Contents
I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Manahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.
Walt Whitman
One
E VERYBODY ELSE HAD A CHILDHOOD , for one thingwhere they were coaxed and coached and taught all the shorthand. Or thats how it always seemed to me, eavesdropping my way through twenty-five years, filling in the stories of straight mens lives. First they had their shining boyhood, which made them strong and psyched them up for the leap across the chasm to adolescence, where the real rites of manhood began. I grilled them about it whenever I could, slipping the casual question in while I did their Latin homework for them, sprawled on the lawn at Andover under the reeling elms.
And every year they leaped further ahead, leaving me in the dust with all my doors closed, and each with a new and better deadbolt. Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all. Id long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. Thats how the closet feels, once youve made your nest in it and learned to call it home. Self-pity becomes your oxygen.
I speak for no one else here, if only because I dont want to saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular doorless room of my internal exile. Yet Ive come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.
Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes a voice in my head, it was just like that for me. When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up. And every time we dance, our enemies writhe like the Witch in Oz, melting, meltingthe Nazi Popes and all their brocaded minions, the rat-brain politicians, the wacko fundamentalists and their Book of Lies.
We may not win in the end, of course. Genocide is still the national sport of straight men, especially in this century of nightmares. And death by AIDS is everywhere around me, seething through the streets of this broken land. Last September I buried another lover, Stephen Kolzakdied of homophobia, murdered by barbaric priests and petty bureaucrats. So whether or not I was ever a child is a matter of very small moment. But every memoir now is a kind of manifesto, as we piece together the tale of the tribe. Our stories have died with us long enough. We mean to leave behind some map, some key, for the gay and lesbian people who followthat they may not drown in the lies, in the hate that pools and foams like pus on the carcass of America.
I dont come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like thisyear after year after year, collaborating by indifferenceexcept by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.
Why do they hate us? Why do they fear us? Why do they want us invisible?
I dont trust my own answers anymore. Im too twisted up with rage, too hooked on the millennium. But I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I dont chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys arent all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.
Put it this way. A month after Stevie died, running from grief, I drove three days through Normandy. In the crystalline October light I walked the beach at Omaha, scoped the landing from a German bunker, then headed up the pasture bluff to the white field of American crosses. American soil in fact, this ocean graveyard, unpolluted even by the SS visit of Reagan in 84, who couldnt tell the difference between the dead here and the dead at Bitburg. You cant do Normandy without D-Day. After Omaha, the carnage and heroism shimmer across the pastureland, ghosts of the soldiers who freed the world of evil for a while.
Two days later I fetched up in Caen, where theyve built a Museum of Peace on the site of an eighty-day battle fought by three million men. Newsreel footage and camp uniforms, ration books, code breakers, yellow star and pink triangle. You watch it all happen like a slow bomb, from the end of World War I, the dementia of power, till the smithereens are in smithereens. You walk numbly from year to year, country to country, helpless as a Jew or a Gypsy or a queer.
And in the belly of the place theres this extraordinary room lined with pictures on either side. On the right are the collaborators, menall men, of coursewho ran the puppet governments for the Nazis. Vichy and Belgium and Denmark, the whole of Europe ruled by fawning men with dead eyes and fat ties, grins that show the gristle between their teeth. On the left wall, opposite, are the leaders of the Resistanceseveral women hereand theyre lean and defiant and alive. Europe is in prison and the world is imploding, and these people are smiling because they cant lose.
So that is what I am doing in the past, figuring out who goes on the left wall and who on the right. For that is the choice, it seems to me: collaborate or resist. The left wall is not all gay and lesbian, and not everyone is out of the closet. I cant judge the world of my first twenty years by the laws of freedom that followed Stonewall. No man was the same after that. And I understand that every ethicsthe gods I dont believe in and the wise men I dotells me to forgive. But if that is what I have to do, I will have to learn not to forget first; to let in the light on the last attic room, the bones of a buried life.
