Visions and Revisions

by Dale Peck

  Books by Dale Peck

  Greenville

  Body Surfing

  Gospel Harmonies

  Martin and John

  The Law of Enclosures

  Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

  The Garden of Lost and Found

  Nonfiction

  Hatchet Jobs

  Visions and Revisions

  Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

  Drift House

  The Lost Cities

  Sprout

  Copyright © 2015

  All rights reserved.

  Portions of this book previously appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, New York, Out, OutWeek, Slate, Swing, and The Village Voice Literary Supplement, as well as the anthologies The Question of Equality and Vital Signs.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peck, Dale.

  Visions and revisions / Dale Peck.

  HC ISBN 978-1-61695-441-3

  PB ISBN 978-1-61695-644-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-442-0

  1. Peck, Dale. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Gay authors—United States—Biography. 4. AIDS activists—United States—Biography. 5. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Medical care—United States. 6. AIDS (Disease)—Treatment—United States. 7. Gays—Crimes against—United States. 8. AIDS (Disease) in literature.

  9. Gays in literature. I. Title.

  PS3566.E245Z46 2015

  813’.54—dc 3

  [B] 2014030846

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  It is customary for novels, plays, essays, and pretty much anything else written about gay life in the eighties and nineties to be dedicated in memoriam to individuals—sometimes one or two, sometimes dozens or hundreds—whose lives were prematurely cut short by AIDS. Without forgetting the millions of the epidemic’s dead, I would nevertheless like to break with tradition and dedicate this book, with gratitude and great respect, to Larry Kramer, because of whose tireless efforts many more millions are alive today. Including him.

  And for Lou Peralta

  This is the path that led me to you.

  As hordes of parents hit the retail trail Friday in search of Christmas gifts for their loved ones, some may have felt a little lost among the mountains of merchandise.

  What do the kids really want?

  Not to fear.

  —The Hutchinson News, Saturday, Nov. 26, 1994

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: Visions and Revisions Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  2: Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul 1. Sloth

  2. Hunger

  3. Shit

  4. Love

  5. Sex

  6. Pain

  7. Addiction

  8. Fear

  9. Grief

  10. Smell

  11. Death

  12. Art

  13. Dreams

  Almost Closed

  Acknowledgments

  1

  VISIONS AND REVISIONS

  VISIONS AND REVISIONS

  And in short, I was afraid.

  1

  My father liked Chris because he could tell she wanted me to fuck her, but when I wouldn’t she left me for someone who would; I think she held out two weeks. Becky was next. She waited nearly a year for the same thing, and if I hadn’t left for college I’d probably still be trying to work up the nerve to go to second base. In college there was Martina, who called me Spike, and Lisa, who was fat, and Shilpa, who always dated guys who turned out gay, and then there was Joy. We dated the summer after our freshman year and I wrote a story about that. Kelly was my last girlfriend. She was the hot freshman when I was the “bisexual” junior, and she liked the way I danced. At a gay disco—Traxx, RIP—I managed to knock her out cold with a well-executed but badly timed spin on the dance floor, and the bruise on her chin lasted longer than our … whatever it was.

