Strange Twilight Urges

Van Dyke Live

2012-01-10T18:58:00.001-08:00

Alain Delon et J-L G

2012-01-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

Happy Together Tango

2011-06-04T15:19:00.001-07:00

Farley Granger R.I.P.

2011-03-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

New York Old Nico

2011-03-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

Nevertheless

2010-06-20T18:47:00.001-07:00

Encore

2010-06-20T18:42:00.001-07:00

Marie

2010-06-20T18:40:00.001-07:00

"Love me less, but love me for a long time"

2010-02-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

Bewitched

2009-12-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

Search For Beauty

2009-12-05T20:34:00.000-08:00

A Real Slow Drag

2009-12-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

Chaka Khan

2009-12-05T20:32:00.002-08:00

La complainte de la butte

2009-12-05T20:32:00.001-08:00

Adam

2009-12-05T20:31:00.002-08:00

Joe

2009-12-05T20:31:00.001-08:00

Idols

2009-12-05T20:30:00.001-08:00

Perfection

2009-09-30T08:14:00.001-07:00

I Love the Old Standards -- Don't You?

2009-09-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

My NEW Hero

2009-09-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

MY HERO!

2009-03-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

Youkali

2009-02-08T20:33:00.001-08:00

THis Time Tomorrow

2009-02-08T20:25:00.001-08:00

L'amour

2009-02-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

In the Valley

2009-01-30T16:32:00.000-08:00

I Don't Care (Either)

2009-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

I Don't Care

2009-01-30T16:29:00.001-08:00

Tango

2009-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

Ceux. . .

2009-01-30T16:22:00.000-08:00

Robert's Wedding (Part 1)

2008-08-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

"You find him . . .attractive now, don't you?"
"Not really."
"What do you mean 'Not really'? He's good-looking, isn't he?"
"Well yes in a kind of 'standard' way. I just don't find him attracive."
"But you'd do it with him, right?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Oh I know he's not gay, but what if you had the chance."
"No."
And then he chuckled softly. Robert always seemed to be chuckling softly Slyly even. Slyness was his stock-in-trade. Or so he thought. He didn't think I knew what he was up to. Or rather he pretended not to think I knew what he was up to. For there he was, sizing up Billy Cowsill of all people. Billy was a big open-faced sandwich of white Americana. With his family's music career slipping into eclipse (soon to be obscured forever by the fictional version created when they declined to "come to terms" with the production company -- thus extended Shirley Jones' carerr and unleashing Danny Bonaduce on an unsuspecting world) Pace was a nice place for Billy. Not for me. And certainly not for Robert -- restless as bi-polar Siamese cat.

Robert was certainly attractive. Far more so than Billy. The floppy brown hair. The clear skin with tight well-proportioned facial features. A nice body, as far as I could tell (never saw him naked, or even shirtless.) The turn-off was his manner. He was trouble. Big trouble. I didn't trust him "from here to the door." He knew it. And he liked it. If he hadn't existed Patricia Highsmith would have invented him. Or Paul Bowles. Gay as Hell, but would rather die than admit it. But instead of deny outright he changed the subject. It was always "but let's talk about you." And in talking about me Robert could talk about himself.

Someone on the Bus

2008-01-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

I rarely notice people anymore. Why did I give him a second glance? Maybe it was where he was sitting. In the back. Looking forward. His face not blank exactly, or false "expectant." Just interesting. So I sat in the side seat for a good view, my sunglass clips firmly fixed (Anouk Aimee at CostCo.) It could have been his physical disposition. He didn't slouch. A maroon pullover over a white T. Blewjeans (as Zazie would say.) Close-cropped brown Protestant rat-fur (hair) and close-cropped beard (like mine) About, oh late 20's? Can't really tell anymore. Definitely young enough to be my son if I were straight (an ever-expanding category of male loveliness.) Uh, oh -- there's something in his hand. It's a phone. (Crap!) He holds it nervously, occasionally glancing at it. Just as we pull up to Santa Monica and Fairfax he makes a call. No one there so he leaves a message. Considers another call then changes his mind. As he gets off the bus he gives me a quick glance. Had he noticed me all this time? Difficult to say. Where is he going? Impossible to say. 20 years ago it would have been to the Spike. Now -- who knows? The louche magnificence that was once Santa Monica blvd has vanished. Nondescript yuppie emporiums and Russian emigre foodshops now reign. Jumping into the Wayback Machine

I follow him into the Spike. We eye each other for a half an hour. He sips a beer, I a gin and tonic. Then we sidle up. He takes me back to his place. I peel off the maroon pullover, the T, pull down his Blewjeans and have at him -- and he me. Lovely.

