by Sky Gilbert
My father, on the other hand, was another kind of homosexual. He didn’t live to buy my records. He didn’t want to belong; he never even tried. The problem wasn’t what many thought it was. My father didn’t molest boys; he just looked like he did. And it wasn’t even effeminacy, though there was a little bit of that. He couldn’t help being out and open — even though there was no “out” then. So what this meant was subtle: he was too enthused about everything (but mainly show business) and dressed too well. He wore wristwatches and undershirts before they were fashionable for heterosexual men. But, most blatantly, he loved all kinds of beauty, was obsessed with it.
As you know, it is Christmas, and tonight I caught sight of a particularly tedious broadcast simply because there was nothing else to do. It featured the Georgia Boys Choir. It had a lot of black young men in it. Amazing how, culturally, we can talk about race but pretend not be talking about it at all. Anyway, the choirmaster, who was of course white, was extolling the virtue of his own pedagogy. In this case, that meant reminding the audience that he was teaching virtue by helping young men to appreciate beauty (as opposed to violence). I’m sure no one out there watching was fooled; it’s no accident that those professions that involve working with youth have a natural attraction for pederasts.
My father was no pederast, but the way the audience must have perceived that fawning choirmaster in those viral Christmas images, explaining how he was teaching young men the importance of beauty — their shining faces and mostly unchanged voices singing “make the yuletide gay” — is exactly how people must have perceived my father. You can’t be so open about your love of beauty and get away with it. Men are not supposed to be concerned with beauty, unless it is the beauty of a woman, and even then, as we all know, he must make sure that adoration (which should be purely sexual, not emotional) is under control. He must not love a woman too much, too passionately, or he’ll lose himself.
Strange how this attitude has still not disappeared. So much else has changed. Sexualities have come and gone, bodies have become unrecognizable in their perfection. And yet the idea of masculinity and femininity is still with us. I am tempted to quote Foucault on power. But it’s even more profound than that — a nostalgia, again, for difference, for friction, for the “rubbing up against” in its most primitive and basic form, which is just so eternally sexy. No one knows who was born male or who was born female anymore, and no one seems to care. Gender is irrelevant. And yet our masquerades are ineluctably linked to hard and soft, dark and light, weighty and airy, sweet and cruel. There are no real men anymore, but there are so many convincing imitations. The transsexuals predicted we would all become indistinct in-betweens. But nobody really wants to be an in-between. (There’s that word again. It is truly one of my favourite songs.)
I must admit that sometimes I still get the urge for plastic surgery. Apparently it wouldn’t be too difficult to actually set my head erect upon my spine. Even though I have a special bed, like the famous Elephant Man, who died trying to lie on his back, I do so yearn sometimes to stretch out and sleep flat.
Anyway, to return to my analogy. My father was that choirmaster, completely recognizable as a dangerous outsider, opining piously about his love of movies, vaudeville, stars, songs, costumes and lighting. He was, remember, a natty dresser. And he was, simply, drawn to men. He liked to talk to them, wine them, dine them, amuse them — it was all he wanted from life. Of course, he was also the perfect husband for my frigid bitch of a mother. Anyway, when they finally drove him out of town, when he finally realized they wouldn’t hire him anywhere, he just simply retired from life. My father died of meningitis in a shack; no one can ever understand it — it’s all so perplexing. I mean, I was still so young. I was a child and he did not communicate with me . . . formally. But we were close. And I knew what he was doing. It was a Manichean struggle; it was the flesh and the spirit. He had decided he couldn’t be a father to us if he couldn’t be who he wanted to be (i.e., a man who loved men). And if he couldn’t achieve self-respect being who he was, then it was best for him to disappear from our world.
I have proof of his struggle in the form a letter he sent my mother. I found it in the garbage. It is still crumpled, but I had it framed. It says, in quite lovely, elegant handwriting: “I haven’t drunk anything for some time now and don’t intend to as long as I keep away from it.” That he would seek pity from my mother — a woman incapable of any human emotion, especially pity — says something about his judgement. So does the pathetic idea that by “keeping away from it” he could cure himself. And I’m sure this wasn’t just about booze. It was about his body, about the body in general, about its tyranny.
I visited him, and saw where he lived, and looked into his eyes. My mother didn’t want me to do any of this. But I made Virginia take me. I insisted. I could see there was a Buddhist sort of struggle going on — a veiled calm behind his eyes, and the veil was tears. I’m not extolling him because he wasn’t one of the young men in a front row reaching out to me. I’m not praising him for suffering. But his devotion to me (and I know he was devoted to me even though he lived far away at the end) was a devotion that was purely his own, purely independent, purely original. He loved me despite my mother, despite who he was and despite a world telling him he couldn’t love me and still remain himself. His adoration was not part and parcel of trying to be accepted by a group; in fact, it was quite the opposite. When I sang: “Zing went the strings . . .” on the radio the night he died, I was singing to one man only: to him.
