Slut (Affectionately, of Course)

Sometimes my job as an editor gets a little personal. For instance, one phrase I detest is "start a family," when what's meant is "start to have children." Whenever I come across "They wanted to start a family," I either change it to something like "They wanted to have kids" or, if the wording doesn't fit with the tone or I have reason to think the writer could stand to be educated, I'll tell him or her that two people in a relationship are a family—and saying they aren't until they start reproducing devalues not only them but other couples who don't have offspring. So can we please come up with another way of saying this?

Last week, I was copyediting an article—that is, doing a second read after the assigning editor had done the main job. And also after our boss had read it, come to think of it, so two people had signed off on it before me. It was a somewhat irreverent piece about a hairdresser who happens to be openly gay. At one point, the author says the guy "goes through men like Kleenex," according to his gaggle of loyal female customers. 

I first queried the editor, saying I found that phrase unnecessarily judgmental. "So he sleeps around or has lots of boyfriends or whatever," I said. "Does this mean he 'disposes' of them? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Does [the author]—or these women?"

The editor said to ask the writer, which, because she's normally very opinionated and hadn't hesitated to address my other queries about the article, I took to mean either she thought it was a good question but wanted the author to come up with the actual rewording or she considered it a dumb, nitpicky question she didn't have the patience to address. So I asked the author, using pretty much the same words I'd used with my colleague.

The writer replied: "This was actually one of the milder descriptions. Someone else used the term 'slut,' affectionately of course—and just during my time with him, I was on hand to see one relationship go from prepping for third date (the sex date, he reminded me) to crazy love to kaput. But maybe something like: 'His clients say you need a program to keep up with his love life.' "

I forwarded that note to the editor, and since she'd been noncommittal before, I underscored my concern (just in case she was considering leaving it as is): "I still strongly feel—no matter what the women said—that it seems gratuitously judgmental to use the 'like Kleenex' line. So I favor the rewrite, or something like it. If it were a quote, I actually would have no problem, because then it would be specifically attributed to one catty person, but 'his clients say' he goes through them like Kleenex? That's a very specific simile attached to a not-at-all specific group of people."

We decided to change it, with the tweak of "you need a flow chart to keep up with his love life"—my idea since we agreed that "program" was a vague, bland word. I was fine with a vivid description of his love life—it was the shaming attitude that was uncalled for, and downright annoying. 

Do I think many straight people (which my colleague and the writer, a freelancer, are) are often clueless and Puritanical in their perception of casual sex, particularly among gay men? Yes, I do.

Weekend, a really beautiful movie not
unrelated to the subject at hand.

I'm sensitive to this subject because during a particular period in my life when I was single, I had a lot of sex with a lot of men I met online. Sometimes now when I can't fall asleep, instead of counting sheep, I'll count the number of guys I hooked up with between 2003 and 2007. I always come up with a slightly different total, which is what makes it challenging—kind of like a sexual Sudoku. The number is less than my age today, but that's all I'll say. 

I'm determined to settle it definitively one of these days, but for now it varies: In one tally, I'll forget the silver daddy with the pierced navel ("a reminder to keep my belly in shape"), or the guy who lived over the coffee shop I got together with after Thanksgiving dinner with my family, or the very first guy I met on the first night after my ex and I definitively broke up—the liberating encounter that started it all. 

They were almost all, each of them, lovely: courteous, warm, considerate, affectionate men—whether, as in most cases, I never saw them again or, as in others, we had a few assignations. Nothing degrading or dangerous happened once. (Lucky? Maybe. But the majority of people are, I found, basically decent.) 

So yeah, I was having tons of sex. Would that make me a "slut" in the eyes of some skinny horse-country lady with straw-colored hair extensions? Probably. And what about my two coworkers (one female, one male, both straight) who read the hairdresser article before me and didn't pause at the extraneous and irrelevant characterization of a gay man as someone who supposedly treated his sex partners like "Kleenex," based on nothing other than the mostly anecdotal evidence that he had many of them?

I think they'd consider me a slut, too. So I spoke up for all of us. 

One of the Free

Christopher Isherwood

The other day I started listening to an audiobook of Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood. 