We never see each other again.

Matthew

2008-01-04T16:09:00.000-08:00

The whitest body I've ever seen. White like the page in Mallarme. White like the figure the looms up at the close of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The hair was white too. Long. cascading. But it was the smile you saw first. Do I remember his body moving at all. It seemed to just be there. Present. Glacial. The Prince Albert was a nice touch. But it was the white, the white. So white you couldn't see his cum when he came. The sound of his sigh so soft. He melts into memory like a cloud floating over the WeHo sky.

An Alabama Song

2007-04-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

Whiskey Sours were my parents' favorite. They used to give me little sips -- plus the cherry -- whenever we were out in restaurants. There was one in downtown Flushing that broiled Salisbury steak just so. Loved it. At home there was wine with dinner on special occasions. But I can't recall ever really being interested in drinking until college. I loved the buzz -- the way it worked its way in, pushing slowly right to and over the edge of genuine intoxication. Rarely would I allow it to go any further toward outright drunk. At least at first. But then came that period of hanging with Bob and Lynn, and Fred and Ann. Late nights listening to music and getting bloto. Bob introduced me to the pleasures of fortified wine. A very cheap but very intense drunk. We used to go to graveyards in Brooklyn with his friend Joe (a very interesting dude, whose girlfriend was a drag queen named Nicole.) Once I even got drunk on it in class in the mid-afternoon. Stnk to high heaven yet maintained my composure. What in hell was I doing? Prolonging my adolescence. Drunk I didn't move. Drunk I didn't pursue what I knew I wanted to pursue but wasn't quite ready to go for.

"Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar,
Oh don't ask why,
Oh don't ask why. . ."

The turning point was with Don, a very strange classmate of mine. It was obvious that he was gay -- at least to me. And it was obvious he knew that I was too. Yet he persisted in playing rhetorical games with me -- bringing up gay places and people, and asking if I knew abotu them, which of course I did. Then he'd stop talking or veer off into another direction. One day he announced he was getting maried and I was invited. The bride was a fag-hag so classic as to be a walkign cliche. Fat and giggly. It was a standard Brooklyn wedding. Traditional in every boring respect. Then after the reception he took me and his new wife to gay disco. Somewhere in the 50's on the west side, I think. Then back at their place I passed out. The one and only time I ever passed out from drinking. Rather alarming. But a lesson learned.
Now I was ready to go.

When Act Two begins I'm found making the rounds of the West Village. Very cautious beers, and maybe a few gin and tonics. But never over the edge. Just enough to keep cruising along smoothly. Even at Tamburlaine I held it in -- which was easy to do as they watered the drinks. In L.A. my drinking was almost enurely in the afternoon. Sundays especially, working my way round Santa Monica blvd that ontoward to Silverlake. But all bad things must come to an end and my stroke in 97 finished my drinking once and for all. Odd that only days before I'd resolved to give it up entirely. I wasn't gettign as much out of ti as I used to and I was feeling sluggish.

Now I'm thinking about the last good buzz. Three a.m. in a hot tub in Palm Springs, looking up at nighttime sky full of stars while spalhing around with some porn stars and sipping Margueritas.

"Oh show me the way to the next little boy,
Oh don't ask why,
Oh don't ask why.
For if I don't find the next little boy,
I tell you I must die
I tell you I must die
I tell you I must die. . .

Oh Moon of the Cochella Valley. . ."

Joe Brainard

2007-02-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

He was always standing somewhere in the back and to one side. Not moviing. Yet there was a sense as if he'd just stopped doing so. Nanoseconds before Joe had been swaying back and forth. Ever so slightly. To a music no one but he could hear. The disposition of the body was always the same. Like a crumpled piece of paper someone had tried to uncrumple just a bit. But the crumples remained. The head bent. The eyes sleepily downcast. The nearly finished half-a-cigarette propped in one hand -- a half-finished drink in the other.

Oh how I longed to talk to him. But I didn't dare. I didn't want to disturb his half-waking repose. And besides what could I say other than gush? Ask him to join me in a chorus of one of Kenward's songs? That might have been nice. Stroking him would have been nicer.

Funny but that day at the Factory I didn't feel anywhere near so intimidated. But that was all about Andy. Joe was an "extra." But now, years later in a West Side bar he was a "star." To me at least. "Nobody leaves a star," Norma says.

Nobdy does.

Jonny

2006-09-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

"There's a line between love and fascination,
Hard to see on an evening such as this,
For they give the very same sensation.
When you’re lost in the passion of a kiss."

