Night & the City

December Foliage Walk

Guaranteed: all photos taken in the month of December...

"The Missing Years"

That $30,000 preys on my soul, 35 years after we turned it down.

Plus what my parents had saved would have made it maybe $50,000? They did not discuss money with me. I knew it enraged my mother if I made a long distance phone call before 5:00 p.m., especially if to a college friend lfrom a posh bedroiom community in New Jersey, and when I wanted my father to collect me and a friend from a late train she insisted the friend’s family do it: “They’re younger and richer than we are!” She once shut herself in the bathroom sobbing when I let the cuff of a clean shirt brush the floor. That’s not really about money, but it’s too good to leave out. At the time it wasn't good, of course. My father said nothing. My only sibling had left when I was seven. I needed a buffer, but instead I was the buffer.

So let’s call it $50,000. Plus regret compounded daily for 35 years. To wit:

In March 1976, Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan and the home of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, offered me a full scholarship for four years. That’s the $30,000 that we turned down.

Actually, we forgot about it. The admission director had to call our house at 6:00 p.m. the day my decision was due, and an awkward conversation ensued. I had already accepted Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

How did we forget a full scholarship? Drew was my “safety school.” If you know anything about either Hamilton or Drew, I doubt you can imagine one being measurably better than the other, except that, with my theater interests, proximity to New York and a prestigious resident theater would make sense. But our college guidance office was touting Hamilton as a best kept secret, a small, stone-and-ivy bastion of excellence. And I bought it. We all bought the tidy, modest, self-satisfied, “better” school, all very WASP-y, the aspirations of us undistinguished New England folks who secretly, desperately wished to be English or maybe even kind of thought we were. And like a pinched, discerning, parsimonious Anglo relative, Hamilton offered just enough money. Drew tackily offered everything (how de trop!), but they were the safety school, so there was no question. Often, then, there were no questions. Nor any answers. So we declined four years at a good school with an acclaimed theater in residence, one hour from Manhattan.

Years later, a friend asked,

Why not take the scholarship, then use the money my parents had saved to let me travel during school vacations (wasn’t there, like, theater in London?) or take unpaid internships with better connections than could be found in the restaurant kitchens and gas stations I worked in summers? Later, during college (Hamilton), when I complained that my theater friends enjoyed such internships, my mother snapped, “Yeah, you can bet their parents are rich doctors!” She made me recite the names of these friends, though she would know none of them; she had visited the campus just once, to drop me off freshman year.

So there was the first reason not to accept Drew’s offer and all that went with it:

1.) One does not go to one’s “safety school.” Hamilton was set up in my mind as a blue chip enclave of excellence, but easy to get into, perfect for conscientious lads of modest promise. Drew was, well, someplace anyone could go. But there were two more reasons:

2.) The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival probably scared me. I was used to the tiny stage at the school I attended because my parents worked there. The usual dearth of boys meant I could be cast in anything I wanted. I probably feared that, if I got anywhere near a real theater, I would be ignored, dismissed or would just slink away of my own accord. And…

3.) The final reason that a smarter financial arrangement did not occur to us is best summarized thus: My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

Before you get all bent out of shape, it is true that she earned that money. My father’s paycheck went to run the household (just barely, but that is another story). My mother’s income from secretarial work was saved for my college. So let us run that reasoning by one more time:

My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

It is not the illogic I wish you to appreciate. It is the logic.

Not that that logic couldn’t have been demolished, had I myself not bought the superiority of Hamilton and the inferiority of Drew. (Drew offered a full scholarship; shows they were desperate. Hamilton offered much less; they must have been better.) My mother might have budged had someone actually put the Drew scenario together and we all had been willing to endure some shouting and door slams. But no one did. Nor did I fight valiantly for Drew or any other place. I wanted Hamilton, too. I liked wanting it. My parents and teachers would applaud me if I went there, but I could tell from having visited that Hamilton would be no challenge. It looked and felt like a slightly bigger version of my high school. I would get through this major life transition with little interruption, little need for re-assessment or readjustment.