Two recent events had put Isherwood at the top of my to-do list (well, three if I go back to last summer when my pal the Total Femme told me of her fondness for his writing; four if I go back to maybe a year and a half ago when D. and I watched Chris & Don: A Love Story, a documentary about Isherwood and his lover Don Bacardi). A couple of months ago, I watched Cabaret for the first time since college and was even more impressed than I was 30 years before (which was a lot). And just last week I finished listening to all nine of Armistead Maupin's terrific Tales of the City books—the original six plus the more recent trilogy he added on in this decade, beginning with 2007's Michael Tolliver Lives. 

I actually read Michael Tolliver a few years ago in book form and enjoyed it. This year when I was recovering from a detached retina and joined Audible.com, the first audiobook I bought was the follow-up to that one: Mary Ann in Autumn (2010). I went on to the final one, The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), then circled back to the very first of the original six, which I'm embarrassed to say I'd never read. By the time I reached the end of those, I had to buy the audio version of Michael Tolliver and listen to what I'd already read on paper, because I now had all the characters' histories in my head that I didn't have the first time around.

At the end of that audiobook is an interview with Maupin in which he states his reverence for Christopher Isherwood (who of course lived openly as a gay man decades before it was widely acceptable), "a charming man who lived totally in the moment . . . . There's not a day that goes by that he doesn't inspire me in some way."

In Christopher and His Kind—a memoir in which Isherwood refers to his younger self as Christopher and uses "I" when looking back from his later vantage point—Isherwood writes of a German lover, Bubi, when he was first living in Berlin in 1929:

When Christopher left for London, Bubi pulled a cheap gold-plated chain bracelet out of his pocket—probably an unwanted gift from some admirer—and fastened it around Christopher's wrist. This delighted Christopher, not only as a love token but also as a badge of his liberation; he still regarded the wearing of jewelry by men as a daring act, and this would be a constant reminder to him that he was now one of the free.

Today as I type, I wear a rather substantial ring on the middle finger of each hand: on my right, a silver signet with my father's initials, of no great value (he didn't even wear it himself) but one he passed on to me years ago, before any of my fingers was even fat enough to fill it; on my left, a midcentury-style ring (or so it was described in the Provincetown shop where I bought it on New Year's Day 2013, having had my eye on it for five years), also silver, with a disk of green onyx surrounded by a thin gold rim—now nicked up from my bike accident six months ago, making it all the more beautiful to me. Hanging from my neck are two small silver baubles on separate chains. Until the accident, I had the thinnest of silver hoops through my right ear, a shiny parenthesis glancing my lobe; they took it out in the hospital and I never got it back. I have a small drawer full of pinkie rings, pendants, bracelets, chains, and more earrings (none of which I like as well as the one I lost). 

For a few years in the '90s, I wore studs in both my ears. It's incredible to me, looking back, that I could have been so bold—I who never had even one ear pierced till I was in my thirties. A student of mine once wrote a description of the writing workshop I taught; I was the unnamed teacher with "a diamond stud in his ear." (A diamond? I don't think so. Calling it cubic zirconium would have been a compliment.) The fact that that was the detail she seemed to notice most about me—the shorthand that sketched me for the world—was flattering and surprising.

I was always envious of my sisters' charm bracelets, jiggling parades marching around their wrists: trinkets, commemorations, gifts, pretty little things. Today I see men—straight and gay—wearing bracelets and wish I could pull that look off. I have as many of the things as Cleopatra but always give up. The rigid bands clink against the desk as I work and get in the way; the link bracelets fall down my skinny arms and halfway over my hands. 

Last month in Provincetown, I wanted to buy one of the tiniest ear studs I'd ever seen—a mere period without a sentence. It was on display with some other "singles" in a window, but I suspected my hole had closed up—something I confirmed when I got back home and tried to push through one of my old posts. I'd have to get it pierced all over again (which would actually be the third time). Maybe someday. 

In the meantime, I wear my rings, and the necklaces peeking from my collar. Constant reminders.

Just Books

Several years ago, I started a book group. This is remarkable because for years I'd resisted the idea of book groups, scoffed at them even: I'm done with English class. Why would I want to discuss the books I read? I want to read them. And everyone says no one really talks about the books in those clubs, it's just a social hour; if I were to join a book group, I'd at least want to talk about the books! (Wait . . . )

Then I found myself both not getting through as many books as I used to and wanting a little more sociability in my life, so I got, as I like to say when something like this happens, a bee in my bonnet. (I need a cool-looking alarm clock, so I get obsessed with alarm-clock shopping. Or it turns 95 degrees and I suddenly need linen shirts—so within 24 hours I have three linen shirts in my closet. My most recent bee: flannel sheets! I ordered them last night.)

