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]
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