City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (20 page)

Patrick Merla, my assistant at
Saturday Review
had suggested me as a co-author of
The Joy of Gay Sex
. To my surprise I discovered that my co-author was my own therapist, Dr. Charles Silverstein. He said that I could be his collaborator or his patient but not both, so I chose collaborator. We had just three or four months to turn out the book. I remember working so hard that I never had time actually to have sex. I would be describing Anal or Oral Sex and would get so excited but would have no time for anything but Masturbation.

We were a good team. Charles, who’d come out late and moved directly into an affair, then another, knew little about the apparatus of gay life, which I was an expert on, though one of his sidelines was sex therapy (cures for impotence and retarded or premature ejaculation), and he brought that to the table as well as a warm, reassuring personality. I was still cynical and cold from having endured my early years of gay life before the era of self-acceptance. If it had been up to me, the book would have been called
The Bleakness of Gay Sex
. Charles introduced the right note of physical closeness and emotional intimacy.

For the longest time I thought being gay was a sort of scandal. It seemed deeply unnatural, not only because it did not make babies but also because it seemed to violate anatomical design. Worse, no man had been brought up to take charge at the office but surrender in bed. In the days when I’d gone out with women, everything had seemed easier, more familiar, more reassuring—but, perhaps, too often sickeningly so. In college I’d dated a woman who adored me so much that I found myself preening, glowing with self-satisfaction. I
thought that gay life, by contrast, toughened me up for this Spartan, competitive, dangerous activity of being a New York writer.

During the 1970s I began to question many of the basic assumptions of our culture. We now saw that for the thousand-year period before Christ the pagan world had accepted boy love as a viable alternative. In the classical world numerous debates, which in their written form ran to hundreds of pages, had argued the relative merits of heterosexuality and pederasty, with the pederasts usually winning. K. J. Dover, a professor of Greek at St. Andrews who happened to be heterosexual, published in 1978 a careful study of all the actual sex practices and romantic conventions between two males in ancient Greece. Such works, and later Foucault’s
History of Sexuality
, provided both a long pedigree for male-male sex and dramatic evidence of how much homosexuality differed from epoch to epoch. If there was nothing exclusively natural about heterosexuality, there were also different “homosexualities,” not one homosexuality. This discussion lay at the heart of one of the major culture wars of the 1970s, between essentialists (who thought homosexuality was the same no matter when or where it appeared) and the social constructionists (who thought Alcibiades’ homosexuality bore no resemblance to Michelangelo’s and that his bore no resemblance to mine). Of course you could be a bit of both and claim, as I would, that the rules of homosexuality might be determined by your society (active or passive roles governed by age, bisexuality permitted or not, anal or “intercrural” penetration preferred, same-sex marriage legalized or not), but that the overpowering attraction to a member of the same sex despite rigorous taboos in certain cultures might actually be innate and biologically determined.

These debates that “naturalized” homosexuality (or that at least showed it was omnipresent, eternal) were backed up by new biological studies of homosexuality throughout the animal
kingdom and new ethnological studies of homosexuality in other cultures. At this time I was beginning to read Foucault. His central idea had a liberating effect on me: that we are all—philosophers, children, and chemical engineers alike—constricted as to what we can think by the prevailing discourses of our period. As he put it, “We cannot think no matter what no matter when” (
On ne peut pas penser n’importe quoi n’importe quand
). Like me (and it sounds absurdly pretentious to put it that way), Foucault was a positivist who rejected metaphysics and all grand spiritual generalities à la Heidegger or class conspiracies à la Marx. Foucault disliked all general principles and held out for particularities, though he did recognize that at each historical moment people could think only certain thoughts and not others—and that these restrictions applied to the entire population. According to Foucault, no one was immune to the subduing power of discourse.

I felt that in the case of homosexuality no one before 1969 had been able to think of homosexuals as something like a minority group. Before that date there were many competing theories, all dismissive, and in the beginning of
Cities of the Plain
(
Sodome et Gomorrhe
), Proust presents at least five etiologies, many of them contradictory. He is obviously caught up in a delirium of theorizing. All other books touching on homosexuality then and later (from André Gide’s
Corydon
to James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
) cannot resist subscribing to a theory; indeed, they seem obliged to theorize. One sign of post-Stonewall liberation is that all this scaffolding of theory has fallen away; now no one friendly to homosexuality feels he or she must explain it, any more than a thinker or writer is forced to explain heterosexuality. Novels and plays treating homosexuality as a theme no longer indulge in presenting the characters’ etiology. Now characters are simply shown inhabiting their difference.