  François was Brian’s ex. Brian wasn’t interested but François was, and he invited me over for Christmas; I stayed three days. A month later he passed me off to Marek, whose kiss had a chemical tang—not my thing. Brian (a different Brian) had been a professional masseur, and the massages were better than the sex; soon enough, though, his hands grew tired and my dick grew restless. Jean-Claude and I made it through all four seasons of the year, starting in spring and ending in winter. He broke up with me during my lunch break—oh, the drama!—but we got back together, and then I broke up with him on Thanksgiving day. He came over covered in fake blood from an ACT UP demo, showered, and then we sat on Tasha’s bed, he naked, I clothed, and ended it to the sounds of side two of Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?, which scratched melancholically from Tasha’s old record player. Later we went to Bruce and Roger’s for turkey and Jean-Claude left in the middle of the meal, in tears; Bruce never forgave me for that. Damien was one of those shaved-head ACT UP clones who look simultaneously like a neo-Nazi and an inmate at Auschwitz; he told me he’d had sex with Terence Trent D’Arby in the Ramble, and that he, Terence Trent, had an enormous cock. Derek and I fucked almost every night for two weeks and then he went to Amsterdam; a few weeks later I was at David’s apartment having my hair dyed pink when Derek showed up: David’s mohawk was blue and Derek’s was green, and his roots didn’t need a touch-up. Dan lived with Charles and was having an affair with John; I was number three on that chain until Dan couldn’t take it anymore, and one by one broke it off with all of us. Dennis was the fourth D in four months: he lived opposite the Hells Angels clubhouse on East 3rd Street, and the lamp on his night table was shaded with X-rays of his skull. Then Eric: after two months during which we both gained weight, he took me to Film Forum to see Sunset Boulevard for my twenty-fourth birthday, and then, over gelato at Raffetto’s, he said, Well, Dale, it looks like our friendship is becoming a friendship. Patrick’s the only one I regret, but Tasha insisted we looked good together: his skin was so coated in freckles it was orange, like his hair, and orange has always looked good on me. Eventually I took him to the Bar to break up because I didn’t want to have sex first, went home that night with Frank, who’d also broken up with someone earlier in the day. John turned out to be the oldest (although François never told me his age); he had hair everywhere except his head. Barry was a palliative care nurse from Australia who just happened to be the first person to test positive Down Under—he’d helped design the nation’s pilot program. Scott was British, here on an internship, and when I made out with him on the subway he flipped. A fan of cottaging, he’d had sex in public restrooms and parks and at least one cemetery, but he’d never held hands with another man on the street, let alone kissed someone on a train. Will couldn’t eat food if it was served on a blue plate. That wasn’t why we broke up but it was still, you know, weird. A month later I went to England to promote Martin and John; met Robbie; ended up spending two out of the next three years in London. When I finally gave up and moved back to New York I had the sense that there was less of me than there’d been before. I was, what? twenty-seven? twenty-eight? If you’d told me it would be another decade until I’d meet t
he man I was going to marry, I’d’ve probably slit my wrists.

  Because this was how it worked: before I could have sex with a man I had to believe I could love him—forever. This wasn’t just fantasy, it was foreplay. The particular way a man looked and the first few words he said provided me with more than enough material to manufacture a life together. These visions, depending on the length of acquaintance, could be revised or abandoned; sometimes they turned into journal entries, sometimes stories; usually they were forgotten after I came. Looking back, I realize they were mostly a way for me to pretend I was looking for The One when what I was really looking for was The Next One. That sounds like residual Christian guilt and who knows, maybe it was, but I think it had more to do with the fact that, for a gay boy ten days shy of his fourteenth birthday on July 3, 1981, sex would forever straddle a nebulous line between meaninglessness and metaphor. “Sex with abandon”: that’s what Allen Barnett eulogized in The Body and Its Dangers, and that’s what I wanted. Sex that was anonymous, inconsequential, and available whenever and wherever I looked for it. But I knew I would never have it, and not just because of AIDS. Promiscuity had become a homosexual corollary around the time I was born, and by the time I reached puberty it was practically a moral imperative. But by 1991, or ’93, or ’95, it had devolved into a kind of last stand against the epidemic, and everyone and everything it had taken from us. It was all we had left. Oh, we had new things, sure. We had ACT UP. We had visibility. We had, God help us, our pride, and the targeted marketing campaigns from alcohol manufacturers to prove it. But sex was all that remained of what we’d had before. What we’d been before. Sex, a few books and even fewer plays, some pictures and paintings, a handful of movies; and as a consequence every back-room blowjob, every hookup, every flushed condom and sticky-dicked walk of shame was a refusal to renounce the behavior that formed the core of our personal as well as cultural identities.

  Still, for my first two or three years in the city, I obsessed over the status of ex-boyfriends and tricks, took an anxiety-ridden, morbid, but very real comfort in the fact that no one I’d slept with had died yet. Yet: though I never acknowledged it, a tiny voice at the back of my head was always asking: Who will be first? But once that question was answered, and once it happened again—and again and again—a more terrifying prospect raised its head:

  Who will be last?

