Come Back

by Sky Gilbert

  And so how does this all connect with Dash? You will see from what follows that Dash himself was the victim of a gay paradigm. That paradigm was self-destruction: suicide. As much as he resisted Foucault, it was inevitable he would be caught in this trap. What was real for Dash and so many of his ilk at the decadent “end of gay” was not sex itself or sexual choice, but some fiction of sexuality. As we know now, object choice is varied, as is gender, and this is quite accepted in the modern world.

  Certainly it has been no problem for our conservative government to fund sex changes as part of our medical plans. It has been no problem for what used to be called same-sex marriages and are now just called plain old marriages. There was never any problem with this, except on the part of certain — I am not afraid to say it — fundamentalists. But as we well know, though there are definite fundamentalist elements in our government, they do not actually make the laws (thank God, and pray they never do!). But they are there, lurking. At any rate, it would be pretty hard, I think, for even fundamentalists to deny the principles of tolerance that have been written into our legal system.

  Similarly, it is impossible to write away the rights of women, although the concept of woman has become pragmatically irrelevant. Biology, after all, has less and less a part to play in that concept, or in sex, sexuality or conception. But what has of course disappeared, and gone underground, are the aspects of sexuality that were associated with gay culture — promiscuity, drug addiction and the endless encyclopedia of weird extreme sexual practices. We all know (and I will say it again, even though it upsets you) that these things exist. Certain very sad and perverted people are involved with these things. We know that they are not healthy. And of course health, or at least survival, for the many — for as many years as possible — has become one of the ruling principles of our existence; so much of a ruling principle that we don’t have to worry about it — the government just takes care of it for us.

  On that note, it amazes me that cigarettes are still for sale. It’s interesting that they are technically illegal. How can something be illegal, and still be taxed? Somehow this has managed to happen with cigarettes. I know that occasionally people are arrested for smoking in public and face stiff jail time, but this is very odd considering that cigarettes are legal to buy and smoke in one’s own home, as long as your home is not a business or connected to another building. But you understand issues of the law and citizenship better than I.

  So what am I getting at? What Dash was “fighting” for, in his own tiny mind, were all the aspects of sexuality that were related to what he labelled gay culture — drag, promiscuity, leather fetish, weird sexual practices, alternative relationships, feminine men with male bodies . . . the fictional constructions of homosexuality. This was his hopeless cause, and made his fight pathetic and bathetic, but interesting to me in its martyred superfluidity. Now, it’s true that Dash, to give him his due, was right about some things. For instance, his complaints about academia and jargon were echoed by others of his time. Remember Sokal’s famous hoax paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”? It was written entirely in fake jargon and published.

  But it is when Dash gets into his own area of queer theory, and into his own incredibly warped, complicated and self-defeating arguments about gay life, that his tragedy, being hanged by his own favourite construction and strangled by his dearest fantasies, becomes clear. It’s also interesting, in the following passage, that Dash talks so much about AIDS, and that his lover challenged that paradigm by practising unsafe sex. But, paradoxically, his lover also fit quite neatly, by doing so, into a much larger and more dangerous construct — that of the suicidal homosexual. Unsafe sex was very dangerous at the time, in fact illegal. Today we have simply made promiscuity illegal — at least, real promiscuity. Promiscuity in cyberspace is, as we know, ubiquitous.

  So this text, which was probably sent to his supervisor, Antonio, although it is not addressed to him specifically, is tragically prophetic — especially when viewed in the context of the rumours around Foucault (of which you are probably aware). It is significant that no one knows whether or not these rumours are true, and probably never will. They are in their own way constructs or fantasies. But, at any rate, there were people who said that Foucault, who died of AIDS, practised unsafe sex. Of course, when he died, safe sex itself was a relatively new concept. But the notion was that Foucault, who ultimately believed in a shifting vision of history and fact, was not himself convinced that there was such a thing as AIDS. How could he be convinced when he did not believe that science, history or facts themselves were anything but fictional constructs? Though it has never ever been proved that Foucault practised unsafe sex, it is nevertheless an interesting theory that slips Foucault into the suicidal paradigm that Dash inhabits so neatly. But you can see for yourself:

