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 divert 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.