“I’m in.” I pulled my phone from my pocket, handed it to her to type in her number, and pressed to call.
“Great.” She smiled her perfect coy little smile at me and said, “See you soon!”
“Soon,” I replied, and Jackson led me back through the party to say goodbye to the crew we’d brought along. We left Grant and Wesley chatting in a circle of rowdy men passing around an obese blunt and Aaliyah chatting in the foyer with some unidentified swaying blonde chick in high frat fashion, and as we turned to walk back up toward Union Street Jackson wrapped his arm around my shoulder and hugged me toward him, although I was not as blue as I had been before I received her symphony invitation.
It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attraction of the next world.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Antinomianism[§§]
I walked down my hill in the non-Castro direction at about 10:00AM one June Sunday in search of coffee. Already, on Haight Street, four different bands were playing odes saturated with the joy of the benevolent weather, mere blocks apart. The closest was a lone bassist plucking quick-fingered blues riffs to rise with the wind. Hipsters shuffled through the streets, passing the impromptu bands’ rotund, sometimes stripe-socked, singers and their grungy guitarists. Amongst the meandering crowds intermingled with tourists, gritty bums and fake-bums hawked incense and pot and sympathetic cardboard messaging. I looked up the rising hill at the tents that had begun to line up on upper Haight Street for the festival later that day, and, all of a sudden, I felt friendly.
“Wanna join for Haight Street Fair?” I texted Ben. I’d already conspired with Jackson to bring folks out to the fair for just another glorious afternoon of enjoying your twenties. After weeks where sitting at my desk at work, hardly socializing, and barely sleeping constituted my entire life, my body demanded a reprieve. I was hoping Ben was in a similar circumstance.
“Maybe. I’m at the office, but I could go when I leave in an hour or two.”
“Okay. Meeting some folks out. Text when free.” I thought about saying Jackson would be there but decided against it. It almost seemed manipulative to do that.
Then Ben made the decision for me: “Who you out with?”
“Just Jackson and some of his crew right now.”
“Cool, I’ll catch up with you guys later.”
I sent another text to Aaliyah, figuring she’d be looking to get out of the house too, then I looked at the clock. Noon. Now I texted Jackson: “Shall we get an early start?”
“Sure. Clint is joining us.” Clint was Jackson’s co-worker, and I’d met him before. He was half of what appeared to be a very happy, cohabitating gay couple. He was bright, with big brown puppy-dog eyes, well-manicured, soft spoken. His face was the type where you knew he’d look like a real woman in drag, sharp and clean and porcelain.
Clint hailed from Utah, which I imagined to be an environment similar in many ways to Mississippi. As I understood it, his parents were not keen on his choice of a male partner. It didn’t matter; he simply didn’t visit much. His brother would come to San Francisco to visit him; that was enough. In my limited conversations with Clint, he’d made clear that he loved to think about art, which endeared me sufficiently to end any internal inquiry as to whether he was good people. He was one of those smart but not quite mainstream folks who coursed into San Francisco through the veins of their unwelcoming birthlands and the arteries of intelligence and ambition, part of the reason everyone here seemed so smart, I thought. Of course, I have a particular love of this City, so I’m sure I’ve spun the phenomenon a tad – still, people from all over the country regularly remark that the Bay Area holds an unusual concentration of smart people.
Haight Street Fair teetered more in the realm of the outcasts than Union Street Fair, though each was fundamentally just a street party, with jewelers and street food and bands perched at intersections, and patrons who may or may not have been smart. It was, however, unique in its promotion of marijuana. The stands bearing fares of jewelry shops and t-shirt artists were sprinkled among booths for pot clubs, paraphernalia shops, rows upon rows of bongs and glass pipes. You couldn’t walk ten feet without passing someone sparking a blunt on the street in the midst of the crowd.
While I waited for Jackson to collect his boys and confirmed Aaliyah would join, I held a heated internal debate. Should I invite Isis? It’s close enough to her hood. Predominantly straight folks in attendance, it won’t seem like I’m trying to gay her up. Oh, Bacchus, stop this. It’s an invite, not a sext. She can say no if she wants to. My invite was simple: “Hey, going to Haight Street Fair with Jackson. Ben may join later. Join if you want...”