Early in April, Hamilton did accept me, and we dumped the “safety school,” not even remembering to tell them they had been dumped, because…

My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

My duty was to earn money, to learn that there was a work/money ratio and that that money was only so elastic. I was obligated to attend these lessons and abstain from “fancy” internships that the sons of rich doctors took, or from “fancy” trips overseas. My parents abstained from such trips. They drove rusty cars eaten away underneath, and we had musty, threadbare carpets and yellowish-green, worn-through linoleum, making us better than the families of “rich doctors.” In an attempt to get me over myself my acupuncturist once said, “It is as if your mother had no legs, and you wanted her to come play outside with you, but she had no legs. So she couldn’t.”

(To be fair, my father was also legless. He structured his life so that his earnings were both small and unpredictable. My mother says he handed her a check every two weeks and just figured she’d make it work.

My father had never worked summers.

His father was a doctor.

No, really.)

The lost opportunity of Drew preyed on my mind for years, alternating exquisite pain and mournful pleasure as I imagined what could have happened and who I could have been. I felt a thrilling pang when I told a therapist I was 40% of the man I could have been had I not consigned myself to the cold hillside in upstate New York. The Lost Opportunity became The Explanation, The Excuse. (Hamilton, I should note, offered an annual London theater trip called “Twenty Plays in Twenty Days.” I never considered it. It was for rich, thoughtless kids. Were there scholarships? I never thought to ask. Just to imagine going, to desire to go was out of bounds; it would have been understood as a critique of my parents’ choices, showing them as choices, when they were terribly unjust facts my parents bore dutifully day after day, with only the occasional outburst over a long distance call. And I was deeply invested in the idea of one’s life as inevitable and immutable. Mine was. I couldn’t have sex. I couldn’t go to London. Sad but intractable. I just had to hang around God’s outer office looking pitiful, hoping someday He would finally feel sorry for me and let whatever it was happen. But if instead I refused to believe those limits were imposed on us all from outside, who would take care of me then? Often over the years I also mourned the lack of mentors when I was young, and wrote it off to my being gay. In fact, it was more my submission to "fate" and my refusal to improve or believe in improvement that discouraged anyone from taking me under their wing.)

And then self-realization through regret stopped working. Because I realized that…

Though I was firmly closeted, even to myself, in 1976, a powerful part of me wanted out. So… Manhattan. Utica. Where would you more likely come out? In Utica I fretted and ached away four years not having sex with anyone, head bowed to the macho ethos of the chilly wilderness. What would have happened at Drew, an hour’s train ride from Manhattan?

Of course that’s what would have happened, helped along by how much I liked to compartmentalize my sex life back then. On breaks in New York or Boston, I slipped into male peep shows, and then, post-orgasm, as I fled Times Square or the Combat Zone, I went right on hoping and pretending I was or would soon be straight. Drew’s access to Manhattan would have tipped the balance, making it easy for me to come out by making it easy for me to come half out: fuck buddies in the City; a nice, bucolic campus to scamper back to. Running for my train, my secret flying behind me in the wind. “How’s college?” “Boring.” “Well, let’s get you excited.” “Yeah, let’s!” Coming home to clueless suburban roommates: “How was The City?” “Great.” “What did you do?” “Oh…nothing.”

Meanwhile:

July 4, 1976, two months before I entered college: Tall ships crowded New York Harbor, and strangers embraced in the street. I spent the day in my hometown washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen. But that is not how Gaeton Dugas spent it. Gaeton Dugas, a flight attendant from Montreal, spent Independence Day 1976 having sex with men all over New York, as did thousands of other men from around the world. But Gaeton Dugas was special. In his blood he carried what would later be dubbed the human immunodeficiency virus. And on that Independence Day he passed it to dozens of other men, each of whom passed it to dozens of other men, and it did not stop on the fifth of July. The band played on.

So what might I have been, had I taken that scholarship and taken advantage of all New York City had to offer, circa 1976-1980? “Wanna swallow?” “[Unintelligible]” “Bet they don’t have this in New Jersey.” “[Unintelligible]”

Dead is what I might have been.