I got the idea of hand-picking the members of the book group: a half dozen or so friends who are gay men, and we'd read gay books. Within a few weeks, we were having a potluck planning meeting at my place.

This turned into a very short-lived group. Here's what I remember reading: Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (about an American family with a gay son visiting Israel, which I think I liked well enough but don't recall very much about six years later); The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín (about political intrigue and closetedness in Argentina of the early '80s, which I enjoyed more); The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard (about Edgar Allan Poe; I'd read a couple others of his, including the far superior Mr. Timothy, about Dickens's Tiny Tim as an adult); and the tediously sitcommy My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan (who happens to have been a sitcom writer, on Frasier).

By that time, my enthusiasm was already starting to dissipate. The discussion wasn't of a very high level or even long-lived, and frankly I realized that I wanted to pick all the books, which wasn't fair (I'd chosen only one of the above officially, but I think I exerted more influence, including veto power, than others, who were much more go-with-the-flow-and-pass-the-lasagna). I used the excuse of my parents' seriously failing health as a reason to put the group "on hold," and as excuses go, it was a pretty legitimate one. But I think I realized I'd been right about book groups all along, at least as they pertain to me. They're just not my thing.

I do kind of miss getting together with those guys, though. And I really miss reading as much as I used to, long before the group existed. I don't seem to have the time I once had, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the concentration. I lose patience with books quicker than before; now I often don't finish if I'm not into them. (I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but I rarely gave up on books when I was younger, so it's definitely a change in sense of responsibility.) I don't do Facebook or Twitter and spend very little of my downtime online, so I can't fully explain the shorter attention span. Perhaps it just pervades the culture and even I'm not immune.

A couple weeks ago, I had brunch with my friend C., an avid reader who I think has always considered me an avid reader (we know each other from an erstwhile gay writing group from the early to mid-'90s) because he's always asking me for book recommendations, and I do "present" like an avid reader, even now. Anyway, when I told him what I consider to be the paltry number of books I finished last year, he said, "Yeah, that's pretty bad." Which wasn't what I wanted to hear.

Part of the problem—and this has been going on since I came out of the closet almost 25 years ago (yay, finally this late bloomer can say a big number like "almost 25 years ago"!)—is that, with occasional exceptions, I have little patience with books that don't at least acknowledge that gay people exist. (That pretty much takes care of catching up with landmarks of world literature that I missed over the years, eh?) They just bore me, particularly of course contemporary literature. This stance of mine has holes all over it, I know—some stories simply have nothing to do with gay life through no deliberate avoidance on the author's part—but that doesn't change how I respond in the moment.

Would I have liked, for instance, Mentor: A Memoir (one of the books I forced myself to finish last year because my boss had lent it to me) better if the self-absorbed Frank Conroy suck-up who wrote it had mentioned a gay fellow writing student at Iowa or something? Probably not. (One thing that kept me reading was my memory of being a Frank Conroy admirer myself back in the day; I even met him and had him sign Stop-Time at a reading. Mentor made me thoroughly loathe him—which is actually fine, as I moved on from him years ago.)

Right about here, I was planning to list the books I finished and liked last year and the ones I didn't finish. (Of the latter group, I'll mention only the most surprising, the award-and-praise-laden Just Kids by Patti Smith, who made life in the East Village with Robert Mapplethorpe in the late '60s and early '70s sound positively Victorian; I became very skeptical very quickly.) But I've already gotten bored with that idea.

I did read a few really good books. Maybe that's all that matters.

Smoke, or a Belated Account of a Memory

Occasionally I'll come across the following unfinished vignette among the drafts of blog posts I've never published. I can't even tell when exactly I wrote it, because the date has changed to the most recent time I opened the file. I can say that the events described would have been in 2005 or 2006. 

There's not much to the story other than what you see here. I  just now put an ending of sorts on it. But in actuality it's only a sketch in a longer narrative about a period in my life that I've yet to write—a house with so many doors and windows that I have no idea where to enter. Maybe this is a start.