“Cool, we’re just kicking it here. I’ll see if the girls want to go out.” I sucked on my lip. Right, the girls.
As I stood at our meeting point in anticipation, I felt I was learning a lot about my friends from the manner in which they approached this fair. Jackson looked summery, playfully Yacht Club, with light, colorful sunglasses, and he strolled down the hill toward me past the drooping leaves with a muted smile on his face. Alongside him, Clint wore shades of blue head to toe, collar to shoes, that playfully complimented one another, porcelain faced, with a puppy-esque joy to the big almond eyes that poked out from his glasses. They both walked with the look of free men.
We stood chatting idly with one another as we listened to the tones of an acoustic guitar nearby, with muted music rising from the distant ends of the street, when Aaliyah sauntered up with a straight-looking, Marina-esque girl on her arm. My eyebrows rose. As she approached, though, I noticed she looked markedly less elated than the boys. The Marina wore a grim look of pursed lips, and Aaliyah’s face was drawn behind her yellow sunglasses.
Ben found a way to liberate himself from the office and change into his own Gingham plaid and Khaki, his tiny nose barely poking out of sharp gunmetal frames, and I daresay he had a little hop in his step. He reminded me to look at my own Blackberry-handcuff one last time before I started drinking and told myself I wasn’t allowed to respond to the Blackberry’s pings, which today was not all too dangerous because since Isis had appeared on the scene I was drinking so much less and had again become diligent about answering my emails. I’d been spending pretty much all of my non-festival, non-Isis time actually at work. I assumed Ben was, as I was, here to revel in freedom for a bit and forget about that otherwise-universal commitment.
The last to descend in my direction was Isis, and as I noted her approach Aaliyah looked to me with raised eyebrows (“she looks hot,” they said) and Jackson leaned in to bump my shoulder. “That’s the only Sauce I’m interested in these days,” I whispered to him. I noted appreciatively that she wore heels, even given the anticipated abundance of walking. They made her hips sway amicably as she walked, and I caught myself staring at her cleavage as she leaned toward Clint’s hand to shake it in introduction.
There was not a particular stop to make at this fair, of course, and now not even a party house contemplated: the goal was simply to watch, to be open to purchase, to enjoy a beer in the sunlight, to let music fill our ears from many directions. It was in this way that I think we meant to balance the monotony of employment with some tangential way of thinking or feeling or dressing. The Marina was its own yuppie curiosity, as well.
In any event, we turned to enter Haight Street, and from the outset it was clear that whatever was percolating with this girl of Aaliyah’s was toxic, and, to be frank, I cannot recall this Marina’s name because within two blocks of walking, the pair of Aaliyah and Marina, who’d quickly broken off into a private mumbling conversation, had erupted apart as Marina yelled, “Fine, I will!” and stormed off without a word to any of the rest of us.
Ten eyes watched passively as she walked away. Then, I looked at Isis, who had turned to look at me, each of us raising our eyebrows in an “oh, my.”
“Wherev
er did you get that one?” I finally asked Aaliyah.
“Union Street Fair.”
“Is that why she looked straight?” Clint asked.
“I suppose it is,” Aaliyah said.
“She didn’t look straight,” Isis said, “she was walking down the street holding hands with a girl.”
“I suppose I thought she looked straightish here, too,” I said, “but I’m of the opinion that straight girls sometimes like to play with girls so often that you really can’t call them ‘straight’ anymore. Even when they ultimately choose to spend their lives with a guy.”
“Oh, not all straight girls,” Jackson chided. “You of all people should know that.” I resisted the urge to shoot him a dirty look.
“Nono, not that all straight girls play with girls, but that most that do often do it with such frequency, for at least some period of their lives, that ‘straight’ becomes a misnomer.”
“There’s an awful lot of them that’ll play,” Aaliyah said simply. “I’ve been playing with them my whole life,” she mused, smiling, turning to walk backward as she talked at us over the thickening crowds, and I wondered why the thing that had just passed with Marina seemed to have so little effect on her.
