in the hall of mirrors

...lazy...

Semi-demi-at-the-beginning-or-in-the-midst-of writing out the Sondheim/Heidegger paper. Various possible procrastination techniques from my extensive store of them are coming up, of course. There are a few concerts I have to see... the weather's a bit dim... have to make dinner... might play another game of computer solitaire....

Wouldn't it be interesting if I had somehow learned some basic discipline at a young age, and had always worked fairly regularly? What a different life that would have led me into....

Oh well. You can only be where you are. So I have about eight days left, which are dotted here and there with other minor responsibilities, to be dilatory and chaotic and finally get something written.

Eight days....

Points on a curve

Last weekend I was in Manchester to hang out on the gay scene for two summer days, with P-. Various things occurred to me, and were written in one of my little notebooks. These points don't really collect into a focused argument or linear series, but they do seem to sort of follow one from another....

[1] The overwhelming pleasure one can experience on coming into a really good club – Essential in Manchester – at the beginning of its Saturday-night peak. Thinking of the ecstatic experience of a club, when it actually works: not because I want to naively view it in completely positive terms (as in Holleran or Picano), nor in the resentfully critical way of those who feel disappointed by or excluded from gay club life (Kramer, Signorile). I'd rather think of it as merely what it appears to be – a relatively shallow, relatively constructed, but still positive 'two-dimensional' experience that, at its best, points towards some possible 'three-dimensional' experience of ecstasy, belonging, pleasure, desire, Stimmung. It's a bit like Tanith Lee's wonderful statement about the connections between sexual love, personal love, social love, and the generous, wise love of everything – she points out that even the crudest and most selfish of basic impulses guide people upward, if allowed. Really, whatever Heidegger would say, club life can be a pointer towards Being.

(Stimmung – the German word, means voicing or tuning – but the Germans use it in a party or bar context to mean everybody's happy, everybody's connecting, everyone is 'in tune' with each other.)

[2] Manchester, though bigger, more fun, and much gayer than my city in northern England, is still not a place I would move to if I had the chance. It remains, around the fringes of this blithely sunny, festive day, still fairly crude, boorish, and dull – one merely needs to go a bit off the Canal Street path to see that. It might sound arrogant of me, but I don't want to move to another rough-edged town... they aren't as interesting as you might think.

[3] [or 2a?] And it's always startling, and kind of disgusting, how badly non-London and/or working-class Brits treat clubs, bars, sidewalks – garbage all over, a marshy sludge of beer on the floor by dawn, all distinctly worse than in clubs I've seen in other countries, even after an entire Saturday night. This seems to be such a working-class British thing, intended to symbolize some kind of rebellion – the implied statement: you can't make us take care of things, treat them well or with respect, because that is just another way that the upper/middle classes are trying to oppress/repress us. It's ridiculous, really, and so self-defeating.

[4] Going shopping. I've become so much more susceptible to mass consumerism in the last few years; increased means, combined with the experiences of Hong Kong, Adelaide and this city in northern England (all of which involved fewer friends and a less interesting street life for me), entailed a personal vacuum that I try to fill, somehow, by shopping. Oh well... at least I don't have the illusion that it's really satisfying. If I were somehow to become a rich person, I'd probably be one of those very confused, jaded ones, who engage in spastic shopping sprees alternating with revulsion at the things I'd bought... (except for the books of course, they're privileged!).

[4a] Shopping is, though, so boring for the most part – either so homogenized (this mall in Manchester, for instance) or so nihilistic. It's sort of like the nasty choices made by the protagonist(s) of Fight Club, between a life of IKEA or one of violence; the nihilistic part is the books and DVDs on sale at HMV or Fopp's, all of which are called 'cult', but really represent a peculiar way of merchandising bitterness, anti-establishment feelings, fascinations with the violent or grotesque, etc. I suppose this is the mass market version of what was Expressionism, or Italian Neo-Realism – basically, if your bourgeois life doesn't make you happy, try to handle it by thinking of something crazy or disgusting. As though that would help!... no wonder the young are so confused (and here, I'm so glad I'm not a parent); the only aspects of life that aren't homogenized into oblivious, fashionable pap force them into some kind of nihilistic rebellion (Columbine). It's Britney Spears or Ozzie Osbourne - yuck, what a choice.

[5] Looking through one of those stylish picture books from Fopp's: Seaside Style – the self-evident pleasure of living by the sea. (This apparent pleasure is, admittedly, a bit reduced by the fact that way too many of these pictures are of rich peoples' homes – I'll never live like that – how about something that is simple and rustic, because the owners can only afford that, rather than because they are affecting it?)

Anyway: the improbability that, by now, I'll ever live happily by the sea – say in Sitges, like Chris and Neville, or (soon, I bet) Susan and Rob; or in Big Sur, or Venice (the Los Angeles one) or Santa Monica; Santa Barbara (well that one would be a tad boring); Sydney Harbor, Vancouver... around the Pacific, or the Mediterranean. It's such a beautiful and increasingly implausible prospect... but dreaming about it is lovely....