***

It was just about exactly two years ago that I met a guy online who was doing reconstruction work in Iraq and was in DC for a training session. I guess you could say we had a little fling over the course of his few days here, though the fling was mostly composed of dinners and walks and e-mails commenting on past dinners and walks or setting up the next dinners and walks. Mostly.

Really, we only saw each other on three evenings, not even successive ones, so I'm exaggerating just a touch.

He was an extremely sweet guy with whom I had little in common, except for the wish to be company for someone who obviously was in need of—and appreciative of—that. Okay, maybe I wanted company, too.

He had been in Iraq for a year or so and had just signed up for another. He wasn't in the military, though he looked as if he could have been. (He got his hair cut by the military barbers.) He did administrative work—training Iraqi businesses owners in accounting, in which he had a degree. I'm pretty certain he was a Republican, though we both tried to avoid the topic of politics, and largely succeeded.

On our last night together, we went to his hotel room and he spent an hour or more showing me pictures of himself, his coworkers, and sights in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East—that bleak, ravaged, armored landscape we see in the paper and online every day. It was fascinating, and kind of unreal, to be looking at someone's computer and clicking through pictures he'd taken in a war zone. He had ridden down Baghdad's infamously violent Airport Road, which I read about again in yesterday's paper.

He had virtually no social life over there. I asked how the military crowd he worked and ate meals with was with his being gay, and he said they were cool, it wasn't much of an issue. I now think he probably wasn't out at all in his workplace.

With the passage of time, I've also started to suspect he might have been in the CIA.

The next morning, we exchanged e-mail addresses—it was a Monday, and I had to call work to say I hadn't slept well and would be late. I walked home from his hotel thinking we'd stay in touch, that maybe I'd be one of his few contacts with gay life for the rest of his time in the Middle East. My lips were raw—that I remember well. 

I e-mailed him right away to thank him, and at least once more after he would have been back in Iraq. He never replied.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Linda Ronstadt

I

Los Angeles Times

I've never seen her in person. Unlike other musical acts I've been anywhere from interested in to borderline obsessed with over the years—Fleetwood Mac, Carly Simon, Emmylou Harris, Judy Collins, Iris Dement, Peter, Paul and
Mary, even Bruce Springsteen (whom I feel lucky have seen once in my life—35 years ago, and he was filling stadiums then!)—the opportunity has never been right and/or has rarely presented itself to see Linda.

It could have happened just a week ago when she was in Washington for the National Book Festival, plugging her new memoir—on my birthday no less—but D. and I went to Philadelphia for the day to have dinner at one of my favorite restaurants. Another chance, perhaps the last, missed.

II
I did buy her book, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, and devoured it in a little more than a day. It's amazingly well written, if highly selective and a little imbalanced—a long, vivid, and transporting chapter on her childhood in Tucson followed by chapters of varying lengths tracking her career, dwelling on landmarks like the making of her breakthrough album, Heart Like a Wheel, and virtually skipping over some others, such as my all-time favorite of hers, Hasten Down the Wind.

III

Ansel Adams

"The place where I grew up bore no resemblance whatsoever to the pictures in the little books I read as a child. I wondered what kind of a place would have such an abundance of lollipop trees and lush green meadows that didn't even have to be watered with a hose. Instead, we had the giant cacti known as saguaros. These enormous plant beings (I can think of no other way to describe them) grow within a few hundred miles of Tucson and no place else on the face of the earth. They are the cleverest of water hoarders and can expand their leathery green skin to capture as much as a ton of additional water. Saguaros produce an extravagantly voluptuous white blossom, which is the bravest gesture I can imagine in an environment so purely hostile to plant growth." —Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir.

IV
Linda recorded "Keep Me From Blowing Away," from Heart Like a Wheel, in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I grew up. I find this is one of the most stunning facts in the book. She came down with the flu in 1974 while passing through Washington with a Jackson Browne tour and ended up staying behind to recover at the Bethesda house of John Starling, a member of the Seldom Scene whom she had met through her friend Emmylou Harris. A snowstorm came, and there was a houseful of musicians, one of whom was Paul Craft, who wrote "Keep Me From Blowing Away," which she decided to record as soon as she could—which in this case was at the nearby Silver Spring studio (who knew?) of the engineer George Massenburg, whom she ended up working with many times later in LA.