Bright houses stacked endlessly along the street and trickled up the adjoining hill, bits of gold leaf garnishing the Victorian cresses and primary hues shining on echoing windowsills. A giant sculpture of fishnetted legs in red heels poked from a second story window, and every block carried a head shop or two. It felt to me an epicenter of decadence greater that the decadence of the Castro, since the rich kids who’d chosen to live among the real homeless here during the day now outnumbered the truly homeless, and the dedication to drugs in public retail exceeded that of any other part of the City (and because the exquisite gayness of the Castro seemed wholly mainstream to me). The Haight seemed the sort of place counterculture enough to be filled with people who looked at “gay” more as a type of action than a personality and, I thought with pleasure, they’re just like the Romans that way.
But the Haight environment had hardly motivated Aaliyah’s feigned bravado. I heard hesitation in Aaliyah’s jest, which I assumed was the result of the row we had somehow stopped discussing, or at least stopped discussing directly. But apparently to Isis it just sounded like bravado, because she asked, “Where do you even find these straight girls to seduce?”
“Oh, everywhere!” Aaliyah replied, looking over at me with a smile, her big eyes dancing. We clearly shared a penchant for the straight-acting, straight-looking female. “But it’s not exactly seduction…”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Bacchus,” Ben said. “It’s definitely seduction when you put the moves on someone, it doesn’t matter whether they seem to like it later or not.” Isis’ eyes jumped curiously between me, Aaliyah, and Ben as we talked, the lot of us settling into our conversation as we took our places in a beer line.
“No fair! I never said that wasn’t seduction,” I protested. “I’m just saying I don’t think she’s tricking anyone into this. She’s just flirting and responding when these girls flirt back. And they do. Flirt back, I mean.”
“Trust me, they have a good time for themselves,” Aaliyah said. She was reputed to be an especially talented lover. Her prowess and her intellectual acumen made me quite fond of Aaliyah, made me think of her as someone to learn from. Of course, I readily admit that because I love and respect my friends so much I can but remember and recount them to you through the lens of rose-colored glasses.
“I daresay it’s easy to find such women in San Francisco. People seem somehow more open here,” I said as we neared the front of the beer line, and thirsty stoners bore into us, trying desperately not to look at Isis to assess her reaction.
“But,” Aaliyah retorted, as Clint stepped to the counter and ordered our libations, “honestly, I’ve found straight girls, or at least girls who ultimately end up dating only men, to be comparably experimental all over the globe.”
As a result of her comment it appeared that our male companions perceived a switch from a conversation about seducing girls to one about comparative sociology, so when we collected our drinks and stepped from the beer line Jackson, Ben, and Clint formed a huddle with Aaliyah. “All over the globe? You’ve been seducing straight girls elsewhere?” Ben asked her.
“Mostly where I went to high school and college...”
“I bet parents would go nuts if they found out their teenage daughter had been ‘seduced’ by a girl, which is ironic considering she’d be in much more danger if she were ‘seduced’ by a boy,” Clint said, piping up, fixing his eyes on a passing boy with gauges in his ears the size of cumquats.
“I don’t think I seduced her, my first girl, that just happened, like an astral phenomenon between two passing masses. Really all I ever do is flirt and see. But actually the parental disapproval was less of a problem with the first girl than the ones that followed,” Aaliyah said. A large man dressed all in black carried a crying 90s shoulder-boombox, pumping waning techno, and our loose circle parted to allow him to pass.
“Why is that?” Isis asked, stepping back to Aaliyah.
“Let’s just say the first part of my life happened in an, er, more liberal kind of place,” Aaliyah said.
I looked to Isis without thinking, but she had already opened her mouth to speak, a reflective, detached look in her eyes. “Oklahoma was certainly not liberal. Not that people made a point of discussing gay in Oklahoma, but it was made very clear what was normal and what was not.”
“Well, my town growing up was theoretically very liberal and all that,” Ben said, “but the community still seemed to only operate in terms of straight life, straight values. Very normative. I don’t think anyone really gave me much opportunity to even express that I might like men.”
