"Who's Jorge?" I asked, feeling as though I, too, were on stage, the embarrassed volunteer dragged up out of the audience.
"My husband," Brandy said solemnly "He's the bouncer at the Club 86, a big Puerto Rican bruiser who beats me though I love him, God help me."
Like an idiot I didn't respond with another Billie Holiday or Helen Morgan song tag but with some irrelevant psychoanalytic twaddle. Brandy was too good an actress to let me spoil her scene; just as the audi-
ence was getting restless, she suddenly lifted my hand to her lips (though she was careful not to allow me actually to touch that gooey pot of strawberry jam) and whispered huskily, "Look, all these guys and dolls around us are all licking their chops over you, so slim and muscly in your grey T-shirt. You know what you are? You're the Universal Ball." It took me a moment to register what she meant.
As a former fatty and stoop-shouldered bookworm I had a hard time believing my amphetamine-powered diet, my years of working out, my painful hair-relaxing, and my newly acquired contact lenses, always attracting cinder specks and provoking tears, had actually paid off. Or perhaps the previous year's bout of hepatitis had made my face gaunt to just the right degree. So everyone desired me?
More likely, Brandy knew how to flatter me into the blushing silence she required. Once my pop-psychology remedies were disposed of (those were the years when we would have told Medea, had we encountered her still steaming in her sons' blood, "You must not like yourself very much"), she took the spodight. She told us of Jorge's jealous rages, his epic drunks, his violence and, like a ballad singer, concluded each verse with a whispered chorus, "But I love him, he's my man."
Brandy was young like us but a throwback to an earlier era of butch-femme role-playing raised to the intensity of Greek drama; her high heels were her cothurni. She expressed our feminine longings to be beat and betrayed by a real man, half-buried wishes we could never have unearthed, wishes that in any event had been superseded by our desire to be wolves running with the pack, men among men, two hard cocks held together in one hand. Unlike us she didn't flash on an imagined glimpse of a raised hand or an angry snarl; instead she articulated those desires in well chosen words through experdy rendered lips, addressing us in an alto voice that fell within a female register but packed a virile wallop. We were Village kids with hippie hair, we were sporting tight jeans, no underwear, cheap deodorant, loose T-shirts and scuffed dirty bucks worn down at the heel; she was a GaUe bud vase, her green fishtail gown molded to her lighdy padded hips, her blondined hair, interwoven with various falls and pieces, as full and fragrant as a blown rose. Important hair, as people say now. She was seductive, not sexual. Like rubes at the fair we were gawking at the bearded lady, or rather the beardless gentleman (do the rubes sometimes long to become the beautiful freak?).
Most of us gay guys had last dated a woman when we were eighteen; Brandy reminded us of our senior prom and brought out in us a throw-
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back to gallantly, the deference paid to something deemed universally desirable that we just didn't happen to desire. At the same time it was all a trick, her act, something done with mirrors, as her sad smile and irony-drenched voice revealed.
Butler and Lynne were graduate students at Columbia. They invited me to dinner at their apartment in one of the teeming, shadowy side streets near the university. Lynne looked exhausted when I arrived. Veiy quickly I understood why. Everything in her dinner came out of an elaborate cookbook popular at that time; I recognized the very recipes I myself had devoted five and sLx hours to realizing. Butler looked cool and languid, and received me with alternating bouts of nei^veless elegance and prim surprise.
I had adopted after six years in New York a certain saucy directness that shocked the recently arrived Buder. I'd learned to flatter people shamelessly, an excessiveness that took them by surprise but that they found to be shamefully gratifying. My theory was that, afraid of sounding insincere, no one dared to compliment his or her friends on quite obvious virtues; I was going to eliminate all half-hearted reticence. Then I'd also acquired the related knack of asking personal, even embarrassing, questions; I'd spring my question, "Do you really like sex?," without any advance warning or a plausible transition. I was careful to avoid painful subjects ("Are you still sleeping with your husband?"), because I wasn't a sadist, just a provocateur I wanted to render conversations entertaining even to the participants; whereas few people had ideas to develop, they all had secrets to reveal. My impertinence was just another form of flattery.