I have no idea where in Silver Spring his studio was, but I love to think that I—12 years old and soon to be in the thrall of Linda Ronstadt—was probably no more than a few miles away from the creation of a piece of this seminal record.

V
Linda is now probably as well known, if not better known, for her albums of American standards that she recorded in the 1980s with Nelson Riddle as she is for her country-rock and pop hits of the 1970s, but to me her work from the '70s will forever define her. She has not done anything since that has come close to that in my estimation, or that suited her voice better (with two exceptions, neither one a solo project: the first Trio record with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton and a great duet album she made in 1999 with Emmylou, Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions).

Thinking a lot about her, as I have been over the last several weeks with the release of her book and the news that she's suffering from Parkinson's disease, I've come to realize that I actually felt betrayed and angry when, in 1981 (I was 19), she abandoned rock for a turn on Broadway in The Pirates of Penzance, which was followed by a less successful run in La Bohème at the Public Theater and then those standards, followed later by the hugely successful albums of Mexican songs.

Something changed in her voice, which she rightfully acknowledges in her book as a new color, richness, and range. Yes, technically, she became a much stronger singer—anyone could detect that—but what I've always heard is an almost synthetic quality, a hyper-polished, often girlishly breathy veneer over what was once raw, from the gut, and far more sensual. (You can hear the effect on her pop singing especially on her mega-popular 1989 duets with Aaron Neville, which I think sound almost computer-generated in their trilling, glittery acrobatics.)

VI
Linda's definitive albums:

Heart Like a Wheel (1974) 
Prisoner in Disguise (1975)
Hasten Down the Wind (1976)
Simple Dreams (1977)
Living in the USA  (1978)

I'm undecided about including her next album, Mad Love (1980), in large part a trend-victim foray into new wave (including three Elvis Costello covers) that met with mixed reception but that I liked. I guess I'd say it's part of my definitive Linda Ronstadt years (and the last of her records I bought for a long, long time) but stylistically not equal to the "canon." Likewise her pre-Heart Like a Wheel album, Don't Cry Now, has some lasting moments (including "Love Has No Pride" and "Desperado") but was mostly a hint of what was to come.

VII
Linda first came onto my radar with the inescapable Top 40 hits from Heart Like a Wheel, "You're No Good," "When Will I Be Loved." She remained merely a radio presence until one of my older sisters put Hasten Down the Wind on her Christmas list in 1976, when I was 15, and I gave it to her (probably about $5.99 at Kemp Mill Records in Wheaton, Maryland). My sister was into the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Little Feat at the time, all musicians who were part of Linda's circle, but it turned out that I listened to Hasten Down the Wind more than she did. I played it all the time and never even had my own copy till she went away to college (it's even possible that I appropriated hers when her tastes moved on; I can't remember). The next Christmas, I got Simple Dreams from Santa.

VIII
I was shy and solitary and didn't really socialize outside of school until I was a senior (I went to a private school and few of my classmates lived near me). My circle was my family, and because I was the youngest of four, my siblings were increasingly unavailable as they pursued activities of their own and then went off to college. I spent a lot of time listening to records by myself. Imagine a skinny 16-year-old kid who never went out or got into trouble tucked up by the stereo singing along to Linda's cover of Warren Zevon's "Carmelita"—Carmelita, hold me tighter. I think I'm sinking down. And I'm all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town . . . .

My parents were wrapped up in their pursuits—my father in his books, my mother in her teaching and graduate work, so they probably didn't give lyrics like that much more thought than I did (even I  didn't give them much thought)—but my mother came to like many of Linda's songs, especially "Blue Bayou" and (an early hint of Linda's later recordings of standards) "When I Grow Too Old to Dream." The prettier ballads were something Mom and I shared.

IX
Last weekend, when I was briefly considering going to see Linda at the book festival, I imagined what I might say to her as she signed my copy. "You probably have a lot of men telling you that you were a key figure in their adolescence, but I can tell you you were important to gay boys, too. . . ." Where I would have gone with that, I have no idea. It's probably just as well I didn't get the chance. The day after her appearance, I read Henry Alford's New York Times column on awkward celebrity encounters, in which "we want to parse or mediate an entity that is at once wholly familiar but wholly unknown to us; we want to touch the proverbial screen."

