“She just sort of threw it at me, and at first I didn’t really believe her. I never said anything to anyone at school, but it was within a month or so that I had to start filling out college applications. When my mother saw “Sarah Paine” written at the top of one of them she told me that I better change it to my legal name, or else we’d have to drive back down to City Hall and change my name back to Sarah. I remember just sort of looking at her, thinking to myself that at least I knew where I’d gotten the stubbornness from, and feeling somehow combative, and also thinking sort of shortsightedly that it’d be interesting to go to college with a new identity, like totally free of Mississippi and everything I’d been there, so I redid the first page of the applications and didn’t bother with City Hall.
“So then I got in, and I got some scholarships, and all the letters and the offers and all that were in the name of ‘Bacchus Paine,’ and I sort of figured I’d change my name back after I’d accepted and got settled. What I didn’t consider was that when I actually got to college I would find that the name ‘Bacchus Paine’ identified me on my freshman hall door, and on my small seminar roll call, and in what seemed like a thousand other places. So suddenly there were fifty people who knew me as ‘Bacchus Paine’ and no one who knew me as ‘Sarah Paine,’ and I realized that if I just changed my name back I would have to explain to all fifty of them that I was being immature with my mother and she called me on it, and I didn’t wanna do that. But I turned 18 two weeks after orientation and I was thinking I’d change the name to something else then. Something like, not jarring, but not mundane either.
“But in the meantime I’d started a Western Civilization class, and my professor was a Classicist. I was sort of rapt from the start with all things ancient – in a week I read his textbook through the ‘fall,’” I made air quotes, “of Rome within the first week – and was coming up after class and asking him all of these questions about the adoption of Greek deities in Rome, and he said ‘I appreciate your curiosity, and you’re uniquely positioned to be a scholar in this field,’ sort of smiling benevolently down on me, ‘and I think you might enjoy my seminar on Roman Amalgamation next semester, but it’s a graduate seminar and we’d have to get you special permission to get in, and there would be a lot of reading, which you clearly do not mind, but I think I might be able to secure you a seat given the interest in the topic that seems to run in your family.’ I thanked him profusely, and I walked out thinking that maybe this name wasn’t so silly after all. At that point, if people were whispering about how ridiculous it was, I didn’t hear it. I guess a sharp decline in petty personal insults is one of the marked differences between expensive private college and public high school, I don’t know.”
I stopped talking to park the car, and both of us stayed quiet while I did.
“So anyways, I didn’t change my name back while I was waiting to get into his class, and then I felt like hundreds of people knew me by that name, which I didn’t find quite so ridiculous anymore. And then it went onto my degree, and onto my grad school applications, and onto my resume, long after I’d decided I couldn’t make enough money to live the life I wanted in academia and had gone into consulting and then to business school. Of course, by the time I left college I’d grown tired of the curious looks people gave me when I introduced myself as ‘Bacchus,’ and the only thing I thought would be more annoying than those looks was to have to tell that whole long ridiculous story to half the people I met, so I started just acting like I had been named Bacchus from birth. I avoided most of the curious looks by giving fake names to people I didn’t expect to interact with for long, and that in itself became like a game.” We were a block from the symphony entrance now. “To this day Jackson is the only person in my San Francisco life that really knows I was born with a run-of-the-mill sort of girls’ name, and that any difficulty I face as a result of my name now is attributable solely to my own preposterousness.” I did it to myself.
She sat listening quietly to my tale as I drove and as we walked, and now that I had finished I expected she would be at a loss, and she was indeed quiet for a few moments afterward. As we pushed open the door of Davies Symphony Hall, she finally asked, “even Ben doesn’t know it’s not your real name?”
“It is my real name. It’s my legal name. It’s just not the name I was born with. Anyway, I’ve said something to Ben along the lines of ‘it’s a long story’ in response to his inquiry, and that was the last time he ever brought it up. He’s great like that; he’s never one to push when you offer even a subtle clue that you don’t want to get into something. Maybe it’s because he’s so shy himself.”