Oh I'm deep, deep in nostalgia, recalling forty year-old kisses from Jonny --my first high school sweetheart. I can't remember when it started. Some cold morning on Morningside Heights. We all hugged one another so freely, and nothing was made of it. So we kissed freely too and nothing was made of it either. After awhile ( a very short while) I became dependent on Jonny-kisses. Was he dependent on me? Hard to say. Frankly I don't think he knew what he was doing. I certainly did. I wanted it all -- Cinemascope and Color by DeLuxe with the full 20th Century-Fox fanfare blaring in the background. (Our local Bernard Herrmann-obsessive would have loved that, leading as he'd hope to a cue for Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.) But that's a tad far afield from Jonny and me, who were generally to be found sitting quietly together. rarely talking. Usually I'd talk and he'd nod.

Naturally I thought it would go on forever, but it didn't. When did it stop? Again hard to say. It sort of evaporated. No "Big Scene." No regrets. No remorse either. In fact I forgot about him for awhile. I was in pursuit of other boys, and besides
after graduating he wen to Israel joined a Kibbutz and was never heard from again.

Oh Jonny I'd love to think of you alive and smiling. You big head of unkempt dirty blond hair in my lap. Your cozy body clutched to mine.

No. I'm neither drunk nor crying.

Just deep in a dream of you.

Old Boyfriends (The Single and the LP)

2006-01-11T17:45:00.000-08:00

“Tho I very seldom think of him, nevertheless
Sometimes a mannequin's Blue summer dress
Can make the window like a dream
Ah but now those dreams belong to someone else”
-- Tom Waites

You’ve got to pay close attention because everything’s edited differently each time. Long-shots become close-ups, temp morts turn to fast-paced “suspense” sequences, as if it were all just a cheap thriller. A long slow track through the rooms of a very large apartment somewhere in the Bronx where people you’ve just met are chattering away wildly, as some Stax-Volt 45 or other thumps the air, conflates into a rapid pan. Then the guy you came looking for staggers out of the cigarette smoke with that big teasing smile of his.
Wait a minute, I’m in the wrong place. He wasn’t there. But who was? And where did it begin? The earliest image is running down the side streets of the Quonset huts in the Bronx. But I’m alone there, all of two. Sex came later. Perhaps in the basement with Ernest, who I never really liked. But we were eight and he wanted me, and (as Frank O’Hara says) I wanted to be wanted more than anything else in the world. Certainly in High School with Cary and his identical twin brother. He was so beautiful it took my breath away. Not cliche, fact. His brother only made my gasping worse. Is that why I didn’t go to visit them anymore? No, it was because of the others. Where are they now? Where’s the guy who ran the bicycle store on Madison near the museum (never asked for his name, nor he mine) who for two weeks running gave me a blow-job as I sipped my morning coffee, standing there in my guards uniform? What happened to that beauty in the pool in Berkeley, inviting me to come down from my hotel room balcony to swim naked with him that hot August afternoon? What happened to the GAA boy with crossed eyes and curved cock who I had in the Firehouse basement? And who was it that I made out with on the Firehouse roof? Nichevo!
Surely there are shots missing. Sometimes entire reels. Maybe I’ll find they’ve been put back some other time. Right now I’m ruminating over that party in the Bronx. What was I doing at there anyway? Oh yes, Peter Blum brought me. And did I meet anyone new? Nope. Seems like I’ve hit a dead end. Only the faint residual lilac smell of unsatisfied desire remains. Only a cue to skip a reel and get down to the business of desire.

