The Last Lovers on Earth: Stories from Dark Times

by Charles Ortleb

  Kyle and Seth actually found living in Palm Beach wearing fright wigs and dark glasses to be quite pleasant. They were housed in plush places reserved for ex-spies and mafia rat finks. The government provided for their every need, with the understanding that they would cooperate in helping the top AIDS researchers understand why the AIDS Manhattan Project had failed. They didn’t get to see their families, but that wasn’t bad because their families now felt embarrassed and guilty that they were related to the only two gay men still living on earth, two men who had also brought shame upon the world’s greatest scientists.

  They were interviewed daily by brigades of psychologists, sociologists, theologists, and AIDS educators. Not since the O-ring brought down the Challenger had there been such an intense American effort to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong with a government endeavor. Why had every other gay person taken the treatments or the vaccine except for Kyle and Seth? What was different about them? The government had spent a fortune on public service spots to get the cooperation of all gay people. Why had Seth and Kyle not been motivated to follow the public service urgings of celebrities like Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, or the incredibly influential Rosie Perez? The government needed to have a firmer understanding of its communication failure for future public health emergencies.

  The experts just wouldn’t accept the rather simple answer that Kyle gave them. He said that starting when he was a teenager, and continuing into his adult years, he had come to the conclusion that the American government didn’t like gay people all that much. In addition, it seemed to him that we primarily expect our government to lie to us and screw everything up. He pointed out that if you accept these basic premises, you would pretty much do what he and Seth had done, which is steer clear of anything that the government was doing on AIDS. They had better things to spend their time on. And incidentally, they wanted to live.

  Not a single AIDS expert who examined the lovers could believe that it was that simple. They were attractive, intelligent men. While they did lack some of the perky desire to please that the scientists had noted in many of the dead gays, they seemed reasonable. Why had they not responded to the carefully crafted, powerful, and sexy ads that the government had used to motivate gay men to get tested and to take the vaccines and pharmaceuticals that had been especially prepared for them? There had been AIDS ads of hunky guys with great abs climbing mountains, AIDS ads showing hot guys rolling in the grass with their dogs, ads with rapturous transvestites donning condoms, even multi-cultural ads with pictures of gorgeous black guys on bicycles next to copy that said they were using their freedom of choice to select which AIDS medication they wanted to take. These ads had worked for every other gay person on earth except Kyle and Seth. One exasperated AIDS educator suggested that the reason that Kyle and Seth hadn’t cooperated with the AIDS program was that they were sexually dysfunctional. They were not responsive to the erotic subliminal messages that Madison Avenue had perfected for the government to utilize throughout the war on AIDS.

  "Actually, we like sex," Kyle told the psychologists.

  "You’ve seen one AIDS ad, you’ve seen them all," said Seth.

  After a year of vigorous research on the matter, the government didn’t know any more than it knew when the two were first discovered living in Cape May.

  Every week that passed after the discovery of the lovers was filled with a great deal of anxiety for the White House. The President was running behind in the polls for re-election, and his opposition was constantly running pictures of Seth and Kyle, accusing the administration of total failure on AIDS. The President himself made a direct appeal to Kyle and Seth to take the AIDS vaccine. He even offered to have it administered to them at the White House during a special ceremony with Sharon Stone attending, but they respectfully declined.

  On the night before the election, the President called the directors of both the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to tell them that they had probably cost him his re-election. "You both told me you would end the AIDS epidemic. You’ve really let me and the country down."

  When the results came in, all the pundits said the President had lost because of Seth and Kyle.

  In his concession speech at a Washington hotel, the President tearfully admitted that his failure to end the AIDS epidemic completely was the reason for his poor showing at the polls. He said that he had done everything that the AIDS activists had demanded that he do, but apparently that was not enough to end the scourge once and for all. When he said that he hoped that the new President would put politics aside and commit himself to whatever public health policies were required to put the epidemic finally behind them, the crowd of his supporters roared their approval.

  Among the millions of TV viewers watching the President concede the election were Seth and Kyle, who were sitting side by side on a big sofa at their secret location. They didn’t know exactly what the defeated President meant by his remarks about public health, but once again in the course of the epidemic, they found themselves putting their arms around each other and holding on for dear life.

  Banned in Boston

  I should have seen what the future held for me when I took a high school career aptitude test and it suggested that I could excel in the field of food preparation. I didn’t let that keep me from my dream of becoming a gay writer; I come from a long line of bullheaded men and women who never take no for an answer.

  But the indications that I had chosen a disastrous career path came as early as the first gay and lesbian creative writing course I signed up for shortly after I had graduated from college.

  It was the early Eighties and I was in my peachy gay youth. I signed up for a popular writing class taught by a gay novelist who had sold more than three thousand copies of his first five novels.

  By the third class, it was pretty obvious that I didn’t fit in. After we read our first stories aloud, we were supposed to comment honestly on our colleagues’ stories, but we were never told how honest we should be. I crossed the line when I told one of my classmates that his coming out story was so poorly written that he should have stayed in the closet until he learned the English language. He immediately started crying and two lesbians rushed to his side and I spent the rest of my first creative writing course in the gay and lesbian doghouse.