What did Linda Ronstadt mean to a gay teenager in the 1970s? Like Stevie Nicks and Carly Simon, she was, for me, a fantasy on which to project my ideas of an unknown territory—but it was all about aesthetics, about sensation, not sexuality. The famous Annie Leibovitz red-negligee photo spread in Rolling Stone, the gauzy white dress on Hasten Down the Wind, Linda gazing off into the Malibu distance—these might as well have been scents of perfume (Charlie! Jean Naté!), a mirrored tray of jeweled necklaces and silk tassels on a dresser, an overheard story about a first date on a winter night, the guy in a puffy down vest, the girl in Frye boots. A future I might someday see. They say just once in life you find someone that's right. But the world looks so confused, I can't tell false from true . . . .

X







XI
I've never felt it was cool to love Linda Ronstadt. I remember when we were teenagers, my brother made a dismissive comment about performers who "only" sang rather than writing songs and playing instruments. It stuck with me, and deep down I felt there must have been something deficient in Linda, and even more in my affection for her.

But what I now know is that she has a musician's and scholar's knowledge of music history, harmony, instrumental arrangement, and the way the voice works. She also can describe a musician's particular qualities like a real writer.

Here she is on Randy Newman, whose adaptation of Faust she sang on (and whose voice makes my own skin crawl, though I recognize his musicianship and songwriting skill): "Randy's songs can be bleak. Not to seem a hard man, he will insert a shard of comfort so meager it seems Dickensian. His songs are superbly crafted, with a musical tension that results from this combination of hope and utter despair. In his orchestrations, he might comment on the narrative being carried by the singer, using the instruments to deliver the jabs. Singing in the midst of one of his arrangements can feel like taking part in a boisterous discussion, with people of unevenly matched intelligence, sensibility, and insight ranting and squabbling."


XII
When I was in Vermont earlier this month, I read a New York Times article about Linda in which she discussed her Parkinson's and her forthcoming memoir. That was the gateway to all of this—she's been on my mind ever since. In a used-CD store in Brattleboro, I bought two of her later records I'd never listened to apart from a song or two. Feels Like Home (1995), whose beautiful title song is by Randy Newman, contains some good performances that could stand up to those of her '70s heyday ("High Sierra," "Morning Blues," "Women Cross the River"). We Ran (1998)—which turned out to be the last solo pop-rock album she recorded—is a lot more uneven.

But I keep listening to them and will no doubt add others to my collection. Not having listened to her much at all for decades, I've started loading her '70s masterworks onto my iPod.

I may one day give her American Songbook projects (Lush Life, etc.) more of a serious listen, or even her mariachi records. But for now the fancy getups, the mannered hairdos, the crinkly-nose smiles of those undertakings just don't interest me. Even as I find I'm more interested than ever in her.

XIII
I've written a lot about having been a solitary, sometimes lonely kid. But thinking back on those days and my love of Linda Ronstadt doesn't make me feel sad or like something I want to distance myself from (though I did distance myself from it for a long time). I feel incredibly attached to this music. These are all really fond memories.

I've never met anyone in adulthood who shared my passion for Linda—not my current partner, not my previous one, not any friends I can think of. I don't know why that is. She still has millions of fans, as the crowds at her appearances have proved. I just don't seem to know any of them.

Linda is at a tough point in her life right now, no longer able to sing and dealing with a serious diagnosis, but here is what I've gleaned: She has a lot of friends, two kids she's proud of, an accomplished and varied body of work to look back on, a fierce engagement with issues she cares about, such as immigration, and—what I've never really appreciated till recently—the great respect of her fellow musicians. There's nothing deficient about her at all (or about me). In short, a life well lived, generously and unpretentiously, whose latest turn she seems to be facing with equanimity and acceptance. I wish her well.

The biggest surprise: After all these years, I find I'm still growing into her.

Rainbows and Dust

Arthur Rothstein, Texas, 1936

Tonight I decided I didn't need to finish yet another so-so book. What sealed the decision was, of all things, a TV show—a rebroadcast of part 1 of Ken Burns's magisterial documentary The Dust Bowl, of which I'd previously seen most of part 2 when it aired in January. Riveted by the unstoppable tragedy, the dignity of its aged witnesses, the clear-eyed storytelling, with its sense of historical sweep and human consequence, I realized I was no longer interested in the rather inconsequential, padded, and self-involved contemporary memoir I was reading by Frank Bruni, a writer I otherwise admire. 