Barry Prince
Can’t recall how we met. Nothing formal surely. Like everyone else back then Barry seemed always to be just there, hovering in the half-light. It could have been though Peter or Lorenzo. They certainly knew him, at least as much as anyone else did, which is to say “from around.” -- that great floating crap game of movies, gallery openings, museum jaunts, coffee shop stops, city street encounters. Surely he must have gone to those Sunday morning screenings Warren held at the Bleecker. Was there a shot or two of Barry in The Tenth Legion or Truth Serum ? He was certainly Warren’s “type” -- smart, self-contained, hot. Oh hell, Barry was everybody’s “type.” But he didn’t go with everybody. In fact he didn’t really seem to go with anybody -- at least as far as I could tell then. (“I’m younger than that now.”) Barry didn’t haunt the de rigeur dives of the West Village (“The Ninth Circle”) or the Lower East Side (“Stanley’s”). Maybe my timing was off. I know I never found him there whenever I (ever so cautiously) slipped through, which was fairly often. He was a Museum of Modern Art boy to the manner born. Very East Side. Now I’m recalling coffee with him at the food stand by the boat house in Central Park, only a few steps away from the Ramble. Was I headed for the Ramble that day? Was he? We’d run into each other by chance in front of the Bethesda fountain and drifted over to the boathouse to sit around and talk about Godard. Hell, we were all about Godard back then. Pynchon too. Easier to speak indirectly through movies like Masculine Feminine and books like V, than head-on as in life.. Was that Bethesda episode before or after that day I saw Barry on Madison Ave.? No, it was before, because (Vivian Leigh in That Hamilton Woman), “There was then, there was no after.”
I was on my way to one of those little bookstores that used to dot Madison (we’re talking years before Arthur Loeb set up shop) when I ran into him. Or rather I suddenly became aware of the fact that Barry had loomed up “out of nowhere.” Could he have been following me? Too romantic. What was the book I’d been looking for? Something by Laurence Durrell maybe, though I know we were most recently talking about was V, which I was convinced would make an ideal Losey movie. It was a conversation I know we’d had before -- ritual chatter in place of what we really wanted to say and couldn’t because we didn’t know how. Or maybe we did know how but were just too scared to try. I know I was in a good mood that day. So much so, that I didn’t really recognize how little Barry (uncharacteristically) actually had to say, or realize that he was steering me towards his apartment which (like him) loomed up seemingly “out of nowhere.” How convenient.
It was a late afternoon, shafts of light cutting through the dusk. We were going to stop by to “have coffee.” Or was it just “a drink”? Meaningless preliminaries really, for the minute we walked through the door he pulled his face up close to mine -- giggling. I can’t recall reacting then as I’m reacting now (aroused). What was I not thinking? Was I that naive to suppose we were just there for coffee? For some reason I “didn’t see it coming.” We sat on a couch where I continued to talk -- as if the “face off” at the door never happened. But in mid mot juste Barry kissed me. Suddenly. Sweetly. Repeatedly. Then he began to undress me. I was being “seduced,” as the paperback potboilers would say. But was I really? Hey, I was taking Barry’s clothes off too. The “seduction” was mutual.
How very odd, I would think to myself days later. It was as if a wish unvoiced until just that very moment had been granted. Was there been even a hint of this before? “There was proximity but no relating,” as Nichols and May would say. Barry “wasn’t for me,” I’d thought (just the shadow of a Larry Hart lyric there.) And part of the reason was there almost always was a girl in Barry’s general vicinity. Or seemed to be. I wasn’t attentive enough to realize what the presence of said girl may have actually meant. Was I attracted to Barry?. Yes of course, but not actively, not consciously. I’d never really “pursued” him because I thought sure he’d say no. I felt so little of myself. I had no body that I could see or respond to. No face to woo and win. I was just a voice. Why court rejection? File Barry away with “flirtations” like Jonny (who kissed me) and Charlie (who didn’t) ? Shove him back into the attic of the “unconscious.”
But what did I know of the “unconscious”? Consciousness was all I cared for. With all the semi-discreet drinking of those days (and we were making love right around “cocktail time”), sometimes accompanied by select narcotics (opium, mon amour) more than anything else I wanted to be "awake" as much as possible. It seemed vitally important that I “stay up till dawn” or I’d “miss something” (a habit that continued well into the 80’s) And yet for all such temporal scrupulousness I nearly missed Barry; his big Modigliani face, with Ninetto Davoli curls on top, and that fuzzy hedge-like mustache over the smile. A mustache, mind you, in place just before the de rigeur “Mark Spitz” arrived. Barry’s was unruly, unlike his manner. That was hesitant, quiet. "Too quiet" as they say in the 40’s programmers. And that was why I was so surprised when he kissed me “just like that.” A suddenness that delighted. A delight I can feel even now. More than I did then in some ways.