With this thought, the bundle of regret I was nursing died. My longing for an alternate past, for what should have been mine, for someone I could have been, my warm, pulsing regret over wanting the college they wanted me to want because I feared making choices and could not face slammed doors – all dead. It turned out for the best, so I could stop worrying and move on. To what? Acceptance that I deliberately chose frozen wilderness and thus defused four critical, never-to-be-come-again years of my life?  Would I have to accept that “mistakes” work out, a “diminished” life is for the best, I should be grateful for what I have, and there is nothing else? I hate accepting. I hate opening up and taking in. I hate surrendering cherished beliefs.

Then my friend, who knows a thing or two about public health, added this:

Among healthy people, only one in 300 instances of receptive anal sex with an HIV-positive partner leads to infection. With oral sex, the odds are even longer. And especially then, I would not have let anyone put…you know…into my…you know anyway. I was a dumpy, dopey, unsophisticated kid who, according to the laws of nature, would have found another dumpy, dopey unsophisticated kid, and we would have jacked off one another and that would have been that. I would have found the same guy I would have found back home, or in Utica. And even if I had found a dumpy, dopey, unsophisticated, infected kid, I was almost unnaturally healthy. I didn’t even get colds. So back to scenario one: What woulda coulda shoulda been if only blah-blah-blah Drew, blah-blah-blah…

But my friend made a further point, and this I find remarkable:

What if I had gone to Drew and had come to Manhattan one fall Saturday in 1976 and many Saturdays after? What if, along with art and culture, I had swallowed semen and become infected? What if it all had happened: Drew scholarship, coming out, Shakespeare Festival, parental money freed up for trips to Europe. And HIV. Might I not have ended up leading a life worth dying for?

I came to Manhattan eventually anyway, right out of Hamilton – so what matter if I was held up just four years? The parental money was gone, that is what matter. I had worked five summers in restaurants and gas stations, that is what matter. I came to Manhattan poor, that is what matter, and I stayed poor. I clung to the idea that I was some kind of artist, and I embodied that idea less by making art than by refusing any but temp or part-time jobs. I came out, and they promptly announced AIDS. The thing I had desired half my life, the thing I had longingly observed in peep shows suddenly could kill. Penniless, adrift, not ambitious or talented at anything in particular, I entered an unsatisfying relationship with an older man who had less money even than I. I witnessed his painful calls for money to his mother, a Houston real estate agent with whom he resumed the Texas twang he had banished to become an actor in New York. Sheltered and tormented by that relationship, I waited out eleven years of plague. I also continued visiting those peep shows, sometimes spending hours there, though never showing up late for the part time job I had to have because I was a writer. When I started bringing guys home, always playing safely but always playing dangerously because you never know who will end up smoking crack in your living room (February 1992) or stealing your credit cards (the following August). At this point I sought help, which came in the form of, quite fittingly, an HIV-positive man with a penchant for helping and, if one got closer, abusive psychosocial games. Then, after several years of learning how many people who are not interested in you will still date you, I entered a new, more productive, more functional and secure relationship.

But money issues persisted. People younger than me spoke of second and third trips to Paris, Madrid, and, yes, London. Then it became people much younger than me. I still had not been to Europe. Whether it was financially impossible or not (I had a flush year or two), it felt impossible. Poverty of spirit as much as of pocketbook. The pop psychology tongue twister is “undeservingness.”

In the fall of 2005, a chance e-mail to a former employer led to a permanent job. I was 47 and nothing else had worked out. I said yes. And I stopped writing. I was a director of development now, as it happened, in a suit (my first in years) and tie. No more art. I got off a little on being Mr. Businessman. Mr. Biggest-Salary-I’d-Ever-Had-in-my-Life-by-Far. Mr. Take-a-Cab-Whenever-I-Feel Like It. And frankly I had gotten tired of writing for little or no audience, for little or no appreciation, for little or no money.

One day I sat at lunch with some of the junior staff and interns. They were comparing notes on Rome versus Paris versus Madrid. One young woman, about 26, contrasted her appreciation of Rome the first time she went with her increased appreciation the second time.

Thanks to income from that job, though, I, too, made it to Europe. At dawn on October 19, 2006, I watched the flat, bright green fields of Holland rise through scraps of mist.

I looked at Rembrandts and Vermeers, I stood a moment alone in the kitchen of Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex,” and at night I watched solitary bicycle headlamps jiggle home in the dark, and I imagined being the people on those bicycles and I imagined what their homes were.