I expected Bruni to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, if not a winner (he was neither . . . this year) for his great New York Times columns in which, among other things, he determinedly hammers away on same-sex marriage and other gay issues. I loved his essay about his father's evolving acceptance of having a gay son:

"In the years before Mom died, I had my first long-term relationship, and I could tell that seeing me coupled, just like my brothers and my sister were, gave [my father] a new, less abstract way to understand me. I just wanted what they wanted. Someone special. 

"He welcomed the man I was with effusively. Took the two of us out to eat.

"Then Mom was gone, and all the parenting fell to Dad. He tapped reserves I’d never imagined in him. When I broke up with the man he’d been so effusive toward, he must have told me six times how sorry he was about that. It was a message—that he was rooting for my happiness, no matter how that happiness came to me."

But Bruni's memoir, Born Round, about his lifelong battles with weight and eating, doesn't have the feel of consequence that that single column has. So, thanks to The Dust Bowl, I'm not going to finish it.

Even the last book I read—courtesy of my old pal the Total Femme—felt more substantial than Bruni's: The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol, an out-of-print sleeper by the surprisingly not bad writer Mel Tormé. The book—about the making, and unmaking, of Judy Garland's one-season-long TV show, which Tormé worked on—illustrates the frustratingly sad fate of an out-of-control addict with mammoth gifts who has not a single person in her life really looking out for her (including Mr. Mel Tormé).

I've been on a bit of a Judy Garland kick of late (which perhaps the Total Femme intuited), having seen the fabulous Broadway show End of the Rainbow last year as well as, more recently, Garland's underrated final film, I Could Go on Singing, in which she plays, wittingly or not, a spot-on version of herself in the last, frayed years of her downward spiral.

What all of this rambling adds up to is this: We all deserve to have someone looking out for us, whether a loving parent, the government, a colleague, or a perceptive friend.

That Sort of Thing

After reading a novel that was very well crafted and ultimately satisfying but not quite as page-turning as I'd hoped, I picked up one by another admired author, Life Class by Pat Barker. 

Having liked Barker's spare but powerful and beautifully rendered Regeneration trilogy, about World War I soldiers and survivors, I was shocked at how pedestrian, clichéd, and almost completely lacking in verisimilitude her more recent Life Class—also a WWI story—was. Honestly, the self-absorbed-artists-in-love first half could be a Lifetime movie set in the mid-1990s with very few alterations. 

                    "For what it's worth, I think he's still very much in love with you."

                        "Then he's got a bloody funny way of showing it."

That sort of thing.

I tried to stick with it once the plot moved to the war front, where the book admittedly improved in just about every way, but the first part had wasted so much of my time—which could have been used making me care about the characters—that I just couldn't muster the interest. Anyway, the Regeneration books covered the exact same territory so much better. Why bother?

What a delicious, chocolaty pleasure to now to turn to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I've been reading him out of order, most recently his first, The Swimming-Pool Library (which I never blogged about; let's say for the time being that it was clearly the first novel of a great author who hadn't yet come into his own, which isn't to say I didn't like it). I've just started his third, The Spell, which is my fifth and last Hollinghurst until his next one comes out.

Here one of the characters, Alex, visits an ex, who is lying out in the sun wearing a thong:

Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. . . . His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers . . . . 

Then there's the "hurrying greeny-black surface of the stream." Later, Alex "felt needlessly shy, as if warned at the beginning of a party of some worrying game to be played after tea."

That sort of thing. Each word a joy.

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D. and I have simultaneously started watching the BBC adaptation of Holinghurst's The Line of Beauty, starring none other than Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. What's left of an Alan Hollinghurst novel without Hollinghurst's incredible language and observation? A story, some characters, relationships. Perhaps more—we've only watched the first of the three episodes. Kudos to the BBC for tackling such forthrightly gay material, even if Stevens's smiley take on what in the book is a seriously horny sex-in-the-park scene is a little too "jolly good."

Perfectly Good

I just finished A Perfectly Good Man, a novel by the gay British writer Patrick Gale, whom I discovered on one of my visits to London.

