He was golden-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and his magnificent form always reminded me of the sleekly powerful Oscar statues. His wardrobe was vast, full of elegant outfits by small and local and sometimes major designers and vintage picks, statements that had wit and wryness and sometimes glamour in many colors, with the shoes to go with it. Contemplating the wonder that was Ed, dressed, I came to recognize that though looking amazing is usually thought of as either a mildly despicable self-glorification or a straightforward strategy to access sex, it can be a gift to the people around you, a sort of public art and a celebration, and, with wardrobes like Ed’s, even a kind of wit and commentary.
People watching is one of life’s great pleasures, and I felt fortunate to live among drag queens and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the AIDS activist group and parodic sororital/fraternal organization launched at the end of the 1970s, among people who took any excuse to costume—in a city of parades and street parties and festivals for Dia de los Muertos and Halloween and Gay Pride and Chinese New Year, among subcultures with their particular styles from punk to lowrider to hip-hop to the many people remaking gender to suit themselves and signifying it by personal style and body language. And the eccentrics who belonged to no clan or were a tribe of one, back when people lived in public more. The city back then felt like an unending carnival of self-invention, of every walk down the street as potentially a parade, and some people worked harder at performing for it than others, but there was always plenty to see, from rainbow-colored Mohawks to tattered ball gowns, and sometimes both together.
Perhaps the reprieve Ed’s wardrobe provided a dying woman was one of the ways I was learning that who you are and what you do and make and wear and say can be a contribution to people around you, that many of the most valuable gifts are not direct or material or measurable. That even how you live your life can be a gift to others. Being around gay men liberated me, because liberation is contagious. I learned so much from them, benefited in so many ways, enjoyed myself so immensely. Of course the things I’m saying are not about all gay men, only about my encounters with the ones who delighted me and the ones who became my friends.
For thirty years, I lived a short walk from the Castro District, and even before I’d been a San Franciscan, I’d gone to see movies at the Castro Theater, one of the few grand movie palaces that hasn’t been demolished or converted to a multiscreen cinema. I’ve seen hundreds of films in its dim, majestic cavern. Sitting there for film festivals, for classic Westerns and musicals, for the annual film noir festival, for the AIDS documentary We Were Here, for scads of Tarkovsky and Antonioni and the feature film about Harvey Milk that let us see the theater we were sitting in on the screen, I learned from the murmurs and sighs, the cheers and groans and snickers, to read the homoerotic subtexts, to note the camp, to call out the hate in the old films and the botched ideas in the new ones. Gay men taught me to read closely, to celebrate and critique, and to share in the jokes, even when we were (mostly) quiet in the dark.
The way you might be proud of your city’s civic architecture or teams, some of those of us who were straight were, I think, proud of our gay population back then, pleased to feel worldly about the antipuritanical realms of the bathhouses and the queer leather scene such as they were before the AIDS epidemic; sophisticated enough to banter with a drag queen or join the glorious variety of Halloween in the Castro when that impromptu street carnival was in full flower, before the college kids and other onlookers diluted it and the violence came; pleased to be in a place where events and characters flourished that might not happen anywhere else, cherishing the way the city was a magnet for people desperate to get away from the wholesome America that wanted to kill them; awestruck by the vision and heroism of some of the political leadership in the streets and eventually in office.
My first gay male friend came along when I was about thirteen, and he took me to my first drag-queen bar on Polk Street not long after, of which I remember little but the festive flutter of the queens wearing pancake makeup who sat at a little café table with us and kindly admired my childish complexion. There was a sexual geography in San Francisco, with the leather scene on Folsom Street, trans women and drag queens in the Tenderloin, gay men on Polk Street before the vitality of that scene faded as the Castro became the new capital, and lesbian bars and clubs in North Beach before my time and then in various places around the city before they too faded away. For a while, in my late teens and early twenties, I went dancing at the Stud, a leather bar that was one of the rare places where a punk crowd and a gay crowd overlapped (and were sometimes the same people).
The gay men and lesbians around me encouraged me to imagine that gender is whatever you want it to be, and that the rules were breakable, and that the price to pay for breaking them was generally worth it and then some. The men made it clear that what troubled and frustrated me in straight men was not innate to the gender but built into the role. Or as the direct-action group Queer Nation put it in the stickers they scattered around town in the early 1990s, “What causes heterosexuality?” They modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I.
Across the United States and elsewhere are people who imagine and desire and sometimes demand homogeneity as a right, who claim coexistence compromises or menaces them. I wonder about them, about what it must be like to be the kind of person who expected to dominate a country and culture forever and to find safety in homogeneity and danger—mostly imagined, or of a metaphysical variety—in heterogeneous society. I was white, but I grew up the daughter of a liberal Irish Catholic and a Russian Jew in a conservative and sometimes anti-Semitic neighborhood, a book-besotted kid in an anti-intellectual town, a girl in a family of boys. I didn’t think there were a lot of people exactly like me or that they would ever amount to a majority population anywhere. In a homogeneous environment, I always felt I stuck out in ways that might be punished; to be in a mixed crowd was safer as well as more rewarding. And living in a white-minority city, I came to think “like me” meant people who loved the same things or held the same ideals.
