City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (37 page)

What their attacks on the phone revealed was the extent to which they assumed I was their puppet in the Bunraku theater of their careers. They were supposed to do all the talking, as in Bunraku, while I was busy gesticulating and bowing and striking their enemies with a sword.

I attended a few sessions of a class Susan taught at the New School on Nietzsche. She did no preparation, didn’t speak from notes, and seemed incapable of serious or trenchant or original reflection. I suppose she felt a certain contempt for the class, which was full of “nobodies” whose opinion didn’t count. I had no doubt that if she wrote an essay on Nietzsche it would be the best imaginable. She once said to me, “Have you ever wondered why my essays are so much more intelligent than I am? That’s because I rewrite them five times and each time I ratchet them up a bit higher. I surpass my own limitations.”

I appreciated her frankness in discussing in a simple way her limitations and amazing strengths. I also admired her acuity in knowing what constituted an improvement.

I once attended a lecture she gave in Paris. I was amazed by how fluent she was in French. She explained to me that she had never studied or practiced French, that she listened to it for years, then suddenly, one day, she opened her mouth and could speak it. Whether true or not—and she was gifted enough in all sorts of ways for it to be a true story—this fable—for to me that’s what it seems like—represents the world according to Susan.

During that lecture I was seated next to a friend of Susan’s, with whom I started chatting. She had a similar tale of language learning. She was Italian but spoke idiomatic American English. When I asked her where she’d learned her English, she said, “In Katherine Dunham’s attic in East St. Louis.” It seemed she’d fallen in love with the great African-American dancer during a performance in Naples. She was just a teen but was completely smitten and followed the Dunham company to Rome. Every night she stood outside the stage door until finally Dunham took pity on her. The girl traveled with them throughout Europe and eventually returned with them to East St. Louis, where Dunham had established a dance center for “ghetto artists” and taught at the nearby University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale. During the summer of 1968, blacks began to riot in a resurgence of an uprising that had started the year before. The Italian girl hid in the attic for weeks with Dunham’s white husband, the set designer John Pratt. Both of them were in danger, she said, because of the color of their skin. In that confined space she mastered her perfect American.

The woman was jolly and voluble, and although I never saw her again and hadn’t caught her name, I was so riveted by her story that I remembered it in great detail. She was one of Susan’s lesbian friends.

Susan could be sweet and melancholy. She was often “out of it” in social settings, never getting the joke and needing everything to be spelled out. Her laugh was mirthless and heavy. She lacked
spontaneity.
Elle n’était pas bien dans sa peau
, as the French would say. One of her girlfriends in the 1950s talks in a journal of the period about how maddening the young Susan could be, lecturing her on Hieronymus Bosch, manufacturing enthusiasms at the flea market, throwing her big, awkward body at her. Susan could be little-girlish and tender at times, though normally she was brusque, lordly, dissatisfied. Someone who might have been trying too hard would walk out of the room and Susan would wrinkle her nose and shake her head dismissively.

She should have been given the Nobel Prize. That would have made her nicer. She was friendly with lots of Nobelists, including Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Derek Wolcott, Czesław Miłosz, all writers I met through her—not to mention her personal favorite to win, the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš, who wrote
Garden, Ashes
. Danilo should have won the prize and would indeed probably have if he hadn’t died rather young from lung cancer. (Susan would die too young as well.) Around all these people Susan was wonderfully natural, and they perceived her as their equal, even their superior.

She had terrible manners. She picked her teeth after dinner. She yawned and looked almost haggard with boredom when ordinary people bothered her with their defensive chatter. She wanted to be one of the big boys but I don’t think she really liked men. That had never occurred to me at the beginning but slowly I came to realize that she was the counterpart to an old-style gay man who didn’t feel comfortable with women. She once said late in life that she only liked young, beautiful men, who were unavailable to older women, but I suspect she was deluding herself. She would have preferred an ugly, gifted, aggressive woman to a pretty boy. She did befriend her Italian translator, who was younger than her son, not handsome but wonderfully winning. He was also, of course, very smart.