  Since it was the beginning of you-know-what in the Eighties, the theme of most of the stories by the men in the class was safe sex, if that can truly be called a theme. (There were some in that class who thought that being cute in a bar was a theme.) It was amazing how many of the safe-sex themed stories ended with a line like, "And then reader, I put on a condom, a really big one."

  In the later Eighties I took another creative writing course from a gay novelist who was also a professional safe sex instructor. He always seemed to have a banana hanging out of his backpack.

  He and I didn’t get along too well because he thought that all gay men’s fiction should be filled with what he referred to as "fessin’ up." He was known as the father of gay literary "fessin’ up." There was so much fessin’ up in that class that I thought we were in the interrogation room at the sixth precinct.

  And what exactly did he want fessed up in our writing? You got it. He wanted gay men to fess up to the fact that they were responsible for the AIDS epidemic. He called for brave existential fessin’ up in our gay short stories. He urged each one of us to become the Dickens or Tolstoy of fessin’ up. He didn’t care whether it was a boy-meets-boy, boy-buys-condom, boy-gets-home-on-Fire-Island, or a coming-out story. There was no fessin’ up in my stories, so I was warned that I would never get published by the gay and literary establishment because he said that nearly every publishing house in New York has a fessin’ up quota requirement for its submissions. It was fascinating to see even lesbians writing stories with gay male characters fessin’ up all over the place. To tell the truth, lesbians fess up gay male characters even better than gay men do.

  There was so little about AID
S in my stories that the instructor thought I was taking the course by mistake.

  "Are you sure you’re even queer?" he asked in exasperation.

  "No, I’m not a queer," I responded.

  "Then why did you take this queer writing course?"

  "It was supposed to be a gay and lesbian writing course," I said.

  "Same thing," he said.

  As he said this, I imagined my instructor coming out to his parents: "Mother and father, I have something wonderful to tell you. I’m a big goosey queer." I could see the celebration going on for days.

  There were tears of frustration in his eyes near the end of the course when he gave us his final evaluation of our work by saying to the class, "I’ve done my darnedest to turn you all into multi-cultural queer writers, and all I get are these crossover assimilationist pieces of crap! What gay and lesbian gratitude this is! One after another of you has written a white, gender-specific short story without a mass AIDS die-off. No red ribbons! No candlelight vigils! No fessin’ up! This is an atrocity. What is going to happen to queer literature? I fear for our gay and lesbian bookstores. They’ll all go out of business. And what the hell are people going to read in the queer studies courses in the next millennium?"

  I thought, how about Shakespeare’s sonnets? Maybe a little Whitman or Proust?

  He looked at me and screamed, "And you, what do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Porter?"

  "I guess I wasn’t born to fess up or celebrate gender diversity. I didn’t know we were going to be writing propaganda for multicultural queer AIDS activism."

  "Mr. Porter, I knew what to expect from you when you turned in your first story. None of your characters exchanged a single clean needle."

  "Well, sir, none of my characters was a junkie."

  "That’s a terrible thing to call someone who is chemically dependent. Especially a queer."

  "Well, none of my characters was a queer chemical dependent."

  "That’s not an excuse. I think you’re AIDSphobic, Mr. Porter. I think that gay literature is going in one direction and you’re going in another. If my intuition is correct, I detect that you are trying to write crossover gay literature. The queer market is queer, Mr. Porter. It will never cross over. You’re trying to pass, aren’t you, Mr. Porter? As a result your work will never be accepted. Your work will never make it into the bibliography of a queer studies program, not even one at a retarded community college."

  "Well, I was just hoping enough gay people would read my stories that I could make some kind of living at it."

  "I wouldn’t quit my day job, Mr. Porter. The other problem I have with your work is that it doesn’t cross-dress enough. Mr. Porter, have you ever worn a dress?"

  "Not since Halloween in the Seventies."

  "That’s what I thought."

  "A gay short story that does not cross-dress is not a gay short story. It’s a straight-acting short story."

  In the last story I wrote, I had included a cameo of a Third World transvestite character in a hot air balloon. But it was too little too late.

  I soldiered on through one gay creative writing course after another for many years. You name the gay writing program and I was there. Harvard. Yale. Yaddo. The New School. Bimini. But somehow I just never fit in anywhere.

  It was at the New School that I penned a rather nifty—if I do say so myself—story about a blind gay man who comes out at a nudist colony. It was not easy to write, especially the action scenes. I was devastated when I was told that coming-out stories were now old hat, that I was a decade behind the gay times.

  The only time anyone showed even remote interest in my work was when I took a gay mystery writing course from the leading lesbian feminist mystery writer. She opened the class by saying that she was a stickler for craft and insisted that there are only six basic gay and lesbian mystery plots and all of them involve lesbian murders on English chicken farms.