Butler didn't take to it. He and Lynne were too Europeanized for it and preferred decorous vacuity, if need be, to premature confidences that might later be regretted. They didn't know me well enough to have heard I was "famous" for the question direct; what my friends considered an adorable eccentricity they regarded as rude. What they were particularly eager to ward off were any questions about their marriage. Was it a real marriage? How much did Lynne know about Buder's homosexual encounters? Did she resent them? Did she plan on having children? Would the children be told about Daddy's cock sucking? Did she like France because she felt more accepted there as a Black woman?
Nothing vulgar touched them. A record of Gerard Souzay singing Du-parc was playing; for once I understood the French words and when the
baritone suddenly exclaimed, "Like a dog love bit me," I burst out laughing, but Butler simply raised an eyebrow and 1 subsided back into silence.
Soon we were dipping into the crusty Lobster I'hermidor Outside, Negro neighbors were sitting on the stoop eating hot dogs from the Nathan's on the corner and listening to Aretha Franklin; they'd placed loudspeakers in the open ground-floor windows. Smiling with curatorial pride, Butler silenced Souzay and opened wide his windows so we could better enjoy Aretha; nothing escaped his connoisscurship. Or were they proving that Lynne had not rejected Black American culture?
As the good Burgundy flowed, our ideas became more heated, our smiles more lingering, our faces hotter. I was so fascinated by Buder that I thought I must be attracted to him—his long, smoothly muscled body, the muscles laid on like furled sail; his Smilin' Sam good looks, as I labeled them in deference to a mustachioed, brilliantined comic-strip hero of my youth; his beautiful dark eyes that winced with real pain when forced to look at the world's wickedness.
We discussed ideas for hours and hours, for in those days we did not yet see a dinner party with friends as a social ritual that must end no later than midnight, and that, in any case, would be repeated over and over, year after year, week in and week out, the tiniest variations on a few choice themes and a mildly pleasant way to feed in company. No, we saw each occasion as the unique opportunity to get to the bottom—of our minds, our hearts, of universal problems. The night set no limits on our fancy, fueled by wine. Dawn would sometimes creep up on us, unbuttoned and still garrulous, curled up on the carpet half-listening to Das Kriaben Wun-derhorn, our eyelids heavy, our veins pumping music and Muscadet instead of blood.
With Buder and a good botde I found I had plenty of ideas, although they were all reactions to something he said, points where my barbed sensibility resisted his smooth assertions. He was convinced that all values including truth were arbitrary functions of a self-sustained cultural code, a floating web of relationships not attached to anything, mapping nothing. Worse, he imagined we were locked inside a cage of language and couldn't even look out through the verbal bars. Next to him I felt I truly was the thorough realist I'd half-jokingly presented myself as being the first time we met.
Buder was vexed with me because I wouldn't agree with everything he said and in truth my feistiness was more an effort to oppose him—a sort of intellectual arm-wresding—than a defense of a solid position. My
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argumentativeness proved that what I felt for him was friendship. I might have been willing to submit to the idiocies of a beautiful lover, knowing all the while that what I really thought was hidden and sacrosanct somewhere within me. But with Butler I was facing someone more deliberate than I, perhaps, but also more cultured. WTien I would phone him and ask him what he was doing he'd say, "Oh, just sitting in the sun and practicing Italian verbs" (a subject he wasn't even stud)'ing at the university). His very application I took as a reproach to my disorder, although of course I made fun of what I called his "bluestocking" perseverance. Around him I wanted to seem frivolous and Wildean, but in fact I was as thick-thighed and self-improving as he.
We liked each other He surprised me with his precise opinions experdy expressed and I liked his interest in me, the way he courted me. I even feared he might fall in love with me and leave Lynne for me—an eventuality that my vanity may have sought but that my conscience feared because of my exaggerated respect for heterosexual couples. I myself wanted to go straight some vague day veiy soon and marry a woman. For my twenty-eighth birthday Buder and Lynne invited me to an expensive French restaurant in Midtown where Buder translated the carte for me, consulted the sommelier at length and even paid the bill during a mock visit to the toilet—a discreet bit of European elegance opposed in spirit to everything my father enjoyed, since for him his solemn, conspicuous verification of the waiter's addition and his slow, deliberate stacking up of one twenty-dollar bill after another was the ceremonial bride-price weighed in before his awed guest, the clear measure of his cold esteem.