“He is great like that,” she said, “he’s an amazingly accepting person.”
“So… yeah. That’s my story.”
“Why did you tell me the story, by the way?”
“What do you mean?”
“You avoid telling even your best friend, why tell me?”
I had not considered that reaction. I quickly did a mental dry run of the various potential responses, ticking them off as untenable. I just really trust you. I don’t like the idea of deceiving you. I think you’re too intelligent to deceive. I want you to know the reality of me. At some point I hope you’ll meet my mother and she’ll mention it.
“I thought somehow you might identify more easily, given the parallel,” I uttered finally, looking for the first time in about half an hour straight at her, finding no trace of judgment in her eyes and a touch of what seemed equally likely to be pity or empathy.
“When I was little,” she said, “I used to read about Isis and imagine I was a god, or what it would be to be a god, to have powers beyond those of the people around me…”
I thought of the Roman bacchanalia, reaching back across the centuries to extol the goddess Isis, and considered drawing a whimsical analogy to the present. Don’t be such a dork, for once. “I think there’s something enticing for a sort of dorky kid – not that you were dorky—”
“Oh, I was dorky.”
“Ha, okay well, then you understand, there’s some sort of draw in imagining that the difference you feel from the people around you is something that makes you as cool and powerful as it does uncool and downtrodden. I had this stint of reading X-Men all the time at about thirteen, and I would lay down at night and wonder if the next morning puberty would bring me superpowers.”
“Oh my god,” she sputtered excitedly, “me too! Every intuition I would feel about what the people around me were thinking, or when they were lying, I would think ‘Oh my god, I’m becoming Jean Grey!’ It was too pleasant a fiction to suppress.”
I’d lost track of myself and was looking with what must have been a googly expression because she asked me suddenly if I was okay. I blinked as though I’d had some moment of gripping introversion and said, “I’m good,” just as the strings began to warm up.
We’d sat just as the musicians began to explore tuning strokes along the strings of their instruments, careful not to chain together more than a note or two, and we joined in the applause as a rare, graceful female conductor boarded the podium.
Then Tchaikovsky’s violin emerged, supported with vague horns, extolling a slow exploration of melancholy, probing the bounds of sad notes tentatively before the lead violin began a song of what seemed a grief, wiggling on the tails of soft, solemn notes and rising to a poignant melody, collecting the flutes to wiggle alongside it, tapping, trying, seeking height, inspecting the melody of curiosity and reveling in its discoveries. At least, that is what I heard. I always found Tchaikovsky a master at painting melancholy elation, fluent in the high-pitched dissonance of gratifying discord. He had a way of teetering tenuously along the edge of a foreboding precipice and then spilling over it with quick, sharp joy, only to begin teetering anew.
When the piece was complete and the applause had subsided, she turned to me and asked, simply, “Thoughts?”
“I think if anyone ever wrote a song of me entirely by accident, it was
him.”
“If anyone ever wrote the feeling of a dangerous precipice, it’s him.”
I turned to her, feeling warm in gazing upon something that appeared as intelligence but could have merely been agreement with something inside me, and felt the throbbing pulse of attraction course through me. I was intoxicated despite my sobriety by the time I could continue, “I suppose I’m being especially narcissistic. All human life is but a series of precipices lept over or shunned.”
“That it is,” she finished simply.
Tchaikovsky was billed first, but Haydn dominated the concert, his brisk, proper melodies sung with academic precision by a slight female Gabriel in a billowing burgundy dress, flanked by a tuxedoed tenor and bass. They sang Haydn’s nearly hymnal, grand epiphany with bold horny accompaniment, curt and careful flutes assuming responsibility for the refrain, bold trumpets bellowing agreement. An alto stood quietly in the wings to offer a short interlude near the selection’s conclusion, which had grown chaotic with absent cadence. Yet Haydn’s academic chaos did not approach the mundane chaos Tchaikovsky seemed to explore.