  I showed great discipline. Virtually every story I wrote involved a lesbian getting iced on an English chicken farm. I usually located my chicken farm near London and I threw in a ton of fog for atmosphere. In my stories I shot lesbians, I stabbed lesbians, I ran over lesbians with cars, but always on an English chicken farm. It was only when I thought I was being a little creative and shifted a lesbian murder to a German health spa that I was politely asked to leave the class.

  All the money I spent learning how to write ultimately did little for my career. Everything I sent to gay literary magazines seemed to come back with a rejection letter. I was constantly told that my writing was too assimilationist. One editor even called me an "Auntie Tom." It looked like nothing I ever wrote was going to appear in a gay or lesbian publication. At bookstores like A Different Light and Lambda Rising, I would never be more than a customer.

  A life of flipping veggie burgers flashed before my eyes if I didn’t get with the program. As a last ditch attempt I started attending every annual Gay and Lesbian Writers Conference. Which was a big mistake.

  At the first one I attended, a novelist who had written a 2000-page novel called Queer Like Me, gave the keynote address in which he attacked the gay community for not buying enough of his books.

  I was booed heavily during the question and answer period when I went up to the microphone and asked him why, if he wanted people to buy his books, he didn’t write something they wanted to read. Someone in the back of the room began to scream "queerphobe" at me, so I sheepishly returned to my chair and didn’t ask another impertinent question for the rest of the conference.

  I noticed that the same people are at every one of these annual conferences. And they all noticed me, too. I quickly became a marked man. All the gay literary editors put me on a little list. I could see the rejection slips piling up for the rest of my days. No witty little gay and lesbian literary cocktail parties for moi. I was writing old fashioned gay stories and the world wanted multicultural queer literature. I was a throwback.

  And then the final blow came at last year’s Gay and Lesbian Writers Conference, which was held in Boston.

  There were a total of 1,200 writers at the conference. Since that is the average sale of a gay and lesbian novel, I think we know the audience for whom our writers are writing.

  All the literary supergays were at the conference. These are the people who decide who will get published and who will spend the rest of their lives cursing the lavender muses for not blessing them. And these are the people who banished me once and for all from gay literature.

  What did I do?

  Oh it was awful, just awful.

  I should have known better when I arrived at the conference. The place was swarming with literary and cultural law enforcement. The gender police were there, as well as the multi-cultural police, the bisexual police, the condom police, the AIDS activist police, and even the turkey-baster police. There were so many literary and cultural arrests prior to the first plenary session of the conference that everyone was a bit edgy. I got a very dirty look from someone sitting behind me when I whispered to the person next to me that I thought there was so much policing going on in gay arts and letters that I wondered how anyone had any time to do any writing.

  The keynote address was given by the man universally regarded as our most important gay novelist because there are over ten thousand deaths from the complications of AIDS—all of them his nearest and dearest friends—in his novels. His most recent novel looked like a gay Arlington National Cemetery. In his presence we all felt inadequate. Some of us neophytes had yet even to start a body count in our fiction.

  He opened his talk by announcing the deaths of a few more gay friends and then launched into AIDS fire and brimstone like I have never heard before. He was interrupted by applause so often you would have thought that Oscar Wilde had come back from the grave. He went into high fessin’ up. The audience exploded in cheers when he said that our behavior had resulted in the biggest plague of all time. And when his eyes rolled back in his head and he said that unless we nominat
ed him for the Nobel Prize we were all going to die, the crowd was on its feet, applauding wildly.

  It did not go unnoticed that everyone in the hall was standing and screaming hallelujahs except me.

  When they finally calmed down, the novelist wound up his inspired talk by calling for a leftist queer AIDS revolution in America: "And in closing, I want you all to remember that none of us will be free until every transgender queer in Pocatello, Idaho, who wants a free sex-change operation gets one!"

  At that point, something urgent and naughty and self-destructive in my soul made me stand up and shout, "Well then, Mary, we ain’t never gonna be free!"

  That was it. They came at me from all sides. Every officer from every imaginable division of the gay and lesbian cultural police. And a good thing too. The audience was about to take the matter into their own lesbigay hands.

  I was shackled and not only taken out of the conference, but Boston proper too. I was blindfolded, thrown into a car and the next thing I knew I was walking around Worcester, Massachusetts.

  Banished forever from queer literature, I decided to taunt destiny no longer. I signed up for the next available class at a culinary institute.

  Now whenever I pass a gay bookstore and see a shiny new queer multicultural AIDS epic in the window, I think sadly of what could have been.

  The Kimono Party

  As Everett and Shea were getting dressed, they watched a gay news show on cable television. The program had very inexpensive production values and occasionally the picture froze on a frame with the lesbian news anchor’s mouth wide open in a state of paralysis, like a reaction shot from a dice-and-slice movie. The image was perfect for the kinds of stories she was reading, mostly from gay newspapers published all over the country.

  The anchors had just shown a film clip of one of the country’s right-wing religious leaders saying the all-too-familiar line about gay folks, that he hated the sin, but loved the sinner.