None of these ideas was racing through my head when I coauthored
The Joy of Gay Sex
, but Charles and I had certainly
been influenced by all the intellectual activity bubbling through the Gay Academic Union. What we discovered in working on our book (aimed at an inexperienced young or old man living in the provinces, far from centers of gay sophistication) was that whereas sexual technique and the divide between male and female cultures were the primary problems for heterosexuals, in gay life your partner’s body was no more a mystery than his priorities and patterns of communication. No, the problem was gay life itself—coming out, dealing with religious prejudice, coping with the straight world of employment or with the problems of friendship, housing, and family, and handling such thorny practical and legal problems as how to leave your property to a gay lover. Then there were the lifestyle questions (cruising, “marriage,” fidelity or open relationships, role-playing).

My own problems in dealing with being gay were crippling—I’d devoted decades in therapy to coping with them and as a teenager had often been suicidal. But in our sex manual I decided to take a jaunty, relaxed tone, to “act ahead of my emotions,” as a friend undergoing therapy put it. That I’d turned away from straight therapists trying to cure me to Charles Silverstein, an openly gay man, revealed that even I had been shaped by the new intellectual and cultural currents before I began working on
The Joy of Gay Sex
.

One of the ironies of writing about such a highly charged subject was that when the book came out, we were criticized within the gay community for being too conservative, for warning people, for instance, against such potentially damaging and outré practices as fist-fucking, whereas just four years later, when AIDS appeared in 1981, we were accused by that community of having been unalarmed by promiscuity. The idea that we’d erred somehow in not foreseeing an unprecedented disease no scientist in the world had predicted strikes me as bizarre and unfair. The publisher certainly made a mistake, however, in not withdrawing the book
immediately and replacing it with an AIDS-conscious edition. It took several years before the book was revised.

I was never quite sure how I felt about having coauthored
The Joy of Gay Sex
. I discovered that having a “bankable” book made me more attractive to publishers, but its sexual nature turned my name into a bit of a joke. That such a book now existed—and as a companion to the bestselling
The Joy of Sex
—caused it to count as a liberating publication, and in certain circles I seemed to be striking a blow for gay freedom. Amazingly, no one tried to ban it except in a province of Canada where a lady had thought she was buying
The Joy of Cooking
and was so horrified by what she found under “chicken” that she convinced the local bookshops to withdraw it from their shelves, a form of de facto censorship that the Candian version of the ACLU instantly and effectively opposed.

Chapter 11

David Kalstone invited me to join him one summer in Venice—then another, then another, on and on for several years. Stan and I had visited Venice that first time, but I hadn’t gone back in ten years. David introduced me to his Italian summer world, which was
dolce
and
soave
and
raffinato
. Funded with a few thousand dollars here and there by the Merrill Foundation, I was able to afford my flight and pocket money, but David paid the rent and financed the major treats, such as dinner once a season at Harry’s Bar and a day beside the Cipriani pool once every week or two. At the pool everyone was so old that Gore Vidal had reputedly referred to it as Lourdes. It was there that Marguerite Littman (an American socialite and AIDS fund-raiser in London whom I interviewed years later) said to Tennessee Williams as they looked at a cadaverous girl shambling past in her bikini, “Look, anorexia nervosa!” to which Williams replied, “Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone.”

At Harry’s Bar the waiters were like characters in Goldoni’s
The Servant of Two Masters
, whirling chairs through the air and posing them beside an already crowded table or catching plates of pasta hurled out of the kitchen and rushing them upstairs (social hell) or to the backroom on the main floor (purgatory) or to the front room (heaven). There in heaven we’d see, sitting by the front door
every time, a couple of elderly gay men from Kansas who came bedizened with their heavy gold necklaces (David called them “the chain gang”). They never spoke to anyone or to each other, but just sat there at the price of hundreds of dollars an hour absorbing old-fashioned gin martinis and looking on at each arrival and departure with all the attention they’d lavish on pigeons in San Marco. There we once saw Lady Diana Cooper, ancient but with startling sapphire eyes (David would have marked the word
sapphire
in my manuscript and then written in the margin, “The sin of aristocratic admiration,” which he considered a failure of taste as much as a breach in style). She and her husband, Duff Cooper, the British ambassador, had been the social leaders of postwar Paris. During the winter she lived alone in London in “Little Venice,” mostly bedridden, and there she would receive the Queen Mother for tea.

