by David Rees
Harvey Milk had many premonitions that he would be murdered. “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet open every closet door,” he said in a tape-recorded message found after his death. The bullet that killed him has not opened every closet door, but it has given the gays of San Francisco unprecedented political clout. Their votes subsequently elected Feinstein, and no politician here would now run for office without seeking an endorsement from the gay political clubs. Many openly gay people hold important positions in the city (Feinstein has certainly been aware of her debts), but none has the stature or the charisma of Harvey Milk.
PHIL AND I HAVE ACQUIRED a huge dildo. I suppose it could provide some variety to our sex games, but it’s the childishness of buying such a thing that I like. It has a cock head at either end. However, I doubt if we’ll be using it much!
XIII
THE CORONA CORONA MONK asked Harriet to go out with him. “So she must have something to offer,” Katya says, a little enviously.
“She just gives out come-to-bed signals,” I answer. “What would you have done if he’d asked you for a date?”
“I’d have said no, of course.”
“Did she accept the invitation?”
“Sure she did.”
They went wining and dining and dancing. Sarah has not been informed—she is still dithering about whether she should leave for good. One day she is, the next she isn’t. But, Harriet wants to know from Katya, is the monk crazy? He has told her a long story about not being a monk at all, that he’s really employed on secret surveillance work for some intelligence-gathering organization. In Los Gatos? I say, incredulous. What on earth is there in rural, upper-middle-class Los Gatos to spy on? Communists, drug-runners, men from Mars? Katya agrees—she told Harriet it was merely a bit of silly boasting. “I think I’m getting paranoid,” Harriet says. “It’s the loneliness.” You ought to apologize to David for the shabby way you treated him, Katya tells her. Harriet admits she did treat me badly and says she would like to apologize.
TO TAHOE. It’s good to drive out of the city, and go on driving for hours, even if the Sacramento Valley on a wet cloudy day has little that’s interesting to look at. But soon we reach the foothills of the Sierras and there are fir forests and boulders—like Scotland, though on a much grander scale. We climb and climb. The rain turns to sleet. The snow-line! We worry that we didn’t bring chains, but decide to press on, though the Donner Pass— which we have to use as all other routes are still closed—is nearly eight thousand feet above sea level. Snow everywhere, dazzling in the brief moments of sun; glimpses of huge summits. Christmas card scenery—trees bent under the snow. Twenty feet deep on the ground in places, I guess.
Lake Tahoe is cold blue, icy green and freezing turquoise; I’m reminded of looking last August from the plane into the Arctic Ocean—the same colours, beautiful and utterly uninviting. Summer chalets in the trees by the lakeshore, not visited by their owners since autumn—snow piled so high on their roofs that they’re like pictures from a children’s book of fairy stories. Some totally buried; the only sign that a house is there is a gable, a chimney. One has collapsed—a tangled mess of wood and snow. We eat hamburgers and french fries at Stateline, and I change from shorts and tee-shirt to jeans and two sweaters: the temperature is thirty-eight degrees. We cross from California into Nevada, and gamble in a casino.
We’re only five hours from the Bay, where it is seventy degrees and never experiences frost. What contrasts California provides! More than anywhere else I’ve seen. Once, at 10 a.m., the temperature ninety plus, I gazed at the granite and snow of Mount Whitney. Turning round, I was looking at desert— scrub, salt, a dried-up lake: the hinterland of the hottest, driest place on earth—Death Valley.
BEETHOVEN’S FOURTH PIANO CONCERTO, a favourite of my mother’s and her mother’s and mine. It pleases me that it’s spoken to three generations; it puts me in touch with the two before me.
WHAT DO I REQUIRE IN A LOVER? That he has a beautiful body to rouse me sexually and which goes on and on rousing me sexually for a long time. That he wants to get fucked. That sex is inventive, uninhibited, frequent, and satisfying. That we part amicably if it doesn’t work. Without, all that, there is no difference between a lover and a friend.