And I did make it to London, on March 9, 2007, when the daffodils were coming up in Regents’ Park. The next afternoon, while my partner napped, I strolled to the West End, looped past St. James’s Park, and walked back to Trafalgar Square, nearly empty at that hour on a winter Sunday.

There are four plinths in the four corners of Trafalgar Square. Three hold up various British warriors on horseback. The fourth is reserved for works of contemporary art. In late winter 2007, that fourth plinth held Marc Quinn’s white marble sculpture of the British painter Alison Lapper, nude and pregnant. What makes Lapper, her pregnancy and her artistry remarkable is that she was born with no arms and foreshortened legs. That evening she sat atop the plinth, head turned, blazing eyes and jutting chin set against the western sky.

In the fading winter light I sat by Wellington’s column and looked up at Lapper, white, naked, pregnant, with no arms and stubs for legs, and my own eyes teared up – because I was finally there; and because I realized that, no matter how hard you lean on the gas, you can not get back the years from 18 to 48. The gestures you buy thereafter are symbolic – French classes, Christmas bells from Amsterdam, tickets to an avant-garde Fledermaus in Vienna. So many refrigerator magnets. Well, not entirely. Your mind really does expand when, for example, you learn a language, and there was one scene in that Fledermaus that makes me smile whenever I think back.

But at 53 one’s mind becomes as inelastic as one’s money once was. I have not solved the problem of what to think about missed opportunities. Instead I keep remembering more: the college writing course I dropped after one session; the novel I stopped at 23, just pages from the end. (It was typewritten; where is it now?) Maybe there is nothing to solve. Must this story lack an ending?

Not quite.

They have recently told us that, theoretically, time travel is possible. It involves wormholes, perhaps as in Contact, that Jodie Foster movie of a dozen or so years ago. But real, regular time travel, as in Back to the Future, must, I think, remain impossible. Everyone would go around changing everything and creating multiple overlapping realities that can not possibly co-exist. Regret is a form of time travel. Or of positing parallel universes with which to comfort oneself: it may not have happened, but I can gain back my power by becoming an authority on how it should have happened. But all regret dramas will git the wall of impossibility, the impossibility of time travel. If that had happened, that would not have happened and then this and then that and then that and who is to say it even could have, let alone that it would have been better. Could I have died of AIDS without regret. That does not sound like me. That sounds like another person that, regardless of what college I attended where, I could never have been. I was me. That I suppose I could be proud of: just going on being me. Maybe I have beautiful restraints to work with. My faults are my own rare jewels. And maybe every now and then, a real virtue shows up. And I laugh.

I Want to Live in My Language Book

Things are always friendly there and simple. People greet one another cheerily and get cheery greetings back. They say "excuse me" and "I'm sorry" if they make a mistake or bump you with their suitcase, and the person bumped says it is all right. They happily invite one another to parties and happily go. Or if the can;t go it is because they have some other place to go. They lend one another CDs, and older students tell new students what number room to go to to get forms signed. They are all from different countries. One girl is Japanese and lives in Paris. She e-mails with a boy from Brasilia and he e-mails with a Moroccan girl from Lyon. My teacher is Moroccan from Montmartre.

In my language book no one's parents are divorcing. No one is anorexic. No one is anti-social. No one schemes. They are like exchange students - outgoing and busy, cheerful what seems like all the time, in a primary color world ou il ne pleut pas. The bell on the baker's door jingles. Bonjour. Merci. Au revoir. In Paris they really do trot down early morning cobblestones clutching long thin loaves of bread under their arms. They really do.

Riot Youth!

I did not land in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the reasons that I thought I did. Well, for those reasons, but not in the order of importance I thought. This trip was supposed to be about promoting my novel, and I would also facilitate a young people's theater and writing workshop and see some old college friends. The friends and the young workshoppers turned out to be more significant than the self-promotion, though that went very well, too. What I learned from my old friends will be the subject of future blog pieces. For now I want to pay tribute to all I learned from the fabulously out and creative members of Riot Youth, the young LGBT group at Ann Arbor's Neutral Zone teen center.

