A few days ago, I was reading The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to their Younger Selves. It's a collection of, well, exactly what it says – which suggests 'it gets better' messages, and many of them are. But it was interesting that they also do different things, take different tones... I thought I should write my own. For several days I thought its tone is a but too personal or odd to put in this blog; but it is my 68th birthday, and it feels like something that I would like to do.
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I want to caution you not to do certain things: I know this letter can’t do that – it is to an internal image of a younger self, it is about kindliness, not information…
I want to tell you: go to Brown, not U.Va.; if you must go to U.Va., do *not* move into the fraternity.
Going to San Francisco will be glorious, but it will also put you in the oncoming path of the freight train of AIDS. Strangely enough AIDS will define your life – it will ruin it, several times, then start to give it a deeper, more difficult but larger, meaning.
Once you are HIV+, be careful how you move from country to country; getting deported is no fun, and is a financial wrecking ball.
Slow down and spend time with the men you have sex with, the men you think you love. Try to find out who they are – and who you are. It is better to take the time to get to know men who like you, rather than chasing after men you don’t know: they are really only images, abstract ideals, until you do know them.
Above all – I wish I could tell you to be less rigid, less driven and despairing, less judgmental of yourself. You’ll actually be handed a lot of opportunities and connections over the decades – you’ll ruin a lot of them by hesitating too long or grabbing too tightly. You aren’t enough of a composer, but you are a writer and a thinker, and there is a lot of kindness and warmth in you, though you’ll have trouble believing in it. You should do more, you should have done more: you actually have a lot of talents and abilities, and you would have been much happier (and more successful) if you’d just waded into them and treated them all as wonderful play. Collaboration, experimentation, many apprenticeships… that would have worked better than trying to be brilliant in focused ways, in isolation.
Though you’ll have many fantastic experiences – more, I think, than most people – you’ll also have a lot of depressing, stale months and years, coasting between things, not quite being one thing or another. Fortunately, you’ll turn that into its own kind of wisdom, and see the flow between states, the depth of being, even in apparently dull brown spaces. But there is a cost: you will learn by not doing – you might have learned more by doing.
I’m about to be 68 years old: amazingly, even in the shadow of AIDS, you do live that long (and it will be still longer, I think). This life with all those years means a lot more to me now, it all makes a kind of meta-sense. I would have liked more immanent experiences of sense, of pleasure and content and confidence and safety – but perhaps it would have been harder to see the greater, the meta-sense, if there had been more immediate happiness.
On the other hand, from all the above – you are never greatly harmed: you overestimate the importance of some stupid situations, you wander into administrative traps. But you don’t get beaten up or attacked or jailed; you are never really in danger, and the only times you seem near death it is in hospitals, with people trying hard to take care of you.
I wish you would better realize what you have: ability, awareness, empathy – not as organized and powerful tools, things that lead you to specific goals, but really as larger contexts. The book given to you by Mamie Spruill, your third-grade Parklawn school librarian – there’s a reason you didn’t win one of the usual prizes, but she made up a special prize for you: she was trying to tell you that you really are remarkable. Those remarkable qualities – there are a lot of them, though none are obviously focused or uppermost – would all have been best served, and you would have been best served, if you had just done them, had done many things…
And even now, a few days before that 68 birthday, you can still do a lot of things.
Doing: that is what you could have spent more time with, and what you can now spend more time on.
So: do. Be more passionate about doing.
Don’t worry about having, it will seem difficult for years, but it will ultimately work out; and I am glad to tell you that you have become, ultimately, especially good at being.
P.