When the applause rose again I found myself annoyed with Haydn, annoyed with his tradition and precision and tart German narration, his seething worship, but I clapped in kind. Each halfhearted slap of my hand likened Haydn to the mindset of the South I had fled, but it occurred to me that the South would be so much more tolerable if she was observing it beside me.
She was as quiet as I when we filed out of the aisles, until finally we were flowing into the street with the squeak of countless orthopedic shoes and I couldn’t help but voice the irony taunting me since she’d first mentioned the lineup.
“I think it endlessly curious that they chose to contrast those two pieces,” I muttered.
“Why?” she asked sarcastically, “because of the stylistic differences?”
“Ha! Those abound, certainly. But really I suppose I feel I should rise in Tchaikovsky’s defense at his being set alongside a celebration of the source of what must have been the greatest misery of his life.”
“What do you mean?” The playful countenance was simply curious now, but I thought I caught a spot of beaming in her expression.
“Well… I mean… Tchaikovsky was as obviously gay as someone could get in nineteenth century Russia, I think, and Haydn was as devoutly Christian as they come. I hear in Tchaikovsky all notes of frustration and tentative, illicit joy. Haydn strikes me as the ultimate in normative.”
“Well, torturous, careful normativism, but I suppose I see your point. I hadn’t realized Tchaikovsky was gay.”
“Eh, I doubt most straight people notice that section of the program.”
“But I’m –”
I looked sidelong at her as we walked, but her mouth was closed.
“But?” I ventured as we approached the car.
“Oh… nothing. Just… sometimes it’s odd to hear a thing described as normative when you’ve never thought it so.”
I tugged the conversation from normative to the Marina – which I considered a reasonable progression, particularly when something is so aesthetically pleasing in its normativity as the Marina is – intent on interrogating her more about this Dan fool, but I soon lost my nerve. I changed the subject.
“Is your crew doing the March this year?”
“The Dyke March?”
“Yeah.”
“They usually do.”
“You don’t usually do it with them?”
“I never thought that would be appropriate.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I can’t believe they let you miss such a grand party so unavoidable from your apartment simply because you’re ‘only’ an ally. I’m not aware of any rule saying you can’t walk with lesbians, or at least chill in the park beforehand…”
“Maybe I’ll go to the park with them. We’ll see. Are you going?”
“I try not to miss it.”
“Okay, well, let me know if you go.”
“Okay.”
I swear when she got out of my car it still smelled of the apricots.
What draws us into suffering – and untamed mind – is not external but within our own mental continuums. For it is through the appearance of afflictive emotions in our minds that we are drawn into various faulty actions.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, Kindness, Clarity, and Insight
Gay Disneyland
June is rarely hot, and more rarely cool, but persists in an interim state of sunlight mixed with breeze, lacking sweat.
Pride’s Pink Saturday brings droves of the gay and the lesbian and the “bisexual,” the intermediate and the drag and the intersex and the curious, pouring over the hills of Church Street and the valleys of Dolores, over 20th, and the Gay Beach, that corner of speedo and Adonis peppered with homosexuals on sunny days, expands and spills over the entirety of Dolores Park.
There needn’t be a show, any stage, any attraction to draw the masses here on this day, though stages pulsed with tunes. The ladies come because they know that most of the lesbians in the City will find their way here today, because the other options and the parades of Pride are focused on the boys, as most Castro nights are. It is only for this one afternoon that the lesbians of the Mission and the outer Castro and Bernal Heights and Glen Park – at least those not so settled with a partner as to be tired of crowds and sun – choose between a hat and cargo shorts and bathing suits and body paint and Mohawks and wife beaters and any other similar article of clothing that might readily identify them as same-sex-interested, and make their way festively to the park to look over the expanse rolling down into the Bay, to rejoice for a moment, perhaps not so much in what we are as in those that lie alongside us.