  I have had it with the idea of writing a thesis. There isn’t any point; I don’t want to go on and can’t go on. Instead I am writing you this. This belongs in the garbage or in my memoirs. Do you think anyone would be interested in the memoirs of an old fag like me who created one of the world’s premier gay theatres? No, no one is interested in that now. I wouldn’t even try. It would be like casting pearls before swine. I have decided that if you want me to write something for you, and not “give up” writing, then I have to go on academic strike, and by that I mean I am unable to write another essay or weave any more theories. They have nothing to do with reality. And I’m not going to play the game called “What is reality?” Anybody who comes to me with that kind of question I would class with the philosophers that Bill Cosby talks about in his comedy. The philosophers who ask, “Why is there air?” ask a question as valid as “Does reality exist?” Any dummy knows the answer to that: it doesn’t matter if reality does not exist, it’s all we’ve got. So I’m not going to even try filling this paper with anything that resembles jargon. And I’m not going to talk about Shakespeare anymore. I’m going to talk about myself. This is going to be very embarrassing for you, I’m sure. But it’s much more embarrassing for me to write. But since you said, “Don’t stop writing, write about anything,” it’s your fault. How embarrassing will this be for you? Well, you said you lived through the sixties and that that time was more embarrassing than anything — you took part in nude sit-ins, the whole bit.

  Okay, so not only am I going to be personal, I am going to be as personal as possible. I am in love with an impossible person. He is an impossible boy. And he doesn’t love me back. He never will. And that is why I love him. I love him more than anything and I get absolutely nothing in return. There’s a novel by Barbara Pym called No Fond Return of Love (that is a quote from some poem). Okay, I admit it, I’m a big fan of Barbara Pym. And Philip Larkin. Yeah, Philip Larkin. There’s one for you. I can’t be bothered to look up the Pym quote and I’m not going to. The novel is about a woman who is in love with a man and follows him around everywhere but doesn’t expect anything back. The man returns her love by falling in love with her daughter and trying to seduce the girl because he’s basically a pedophile.

  My boyfriend is very beautiful but very shallow. His inside doesn’t match his outside. I don’t know if he was ever a good person. He is very lovely, but empty; he is blond and slender and he looks like he is about fifteen years old. He is in fact twenty-three. He was born in the Yukon. There is something of the Yukon about him — he is remoteness itself. His name is Jason Swallows. That’s his name; I didn’t make it up. His name is a pun, because he does swallow — other men, not me. I lie about him to all my friends. I tell them that my boyfriend and I used to have sex but we don’t any longer. The truth is that we never had sex. He won’t let me. I don’t measure up. At least he is honest, and I know where I stand. I don’t care; it’s the hopelessness of my love for him that keeps the relationship fresh. I will never be close to him because he won’t let me, and because even if I could be close to him, there would b
e nothing for me to be close to. He embarrasses me in all social situations. I just can’t be with him in public. People stare at him, and me, they can’t believe we’re together — but we aren’t, not really. And they can’t believe that I’m madly in love with him, or that we have anything in common. Well, we don’t. What do I get out of the relationship? I’m free to pursue other sexual relationships. He doesn’t interfere with that, because he doesn’t care enough about me to care. What does he get out of our relationship? He gets the privilege of hanging out with someone who is a very prestigious member of the gay community. He likes that. I would say he was a star fucker if he were actually fucking me.