Butler and I spent long hours together walking through Central Park. I kept quoting the Logical Positivists to him, philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap or AJ. Ayer, whereas he spoke of Saussure and Roland Barthes; he'd never heard of my men nor I of his, nor was either of us eager to learn anything about the other We each wanted to convince, something we'd always been able to do with friends up till now. I accused him of being uncritical, not sufiiciendy skeptical (I meant original), a slave to French fads, although in 1968 Structuralism and semiotics had not yet triumphed in America and he was ahead of the fad. He accused me of embracing a stony-hearted Austrian Positivism that went against my own artistic ambitions. I saw my Positivism as parallel to my Socialism; I could believe in them both precisely because they worked against the cultural and social elitism my natural allegiances might favor.
",\nyway," I said, "your Mr. Barthes or Bardeby, you say, believes in the
death of the author whereas my ideas merely assign the writer a useful if highly limited role in the ideal society of the future."
We had but one article of faith in common. We were both Socialists although of the anguished puritanical sort who waste more time on wondering whether to give alms, translate Mallarmc or kill oui' rich parents than on discussing concrete steps toward social justice or taking power. Buder's parents weren't even rich and his imaginary sacrifice of them to the revolutionary firing squad was a form of social climbing. We wanted to imagine personal sacrifices worthy of a saint and cruelty worthy of Saint-Just. China's great Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965, thrilled us as we dimly heard echoes of it, because we liked the idea that intellectuals must endles.sly examine their conscience and submit to work in the fields beside the "people," that entity we idealized in the abstract and despised in the particular, especially the funny-smelling, hard-drinking, unsmiling, racist members of the proletariat we were meeting in New York.
We may have discussed the faraway Cultural Revolution; what we didn't see was that a gay revolution was happening under our very noses. More and more gay men were telling me their stories, as though the main pressure behind cruising were narrative rather than sexual. "So many stories, so litde time to tell them," might have been a T-shirt slogan back then. The silence that had been imposed for so many centuries on homosexuals had finally been broken, and now we were all talking at once. Sometimes we'd rather talk than fuck; perhaps we fucked so that we could indulge in the pillow talk afterwards. We talked and talked about our lives and even very young men could sound as though they were ancient as they recounted their stories. "Oh, that was years and years ago," they'd say, launching into tales about home, church, school.
Not all the stories inspired me with sympathy. One night after I left Butler's and Lynne's apartment I cruised a guy my age on Broadway who invited me home with him. He was tall, thick, hairy, his chest operatically wide under a straining white T-shirt, his hair wiry and long, pushed back behind his ears. He had a three-day beard. His dodgy green eyes protruded from his pale boxer's face, itself unhealthily attractive as though he'd just nursed a bruise with a piece of raw steak.
He spoke grammatical English with a thug's slur and in a low, resonant voice, a voice from the balls. He said, without a smile, "Warm come to my place and get furk?"
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"Sure," I said, getting hard, frightened he might be dangerous. We walked side by side, block after block, heading down toward Ri\erside as an old Chevy with a broken exhaust pipe and good radio putt-putted past, swirling us in richest Motown, a falling gospel wail sustained by a sudden updraft of doo-dahing. In the darkened canyons of buildings only one window on the twentieth floor released a sulfurous yellow glow, and for some reason I thought of the words "half-life," something I imagined that rotting carbon emits. The Hudson, beyond the strip of park and the West Side Highway, exhaled a colder, damper breath into the hot night, like a trace of sweat perceived as the black stain through a blue shirt. Neither of us spoke, as though afraid to cut the sexual tension with mindless chitchat. He looked straight ahead but must have been aware I was side-swiping him at every step with another glance, calculating the flab at his waist, the heft of his hands, the girth of his calves. Was he clean? Was he a cold man who could express tenderness only in bed, or would there be no bed, just him backed up against a wall, cock jutting out of his jeans in the darkened hall, eyes squeezed shut, his mouth clamped shut when I would tiy to kiss him?