I had two challenging hours planned to bring the participants all the way from "webbing" (the technique of starting with a random phrase and free associating on paper, prior to writing); all the way through writing; working with large pieces of cloth as flexible props to experiment with and build a character's spirit and body; and finally adding another random prop to complete a short performance based on the writing previously done. In two hours. If I talked too much, which I usually do, it was to encourage the young people to let go of rules or how it "should be." One young woman started "webbing" but transitioned almost immediately to list making. A young man included drawings in his web of words. Some transitioned from webbing to intense writing - long pieces stuffed with feelings and ideas. Others wrote only a little. One young man wrote a piece that sounded like random sounds when read aloud, but could be deciphered into recognizable words when read on paper - but only when read on paper. Everyone made penetrating and supportive comments about the pieces of writing, and I don't think anyone declined to read at least a part of what they wrote.

Using a big piece of cloth (like a bed sheet) to build a body and a character is a favorite theater exercise from a college acting class. Then, the cloth was used by us students as we were directed by our professor to experience the seasons of life in our bodies. The cloth was flung outward by energetic hands and arms in spring, used more provocatively in summer, assumed more stately uses in fall, and at last became the very source of our waning energy as we wrapped it around ourselves in winter. With Riot Youth, I did not have the time for such explorations. Instead I turned the participants loose, first to explore all possible uses of their cloths (used bedsheets we harvested from a thrift shop and frantically laundered the night before, the washing machine sliding off balance and thumping from the basement); and then to use in building up the character that had written, or might have written, their piece. Once the cloth work brought that character into focus (many were bound up in or covered with their cloths), each character had to choose favorite text from what that participant had written. Did they like the whole piece? Or just one sentence or phrase? Or just one sound? Did they wish to improvise off the piece? Or paraphrase it? Or disagree with it entirely?

At this point, my plan was to discard the cloths and have the young people move to randomly selected props (also harvested at the thrift shop, these ranged from a hair dryer to a nutcracker to a toy hard hat and were huge fun to pick out). They would deliver their chosen text and employ the prop. (One step too many in here, I know, but everyone was game and cooperative and creative.) Many, however, had made their cloths a part of them or turned them into something, another character in their evolving piece, perhaps. So I gave the option of keeping the cloth and adding the additional prop, or discarding the cloth and using the prop alone. Almost all kept the cloth, and all used it in different ways in their (semi-) finished pieces.

We made other adjustments as we went, too. Some moved through one stage or another of the workshop rapidly. Others lingered over certain stages. One young man began performing his piece long before I gave the formal direction for performances to begin. His performance continued quietly, all the way to the end of all the others. He had chosen the hair dryer, and he lay on the floor, arms out, Christ-like, the cord placed around his neck (loosely) and plugged into the wall. When finally he unplugged it, when everyone else had performed their pieces, that signalled the end of his performance.

One young woman made a bear den of her cloth and made a point of discarding her previously written text as "litter." (Litter...literature...more than coincidence?)

A young man repeated "I'm gay" as he shed his cloth and a pair of sunglasses he had taken from the prop table. With these encumbrances removed he repeated "I'm gay" one last time, while holding his arms up and making muscles.

The list maker rang a set of chimes as she read items randomly from her list. (Thus, a request to perform her piece a second time elicited a different list; a request for a third run through elicited yet another.)

One young woman asked someone to take the mop she had chosen (no handle; just strings and strings and strings) and tie up her wrists with it. This image made me want to see scary and powerful things from her, so when her first recitation came out simply and quickly, I began directing her to elicit more struggle and emotion. I pointed out to the group that I was now not just facilitating or requesting a repetition in order to see what might happen. I was guiding and "improving"  as a director does. The young woman gamely went through five iterations of her piece, the struggle against the tied mop strings becoming fiercer and fiercer, her vocal shifts more defined, and her tendency to look at me for approval at the end diminished.

I wish I had room to describe everyone's piece, but I can speak for everyone when I say the explorations were creative, brave, and unexpected, and that everyone took full ownership of the exercises and of their pieces. It was also sobering how many of the pieces, as you can gather from the descriptions above, involved images of binding, confining, and hiding. (I should mention that all of this was portrayed safely. No materials or props or activities posed any hazard, and all youth were under adult supervision at all times.)