So there we were, spooning. We rubbed up against one another, getting hard, looking at our hardness and laughing at its absurdity (sex is nothing if not absurd) , and kissed some more. And then Barry took me over to -- of all things -- a waterbed. It was my first and last time on that great silly 60’s-era contraption. Funny to find one in his apartment. He never struck me as susceptible to "trends.” But what did I know? Was it even Barry’s apartment anyway? He could have been “minding” the place for friend or relative. No reason to ask, for by then we’d started fucking; a long, slow tender fuck, quite different from the furtive late night violence I’d been used to up till then, and largely enjoyed. Sex was something to be consummated (consumed) with total strangers, not friends. Quickly, vertically, and in the dark -- not savored like this when it was still light.
Barry cooed, and we rocked gently to and fro with the flow of water. How corny. How lovely. Then we lay back, almost falling asleep, then stroking and kissing some more in anticipation of the next round, and then some rest and then some more. Then quiet as we just lay there looking at each other for the longest time. And then there was a knock at the door.
It was Gypsy. She was a member of The Living Theater, just back from its world tour. And she was totally prepared to make amends for our lack of volubility. Amends hell -- she ignored it. Full of talk she was, all about Europe and America and how things had and hadn’t changed since she’d last been to New York -- a perfect interloper aperitif. Her timing couldn’t have been better, for it was clear we were though with fucking for the short run. Now it was early evening. and Barry and I were on the edge of restlessness. Gypsy raided the refrigerator and cooked us something. Or did we just open a few cans of this or that “delicacy” and down a few glasses of wine? Here’s a missing reel for you. Not important. We were in such a rush to keep up with Gypsy--physically as well as mentally. We had to go dancing, she commanded us, and she knew just the place. Barry smiled -- a far different one from those he’d flashed before. It’s taken me all this time to really see that smile. He knew where we were going all along. Not that any of this was planned Certainly not meeting me. And he hadn’t been expecting Gypsy’s arrival either. But put those two chance events together and he knew there was only one place to go next.
"You can’t live if you don’t have money!" was one of the many Paradise Now! watch-cries that Gypsy had been shouting out all over Europe. And like any true-blue member of “Le Living,” she wasn’t just mouthing a text that Julian Beck and Judith Malina had handed to her. She lived anarchy. Or rather she lived with it. “Let’s take this cab,” she said striding right out into the street and stopping one, as if for an emergency. Clearly the drive would have stopped anyway. But what did he think of the fare he’d just picked up? He gave no notice of Barry and I needless to say. Gypsy was in complete command of the situation With her long dark brown hair and bangs covering her forehead in a style Nico made her own (did she copy it from Gypsy or vice versa?) with lovely pale white features peering out from underneath she was a cabby’s dream of a “beatnik/hippie” girl/woman. He was dazzled from the start, and clearly ripe for the picking -- which in this case constituted giving us a free ride.
“These pieces of paper are meaningless,” Gypsy told him. “Don’t let them control your life. We should all do things because we love each other. We love you, you know. Do you love us?” The cabby chuckled. Had he heard this spiel before? He didn’t say. But there was no way for him to say anything. Gypsy was doing all the talking -- seizing every molecule of air that rushed thought the open windows just as she did the more easily dominated stasis of the apartment. Not that the cabby cared. This would be a story he could tell his fellow cabbies later at the diner. And so we arrived at wherever-in-hell we were going. It was on the West Side somewhere in the 50’s. Gypsy kissed the cabby and we all got out. Had Barry seen Gypsy do this before? Not important really. He was as giddy as I was with the thrill of “getting away with it” And so with this distaff embodiment of Melville’s Confidence-Man we strode up to a front door of a club -- yes it had to have been somewhere in the lower West 50’s -- and went inside. Now what was it’s name? Never looked. Never asked. Never mind.
It was enormous; decorated in (Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat ) “early nothing.” But it truly didn’t need anything. It had women. Or rather it had lesbians. A literal sea of lesbians. Barry and I were the only men in the place (perfectly evoked in Living Out Loud. Had Richard LaGravanese been there that night too?) Gypsy vanished into that sea, never to be seen again, leaving Barry and I to dance by ourselves --swimming with the sapphic tide. And swim we did, dancing together yet alone. For Barry being here was an exercise in perfect solitude. I was along for the ride. His ride. Like me, Barry adored the solitude of crowds. And the crowds he adored were lesbian. The sisterly-maternal warmth they provided had an intoxicating effect on him that was palpable. It was as if he were drunk on air.
Barry was a lesbian-hag. Like Proust. A singular breed of gay man, not easily found, and not easily held. Oh I could hold him for a few hours, but surely I could expect no more. In the wee smalls we left and went back to the apartment. Night and the city and we rocked in each others arms (in a regular bed, not the water one.) Time stops and the world goes away. And in the morning ? Smiles, kisses, coffee, and good-bye. No, maybe not even anything voiced. Just a kisses -- as sweet as all the others. Maybe sweeter because we would never see each other again. Not by design of course. We were swallowed up by the city. We spun away into its space and time. I don’t know what ever “became” of Barry, a l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. But hey, no tears now, no regrets.
It was a good first marriage.