I like living together, sharing space, though it’s not of paramount importance. I like sleeping together, curling round him at night, hearing him breathe. It’s good if we both enjoy the gay scene, though similar attitudes to life and temperaments, and respect for one another’s share of the space, are more important than similar interests. I don’t need him for security, or because the world prefers couples. Till-death-do-us-part promises are crap, and so are demands for sexual fidelity, and romanticism of the gazing-into-his-eyes, walking-hand-in-hand-into-the-sunset sort.
I used to think differently, and paid some severe penalties for doing so. I may have lost something in the process, on the road from there to here, but it’s not something I regret.
I could change my mind about all this: I could still get swept off my feet, I suppose. But I doubt it. I don’t want or need to be swept anywhere.
THE WILD BACK ROOM OF THE JAGUAR, Friday night, 1 a.m. Three years ago at this weekend hour, a couple of hundred men would have been here, kissing and fucking and sucking and poking and prodding and pulling. Now, such is the effect of the AIDS scare, there are perhaps twenty or thirty. Only one man, a good-looking slim black, allows himself to be screwed. If AIDS has stopped fucking with total strangers, it hasn’t stopped oral sex. I spend an hour and a half being sucked by a dozen different mouths, always pulling away just before orgasm—I haven’t yet found the right guy. I end up with two hunks who are possibly brothers—dark curly hair, hairy bodies; Jewish, I think. One of them has easily the biggest cock of the whole night; I have to suck that. But they’re very cautions about contact—no kissing, fucking or sucking me; it’s all hands and spit. They like my body as much as I like theirs; that’s evident from the caresses. Orgasm, in one of the hands, isn’t the greatest—is it ever, this way?
I sucked one cock (not to the point of orgasm) and kissed one man. Enough to give me AIDS? No, unless it’s transmitted in saliva. Is it totally stupid to do this from time to time? Perhaps. But … do we have to lose the whole life-style of orgies, of tricking, which is such an exhilarating change from sex in a one-to-one relationship? Obviously the Jaguar is not making much money: how long before it has to shut? And the baths? There’s a chilling irony here—the freedom we’ve won in the 1960s and 1970s to have this kind of life is less likely to be taken from us by the law or born-again Christianity than by our own fears of a deadly disease.
Next day, driving past the Jaguar, we see an old grey-haired woman leaning out of the top-floor window, shaking a duster. I’m told she is the owner’s mother—the top floor is her flat, self-contained with its own entrance. She presumably knows what goes on downstairs. That men suck cock, fuck… and get AIDS. Extraordinary.
THIS MORNING IS NOT THE BEST TIME to write, with workmen digging the street up; the pneumatic drills are so close they could just as well be in our living-room.
Events in Britain seem more interesting than events here: Thatcher’s called an election for early June and Gay News has ceased to publish. A great many people connected with Gay News appear to have suffered financially in the crash, including me. Gay Men’s Press, who sold books through Gay News mail order, won’t now get what they are owed for all those copies of The Milkman’s On His Way and others. So they can’t give me my royalties. Not an enormous sum compared with Gay News’s debts, but it is my air fare home and half my income tax for this year. I am assured I will get paid; it’s all a matter of arranging a bank loan—but the money should have been in my bank seven weeks ago.
The role of Gay News was more important than that of any other gay newspaper. It dominated the market in Britain as no single gay journal does here; it was literate, intelligent, useful— and necessary. It was often the only link isol
ated people in the provinces had with the larger gay world. Its book pages were second to none. All this destroyed—because of selfishness and greed.
THE ESTUARY IS NOW IN THE BOOKSHOPS HERE. Reviews in England have been indifferent, and sales are not as good as those of The Milkman; but it has, briefly, made the alternative best-seller charts. Gay News, in its final issue, carried a piece on it by Rosanna Hibbert, an extremely homophobic lesbian, who laughed at the whole idea of a publishing house catering solely for gay men. I doubt if she’d say the same thing about the various women’s presses. And yesterday I said the book pages of Gay News were second to none!