  I’ll tell you what we do in bed. (You wanted me to write something, anything, so that’s what I’m doing.) I like to lie beside him and kiss his pale white shoulder. And then I jerk off. I jerk off while I’m looking at his body. Occasionally he lets me run my hands over it. Then he lets me cum. I make a little puddle on his thigh. And he just lies there. Dead, for all intents and purposes. But mainly he’s just bored. I don’t mind. You know what else we do? Sometimes when I’m in the bathtub and he has to come in to take a leak, he pees on me. He pees on me, and I drink it. This can’t be healthy. Why? Because my boyfriend is HIV positive. We will never have sex, ever; there is no chance of it, because of this. He is perfectly unattainable. He will also probably not be alive for much longer. His health is good now, but it won’t be long, until . . . You see, he likes to practise unsafe sex. I like to try and practise safe sex on my nightly escapades, but these days, especially, when life is pretty bleak, I find my only solace is a nice stiff drink or two and some poppers and a young body that will remind me of Jason. Jason Swallows. Other guys — not me. That’s probably how he got AIDS. After all, he likes to take it up the bum from gigantic bodybuilders who are much more adequate than I am.

  So that’s my life. Do you think I can work that into a thesis? Or perhaps I should turn it into art. The only problem is that nobody wants to read anything I write anymore. I’m not telling you this so you can save me. I don’t want to be saved. I remember when I was young I didn’t want to be a homosexual, and the reason was because I had a vision in my head of an ugly old man sitting beside a table in an empty apartment staring at a single light bulb, wanting to commit suicide. I never wanted to become that man. But somehow I have become him. Thanks for listening.

  The letter is unaddressed and unsigned and the barrenness of it is devastating. One wonders what it would have been like to know this unpleasant individual. I expect he was, at this point, the type of person who truly lived only in his alcohol-induced, nitrate-driven sexual fantasies. It’s interesting to me also that he does not mention Shakespeare. Yet this is certainly his most Shakespearean moment. The letter is like a Petrarchan sonnet, though the style is mundane. Dash wants nothing from his lover, nothing in return. This stretches the medieval notion of courtly love beyond its wildest dreams — until it becomes the Elizabethan ideal of courtly abuse. One sees echoes of Blanche DuBois in his description of himself; the lonely man sitting in an empty room is Blanche’s “ever since then there has only been this one candle.” It is more than masochism; in the context of homosexual ethos, this is the death of a culture that is suicidally obsessed with the worship of youth and beauty. So much so that Dash can do nothing but lie in bed beside beauty and kiss its shoulder. Finally, he allows himself to make an embarrassed, sad puddle on beauty’s thigh.

  Dash has wholeheartedly bought into the tragic paradigm of homosexuality. It is his fate. Whether he has chosen it or not is a deeper philosophical question. I would say he is certainly trapped in it. I think that after the death of homosexuality, its most noxious obsessions were usurped by mass culture. Certainly what the Christian fundamentalists saw as the dangers of homosexuality did, in fact, become a part of our cyberworld. Nothing that is “old” or “ugly” has any place in our culture now, except of course in the musty groves of academe. Here, monsters like me are kept alive by those few who imagine we might be valuable artifacts. But even that is being questioned. You have told me that some have questioned your work with me — that the grant you received to encourage me, and to examine me, has been challenged. This is despite the fact that you were careful to place the work in a modern context, and certain to make it evident that it was not a “historical” project.

  I have no proof for the assertion that when homosexuality died our culture effectively ate the values of that culture. For instance, I have no proof that the homosexual obsession with youth and beauty had any influence on us. Indeed, what was so important when those we used to call “the terrorists” won was whether or not tolerance was still to be a cultural value. Would the government brook no quarter for homosexual culture? Looking back, which I know is dangerous, I wonder if what saved people like us, and various kinds of human difference in general, was when the cyberworld became sacrosanct — when web activists decreed that it was exploitative and unfair to police the web. At this point, the powers that be realized it was simply impossible to control cyberspace. Cyberlife was to be unquestioningly protected. Now anything is permitted on the web; nothing is permitted in reality. Everything is allowed as long as it is not real.