[6] This intensely hot weather, especially on the train home – some of the guys lounging around on the seats – the gesture of wiping off sweat...

they recall for me the eerie, slightly camp choreography by Bèjart for Ravel's Bolero, where Marcia Haydée danced a long, sultry solo on a raised circular platform, surrounded by a large open square of chairs where sat a number of scruffy, sexy guys. Though I've always loved Haydée (my mother took us to see her in her heyday (!) with the Stuttgart Ballett, when they visited Wolf Trap Farm Park in the early 1970s – though I didn't like classical ballet much then, nor do I now, the Stuttgart's modernized, dramatic approach got my full attention), Bèjart didn't really feature her – as was typical of him, the boys were the real feature, and their rough, back-alley-Paris looks and clothing were almost funny in their lasciviously calculated impact.

The remarkable thing, though, was a very formalized gesture they all used before they got up and started dancing individually in response to Haydée – a peculiar but not implausible wipe across the face and chest – a very sexy, sweaty kind of move. It was especially funny, and wonderful, that that move was precisely learned and imitated by all 30-40 of them in rehearsal, but then performed in an offhand, unthinking way, off the beat, as though it represented 30-40 sequential accidents that just happened to look exactly the same. Very witty, really... if a bit erotically heavy-handed (but that's Bèjart for you – brilliant, innovative, sexy, and cheap, all at the same time).

[7] [or maybe 6a, but definitely last] Some of the guys around me on the train... one long-torsoed and a bit disaffected; very sexy, but off-putting. Another with an exquisitely even, beautifully golden tan – surely not British? – has an open and rather sweet face; stylishly quiet clothes – an olive shirt, cream pants, and light non-athletic, non-fussy sneakers. He looks very comfortable and happy... (and later I heard him on his mobile – yes, British, yes, northern – he managed quite successfully to look Spanish or Italian, somehow). A pleasure to look at....

WDC ➔ SFO

I grew up in Washington, D.C., where people are always careful of what they say. There are many gay men, but they don’t tell those who can’t use the information: congressmen and lawyers don’t want just anyone to know about their personal lives, and they give you only their first names. There is a lot of speaking, but little is said, and that little is concealed in a cloud of contradictions and silences, so that at times the city resembles the corridors of the Pentagon, an endless gray labyrinth of closed doors. But I fled to San Francisco in 1979, and everything was different. Men, and a carnival of streets under the constantly changing sky, brave eyes that told everything, laughing and with affection, elaborated by warm hands and the close breath of lovers.

That first year in San Francisco, I went back east for Christmas. On my return to the city, one of my new friends drove to the airport to pick me up. I got into his car, sitting quietly as we drove up the peninsula, but was surprised to find myself bursting into tears when we saw the sign that said: City of San Francisco. He asked, is anything wrong? I felt so strange, but so happy to see that sign, I pointed at it and tried to blubber out an explanation. He touched my arm, and said: I know, it’s not like this anywhere else. He meant, of course, that all other cities were, for us, places of exile; that I was crying because I was coming home; and, for the first time, I knew it.

In San Francisco, I had a small, neat studio a block from Castro and Eighteenth. It looked onto a garden that was surrounded by a wall, the kind of garden where someone must sleep behind a hedge of thorns until the spell is broken. On the great feast days, the Castro Street Fair or Gay Pride Day, when the intersection a block away was packed with handsome faces, mustaches and elaborately muscled bodies, and the noise level was incredible, a fabulous din of voices and disco; on those days you could hear only a faint roar in my garden, as though from a seashell held close to the ear. Sundays of Gay Pride Week, because I always slept late, I would wake to hear that faint roar and be disoriented: was it the ocean, had I been taken to a place beside the waves? Then I would recognize it and jump out of bed, eager to dress and run out into the erotic madness of the crowd.

Those feast days were amazing, they would leave me drunk on the sight and smell of beautiful flesh. When the parade went by I always started to cry, but then so did everyone else – they were so brave, so happy, glorious men and women on motorcycles, drag queens having their day in the sun, and everyday people who were just there because it was what they wanted, what they were willing to stand for.

These days are different for me. Distance and time has intervened, and I walk always a proper distance behind invisible men who have died, all the lost lovers and friends. Pride Day seems to be for younger men, people with exciting projects and things to do, and they are all so brash and self-involved, caught up in their thousand isolated worlds. I still cry when I see the people walking in the parades, but it’s as much for my memories as anything; it doesn’t feel like they need my love and sympathy, they appear to be doing just fine on their own.

But sometimes I hear that roar, the sensual, smooth roar of bodies rubbing against each other, the friction of love amplified to an endless rumble, like a vast explosion on tape, slowed down and played forever. And when I hear that, I fall in love with the crowd all over again – just like it’s the first time.

[Los Angeles, 6/18-11/2/91]