I’d previously read his book Rough Music, which I liked a lot. That one is a family story involving an adult gay son having an affair with his sister’s husband (revealed pretty early on, so this is only a semi-spoiler); his mother, who has early-stage dementia; a long-ago childhood vacation that became an incubator for parental adultery; a present-day return to the same spot, leading to a sweet and sexy love story between the gay son and a mysterious artist guy; and regular shifts in time.

A Perfectly Good Man moves back and forth even more—not only in time but also among quite a few characters. It’s another family drama, this time hinging in part on questions of faith and loss of faith, and is centered on the life of a minister, a married father of two, on the Cornwall coast, where Gale lives and most of his work seems to be set. It’s not as gay as Rough Music, but a peripheral character is a gay man, and the minister’s daughter, whose sexuality is kind of indeterminate throughout the story, ends up marrying a woman, which is nice and in fact one of the book’s pivotal events.

Gale’s strength is his mastery of structure, time, and perspective. A Perfectly Good Man (his most recent book) felt ever so slightly less compelling to get through than Rough Music, but darned if I didn’t close it pretty amazed at what he’d built and where he’d taken it. He even manages to make a unicorn reference work! (On that note, if you ask me what I thought of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, I’ll tell you I found it a moving invocation on a momentous occasion, but I could have done without the rainbows.)

Smoke and Metal

"He was asking for memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh."

These are two typically beautiful and apt sentences from a novel I finished last night, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (about whom I've written before). It's largely about memory and versions of a life (one life in particular, that of a World War I poet); the mystery of what we can never know about someone because we're at the mercy of what he or she chooses to reveal; and the secrets that the satellites of people around that person keep, which we're often powerless to pry open.

Here's another passage that rang so true to me. This scene takes place in 1967, outdoors in the shadow of a party; Paul has never been with a man before, and Peter has more experience. They're in their early twenties.

"He'd brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter's hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking that the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter's head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man's wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him."

It's been only a little more than four years, but D. and I already have different memories of the night we met, even argue about the date (easily—and often—provable thanks to calendars and journals, but still). What I was wearing, whether we actually danced that night or the next, when we kissed for the first time. I've written about it (not here but in an unpublished essay), and even I discovered—after I finished the essay—that I'd misremembered important details (specifically when D. first met my parents).

I'm not sure I can say how any of it really happened, what's metal and what's smoke.

Foreign Countries

Greetings from Provincetown. The last time I was here, it was New Year's, the population closed in on itself for warmth. It's now the height of summer—tattoos breathing for the first time in months, vacation beards sprouting, people relaxing into each other and themselves. One of the notes in the guest book of our condo, from two men, adds a P.S.: "We held hands walking down the streets of Provincetown." A big duh to anyone who has been here more than once or who is from a big progressive city, but a revelation when you've never done it before anywhere. The same couple: "It's like coming to another country from our beautiful but conservative Maine."

D. and I saw the Swedish movie The Girl Who Played With Fire last night. Excellent, complex, disturbing, but as far from Ikea's cheerful dining rooms and entertainment centers as you could imagine. Though Ikea is, funnily enough, among the credits.

History, Boys

I recently rented The History Boys and was especially struck by the matter-of-fact way this group of mostly straight boys in an British "public" (private) school accepted and joshed with and even sympathized with the gay kid among them, particularly his crush on the dreamiest straight guy of the bunch (Dominic Cooper). And at least as much by the matter-of-fact way the gay boy himself, even as he struggled with his feelings, openly talked about his attractions and identity.

It was refreshing to see, and I guess I have to assume it's not wildly implausible for the setting (England) and the time (1983), though the movie (and Alan Bennett play on which it's based) takes place only four years after I graduated from high school.

It couldn't be further from my experience in a private boys' school in the United States, in which heterosexism and homophobia ruled to such an extent that the gay boys either kept staunchly silent and softly invisible or let their peculiarities leak out (awkwardly queer mannerisms, penchants for sketching fantasy characters on every available surface) and were subjected to isolation, ridicule, even cruelty. One boy in the latter category (let's call him M.S.) when confronted with the message "M.S. is a fag" in large letters on the blackboard and all the erasers hidden—as well as a roomful of classmates waiting to see his reaction—had no choice but to wipe the words off with his own '70s-plaid polyester suitcoat.

I watched and said nothing. Guess which of the groups of gay boys I was in.