by Paul Lisicky
But the photo isn’t so much about the now. It is a photo about our deaths. It is a photo that is meant to be looked back upon, at a much later date, fifty years from now. At that point the Scandinavian seriousness of our faces won’t look so self-impressed. No one will even think of us as posturing, so self-conscious in our glamour, as we’ll all be dead. And death? Well, that puts us all in our places.
After the group photo wraps up, we stand in line, and one by one we approach the photographer’s camera with all the gravity of young children getting ready to receive First Communion—or is it a firing squad? The smile I usually have on my face falls, and it goes instantly hard and very serious. Is this my inner life turned inside out, or just an expression of fakery, nothing much to do with me? One of us stands to the sideline, and like my mother, he laughs, a combination of disapproval, anxiety, and all the other inchoate feelings. Perhaps it’s in response to so many faces changing on command. Or maybe it’s just brute release. I feel exposed, as if he’s thinking, That’s not you. But there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to have more than one face. The other face, the smiling, welcoming face, is the face I make when I’m anxious.
I wonder what the Fellows in the brochure I studied all those years back would make of us now. Would they look at us if we were siblings, younger versions of what they once were? Or would they cry, Imposters?
Stay
Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.
LAUREN BERLANT, Cruel Optimism
If I were Emma Bovary, I’d be trudging down Commercial Street through snow, in the middle of the night, ice caked into the eyelets of my boots, to see him. I’d bang on Hollis’s door at all hours, I’d stand there on the step while his boyfriend answered the door, I wouldn’t be afraid to shame myself for love, and as if to prove that, I’d reach down into the dirt by the doorstep, the part not covered with snow, the part where the dog lifts his leg, scoop it out with my hand, shove it into my mouth, and start chewing. I’d chew for the longest time without swallowing, biting the inside of my cheek, and once that mixture was mud, I’d spit it back out into my hand, and rub it all over my face. The boyfriend’s gawking would serve only to heighten my ardor and anger, and to call attention to our dual plight, I’d rub some of the mud on him, rub it on his forehead, on his parted lips, rub it in spite of his yelling and flinching and attempts to jerk away, and scream, You’re not getting out of this alive. None of us are getting out of this alive. Better get used to it, suckers, and only after I’d hear his weeping, his deep weeping, would I turn around, take off my clothes, squat, and pee in the middle of the yard by a cherry tree. I’d pee on the arriving officer, who would eventually try to handcuff me. Later, over at the police station, I’d pee some more, right in the plastic seat so I’d be soaking in myself, in my own warm broth. This is what love does to us, don’t you see, you miserable fucking bourgeois cretin, and I’d collapse to the floor, collapse until all the rage was out of me. There’s enough rage in me to fuel a nuclear power station, even if I had no idea what nuclear power is in the provinces of France, in Yonville, in 1856.
But je ne suis pas Emma. Hollis appears to have withdrawn from me, and by withdrawn I mean lost interest in hooking up. As I haven’t allowed myself to be the one to initiate the hooking up, I am confused, as if I’ve been tossed up on some shoreline where I’d never wanted to be. Given that Hollis is in a relationship, I suppose I don’t think I have the right to ask for what I want—is that merely out of guilt, a sense of being complicit in a scenario I must think is wrong? Is my gain at someone’s else cost? But Hollis would laugh at the idea of guilt being for Catholics, who make his eyes roll for their backwardness and eager martyrdom. Hollis has never given me the sense that I should consider myself an equal—that’s a condition I have agreed to, without quite acknowledging it to myself. I suppose if I asked, Shall we get together Friday after the gym? I’d be opening myself up to a rejection that might come too easily to him, offhandedly, as if there were a person inside me who couldn’t be hurt. I hear how effortlessly, guiltlessly that no comes to him. It feels weird to be that tentative about us, especially now that something feels indefinably late about us being together. We missed something big, an exchange that could have heightened our lives.
Is it just that he has had enough change?