I didn’t mean to get onto this “father and the radio show” business, even though I warned you about it earlier. I thought you might interpret it the wrong way, and you may still. But that’s one of the things I have been thinking about lately. Of course, I realize that I am an addict, and I don’t have any delusions about not being one — or of graduating from that condition. But I am thinking about the way I divide things so carefully now, in such a controlling way: a time for this and a time for that. I dare not speak or write about certain things, or do them, because it will connect me with you-know-what. And of course I cannot, must not, go back there.
I think instead there is a point when a person can’t live with, and doesn’t need, boundaries. Dangerous talk, you will say. I am not abandoning the self-evident truth that I am an addict. For in a world in which there are so few truths, strangely, addiction is empirical. Even that antique deconstructionist Derrida acknowledged empirical truths, of opening a door or touching a table or being struck in the face and feeling the sting. Well, the tangible reality here is my addiction. But what I am frustrated with is the relentless order of my life — which I have imposed upon myself to protect me from ever straying. The loss of those minute satisfactions — I hardly ever eat old-fashioned unpackaged food, hardly ever have a sip of coffee, and I feel so guilty, so very guilty, for the occasional, very occasional, cigarette. Perhaps these activities might not, in the future, be spaced out so religiously (or should I say Jesuitically?). Is that possible? Because this tedious discipline has become my way of life. And I really don’t think I have anything to fear by making tiny alterations.
I love you and never want to leave you, but part of love is recognizing growth and change in the one you love. I think I am changing; I want you to know about it. If I were on the desperate slide to addiction, would I be telling you about all this, asking for advice? What I am saying is that I don’t think it makes sense for me to stay away from homosexuality, or homosexuals. This fear is based on a false notion, which I have already explained — that they killed me, or that I cannot control my feelings about them, or I do not understand what happened to me when I was so close with them. It’s very clear what happened to me, and I have no desire to go back to where I was. Being obsessed with Dash King is not a signal through the flames, it’s not a signal of any kind, nor a hint, or a bad sign. It’s simply an interest — that’s all.
Here is Dash’s next paper (dated
approximately one month after the last). The monthly missives emailed to his advisor were partly an academic duty — the pressure was on for Dash to write his thesis. And if he were to procrastinate, there was always the danger he would drift into the vast, uncharted desert populated by those who never finished their theses. (This happened, eventually, as he died relatively young, before he could finish.) So it was important for him to make contact with his advisor in order to not jeopardize his funding.
As we can see from these papers, several things were happening — not the least of which was that his scholarly writing was quickly disintegrating into personal memoir. At this point he wasn’t completely cognizant of the process. It seems he felt that confiding in his advisor was somehow relevant, though obviously digressive. The material below is ostensibly about the Shakespearean authorship again, as King is speaking of his disappointment with his lack of success at organizing a conference. But it quickly meanders into confession.
Let me give you a little more background. I know the details of his personal life because I have communicated with a professor who was a student at the University of Toronto during Dash’s declining years at the turn of the century. He was an excessively beautiful and cheerful man who caught Dash’s eye. Now he is quite old — but still very cheerful — and seems to remember quite a bit about what Dash was up to. Apparently Dash had organized a small meeting of University of Toronto professors in an attempt to interest them in the idea of a Shakespeare conference. The conference was to centre on the subject of Shakespeare and sexuality, which was of course an acceptable area of inquiry at the time — in the context of the New Historicism (which quickly became old) of Orgel and Greenblatt. New Historicism purported to juxtapose literature against history, without insisting that history should necessarily be thought of as authoring literature. At any rate, there were all sorts of ways in which such a conference might have been justifiable and fundable.
What’s interesting about Dash’s focus at this time is that his interest in the notion of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare had clearly superseded his interest in Shakespeare’s sexuality. My talks with the cheerful academic who knew Dash (his name is Trevor) have been revealing. He and Dash were drinking companions. Trevor was friends with many attractive young male university students, as he was a graduate student when he first met Dash, and later an assistant in the “Department of Difference.”
It’s interesting that these departments were named (even when they first came into being) in a manner that predicted the erasure of sexuality as a subject of study. They were such sad things — these departments of “Difference” and “Equality” (there was even one in Brussels dedicated to “The Othered and the Abject”). Of course, since sexuality as an academic pursuit would soon be on the wane, it’s almost as if the university administration realized it was best to name these departments in a way that might also suit any other emerging academic issue — disability, transsexuality and indeed the transhuman being the issues that eventually ate — or I should say devoured — departments that were originally devoted to race and/or sexuality.
At any rate, Trevor and Dash were drinking buddies, and Trevor is a veritable treasure trove of trivial yet indispensable personal information about King. Trevor informed me that Dash — until he tried to organize the Shakespeare conference that quickly became a turning point in his life (the failure of the conference was a huge blow to him, as you will see) — had been trying to control his addictions. After the conference failed, he began falling prey to his most pernicious habits. Trevor claims Dash was addicted to poppers. (This could explain his eventual heart failure.) Dash associated poppers with late-night promiscuity and alcohol. He was also prone to paranoia, unable to smoke marijuana and was, according to Trevor, afraid of chemical drugs of any kind. Dash had, for many years, controlled his obsessive attendance at the gay bathhouse by limiting his visits to the early part of the evening, and imbibing afterwards, thus avoiding the dreaded poppers.