SUMMER STARTED ON MAY 6. The day before, the rain was torrential—but that was the end of it. A fortnight after, record high temperatures in San Francisco. Ninety plus in our back yard; evenings, walking about Castro in shorts. But, here in the city, it doesn’t last. The Sacramento valley has heated up now and is pulling in cool air from the ocean. Which means, for us, fog night and morning, no sun till noon, and a cold wind when the fog burns off. Yet in the South Bay there is perpetual sun from dawn till dusk and no wind. I’m driving down to Los Gatos three times a week to write in Katya’s garden and soak up the sun; already I’m mahogany colour.
Katya has a room to let. Phil and I have decided to take it; when I return to England he’ll stay on there till Christmas. At Katya’s we’ll have more space, the garden, the peace and quiet, the mountains; and it’s cheaper than this apartment. And sun— as I write this in San Francisco, it’s afternoon and still foggy.
But the fog can be a beautiful, spectacular phenomenon. Yesterday, driving up the Junipero Serra in the gilded evening light, the fog banks swirled in over the mountains: densely packed white cotton wool that tumbled, frothed, eddied. San Francisco was obliterated, suffocated in that cocoon. At a distance it could have been snow-capped sierras glittering in the sun.
AT LAST WE FIND A DISCO where we can dance, where the music is good—the Stud, a ramshackle bar on ramshackle Folsom, a “young crowd” scene totally different from the rest of Folsom’s leather and clone watering-holes. Wednesday is Golden Oldies night. So we wanted to hold your hand, twisted like we did last summer, had Saturday night fever, laid all your love on me, and, so brief is pop life that it’s already an oldie, did anything Hall and Oates wanted us to do. We shall certainly do it again.
DRINKING GIN AT A QUARTER TO FIVE in the afternoon when the earthquake destroys Coalinga. In the garden at Los Gatos we feel nothing; had I been just down the road in San José the story would be different. Avril was working in the office we share at the university: her desk skidded across the room; our books fell off the shelves; our papers scattered like feathers. Outside, the ground heaved. She ran out of the building, as did everyone else. But no damage, no injuries.
It must have been very severe—San José is a hundred and fifty miles from the epicentre.
I read that there is a ten per cent chance of a major earthquake—eight on the Richter scale—in San Francisco soon. But a forty per cent chance of it occurring in Los Angeles. LA would be wiped off the map: the shortest-lived big city in history.
THE PHONE RINGS. Harriet! She apologizes at length for the way she has treated me. So many problems this year with Sarah; she really was too disturbed and upset to know what she was doing. If I’m ever in Los Gatos, I must call in for a drink and a chat. I say, guardedly, that I know it isn’t easy to apologize, and thank her for doing so. The conversation drifts on to how we coped with work this semester…
There is method in her madness, Katya and I agree. I’m a transient; Katya is not. To restore her relationship with Katya it’s necessary to mend fences with me—and she needs to restore that relationship. If Sarah goes—and she has said that, though she hasn’t yet planned out her summer, she is going to spend her time as far away from Los Gatos as possible—Harriet will be quite alone. (What, I wonder, has happened to the monk?) Katya wants to regain access to Harriet’s pool. Soon after I tell her of the phone call, she’s gone up there to swim!
MY BIRTHDAY, and it’s the hottest day of the year so far. So it was on my eighth birthday when all the tulip petals withered in the heat and dropped on to the fallen cherry blossom, streaks of blood on the white grass. To Katya’s, where plans for the evening are curiously vague.
“We are to have a drink with Sarah and Harriet,” she tells me. “So they can meet Phil.”
“I don’t really want to do that,” I say. “I don’t imagine for one second that he does, either. And what about food?”
“Oh, we’ll have something to nibble somewhere.”
I suspect she and Phil are taking me out to a restaurant.
Last week I found lying around in the apartment an envelope addressed to Phil, with Katya’s name on it as the sender. He refused to tell me what was in it, but when I pressed him he said he’d written to her for advice—he was worried about our relationship. I felt embarrassed by this confession, and mildly annoyed.