There’s a Jack Pierson sculpture that simply spells out the word STAY, in found letters from a set of signs, so none of the fonts resemble each other. At another time that word would probably come off as safe and too cautious, but not now.
For all my insecurities, I’m very likely to pull away from someone once I sense I’m less valuable to that person than I once was. You don’t want me that much anymore? Well, I’ll show you just what you lost, son of a bitch. How do you feel about yourself now?
I would never have the long-term commitment of an addict. I would never know how to be an Emma Bovary: I’d never have the energy, never the faith, never the self-cruelty. Addicts don’t stop. Addicts keep on going, walking right into the sun, in spite of the fact that they’re burning up in its fire. They don’t mind losing their minds, their perfect hair, their wrists, the skin on their fingertips.
I want to stop.
But that doesn’t mean my abandonment doesn’t scorch an inner part of me. It will take years to get the scorched part back.
FWB
We’ve crossed too many lines, Hollis and I. We make each other laugh. We know our parents’ names, mimic their voices in character, hold conversations between his mom and my mom in which we talk about food, dishes, and where our kids went to college. It’s no casual friendship: we can’t even pretend that at this point. Plus, the idea of boundaries seems so safe. We don’t even know what to do with that term, can’t even translate it into action. If there are boundaries between us, it’s that I’m not supposed to pick up the phone and call him. That’s boundaries?
Sarah Lawrence Dancing
As it’s a Thursday and not a Saturday, it isn’t sweltering and packed on the A-House floor, so Lucy and I have room to move our arms without accidentally knocking anyone nearby. Not that the place is exactly empty, and maybe that’s why Lucy dances with her pelvis so close to mine: I don’t know what to do. I cannot hurt her feelings. She can have a tough surface, but I feel I’d wound her if I simply said, Stop! This is Sarah Lawrence dancing, not adult gay man dancing. The difference being that the first puts sex in quotes, and the latter? The latter keeps some distance between the bodies, because the possibility of fucking is scary, is real. And there are men looking on, not so happy with us.
Perfect
Somewhere in the world someone says Provincetown, and they say it the way they might say Paris. The tone has good intentions, but the deadly earnestness of it shuts its door on too many truths. It can try your patience when you’ve put in your time in Town. That voice refuses complexity. That voice leaves no room for any trait that doesn’t support the myth of the perfect home: There is a place for us, somewhere a place for us. It doesn’t want to know about full-to-capacity septic tanks or boredom or power outages or fights at Town meetings or the huge gaps between communities—any of the sacrifices and difficulties of those who choose to live in a place that’s hard to get to, expensive to get to, isolated in summer, even more so in winter when fewer planes fly in from Boston, and everyone depends on two bus departures and arrivals a day. That voice doesn’t acknowledge all the forces that want to make money from it, chew it up, spit it out. How much does it cost to rent the most modest retail space in summer? Thirty thousand? Sixty thousand? If I have to go one more night to free movies at the Whaler, where people scoop up free popcorn from a trash barrel, I’ll choke myself. No wonder Polly and I take drives up Cape, lumping through the strip malls of dreary Iyannough Road in Hyannis. And then Frank Bidart stands behind the podium of the Work Center’s Common Room. He reads his long poem “Ellen West” for the twenty or so people in those chairs, an
d his urgent voice is the inner life incarnate, and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
I’ll never say Provincetown in that voice. The perfect world, the dream of: that’s for people who want to stay where they are, in a place of routine and duty, which they don’t have to inhabit fully. They need others to take their chances for them.
Acid Test
At least Benny isn’t also dropping acid—I don’t feel so soppy and timid. Happy Benny, who manages to have an edge, a sense of constructed urbanized cool, while still keeping his boyish country sweetness, even though I am sure he grew up in Boston or its suburbs. He looks like someone who might have had a recurring role on an Andy Griffith sitcom: the worldly nephew who comes back home to Mayberry after spending too many late nights at Warhol’s Factory.