So they are cooking and creating in Ann Arbor! They are supporting one another and they are putting themselves out there. You let them say it, and they will. You let them do it and they will do it and they will think up the next thing to do and they will do that, too.

Look for them on pages and stages near you in the years to come.

Just some pictures of Atlanta

Who is a Gay Author? What is a Gay Book?

This the topic Christopher Bram and I will discuss at my reading/signing at Barnes and Noble next week (Weds. 11/3 at 7:00 p.m., store at 82nd and B'way; for complete info please look here). The character of Bob the Book is, after all, a gay book, born out of the old joke, "A gay book is a book that is attracted to other books of the same gender" - a joke Chris says gay writers make out of anxiety over the whole issue of being pigeonholed. You want to think your writing is for the widest possible audience. Chris's definition for a gay book is a book written by, for, and about gay men. He then immediately points out that the prepositions here are slippery, especially "for." All this happens, by the way, in Chris's excellent nonfiction collection Mapping the Territory, a consideration of gay life and letters that will teach you much about reading, writing, perception, community, and relationships. You can check out "Mapping" here, and of course check out "Bob the Book" here.

Until my preliminary discussion last night with Chris, I would have said a gay book is a book that it could only possibly be of interest to gay men or women. Theroretically, gay literary writing can and should be of interest to everyone, so the definition above would have to narrow the field of what writing is really and truly "gay" down to gay erotica. But, though neither is terribly explicit, the M/M and yaoi genres open the door to somewhat eroticized gay romance that is, in the first case, written by straight women, presumably for at least some other straight women; and in the second case, consumed by tweener girls, primarily in Japan. (I have seen some yaoi animations on YouTube that were quite compelling. A thesis could be written - and I am sure some have - on what 13-year-old Japanese girls are getting from seeing slightly older Japanese boys in the throes of physical love. There are also these things called yaoi paddles that the girls go around whacking each other with. No, really. Sometimes they get out of control and whack people outside their circle.)

So that leaves flat-out porn. With some odd exceptions, hard-core gay porn should be the one kind of "gay book" of interest exclusively to gay men. Everything else should be up for grabs. Unfortunately it is not. Some straight male friends of mine have read Bob the Book. But Bob, being a book, is sexually nonthreatening. More on my straight male friends' reaction soon.

Scary art and how to make it

The title of this post is misleading. But then, "A stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden" would also have been misleading. Their Botanical Garden, or any botanical garden, is a place for both tourists and locals to escape the reality of a place. In this case, the reality of Atlanta as a city belonging to its African American citizens, who look as though they have not taken possession of it yet but are waiting - tired, angry or bored - for the great come-and-get-it day when they will. My favorite site was the King Memorial and birthplace, located in golden lit, still scruffy Sweet Auburn. If you go, be sure to walk from the MARTA train. Be sure to pass through dilapidated neighborhoods where poor African Americans watch you, the privileged white tourist, on your way to pay homage to the Great Man. Their Great Man. But more on down-at-the heels Atlanta later.

For now, we are in the spiffy, lush, quiet, clean and orderly Botanic Garden, looking not at orchids (they have the biggest collection in the world, but at the messy, ragtag Halloween sculptures of Atlanta children, nestled in the bushes. Some, pictured here, are quite gripping and scary, more so than anything made by the professional artists also engaged for this seasonal show. The adults, the pros are studied and deliberate in their effects, the children random in ways that are much more celebratory and much more unnerving. How? You can not study to be unstudied. One scarecrow figure, created by a Cub Scout troop, wears a ball of feathers and other unidentifiable amulets on its chest, a proud, defiant display of masculinity that I find enthralling, together with the scarecrow's tattered head, built on a gallon plastic milk jug. The scarecrow's fatigue pants have assertive airplane silhouettes on them. Did the young artists know what they were doing? They certainly did not know the effect they were having on me. Still less did the preschoolers whose bluntly, randomly detailed brown bunny I also find disturbing. What rules did they follow? What rules do they know, even at that age?

Maybe Halloween is the best - maybe only - holiday for kid art. Because they are allowed to make it pure id. Bad behavior. You can't do that to Santa, but you are supposed to do that to skeletons and scare crows. That is why they exist. On the one holiday that is the child's portal to making real, true, scary art.