  I’m sure this has relevance to your concerns about my visit to the Tranquility Spa. Let me put it this way: there is no death penalty anymore. And what would death be to me, anyway? Aren’t I too old to murder? When the prospect of my demise hangs over my head daily like the sword of Damocles, the worst that will happen to me is that I will be incarcerated indefinitely for my crimes. I have not committed any crime yet. But I speak facetiously. I will not commit any in the future. And anyway, I can’t imagine the government locking me up; I am a cultural artifact. At the very least, my body will undoubtedly be carefully saved and ransacked by cyberbiogeneticists after my death. More than that, my present existence is already a kind of incarceration. It is so difficult for me to walk, and my monstrosity certainly makes the possibility of human contact a grim and unlikely prospect.

  But for once I didn’t mean to digress. I want you to be aware that I don’t think my little bar visit is the melodramatic issue you have made it out to be. That’s why I want you to understand the scholarly value of Dash King’s papers. Please don’t worry any further about some return to my previous addictions.

  So let’s return specifically to Dash and the issue of the death of homosexuality. What’s clear to us now is that AIDS not only killed homosexuals, it killed homosexuality. We are none the worse for it; no one misses it. Dash was prematurely grieving its death, eulogizing it with a kind of negative capability.

  If one examines the male love poetry that was connected with Virgil and the pastoral poets, one observes a melancholy that morphed into A. E. Housman and his elegies for soldier boys. It’s not only twentieth-century gay literature that is suicidal, countless plays — from The Children’s Hour and The Green Bay Tree, to The Boys in the Band — all featured tortured, self-flagellating, suicidal queers. This tradition is transhistorical in Western culture. In fact, it is my suspicion that if Dash is right, and Shakespeare was de Vere, and was trying to escape his own doomed pederasty, he may have avoided, in his sonnets, the direct homosexual address of one of his contemporaries, as it may have become inflected with an already clichéd pathetic flavour.

  Little is known about Barnfield, a much-forgotten poetic contemporary of Shakespeare’s. To imagine, as Foucault does, that there was no homosexuality in Early Modern culture is naive. Barnfield, in his blatantly and clearly homosexual poetry, talks not only of sodomy (Foucault’s favourite concept) but of love and affection and even possible partnering between men. But the tone is invariably sad, melodramatic and tragic. So there is reason to imagine that Shakespeare was all too wary of the pitfalls of a homosexual aesthetic. Whether he was de Vere or not, Shakespeare may have been writing about a homosexual love affair (or more likely a pederastic one) in the sonnets, but he is deliberately cagey about it. Thi
s is not because it was forbidden. Barnfield’s odes can attest to that. (He does apologize for the homosexual content of his poems in an introduction to one of his books of poetry, but this hardly indicates that he was persecuted, or that his work was banned for being homosexual.) Perhaps it was merely that Shakespeare didn’t want to write bad, melodramatic, bathetic poems that — like Barnfield’s — were drowning in pastoral excess and melancholy. He didn’t want to write bad Elizabethan homosexual pastorals.

  These issues were rarely dealt with in discussions of the master poet. And now that Shakespeare has become irrelevant, these issues may never be dealt with again. But though his work may be unsalvageable, ancient and written in what is essentially a foreign language even to those who speak English, the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s period are fascinating. The epitaph for Shakespeare’s sonnets was written by Northrop Frye when he said, and I am paraphrasing here, “If we took the sonnets literally, we would have to believe that Shakespeare was in love with a stupid teenager, which is simply impossible.” Impossible indeed. Truth is impossible — always has been, always will be. Perhaps you and I can at least agree on that.

  At any rate, this is the vast tragic homosexual aesthetic legacy, and when AIDS appeared, we saw a depressing march of AIDS plays and novels from the homosexual community — not depressing because of their subject matter, but because they were so badly written. As Susan Sontag rightly observed, AIDS did for the theatre exactly what tuberculosis did for it — and by that I mean absolutely nothing. I am convinced that the dance of death that people sometimes spoke of as having followed AIDS was not the return of promiscuity. (Although this happened in the early part of the last century, before sex became almost universally — as they used to call it — virtual.)