Tom Dillow
“Let’s get out of here, Tom whispered down my ear quite suddenly. “OK,” I said. And why not? I was being seduced again, wasn’t I? Well maybe, sorta, kinda. With Tom who could say? I had just been introduced to him (though I knew of him well before ) at this perfectly lovely party -- winter of ‘67, right around New Year's, somewhere on the east side in the 80s. And who was seducing whom anyway? A very open question.
I’d been thinking about Tom for some quite time prior to this. He was in Warren's first film, Amphetamine where he shares one of the longest most intense screen kisses ever with Tommy Mitchell. They were both high as kites, and Warren was doing a rapid hand-held 360 around them -- a homemade homage to the climax of Vertigo. Oh to be inside that shot.
“So who was that blonde kissing Tommy?”
“Oh that’s Tom Dillow.”
“And?”
“(knowing chuckle)”
Of course Warren was at the party. So were several of the other people we both knew, like Vivian. Vivian and I were cinematic soulmates, strung out on Demy’s Lola , going to see it every time it played The New Yorker or the Thalia. (“I just knew you’d be here,” she said to me one afternoon floating out of the theater just as I was floating in.) Andy Meyer (hushed and slightly withdrawn as always) was there too. He wanted to make Vivian a star. So did Bruce Conner. But Vivian’s taste shifted to eastern religion until she discovered after years of study “I don’t want no Rimposhe romance.” I could have chatted with Vivian all night if I hadn’t been distracted by Tom -- that huge lock of hair falling across his face in the classic manner of 60’s-era bombshells (Terence Stamp, Richard Warwick and all the schoolboys in If. . .)
Tom was very loud and very forward and very drunk and very hot. Flirting stealthily with great panache (sidling up alongside me, talking in calm, hushed, deliberate tones about this person or that) he was “feeling me out” -- learning what and who I did and didn’t know. As if I’d so much as considered lying to him. Then suddenly he proposed, right out of the blue, that we up and go to the movies. Ordinarily I wouldn’t want to leave a party as lively as this one. But Tom was ever so much livelier than any party. So we left, and went to the Regency to see The Chelsea Girls -- which, needless to say, we'd both seen many times before. Tom knew everyone in the cast, particularly the Boston crowd (Ed Hood and Patrick Fleyming) and began dishing away cheerily -- all the while making out with me. It was a delirium of talk and smooch. “Well you know what Rene said?” and “Oh she’s such a slut!” and “Oh I must show you Boston!” and “Well that night at the Casa B. . .” Plus good old-fashioned movie theater balcony necking, quite intense. I came very close to coming several times. And every time I reached the brink he whispered down my ear to calm me down and hold me off -- which I did until we got back to his hotel room for what turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic in context. We were both too distracted by then -- essentially already spent. Naturally I never saw him again. No point. I'd gotten more than I'd asked for.
Decades later, I read Savage Grace; the oral history of a real-life incest and murder story that Tom Kalin has been trying to turn into a movie for years. Compiled Edie style it recounts what came to be known as “the Bakelite Murder; how the rich and twisted Brooks and Barbara Bakeland destroyed Tony -- the gay son that Brooks ordered Barbara to "ungay." She elected to do so by sleeping with him. Obviously not a good idea. Mother-son relations went from worse to Worst Case Scenario. While on a visit to England he slashed her throat in what can only be called a fit of pique. Sent to a local loony bin Tony was thought to be successfully rehabbed enough to get shipped back stateside for care in a nice expensive clinic. But due to an unaccountable screw up he was sent to his grandmother instead. He pulled a knife, stabbing her several times. She lived. He went to a U.S. prison where he eventually killed himself. Minus the murder and incest, Tony Bakeland struck a familiar chord -- an Arthur Loeb gone wrong as it were. But there was something more that popped upright into my face on page 59 -- Tom Dillow. He was describing how Barbara Bakeland told her seduction of Tony “happened in that house they had in Mallorca. . .a real spooky place. . .She didn’t give men any details. Oh no. Barbara was a lady.” Then on page 366, Frederic Combs part-time actor/model (best remembered as one of The Boys in the Band) part-time drug dealer (and supplier to Dominick Dunne) mentions how Tom introduced him to Barbara and Tony. But the big payoff is on page 409 where Tom reports “Tony asked Bart for my number, and Bart called to warn men that Tony was trying to find me. I mean, I was in the phone book, but, you now, for the Bakelands a telephone number didn’t exist unless they got it from someone. Bart said Tony told him, ‘T-t-t-tom n-never understood why I m-m-murdered M-mummy.’ ”
Was Tom afraid that Tony was thinking of killing him? Obviously the book identifies his as a friend of Barbara’s more than Tony’s. But what would that mean in context? After all this was a woman who on the one had pursued gay men (she’s reported to at one point desired to have Sam Green’s child) and on the other called her son a “homo.” The detail about getting a telephone number form a third party rather than the phone book is most fascinating in that it truly evokes that class and their lives. It was a class Warren slipped though easily, but never truly lighted on. Tom it appears was Nick Caraway to Tony’s Daisy. Or better still a player of note in the failed schemes of the Tony the Ripley wannabe. But that was long ago and far away in 1985 (when Savage Grace was published, nanoseconds before the full-frontal impact of the AIDS epidemic hit), and as Thackeray says “They are all equal now.”