We’re in the backyard of Hollis’s house, where tabs of acid are being passed from person to person. There’s no group pressure to participate, and I don’t want to. I pass the cup to the next person. Maybe I want to hold on to some of my distrust, for without that distrust I’d have nothing to keep me tethered to myself. As much as I like some of the people at the party, I don’t want to be just another bee in the hive. It takes so much work to be myself, it is ongoing work, and that’s the way I stay alive, minute by minute. Without that, I’m the person I was back in my family’s house, living in reaction to chaos, fearful, waiting for the next blow, a tumbleweed.
People in trauma give up individuality, which is made absurd by war, epidemics, poverty, racism. I look over at Jimmy, who might as well be blowing smoke off the end of a pistol. He is Personality Supremo. At least I have him.
We move outside to the deck, around the table. Leaves scratch the wood planks after a sudden gust of wind. Everyone seems unchanged to me. No one is climbing the roof to dive off into our arms, no one is staring long and hard at the nimbus around his hand, in the manner of a character from Go Ask Alice, the movie of the week, which was meant to scare the shit out of us and managed only to make drugs seem attractive and glamorous. Perhaps that pill is just a sugar pill and people are just performing their good feelings so that others will like them. Maybe it’s just the public nature of this ritual that bothers me. It feels like a family holding hands and praying at a restaurant so others can see their virtue. It’s never really about talking to God.
The Daddy of Boston
Maybe because he feels some regret about not being available to me, Hollis tells me about his friend Adam, a graphic designer, whom he describes as “the Daddy of Boston.” It seems that Adam likes sex as much as Hollis does, probably even more. Adam likes sex so much he doesn’t even have a boyfriend—how could just one boyfriend satisfy the voracious needs of Adam? Hollis offers to introduce me to him, and I say yes, yes, though Hollis cautions that Adam isn’t to be thought of as boyfriend material. He gets serious about this: his eyes narrow and lose their sense of play. Is his sending me to Adam part of the ongoing sentimental education he’s giving me? Or is Hollis still trying to keep my longing for him to himself?
If Hollis isn’t in love with me, then he is definitely in love with my feelings for him.
The Daddy of Boston. Everyone wants the Daddy of Boston, because everyone is young, and all the queer men over forty are dead. To be the Daddy of Boston, you need to work out every day, maintain your musculature, drink your Dutch chocolate protein shakes, and live to be the ripe old age of thirty-nine. Somehow you’ve managed to escape the scourge of HIV, and that isn’t the overt subject of you.
The very fact of you gives others hope: You have sex. You don’t die.
17
X-rated
The new crop of Work Center Fellows talk about sex a lot, much more than if the Work Center were in Peterborough or Saratoga Springs. Sex is in the air, sex is in our work, it’s changing our work in heightened, unexpected ways. One night, to stave off the off-season boredom, one of us decides to have a porn-viewing party—maybe it is Lucy. It sounds like an idea Lucy would cook up; Lucy is always ready to provoke and unsettle. As a group we have no intellectual agenda about this gathering. The intention is not to make any connections to the work of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick or any other theorist. Perhaps to do so would be to make this evening too safe. Nor is anyone out to stir up erotic feelings between us; our sexual desires are fairly well known to one another, and we’re pretty much certain that what we’re looking for is not to be found among us. But maybe Lucy is out to break down some boundaries. Her apartment sits out on the harbor, off the compound, and she has a TV and a VCR. Her living room accommodates a veritable crowd, eight of us. One of us is designated to go out to City Video and rent porn films: Dress Up for Daddy, a lesbian BDSM film; a film starring Long Dong Silver, reportedly a favorite of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas; a film by Falcon Studios, featuring white, gay, gym-worked men; and a compilation of bloopers, terrible straight porn bloopers.
I’m not sure whom I end up accompanying on the trip. I am more than happy to be an accomplice.