Katya insists that we have a couple of drinks in downtown Los Gatos, which is odd as her kitchen is, as usual, overflowing with every variety of booze; after that, to Harriet’s. Hadn’t we better wait for Phil to arrive from work? I ask. But she says Anne will bring him up. Harriet and Sarah are all smiles, all welcomes—and they give me a birthday present! A bottle of Dutch gin. We’ve hardly downed our first cocktail when Katya drags me off to her house. So much for mending fences.
The driveway is full of cars. What is going on? I ask, but have not long to wait for an answer. Indoors are Phil, Tim, Anne, Dennis and Paul, Avril, Alan and Nils, Kevin, Lee, Julian, Robert and Matt, Janos and Jim, Maureen; a great pile of cards and presents, a turkey dinner on the table, and everyone singing “Happy Birthday To You!” Phil has stage-managed this; Katya was the decoy to whisk me elsewhere while the guests and the dinner arrived, and her letter to Phil was copies of a map to tell people who had never been to her house how to find it. He was clever enough to invent a lie that, more than any other, would divert my attention from the real contents of the envelope!
I’ve been involved two or three times before in planning such parties, but I’ve never been on the receiving end. I’m embarrassed, giggly, sure I’m incapable of rising to the occasion … but what a sweet, gorgeous thing to do! Why should anyone care, I say to myself over and over again—and worry that I’m not being properly appreciative. Overwhelmed, I suppose, is the one word that sums up my feelings.
It’s an immense pleasure to see how well these friends from different bits of my life get on together, gay and straight, work colleagues, San Francisco, Los Gatos, San José. Particularly good to see Alan, who has travelled fifty-five miles despite phlebitis, diabetes and emphysema.
We eat, drink, talk, and dance in the garden this marvellous, hot, enchanted May evening till long past midnight and watch a huge moon, white as bone, hang above the Santa Clara Mountains …
XIV
SEXUAL PROMISCUITY THIS WEEKEND. Phil and I at the Watergarden; he’s picked up by a man with, he tells me afterwards, “a washboard stomach”. For me, a Frenchman who, when we’ve screwed, wants a date, my address and phone number, wants to begin an affair tout de suite. More pleasurable are a couple of teenage Canadians on holiday here, a slim blond and his friend, a muscular guy with dark curly hair. Firm youthful buns…
Phil and I spend Sunday having sex, discussing sex, analysing last night’s sex, saying we talk and think far too much about sex. I exude sexuality, he says, a lazy male arrogant sexuality that constantly turns him on. But, he tells me, I’m too obsessed with sex, and I admit he’s right—it’s the result of living in Sin City.
Overshadowing this hedonistic paradise is AIDS. The newspapers and the TV are, if not reaching saturation point, certainly giving the subject enormous coverage at the moment: because it now affects heterosexuals. I’m not in the bathhouses every night. Once a month, perhaps, on average. When I’ve fucked people other than Phil I’ve rarely “ingested body fluids” as the precautio
nary literature puts it. But what substances pass through the skin of my cock, the lining of my mouth? The long incubation period, up to two years—how many men have I had in that time? The only real precaution is to screw with one regular partner. I don’t think I’m a high risk, but I have obviously been in situations where there has been some risk. What sexually active gay man in the past two years has not?
There are questions, but no answers. Are we all going to die? It seems so improbable—and in that is the core of the problem: the it-only-happens-to-the-other-person syndrome, as in plane crashes and wrecked cars, means AIDS will spread.
THE LAST PROGRAMME of the ballet season. Béjart’s Firebird is a disappointment, but Christiansen’s Il Distratto is as hilarious a send-up of every dance stereotype as is the Royal Ballet’s Élite Syncopations. Beach Blanket Babylon, a revue at a downtown San Francisco theatre club-, is a more satisfying evening, despite the heat and the crowded smoky room. SF is particularly good on pub and club theatre, intimate sophisticated revue. This one tells the story of how Snow White left the Bay to seek her fortune in New York, but sensibly chose in the end to return here. It is a celebration of the chauvinism of this most chauvinist of places, a good example of the old adage that a San Franciscan would prefer to starve in a gutter of his own city than live in a penthouse elsewhere.