There are so many ways to disappear. And some were never allowed to appear in the first place. San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk’s aide and close friend Cleve Jones, who’s had a major political career of his own since, wrote in his memoir When We Rise, “I was born into the last generation of homosexual people who grew up not knowing if there was anyone else on the entire planet who felt the way that we felt. It was simply never spoken of. . . . Being queer was sick, illegal and disgusting and getting caught meant going to prison or a mental institution. Those who were arrested lost everything—careers, families and often their lives. Special police units hunted us relentlessly in every city and state. . . . By twelve years old I knew that I needed a plan. The only plan I could imagine was to hide, never reveal my secret, and if discovered, commit suicide.”
Those formative years of mine were transformative years for queer culture, and most of the men I knew had some version of Cleve’s journey through secrecy and shame to find friends, lovers, and a place in the world, or at least in the city, or at least a few neighborhoods there. From the 1970s protests against antigay legislation through the White Night riots after Milk was assassinated by a conservative ex-cop to the ferocious activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation into the 1990s, it was a politically charged place. It was both a center of the AIDS crisis and of organizing to respond to it, from the work of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to educate about safe sex to ACT UP and Queer Nation to Cleve’s AIDS memorial quilt project, a project so massive that the last time it was displayed in its entirety, in 1996, it covered the entire Mall in the nation’s capital.
I watched the AIDS crisis as a bystander passing through a Castro that suddenly had bulletin-board notices and gay newspaper articles about a strange new disease, then skeletal men teetering along the sidewalks, memorial
displays, protests and marches. I was close to one man, the artist David Cannon Dashiell, from the time his longtime partner Barry died of an experimental AIDS drug to his own death almost four years later. David gave me Barry’s black leather motorcycle jacket after my own was stolen, and I wore it for years, back when leather jackets were a kind of uniform for people like us.
David was devastated by Barry’s death, but his partner’s life insurance policy let him have things he’d always wanted, starting with more time to make art. He went on a shopping spree, buying and remodeling and furnishing an apartment and buying a lot of art by gay artists he admired—Jerome, Nayland Blake, Lari Pittman—knowing what I didn’t, that his remaining time was brief. Even the furnishings had mordant wit; at his dining table were six steel wheelchairs upholstered with dark watered satin and fringe dripping from the arms, a wink at how the disease might disable him. We used to speed around the flat in those chairs, laughing.
His art was erudite, a project of queering existing representational systems—I still have one panel from the Tarot deck he redrew in chalk on big rounds of black paper; mine shows a man from above, his muscular form drawn in a few swift lines, his nipples tiny spikes on his strong chest. David was tall, willowy, with pallid skin, an archly aristocratic manner, and much delight in decadence and transgression. I was who he called the night his HIV turned into AIDS. I rushed over to the glamorous flat he’d put together, bringing fruit juice, soup, and the fluffiest films I could find. Reclining in his bed in the bay window of his Victorian apartment, we watched Picnic with Kim Novak and William Holden, one of those movies whose over-the-top heterosexual rites were a perfect occasion for snarky remarks. We stayed up late over soup and movies, and in the morning he went to the doctor. Neither of us was equipped to talk directly about what was happening, but it happened anyway.
David fell in love again, and they toured Europe with a suitcase of clothes and a suitcase of pills. He completed his masterpiece just before he died. It was a reenvisioning of the Villa of the Mysteries murals in Pompeii, a huge installation, with life-size figures painted on eight-foot-high sheets of plexiglass: white- and lavender-complected Edwardian gay men, kissing, cannibalizing, exchanging bodily fluids; green-skinned science-fiction lesbians also engaged in transgressive erotic rites. I was witnessing his simultaneous appearance and disappearance, the former as an artist rising in ambition and visibility, the latter from the disease that killed him at forty in the summer of 1993.
San Francisco was a refuge, but far from a perfect one, and homophobic violence was a presence even here. A man named James Finn, in the course of writing about being assaulted elsewhere for being gay (and, with his powerful husband, winning the battle), noted, “When a homophobic man taunts a gay man, he almost invariably does so by comparing him in unfavorable terms to a woman.” Gay men were despised for being men who had, in the imaginings of homophobes, chosen to be like women. Like women in being penetrated, when being penetrated was seen as being conquered, invaded, humiliated. Like straight women in being subject to men (though nonstraight women who were not subject to men upset them too; they upset easily).