Death

In the Quaker meetinghouse a blank, pointless, purposeless wall rises and curves out, appearing to separate from the western wall behind it, cresting like a frozen wave, and across its blankness are projected squares of moving light, faint or glaring depending on the season and the hour, sliding slowly down and disappearing. "Death, like an overflowing stream," the Puritans sang, "Sweeps us away; our life's a dream." How much longer? When I open my eyes the wall is blank, the light gone. How much longer? When I open them again the light has changed. A square of sun blazes in an upper window, but the wall is still blank. The most joyous, affirming moment of the hour was when we pressed our shoulders gently together. And they stayed that way several minutes before we separated.

All That Jazz

I was gut punched by this "It Gets Better" video created by members of the current Broadway cast of Chicago. It is supposed to encourage young gay women and men (and other misfits) having a rough time of it, but the stories of bullying, one after another, eight minutes of them, are immensely sad. The fact that the protagonists all ended up on Broadway - plus some with relationships and one with a child - seems beside the point, of little comfort. The service this video performs is that, as the stories pile up, you feel the hopelessness, you understand why suicide would seem like a relief. (Sad music in the background was no help. It's Chicago for Heaven's sake; I kept wanting to hear the opening vamp from the show, building up to a rousing chorus of, "Oh, I'm no one's wife, and oh, I love my life!") As well as these people's lives have turned out, one sees in their faces that you never get over it. The Ambassador Theater is just a better class of refuge, not a winner's circle.

After this I watched a similar, shorter video by the cast of the national tour of "Wicked," which video is also peppier, sexier, and more fun. And it affected me much less. No one seemed permanently scarred. And I like permanently scarred. I think John Kander and Fred Ebb, the creators of Chicago, like permanently scarred. (I think of the late Fred Ebb in the present tense.) Think about it: they also created Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman and the brand new Scottsboro Boys. Their specialty is making permanently scarred sing. Certainly Bob Fosse, Chicago's original director/choreographer, liked permanently scarred. He made permanently scarred dance. He splashed permanently scarred across movie screens. Lenny Bruce reading court transcripts to a dwindling, hostile audience in Lenny. The graphic death of a Playboy bunny in Star 80. (Yes, I liked that film.) I once heard a Russian theater director tell of a meeting of Russian actors at which salaries were at stake. "How much," one actress demanded, "are our wounds worth?"

From a friend

My high school friend Kim was inspired by Bob to write me the following. Kim and I served on the board of the school literary magazine. Her thoughtfulness and erudition were always appreciated then. And they still are.

"I feel a bond with your book premise -- I work third shift at a college library, where one of my nightly routines is to prepare/pack books for morning shipment for an interlibrary lending consortium the school belongs to. I have a tendency to "anthropomorphize" my charges (strange things happen to the mind when you're working alone on the third shift). I package them carefully (of course) so that they don't become bruised (bent, torn or mutilated) in transit, but beyond that I like to imagine I'm preparing them for a grand expedition.

"Sometimes books that belong to our library get misshelved at the borrowing library and remain on the borrower's shelves for months, even years. I correspond with the partners in the exchange program to follow up on missing books, and when they apologize for misshelving/misplacing a book, I absolve them by inventing stories about the books taking a vacation to visit their friends or taking a sabbatical to do research at the other library. It's exciting to know that you have spent so much time thinking about the secret life of books. I wish you and Bob the Book much success.

First review!

Buy Bob here!

"Bob Comes Out"