  2

  In his seminal 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani wrote, “I have been trying to account for the murderous representations of homosexuals unleashed and ‘legitimized’ by AIDS, and in so doing I have been struck by what might be called the aversion-displacements characteristic of both those representations and the gay responses to them.” “Is the Rectum a Grave?” exposed and exploded those “murderous representations,” but “the gay responses” clearly held more fascination for Bersani—specifically, the way theorists tended toward hagiography in their descriptions of pre-AIDS A-list gay culture. “We have been telling a few lies,” Bersani declared, “lies whose strategic value I fully understand, but which the AIDS crisis has rendered obsolescent.”

  Queer theorists, Bersani argued, maintain a false position when they idealize homosexual desire, and went on to declare “particularly disheartening” the “participation of the powerless” in “finding new ways to defend our culture’s lies about sexuality.” Such statements placed Bersani both in- and outside the circle of his contemporaries: inside in that he opposed heterosexual bourgeois norms in the revolutionary terms then in vogue; but outside in his insistence that “to want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism.” But in its attempt to explain what, exactly, the desire for sex with another man was a credential for, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” proffered the seeds of its own radicalism. Phrases that described sex as “anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” were neither accidental nor finite. But where was Bersani going when he claimed that homosexual desire possessed a “revolutionary inaptitude” for heterosexual society, or that “Far from welcoming the return to monogamy as a beneficent consequence of the horror of AIDS, gay men should ceaselessly lament the practical necessity, now, of such relationships”?

  Such provocations had to wait nearly a decade before they were picked up in his 1995 book, Homos, but in the interim readers were left with much to ponder, both from Bersani’s essay, as well as the spate of queer theoretical projects that began appearing in the late eighties—for example, Policing Desire by Simon Watney, a far-reaching analysis of images of AIDS and homosexuality in the media, a review of which engendered Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, which in turn appeared in a Douglas Crimp–edited issue of October magazine, later reprinted in book form as AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Far more than a curatorial project, Crimp’s anthology united a farflung group of artists, activists, and academics, and in the process created a movement, or at least revealed the movement’s existence to its members, which is just as important. AIDS had blindsided the gay community in 1981. For the first several years it was all people could do to stare, and mourn, and die. But eventually grief moved beyond sorrow to anger, and in the second half of the decade we began to fight back. Eighty-seven was the key year—the year ACT UP was born, the year Crimp’s issue of October appeared—and neither would have been what it was without the other. The particularly dense jargon favored by cultural critics, which often read as though translated from the French with a Quebecer’s hostility to English, would have lacked urgency without its link to ACT UP’s realpolitik, while ACT UP would have been just another group of headline-clambering discontents, morally justified but intellectually bankrupt, without the foundation provided by Crimp, Bersani, and Watney, among many others—above all, Michel Foucault, whose History of Sexuality, although incomplete when Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, still dominated virtually every discussion of sex, identity, and politics through the turn of the millennium.