Everyone anticipates the witching hour, when the cascade of “Dykes on Bikes” will lead a procession down the residential alleys of the Castro toward a massive hanging disco ball marking the center of Pink Saturday, at the intersection of Castro and Market, the Pride event we share with boys, a shirtless orgy spanning six square blocks.
Jackson was, fortunately for me, perpetually willing to tolerate the girls’ events in exchange for my attendance at the boys’, and so he did not protest when I appeared at his door at 11:30 Pink Saturday morning, wearing a rainbow knit shirt that knit only loosely through the chest, leaving me as exposed as I’d been at any of our line of festivals. He informed me promptly that he’d enlisted Clint and company to attempt to join us under the disco ball, and I replied that I was to seek out Wesley there as well. Wesley would not be wasting any time today looking at women; he’d not join for the park. We began our journey overhill.
“And Ben?” he asked. It had grown tedious and predictable, Jackson and Ben. I’d never verbalized it, but it took Isis all of four steps away from Haight Street Fair to note their having been so coquettish with one another, so I knew I wasn’t crazy, at least not in thinking this.
“I won’t claim to understand why it hasn’t happened yet,” I’d said. “It does seem inevitable. All I can tell you is that it hasn’t. One of them would have said something.”
Now I debated taking an uncharacteristically blunt tack with Jackson, it being Pride and all. What if I just stopped and grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him and said “by god man, if you’re into him just fucking tell him about it. I can’t go silent much longer watching the two of you ogle one another. Christ it’d be more subtle if you’d just reach over and pull his cock out of his pants…”?
Fortitude, Bacchus. Instead, I opted for delicacy. “I’m sure he’s going at some point. He lives awfully close to the park. You wanna call and ask him? I need to check in with someone myself.”
Jackson flashed apprehension. “Oh… okay.”
“You have his number?” This was a farce; I’d watched them exchange numbers on Haight Street.
“Yeah.”
I used the excuse to place a text to Isis, cautiously hoping that she’d be out with her roommates, fully intending to ma
neuver my troupe of gays in her general direction.
It felt somehow comforting to walk amongst abundant rainbow flags, to watch the populace spill out onto the streets holding same-sex hands, to look up at Twin Peaks to find the upside-down pink triangle repurposed from its Nazi days to serve as a colossal symbol of Pride. Everyone seemed so free.
I only half-heard Jackson when he disclosed that Ben would meet us at the corner of 18th Street as we walked over. We took the opportunity to purchase a six pack apiece, sparking a thin joint on the steps of a cozy pink townhouse, having grown unsatisfied with the contact high inherent in walking down 18th at this particular time of this particular day of this particular year.
It seemed ages had passed instantly when Ben approached from an unexpected direction, and I indulged in a certain cannaboid consideration of his figure as he swayed toward us.
Since he’d emerged singing from the closet, his demeanor had morphed to become decidedly more jovial, and his long spindly limbs flayed with greater exclamation than I recalled during business school, and his voice had a certain noticeable lisp that I felt certain I’d never heard before. Of course, it was not at all abnormal for a gay man to become more obviously gay once he’d gone through the coming-out process. Ben had been out for some time, though, and something seemed different this Pride morning. Finally it dawned on me what the difference was.
Ben was buff. Not Schwarzenegger buff, but spindly-queen buff. The veins had started to peek from his biceps, which were considerably rounder now where flatness had dominated before, and the puddle of pudge at his waist had faded into oblivion. What had been quirky chicken legs now had a distinctive shape to them, and Ben’s once-round jaw had grown sharper. I thought on the matter, slowly, and realized it had been almost six weeks since I’d last seen him in tight clothing. With few exceptions, we’d not managed to escape our offices in a simultaneous fashion in that time, other than our walk through Haight Street Fair, where he’d worn baggy plaids to match the Fair’s grungy theme. It was clear that while he had not escaped into any sort of social life, he had escaped to the gym once or twice.
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