I don’t know how familiar you are with gay bathhouses. Of course, they haven’t existed since the paranoia about disease grew to such epic proportions. (Strange, isn’t it, how unconcerned we are with consequences of our actions, and yet the fear of disease is omnipresent.) The gay steambaths had little to do with steam, or even baths. If you want to learn more about them, there are some cyberbaths that apparently provide a lot of fun for those nostalgic for the experience. These sites are a fair — though obviously mediated — representation of what the real experience was like. People today would find the actual experience alien and discomfiting — for there was much real, physical, sexual contact. (Although the contact was under controlled conditions. Condoms and lube were made available, along with suitable sanitary facilities, etc.) This is, of course, completely alien to present-day sexuality, which rarely involves human contact at all, at least, that is, above ground — or commonly.
In Dash’s day, sex was still linked with propagation, even though people feared that homosexuality might wipe out the human race. It’s quaint that people might have thought that, isn’t it? What actually happened was that matters of convenience, issues of population control and the fear of disease made it more practical for human beings to be conceived in test tubes. In fact, at the turn of the last century it was, paradoxically, people who called themselves heterosexuals who campaigned for a safe, sterile method of procreation that did not involve intercourse.
The steambath was a series of tiny rooms that one could barely move around in — rooms the size of closets. This was certainly ironic. Gay men fought so long to get out of the closet, only to find themselves cruising the darkened hallways and tiny rooms that were so very much like closets in search of a passionate embrace. The tiny sex rooms also resembled prison cells. Indeed, the prison motif was played up in establishments (as it is today in cyberbathhouses) — barbed wire over the doorways, sexy little prison windows, that kind of thing.
So this was where Dash would spend the early part of his evenings, followed by drinks with Trevor and the students at the university. It was a sad and lonely life — at least, in terms of the sexual practices of the time. For there were other “gay” people who were not only still having actual sex with each other, but falling in love, getting married, experiencing romance. Dash got drunk almost every night — remember, for him this was controlled, “good” behaviour because he separated his drinking from his cruising. When Trevor asked Dash why he enjoyed this lifestyle so much, he said, “I’m not very good at sex.” This certainly smelled of paradox for someone who had sex so frequently. So Trevor suggested, “Does that mean you’re practicing?” which apparently Dash laughed at, or rather Trevor couldn’t really remember what his response was. At another point, after the death of his Shakespeare conference, Dash was very depressed. He confided to Trevor, “I don’t really want to go to the baths, but I have to because my boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” Trevor became instantly sympathetic — he’s a very sympathetic type of fellow — and wanted to talk to Dash about his “problem.” But Dash became defensive, saying, “It’s not because my boyfriend and I don’t have sex.” He then specified, “That is, we don’t have sex, but it’s not because of that.” Trevor, who had a notion of himself as a kind of amateur psychoanalyst, tried to probe into Dash’s promiscuous habits and reluctant boyfriend, but had little success.
It was also during these discussions that Dash revealed that his interest in Shakespeare’s sexuality had turned primarily into a fascination with the authorship question. Trevor was confused by the switch, and again the conversation was a drunken one. But one night at the bar, Dash apparently frightened some young wet-behind-the-ears undergraduates from the Department of Difference by banging on the table and yelling, “It’s de Vere. I know it’s de Vere! I can’t stand the lies anymore! I have to expose the lies.”
Once Trevor had calmed down the undergrads and had found a private corner on the patio, he was able to get Dash to explain that “the
lie about a heterosexual Shakespeare is actually less appalling than the lie about Shakespeare himself.” On further probing Dash said, “De Vere was definitely a fag, but what drives me crazy is the way the academic establishment refuses to discuss him. . . .” Or something to that effect.
Trevor’s revelations concerning his drunken talks with Dash shed a glaring light on Dash’s disappointment in the writing addressed to his advisor. It’s obvious that Dash’s depression over the conference may have been the cause of his disillusionment with academia, and may be related to his tragic romantic life. Here is the passage:
Antonio:
I want to relate something that is really upsetting. You may think that I am blowing it out of proportion but I want you to know that I am not. At least, it’s important to me, very important, and something we really must talk about. Or you simply have to listen. Here, let me write this to you. I’m sorry I’m not being very articulate. But I’m deeply, deeply angry. I’m going to tell you the whole story. It all has to do with organizing the conference. I might as well tell you right off the bat that I’m not going to try to organize a Shakespeare conference. I’ve given up. As far as I’m concerned there’s no point; all my enthusiasm has gone. The first thing I want to say is that I apologize. I feel terrible for getting everyone together and asking for advice and then copping out. I wouldn’t be pulling out if I wasn’t so discouraged and upset. As you know, in my spare time I have been reading a lot about the authorship question. You’ve been very kind about it, as you are always kind about things — and you haven’t seemed particularly disturbed about my pursuit of these ideas. I’m new to academia, as you know, and I thought that even though the ideas I am interested in are considered radical by some, controversy might be important to a conference.