AIDS first started to be mentioned in 1981. No one had ever heard of it before then. Larry Kramer, a screenwriter and producer
(
Women in Love
) and novelist (
Faggots
), convened a meeting of gay men in his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square. We were addressed by Dr. Friedman Keene, who’d studied several cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that usually appeared in old men of Jewish or Mediterranean origin. Suddenly it was showing up in young gay men, as was an unusual and virulent form of pneumonia. Soon this new cluster of diseases was being called gay-related immunodeficiency or GRID.

Larry invited five or six other men, including me, to discuss forming an offensive against GRID (which a year later was renamed AIDS, since we quickly discovered that gays were only one of several “at-risk” groups). We decided to call our group the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. We wanted through the name to make it clear that this was not a lesbian condition, since we’d all had so many tussles with lesbians during the culture wars of the 1970s (though later in the 1980s, as many gay male activists were dying, lesbians came to play a larger leadership role in the movement thanks to their generous feelings of solidarity with gay men). We wanted to emphasize that it was a “crisis” and not a permanent condition, since gays were not eager to be equated with yet another medical diagnosis.

We were naïve, but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague. Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone before.

Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien said to us that he thought we should give up sex altogether until researchers understood a little more about how the disease was transmitted. We looked at him as if he were mad. Just as the Crash of 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties, so the AIDS epidemic of 1981 ended the sexy seventies. Sontag once said to me that in all of human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted—between 1960, with the introduction of the first birth-control pills, and 1981, with
the advent of AIDS. For those two decades all sexually transmitted diseases could be treated with antibiotics, unwanted pregnancies were eliminated through the pill and legalized abortion, and AIDS did not yet exist. Religion seemed to be on the wane and promiscuity appeared to be the wave of the future.

In 1981 all that came to an end. Gays of my generation were especially unprepared to accept the new reality since for us, as I’ve mentioned before, gay liberation had meant sexual liberation and gay culture still meant sexual access and abundance. Now we were being told to limit the number of our partners, to know our partners’ names, or to abstain from sex altogether. Later we were told to suck not fuck, but even so the definition of safe sex was highly unstable, and to this day, almost thirty years into AIDS, no one seems certain exactly which practices are safe or unsafe.

Sontag followed the developments carefully and soon began to see that the demonizing of the gay population because of AIDS was not unlike the previous blaming of patients with tuberculosis and syphilis in the nineteenth century or cancer in our own day. She thought that she might add an appendix about AIDS to
Illness as Metaphor
, her 1978 study. Charles Silverstein and I thought that our influential
The Joy of Gay Sex
should be revised to include warnings about AIDS, but with still so little information about it, no one knew how to frame that cautionary advice. The revision did not come out until several years later. My own 1980
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
read like a period piece just two years after it was published. The cheerful promiscuity and the civil rights struggles I’d described had all been discarded or eclipsed by the sudden, unexplained appearance of a virus.

I was the first president of GMHC, though I quickly retired in favor of Paul Popham, an attractive macho businessman who was far more competent. Almost from the beginning Larry Kramer was sharply critical of the other members, and by 1987 he had founded a
much more militant group called ACT UP. Certainly we all made lots of mistakes. Instead of instantly enlisting the help of the federal government, we organized a disco fund-raiser. We thought small. We thought ghetto. We didn’t understand that we were watching the beginnings of an epidemic that would soon enough infect forty million people worldwide. To be fair, no one else had that sort of apocalyptic prescience any more than we did. Nor was Ronald Reagan even willing to mention the disease by name until years later.

Because we were moralistic Americans, we thought promiscuity was the enemy and fidelity the solution. We were incapable of understanding that it was safer to have safe sex with ten men at the baths than to be faithful to one lover—and to be unsafe with him.