Allen

I see it all as one swift continuous motion. Run up the stars, knock on the door, throw him on the floor, peel off his clothes, fuck him. Could it all have been that easy? Surely not. Surely there was some slight tremor of resistance (either real or feigned, it doesn't matter) on his part. Not on mine. I wanted to fuck and he wanted to get fucked. Afternoons were best. Always. We were both awake and alert by then and just bored enough to ache (ever so slightly) for a soupcon of physical release. There was no emotional release -- either sought or achieved.
Allen was pretentious. Hell, I was pretentious too, but no quite so much as he. Oh hell, it was a photo finish. Allen insisted that Jean-Paul Sartre was gay because Simone de Beauvoir used to pass her girlfriends on to him. "So who was his boyfriend?" I'd ask. Allen would never say. He'd just laugh his “What a stupid question,” laugh and gloss on. He was always one for great vague pronouncements about one thing or another. And when he spoke to me he always seemed to be looking every so slightly away -- as if he was trying to attract the attention of someone else in the room. But there wasn't anyone else in the room. Not much in the way of furniture either -- which was typical of the lower east side in those days. ("But a chair is not a house.") Just a big and well-swept ( the equivalent of "clean") space.
Allen chattered away almost incessantly. Only sex would shut him up. It was as if someone had left the bathtub running and I'd rushed in to stop it just before it overflowed. Rather proud of myself for being able to do so. Then ever so slightly annoyed. Then truly annoyed. No, this couldn't go on. It couldn’t. It didn't.
In some ways Allen wasn’t all that special. In point of fact I recall him as “one of a set.” He was like that guy who lived in a townhouse on the upper east side -- right on the first floor with a view of the park. Just as insolent. Just as semi-involved. He wanted it, then hesitated, then took it, then withdrew, then moved forward again. And by that time I’d started to dress and leave. All told it wasn’t half-bad. Just half-memorable, like a quickie at the Baths. Complete strangers can (sometimes) be so much more satisfying than friends. Especially "friends" like Allen who didn't need me. Or maybe he did. I certainly thought I needed Allen. From time to time. In a manner of speaking. In a manner of fucking. So I kept going back, maybe in the (vain) hope of breaking through to something more, something other. Somewhere along the way I gave up and stopped. And further along Allen vanished. Nowhere in the streets, the bars, the clubs. Then I left New York --my own vanishing act. Now all that remains is Allen’s smile -- hovering Cheshire Cat-like in the remembered air.
I still want to smack him.

Joe Drexel
Is love necessary? No seriously. So much trouble. So much bother. Sex, on the other hand is necessary. Some of the time. In any event it's a whole lot easier to navigate than love. You know where you are, where you’ve been and most important of all where you’re going. Right there. That’s where Joe was -- the there.
One thing's certain -- it started with a lot of talk. Joe loved to talk. a fortiori he loved to argue. I loved to argue back. So "conversation" consisted of long, quasi-stream-of-consciousness monologues on his part punctuated by the "additional dialogue" by me.
“I really can’t agree with you on that,” I’d say. He’d fume. And then we'd fuck. Intense angry fucks. A struggle for dominance surely Yet more like clearing the air. Fucking was a way of saying "I don't love you." Fucking was a way to keep warm in his cold water flat. All painted white and clean it was, cozy. Joe was a dancer. No, more than that. What’s called a "performance artist" today. They had no name for what he did back then. He didn’t care. He had plans.
An original member of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Joe appeared in Wilson's very first spectacular The King of Spain. But then Joe moved on. Wilson moved on too, though when I met Wilson decades later and mentioned Joe he flushed with excitement. Who could forget Deafman Glance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the tropical forest, Egyptian pyramids, dancing mammies penguins and bunny rabbits, and Jack Smith fighting his own appearance in the thing every step of the way and screaming about the penguins. No room for Joe in that crowd. In its wake Wilson was taken up by Jerome Robbins and was off to the Big Time never to return to such baroque primitivism.
Joe was (is) elsewhere. The last time I saw him I was invited to Baird Searles and Martin Last's place for a party around Christmas/ New Year’s. They had been toying with the notion of an orgy, but really didn’t have the nerve for it. Everyone was supposed to come dressed for the beach. But they weren't really serious about it. So Joe and I didn’t' bother bringing bathing suits. After lolling about for a couple of hours stark naked, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone else there (clearly we had scared them off) we fucked in the shower, and then left.
I'm not sure why I never saw Joe after that. We hadn't quarreled. People started to recede in New York 70's as the city had begun to take on the aspect of a vast stage spectacle -- far more complex than any Wilson could devise. Odd none of his plays ever evoked the piers, like Bernard-Marie Koltes (who I do believe I did one hot afternoon.) New York itself began to recede. So I brought down the curtain and left with Bill for California. All gone now, save for happy thoughts of angry fucks.

