bars to dance. It was cool. But at the time we had no idea how we were supposed to act.
OUR VIDEOTAPE was to be shown at eight thirty in the evening. Olivia had said she would meet me at the Connection by eight ten.
I drove down West Walnut and passed the Connection. There was a beige Camaro SS, early 1970s vintage and nicely restored with chrome oversize wheels and a black interior, parked outside. I drove past and circled the block.
On my second go-round, there was still no sign of Olivia and I did not have the courage to park and go in alone. I pulled up across the street and sat in the car, looking at my watch. I was early.
I thought the occupants of the cars driving by were scrutinizing me. I stared straight ahead. My palms were sweating and I needed to pee, though I had gone just before I left home. Did every gay man go through what I was going through in order to work up the courage to walk into the Connection? What a price to pay.
When I saw a police car approach from the other direction and study me carefully, I lost my nerve and drove away. I took a long loop before heading back. My watch now showed exactly 8:10.
Olivia’s station wagon was nowhere in sight. I was driving away when I saw her in the distance heading toward me. I made a quick U-turn and tucked in behind her. She pulled up to the front of the building, waited for me to park next to her, and gave me a hearty wave. Seeing her and the way she conducted herself made me feel ashamed. “Damn it, Abe,” I said to myself, “you need her attitude. So what if someone sees you? It’s their problem.” Despite these brave words, I was still very nervous when I stepped into the Connection.
We entered a large rectangular room. A fake oak bar ran down one side of the room. A dance floor occupied the center and Formica-top tables with padded red chairs were scattered all around. The place was ill-lit and musty.
Three men sat at the bar. The bartender came around from behind the counter and greeted
us; he was Olivia’s contact. He was a handsome, brown-haired man with a mustache. He looked like a cowboy in his denim shirt and tight jeans. That whole evening he struck me as the one person most at ease, most comfortable in this setting.
I recognized one of the men sitting at the bar. He used to work behind the counter at a 7-Eleven near my old apartment. He had curly blond hair and chubby cheeks. The only reason he stayed in my mind was that he was often surly and distracted when he worked—an unusual trait for Tennessee. He was also obese, a trait that had characterized all the 7-Eleven employees in that particular store, as if they were all from the same stock.
Now he was dressed in short-shorts, sandals and a tank top. And he had applied eye shadow and lipstick. It was an incongruous, almost pathetic image: He was not in drag—all he had done was apply the lipstick and mascara. But what struck me most was how nervous and uncomfortable he looked. My own angst seemed to pale in comparison to the tension written on his face. A cigarette went back and forth from his lips to the ashtray with scarcely a pause and his foot was nervously hammering out a measure on the bar rail. It was obvious from the way he handled his glass that he was either drunk or quickly getting there.
For interior decoration, the Connection had a smattering of travel posters placed haphazardly on the wall. It was as if the owners had provided the barest trappings of a club, and even that without much conviction.
A tiny stage stood at one end of the room, near the exit, looking like the best efforts of a church preschool. The curtains were drawn.
A flyer on the wall announced our presence and the screening of the video. Next to it was a larger notice announcing the times of the “show” for that night; “Sabra,” “Chanel” and “Ursula” were to be the artistes. For a fleeting moment I wondered if the 7-Eleven man might be one of the performers.
The owner-cum-manager directed us to a windowless back room separated from the bar by a cloth curtain. We set up the video player that Olivia had brought. Problems connecting it to the TV occupied us for a good while.