“Was that Judaism? I mean in our town I think religion was creating most of the hate. God said gay was wrong, so all the people made sure to enforce that,” Jackson said, now gloomy.
“Not specifically Judaism, though of course the culture maintains a certain respect for the traditional nuclear unit. It was a normative place though, and it was as if the ‘gay’ option didn’t exist. When I told my mother I was gay, a couple of months ago, she said, ‘I’m just upset I won’t have grandbabies.’ I didn’t even know how to explain that I still planned to give her grandbabies.”
Aaliyah looked up at the ironically timed appearance of a selection of t-shirts that said “Jesus is my Homeboy,” shaking her head.
Isis thrilled me by responding, “Let’s be clear, it’s not god saying gay is wrong, it’s people interpreting god. The basis for their interpretation suggests that gay is wrong to the same extent that eating a ham and cheese sandwich is wrong, it’s just that man has interpreted that mandate through his own lens. Homosexuality prevents the creation of more Christians, or at least it used to, where ham and cheese sandwiches cause nothing detrimental to the proliferation of the faith.” I felt a rush of attraction at her insight.
“By the same logic mass infanticide and the setting of rabid insects upon an entire race are more ‘right’ than either homosexuality or ham and cheese sandwiches, and slavery is tolerable,” I said, hoping to imply that I thought mass infanticide decidedly less acceptable than ham and cheese sandwiches.
“Well, it’s not like it’s uncommon for a religion to pick and choose ways to put the people practicing the religion in the right. The Mormons are up on quite a high horse in Utah, and even though my parents aren’t Mormon, somehow those ‘values,’” he made air quotes, “trickle down, because my parents certainly weren’t happy when I came out.” He stopped to look at a painting of the Golden Gate bridge, and we neared a different stage touting reggae tunes.
“Isn’t it amazing how every religious person is god’s favorite?” Jackson asked. “At least, until they make the wrong choice.”
“As though it’s a choice,” I muttered.
“Wait I thought you think a
ll people are always choosing to be straight and that’s a problem? Didn’t you lecture me about that recently?” Ben asked.
“If I was lecturing, the point was to say that we all make a choice about who we actually do hook up with. I don’t think we have any choice who we’re attracted to,” I explained.
“I certainly never felt like I was making a choice,” Aaliyah said. “When we moved back to Kansas, it seemed that the thing girls did was date boys, so I dated a boy. But it didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t attracted to him. I had to give him the ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ He was a good guy, I just didn’t feel anything for him beyond friendship.”
“Was it the same for you guys?” Isis asked, looking back over our meandering group toward the boys.
“I dated women in high school,” Jackson explained, “but I already knew I was gay then. I watched a bit of porn but mostly mainstream-accessible stuff like wrestling, and I always had a crush on a particular male friend. The girls were mostly for show.”
“I knew I was attracted to men, I guess, but I didn’t really think about it,” Ben said. “But I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be with a woman again, or want to. I might.” This comment drew no reaction, even from the heavily-pierced vendor manning the stall we passed as Ben spoke.
I looked at Clint, who had remained quiet while Jackson and Ben answered. I wanted to know his story, and I asked him directly, “What about you? I know you’re almost married to your boy…”
“They’re the epitome of the happy gay couple. They don’t look elsewhere, as far as I can tell,” Jackson supplemented. Is that longing in his voice?
“Well, that’s not perfectly true. I’m interested in women,” Clint said.
“You are?” Isis asked with palpable curiosity and a touch of incredulity. Jackson and I knew this already, or at least had heard it mentioned by Scott, his partner.
“Yeah. I like women, I’m attracted to them. I’d like to experiment a little. But at this point my whole identity – everything everyone knows about me – is tied up in being gay. I don’t know how I would explain to anyone in my life what I was doing if I tried women, even though Scott says it’s okay if I want to. I certainly couldn’t broach that with my parents. They’d get all excited and I’d probably end up with a guy anyway, and then I’d be the kid who made my parents cry. Again. And my whole community here would probably ostracize me.”
No Church in the Wild Page 18