Which means that some heterosexual men and for that matter whole societies, notably ours, imagine sex with women is punitive, damaging, adversarial, an act that enhances his status and demolishes hers. In some cultures the man who penetrates anyone or anything, including another man, retains his stature; it’s the man who allows himself to be penetrated who has fallen from the status of a man (which has made it doubly hard for boys and men who are rape victims). An acquaintance told me about going home, long ago, with a college friend whose father was a Wall Street broker. The rest of the family was enjoying dinner in their lavish Upper East Side apartment when the broker arrived. Everyone fell silent, and he sat down and roared, apropos of his day in the stock market, “I fucked him up the ass.” Winning over his competitor was like having sex with him, and sex is hostile and punitive at one end and humiliating at the other, an interesting thing to proclaim to your wife and children at dinner.
Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman. If what a man does to a woman, or to anyone he penetrates, is imagined as violating and despoiling her, humiliation and degradation come to be indistinguishable from sexuality or a proxy for it in the puritanical imagination. So many of the thousands of sexual assault accounts I’ve read in recent years include acts that have nothing to do with the bodily satisfaction often presumed to be the goal. It’s a version of love that’s war, the enactment or realization of a set of metaphors in which men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets, and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.
Everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear, by the light shining in our eyes and on the surface of our bodies, by the air we must never stop breathing, by the food and water we take in, by the contacts that generate sensations that run from the surface of our skin to our brains, by the pheromones and bacteria we transmit imperceptibly to each other by air and contact, by the smells that are tiny particles we have inhaled, by the myriad species of beneficial bacteria in our gut and elsewhere that constitute so vast a portion of a human body that self is something of a misnomer or at least a crowd and maybe a party. If you were truly impenetrable you’d be dead in minutes, and there was a kind of deadening inertness that was part of the equation of imagining you could be so.
James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.” Redefining women and their roles redefined men and masculinity and vice versa. If the genders were not opposite but a spectrum of variations on some central theme of being human, if there were many ways to execute your role or refuse it, and liberation for each gender was seen as being allowed to take up what had been considered the proper role and goods and even feelings of the other or find some third (or seventh) way, then the citadel would be broken and everyone could travel freely.
Heterosexual masculinity has often seemed to me a great renunciation, a repudiation not only of the myriad things that men are not supposed to like, but even a plethora of things that they are not supposed even to notice. Many of the gay men I knew noticed, and one of the pleasures of conversation with gay friends was an acute awareness of emotional, aesthetic, and political phenomena, an ability to weigh minute things and evaluate nuances and fine degrees of differentiation.
These men knew that words could be festive, recreational, medicinal, that banter and flirtation and extravagance, that humor and wryness and anecdotes of the absurd were pleasures worth pursuing. They knew that talk wasn’t, as many straight men seemed to assume, just transactional, a way to dump or extract information or instructions. It could be play, riffing on ideas and tones; it could give encouragement and affection; and it could invite people to be themselves and to know themselves in order to be known. There were so many kinds of love at work: the love of vivid and exact description, which was sometimes poetic, sometimes skewering wit, sometimes deep insight, and of exchanges that wove connections between speakers and ideas.
If humor consists of noting the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are—and much humor of the nonbrutal variety is—then those least invested in things as they are supposed to be, or who are actually adversaries and victims of conventionality, are most inclined and able to celebrate those gaps. The straight man is a figure in humor, the one who doesn’t make or get the joke, and straight suggests linear thinking and conventional paths as well as heterosexuality.
I think of how for years when I encountered the great artist and graphic designer Rex Ray, who designed my first book, I’d shout “LambCHOP!!!” and he roared back in his rich, amused, rollicking voice, “CUPCAKE!!!” or of how when I was first getting to know the young architect Tim
O’Toole around 1990, we’d greet each other with a caustic “HELLO, Kitty,” bearing down on the first word, swinging back up with the second, so that the phrase was like a secret handshake, a badge of belonging. Of how I was free to be funny or dramatic or preposterous around them, and of how fun it was, and how much we laughed, and how there was room in there to be sad and bereft too. Even that could become something whose absurdities and excesses were occasion for more wit, because heartbreak and loneliness have their comic sides, and finding them can be key to survival. How it let me be someone I might not have gotten to be elsewhere. Not that all my gay friends were campy or even culture mavens. Bob Fulkerson was a rugged outdoorsman and political organizer, a fifth-generation Nevadan devoted to his state, but he was and is someone who calls me up sometimes just to leave me a message that he loves me, almost thirty years after we met at the Nevada Test Site.
Queer culture made it clear that a life can have as its stable foundation friendships so strong that they are a form of family, that family too can be liberated from the conventional roles of spousal contracts and begetting and blood kinship. It was a bulwark against the widespread, wearing insistence that only the nuclear family supplies love and stability—which sometimes it does, but we all know that sometimes it supplies misery and sabotage. This was, of course, in part the result of the exclusion of queer people from marriage and rejection by birth families long before marriage equality became the law of the land and adoptions became more available to same-sex couples. Later in life, when I forgot to tell interviewers that they would never ask a man that or to simply garrote them for being so noxious, I sometimes answered the intrusive questions about why I didn’t marry and bear offspring with reference to being a San Franciscan, to being among people who had less conventional ideas of what a life could look like and what kinds of love could shore it up. It was a tremendous gift.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 14