  I remember reading The History of Sexuality (volume 1 only, about which I could now tell you very little), remember better that issue of October, and Simon Watney’s Policing Desire. I read the latter in a photocopy because I couldn’t afford to buy the book, and even the photocopying had been done free in my friend Scott’s office—“guerrilla xeroxing” was how we justified it, although the truth is we were just broke. But as I read Watney’s book I felt not poor but rich, and powerful, because Watney had called bullshit on the media, and the media had responded, and coverage of AIDS and queers actually changed. I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old, a senior in college, a first-year student in the MFA program at Columbia, I was a gay man and a writer, but both these identities were more theory than praxis, and remained circumscribed by death until a radicalized generation of queers took to the streets armed with tactics inherited from the civil rights and antiwar movements and given new life by the exploding fields of cultural studies and identity politics. The distinction between academic conference and activist demonstration was for all intents and purposes irrelevant. “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it”: Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach could have been our mantra during what my friend the playwright Gordon Armstrong called “our era of crisis” (the key word here: not “crisis” but “our”), when personal tragedy and political triumph swirled together like oil in water. Indeed, it was like an oil spill: some days gripped you in paralyzing sludge, other days a single spark threatened to blow everything away. But every time you felt ready to give up someone would come along with another idea, another strategy, another chant. Virginia Apuzzo, Allan Bérubé, Kate Bornstein, John Boswell, Michael Bronski, Judith Butler, Pat Califia, Michael Callen, George Chauncey, Andrea Dworkin, Lillian Faderman, Leslie Feinberg, David Halperin, Larry Kramer, Audre Lorde, Cindy Patton, Vito Russo, Sarah Schulman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Urvashi Vaid, Michael Warner, Jeffrey Weeks, Monique Wittig, David Wojnarowicz. The people queers looked to for inspiration then, the people they called their leader
s, were known for their accomplishments—their ideas—and didn’t simply parlay celebrity into a (pseudo-) political platform. As befit the times, the agenda wasn’t assimilationist but interventionist. People didn’t argue for marriage equality, they argued against the bureaucratization and commodification of love (even a neocon like Allan Bloom got that one right), while the concept of gays in the military was about as welcome at an ACT UP or Queer Nation meeting as ROTC recruiters at Columbia University during the Vietnam War. And despite Susan Sontag’s pointed reminder in AIDS and Its Metaphors against the danger of war analogies as explanations for or mediations of disease, we knew we were fighting a war: against HIV, against the AIDS epidemic, and against the political and social forces whose genocidal negligence led to the deaths of first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people. What we didn’t know was that we would win, or that victory would be scant consolation for all those who shouldn’t have died in the first place. Victory wasn’t meaningless, not by any means: millions died (and continue to die), but millions more can attest to the importance of the actions of a handful of activists twenty-five years ago. But the full significance of the medicines that appeared in 1996—by which I mean the psychological rather than physical effects—was slow to reveal itself, and it was only after the removal of the threat of imminent death that we could acknowledge that we hadn’t just been fighting for a cure for the previous fifteen years. We’d been fighting to bring people back from the dead, and any other outcome was doomed to feel like failure.

  I remember an incident near the end of that time, when Michael Cunningham read a eulogy at the memorial service for Mark Fisher on November 2, 1992. The service began in Judson Memorial Church but concluded on the streets of New York City, which Fisher’s body was carried through in a clear-topped coffin, and I remember being filled with hope when Cunningham read his eulogy because here was a writer of the highest caliber speaking truthfully and politically and artistically about a man and about a political crisis and about a disease that was—Gordon’s words again—“the revelatory aspect of our time.” I remember Bob Rafsky delivering a eulogy off the top of his head at the same memorial service, and I remember being filled with hope because here was a man creating political oratory that seemed to me as epochal as any homily by Daniel Webster or Henry Ward Beecher that I studied in college. And I remember looking at Mark Fisher’s face beneath the clear top of his coffin, and it was at that moment I lost hope. At the time of Fisher’s death I had been more or less absent from ACT UP for several months, primarily to prepare my first novel for publication, but also because I was having misgivings about ACT UP’s continued efficacy, especially in the wake of the decision of key members of the Treatment and Data Committee—the so-called “science guys”—to splinter off into a new and pointedly independent organization called the Treatment Action Group. During the course of its first five years ACT UP had perfected a strategy that paired epistemology with epidemiology, creating spectacles of political theater that were perfectly positioned to the media age and given moral weight by irrefutable scientific and bureaucratic fact. But by 1992 the media had become savvy to ACT UP’s tactics, or perhaps just bored of them, and, in the wake of TAG’s departure, statements that had formerly been pitched to a specific research or political agenda devolved into misdirection, drawing the audience’s attention not to the AIDS epidemic but to AIDS activists themselves. Trying to refocus the story on the ever-widening sphere of the epidemic—on the need, say, for needle-exchange programs to prevent the spread of HIV among injection-drug users, or studies investigating how the virus and its medications worked in women’s bodies as opposed to men’s—was like trying to teach a cat to fetch: no matter how wildly you gesticulated toward the object of attention, the stupid, obstinate, or perhaps simply perverse pupil would look only at your pointing finger.