So this blog was created to talk about “Bob the Book,” possibly the only gay anthropomorphized book novel ever written, so I guess I had better write about it. Last night at the Cornelia Street Café was our – Bob’s, my, Jim’s, Rogerio’s – first reading, although I was the lone soul up there, feeling very strange, like I couldn’t take up too much of people’s time and attention. The audience was wonderful – small, as I am steering as many as possible toward the B&N reading on November 3, but full of people who mean a lot to me. Two comrades were there from the days when my LGBT reading group, Three Hots and a Cot, used to hold readings downstairs at Cornelia Street. The downstairs space has been spruced up quite a bit since then, with coordinated saturated colors, mirrors, anti-wobble tables, etc., and new theater lights. Also on hand were Rosemarie and Marlene, both thanked in my acknowledgments for being at pretty much every reading and performance ever (and in Roe’s case in some of them), old friends I hadn’t seen in maybe 16-17 years, a friend from grad school who hauled ass in from Edison…well, you don’t need to hear me enumerate my friends. What’s important is that, on an occasion such as this, one understands what true friendship is, and what friends will do for you, what they WANT to do for you, because it’s like doing it for themselves, too. Plenty of perfectly true friends missed, too, because sometimes that happens, and others, as I said, are being steered to later readings. So it’s true of many people who keep clicking “like” to FB posts and coming through wind and rain to hear me and their other friends read, play, act, and so on.

Coming home, we saw the supposedly pink lights strung on the George Washington Bridge. They really look more lavender because they are bluish with pink gels. Though they are really meant to be for Breast Cancer Awareness, we could not help but think of their appropriateness as a memorial to the Rutgers student who jumped last week.

But first this note from my conscience

I created this blog in part so that I could tour others’ blogs in support of my novel, “Bob the Book.” And I will get to “Bob.” (I’m no fool. Marketing trumps everything.) But in creating the blog I called myself “Man Above Bridge” – that is, man living on 189^th Street in Manhattan, above the George Washington Bridge – and so I was inescapably reminded, as if need be, that two days before my book was to be published, an eighteen-year-old boy jumped off that same bridge because two classmates exposed his sexuality on YouTube.

“This wouldn’t have happened without YouTube.” Please. Lacking YouTube, those classmates would have found another way. We used to bully in person. Yes, “we.” I have been bullied and I, in turn, have bullied others weaker than I. I have been victim and perpetrator. This does not excuse me, but it is interesting: had I been bullied because I was short or disabled or had an accent, I might not have turned so fast on those who were weaker. But I was bullied over my sexuality and that terrified me. I had to defend myself immediately and vigorously, to lash out in order to survive psychically. And I did. A fat, pink, lisping rabbi’s son paid the price. But that is still not the full story. The rabbi’s son and I were also sort of friends. I liked him. Sort of. We had things in common. He was smart. But given that I had a more masculine, athletic friend from Boston, a boy I could never be like, the boy I actually was like lost out. Got pushed up against a wall. Got verbally harassed, by me, when he had done nothing to deserve it.

At any rate, YouTube, my ass.

I am also impatient with cries of “All this bullying has to stop!” Yes, it does, but the people crying out across the Web and the cable channels are mostly focusing, as they usually do, on the actual bullies that posted the actual video. One grand act of bullying does not a suicide make. It takes years – years of put-downs, years of being excluded, years of remarks by people who “didn’t mean anything by it,” years of remarks by people who did, years of ads and TV shows and movies, years of being ignored. Let’s focus on that last one. Maybe, like my parents, the dead boy’s parents were proud of having a rule: “We never, ever ask about our kids’ personal lives.” Maybe like my mother they thought that, “Anyone who did well in school was all set.” (She had not done well, a victim first of being skipped ahead twice and then of diphtheria.) But whatever the reason, dozens of adults decided dozens of times not to talk to this boy, not to get to know him, not to ask anything. It is true, this happened within the first month of school; even the most conscientious RA might not have had the hours in a day to get around to this boy, though no doubt RAs can be taught to recognize at-risk freshmen and keep an eye on them from day one. But there is a contradiction here: those who become RAs are those who are extraordinarily capable socially. They are good not just with some kinds of people, but with all kinds. (So my college dean told me when I was eliminated from being an RA in the first round. No bitterness here: I should have been eliminated; I wanted it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to be liked and looked up to and to be considered special in someone’s life; things would have gone better if I had just wanted it to put on my law school application). So does the typically mature, capable, outgoing RA personality really understand that personalities like the Rutgers suicide really, actually exist? Can they begin to identify with them? Can they ever like them? Mostly, the socially talented wish the socially untalented would just go away, the way the intelligent wish the not-so-intelligent would go away, the way the white wish the black would go away and the rich wish the poor would go away.

And the Rutgers boy did go away, just as everyone wished.