Once we start looking our faces and postures change. The temperature of Lucy’s living room changes. The occasional nervous laugh. We don’t feel comfortable looking at one another: it is mysteriously unnerving to train our eyes to the actions on the screen, the mouth moving up and down on a dick, the eyes theatrically closed, the faces performing transcendence, ecstasy, submission.
Doesn’t Sontag list “stag films seen without lust” as one of the prime examples of camp?
The gay film. I feel protective of the gay film, even though I know it’s a bit predictable, orderly, and clean. The guys are white, swollen: striated, muscular. They look expensive. One is wearing a black leather vest, black chaps. These are intended to be props of transgression, but that is as far as the transgression will go. The guys are very serious about themselves. They look like the types who might tend bar down the street but never crack a joke. Each sex act follows the template of the day: small talk, a hand on the shoulder, leaning in, some kissing, some sucking, perhaps some gentlemanly ass-eating, a shy lick here and there, a condom is rolled on, howls and guttural noises, biting the thread count out of the sheets—you get the picture. The fucking looks vigorous and athletic but that’s all it is: there’s no passion, none of the awkwardness of human feeling. Nothing in the film embarrasses me: it looks like a hundred other films out there. I probably would never rent such a movie myself as it might be the gay porn version of Denise’s high-end kitchen. No mess and the fires can be turned down with a knob. The moves are in style. The moves don’t conjure up ideas of sleaze or bad taste. It’s all polished and curated and maybe on the way to cold, not a body hair or blemish in sight. But what else should I expect in the age of AIDS, where bodies are getting prematurely old in the houses to the right and left of us?
My sense is that my friends are on the edge of bored. Maybe their boredom is a bit of a performance—the room might get nervous if any one of us, female or male, couldn’t quite sit still. Yet I can also imagine no one wanting to offend me; perhaps they think I would take it personally. Cry out, Hah, homophobe! I always knew it. And start tearing up. There is certainly no revulsion in the air. But my friends seem disappointed, as if they were hoping to see something brazen, raw, and enthralling: just a single rough move to make them turn their heads away. Perhaps they were hoping that gay sex would show them something new about being human, about the inherent possibilities of the body, but no. The gay film has let them down in its dedication to ritual, which doesn’t stop me from gazing at it with fellow feeling and pride, as if I’m a World War II veteran at an army reunion looking at footage of the invasion of Normandy.
No one cracks a joke. No one stands up to smoke a cigarette out on the back deck. Lucy still sounds excited, with a voice that wants to believe that the world is much bigger than the one we’ve been given.
Fast-forwarding through the rest of the film. I look around at my friends and think, You still like me? Maybe I am anticipating parental objection on a certain level. A different
film is eased into the VCR, and boundaries slip. We’re uncomfortable again, we don’t know what to do with this language. There is a shade of danger here, some actual transgression: Dress Up for Daddy. Daddy in a movie filled with women? It is smart. Instantly it feels like a labor of love versus a commercial product. It understands a thing or two about roles and masks and the way desire makes use of projection screens, not all of them politically correct, most not. But alongside that it manages to be hot, no small thing when most of us in the room are not lesbians, or at least not yet. We are transported. We’ve all slipped into some interior state—there is a dream passing back and forth between us. We are breathing. The windows are steamed. What’s that monstrous thing, a dildo? And while we might not all be aroused by what we see, we are absolutely in its grip. Whatever is happening has the power of mystery and subversion, but it manages to get there by the plastic, the fake.
But for Mindy, the lone lesbian among us, it’s too much. The blush scorches her face. She leaps out of the room, onto the back deck, where she might smoke a cigarette—does Mindy even smoke cigarettes? I imagine her standing at the rail. I imagine her looking out at the harbor, moonlit and cold, trying to catch her breath, embarrassed and mystified by the intensity of her own reaction. While she’s out there we worry together that we’ve offended her—has any of us said the wrong thing? Soon Mindy will walk back in with a nervous laugh, crossing her arms, rubbing the shiver out of her elbows.