New York didn’t change right away, but a feeling of dread was now in every embrace, the odor of death in every spurt of come. What had seemed innocent revels now felt like the maneuvers of a death squad. What had felt warm and sticky with life was now the cool syrup of mortality. Those gangs of tall men in leather jackets walking joyfully down the street, their engineer boots ringing sparks off the pavement, now broke up, dissipated into the night, melted into furtive individuals. Whereas in the late 1970s everyone wanted to be bisexual, the height of trendiness, now people were starting to deny they’d ever had experiences with members of the same sex. People who’d been fashionably skinny the year before now were beefing up to prove they weren’t besieged by a wasting disease.

I didn’t want the party to stop.
A Boy’s Own Story
came out, with Susan’s blurb, and was a success all over the world and was translated into many languages. Thanks to Susan’s recommendation, I’d won the Guggenheim Fellowship and I moved to Paris in the summer of 1983. David Rieff gave me some sartorial advice. He told me that every man in Paris wore a coat and tie and that I’d have to get rid
of my dirty, torn jeans. David assumed I was leaving New York because I’d become too famous. “You’d never be allowed to write another book if you stayed here, right?” he asked. My concerns were more sybaritic than professional; in any event he exaggerated my success. I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex—and I thought I could go on in Paris. New York was turning into a morgue.

Somebody at the New York Institute for the Humanities found me a furnished apartment on the Île St.-Louis. Soon enough I was taking language classes at the Alliance Française in Paris. I got a part-time job with American
Vogue
writing about cultural life in Paris. The dollar bought ten francs and life in France was cheap. My friend John Purcell had moved with me and was taking courses in interior design at the Paris branch of the Parsons School. I had several French friends—Michel Foucault, Gilles Barbedette (my translator), Ivan Nabokov (my editor), Marie-Claude de Brunhoff (who became my best friend).

I learned French by lying on a couch for two years and looking up every word in a dictionary, sometimes as many as five times before I learned it. After all, I was already forty-three. I shaved off my New York mustache, which no one liked in Paris. I bought lots of suits and coats and ties and overcoats and dress shoes. I met rich and titled ladies through my
Vogue
connections. I had sex after midnight in the little park at the foot of the Île St.-Louis. I started to wear cologne, which would have been anathema in New York. I learned how to kiss a lady’s hand. (Only at a private gathering, never on the street, and you don’t actually touch the hand with your lips.)

I wrote a novel,
Caracole
, that came out in 1985. Although it read like a fable taking place in Venice in the nineteenth century, it could be read as an attack on the institute and on Susan. In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery,
especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me.
A Boy’s Own Story
ends with the boy (me) betraying his teacher, a man with whom he had sex. I doubt if Susan and her son would have recognized themselves or even have bothered to read the book if they hadn’t been warned by an indiscreet mutual friend.

Caracole
was an accurate picture of Susan, but only to those who knew her. For outsiders there were no identifying signs—the character of Mathilda wasn’t a writer nor Jewish nor an intellectual, nor did she have a white streak in her hair. Yet she shared many of Susan’s psychological traits. A typical passage reads:

Mathilda always opposed the people she happened to be among. She would defend whatever was conservative to progressives and argue for liberty on curiously old-fashioned grounds to conservatives: her manner was to challenge, to question. When other people generated enthusiasm while discussing a subject they thought was bound to suit her, she grew restless, squirmed in her chair, looked about with baleful eyes. She picked at something imaginary in her teeth as though she needed this preliminary breach of good manners in order to warm herself up for the real attack she was about to launch. The speaker became nervous, recognizing she wasn’t responding to his words with the customary nods and smiles, that in fact she was grooming herself like a lioness; he broke into a verbal run, hurtling over points, scattering notions, hoping something might appeal to her. At last the lioness focused on him with implacable eyes. “What rubbish,” she said. “I can’t tolerate another word.”