Those first two summers David lived on a
rio
between the Salute and the Guggenheim Museum across from the Da Cici
pensione
. Twice we saw Ezra Pound just before he died in 1972 with the violinist Olga Rudge walking slowly along. Pound no longer chose to speak, though he could. He was small and frail and carefully dressed and had a white beard and a cane. This is the man, I thought, who’d described his virulent anti-Semitism during the war years to Allen Ginsberg in the 1960s as “that suburban vice.” This was the man who’d invented Chinese poetry for our time and culture. Who’d been locked in a cage by the American army and been befriended by a black soldier and written about it in
The Pisan Cantos
. Who’d translated Egyptian poetry and troubadour poetry and parts of the Confucian Analects, launched vorticism in the plastic arts and imagism in poetry, drastically cut and rearranged
The Waste Land
for T. S. Eliot, written an opera (both words and music), written the
ABC of Reading
, and had made such an impression on me since my adolescence, and whose poetry struck me as faultless if daunting. Accompanying Richard Howard to
Princeton once for a class he was teaching, I’d heard him say to his students that the two poets in English with the best “ear” were Herbert and Pound.

David, from the early 1970s up until 1985 (the year before his death), mounted a campaign to conquer Venetian society. As a goal for any other person, he would have laughed at that idea—since he was the first to recognize how vapid Venice could be. He often said, “Venice is as intellectually distinguished as Akron, Ohio.” But if it was small and closed, that made it all the more interesting to the novelist in David. For he had always wanted to write a novel and now began one that opened with a Harvard-educated professor at last getting a job back at his alma mater. He bends down and kisses the ground in Cambridge—or did he put lipstick on so that he could leave the imprint of a kiss on a window? I forget which, but the kiss seems a safe bet.

Though David lived in New York and worshipped the New York City Ballet, I think the city otherwise failed to stimulate his imagination. Manhattan was too big, too kicked-out—historical, yes, but all the evidence of its past worn down and built over and nearly erased. In Venice, by contrast, people bore historic names and lived in historic family palaces that in their way were in perfect repair. Behind the water gates of a palace could be seen the old wooden hood (the
felze
) of a gondola, an intricately carved fitting that protected the family from prying eyes or, in the winter, from icy winds. In the grand
salotto
were the ceilings by Tiepolo, and there, sitting around in gilded chairs in the dim light, were descendants of the very people pictured in the nineteenth-century watercolors in the hallway—ancestors at receptions in these rooms that were the same then as now. Here the pink marble floors were cracked and tilting, the plaster putti slightly grayed and missing a wing or a finger, but the same luminous and elevated luxury everywhere.

Most of David’s conquests were effected at the Cipriani pool. One would get into a boat just next to Harry’s Bar and a few moments later have been sped past San Giorgio and deposited at the hotel, then helped out by the uniformed arm of a young, golden-haired demigod. Led by one of the
bagnini
to a chaise longue by the pool, one would then enter the changing rooms and put on a swimsuit. This was the realm of wens and warts, of bellies and sagging tits—all outfitted in bathing costumes by Hermès or Valentino, and all cosseted on wonderfully upholstered deck lounge chairs with crisp white piping, and supplied with abundant white towels the size of bedsheets. At the shallow end was Patricia Curtis, standing in the water but resting her hands, heavy with family diamonds, on the poolside. Her family had been living in the Palazzo Barbaro for a hundred years, ever since an ancestor had quarreled with someone back home in Boston and in a rage moved his wife and children to Venice. Here they had played host to Henry James and John Singer Sargent and scores of other American visitors and expatriates. Now Patricia was watching her eccentric, fairly mad brother oversee the family’s loss of the palace; her son scarcely spoke English and handled the transfer of luggage from the Orient Express to the various five-star hotels in Venice.