Camille
Los Angeles circa 1977. Different landscape, different men, different mode, different drinks. (beer and whiskey in New York, gin and tonic in L.A.) Then there’s the stark blue-gray flatness of the of it all. In New York I was all scurrying about and doubling back -- little circles jutting up and down across the lower West Side. Through the West and East I floated when stoned. In L.A. movement came as a straight semi-continuous line in either direction -- either down to the ocean and the edge of the world, or back the other way to Silverlake, and the “Swish Alps.” Most often by bus. Sometimes (the kindness of strangers) by car. No rush in any case. Time slows, and sometimes stands still. And so I drank at a different rate Slower. I’m not looking for anyone in particular anymore -- or anything really. If sex happens, so much the better. But it’s no longer immanent. It’s cruising without object, perfect for solo flights.
But then you’re never entirely alone. Bar friendships are struck up here and there with “regulars” at the Spike or those equally “butch”-named clubs in Silverlake. But again the limits are built into the landscape. Space is applied to time. For we are in an eternal present here. No “then” or “when.” Just the spacio-temproal contours of a drink. And into this drink Camille came loping one Sunday.
Late afternoon had given way to early evening. Some of the “regs” trotted off to dinner, others (like myself) stayed on and continued drinking. Slowly. “nothing” happening. Therefore odd to see the entrance of someone who clearly had “an agenda” of some sort. His face scoured the patio as if he were looking for someone specific -- as if he were there to keep an important appointment. But he was just cruising in the aggressive New York manner redolent of “sidewalk sale” time. I know he talked to me because I noticed him. No other reason really. He needed an audience, and wasn’t he lucky to have found an appreciative one. So many things and people in common -- though Camille rode in limos that had only rushed past my line of vision in the wee smalls. He was sharp-tongued like Ondine, almost as withering. Yet he had the air of “class” remindful of Philippe de Montebello, albeit louche. Just what you’d expect of a petit ami of Egon’s. So why wasn’t he in New York then? he never said. Trying his luck in Hollywood, perchance. Trying to translate his book The Power Look into a movie, maybe. The next American Gigolo ? Made sense. After all he wasn’t staying at a hotel. He had a furnished apartment in Beverly Hills just on the edge of WeHo. Half furnished, really.
We did it on the floor. Neither of us enjoyed it much, yet we wanted each other’s company for that space of a night -- waiting for a subject to arise that might bring us together more than a shared series of references. The ritual phone number exchange arrived with a sense that while we’d never call we’d be sure to chat again if we “ran into” each other somewhere, likely soon. No not The Spike. Somewhere more “socially acceptable.” A screening perchance.
And in this Camille evoked what the “second act” I never had with Tom Dillow might have been like. Lust followed by politesse.
Sex is just so fucking absurd.

Arthur Evans 2
And sometimes it isn’t.
New York again, just for a few minutes. That’s all it took, really. The image
(his smiling little furry face) appears to be clear enough, but the sound's too low to hear -- like a TV set whose volume knob you can't reach to turn up. That's how it was with Arthur Evans 2 -- as we all called him.. Arthur Evans 1 is a figure of historical import now -- the Gay Liberation movement's fiercest firebrand. Loud, brusque, taking no shit from anyone whatsoever, Arthur Evans 1 was in the front line at every demo; the first row of every meeting, or press conference. And that’s because he belonged there. Arthur Evans II was someone quite else.
He was a GAA. member as well -- hence the numerical distinction. He went to all the meetings, served on several committees, and joined in any number of dmos or "zaps." But you couldn't mistake Arthur 2 for Arthur 1 if you tried. Easy to recall this small, soft-bearded, long-haired, figure in floppy clothes standing at the edges of everything, smiling. Arthur 2 always seemed happy. And as far as I know he always was happy -- at least until AIDS took him away like so many others. But that was years ago, back in the 80's when I'd lost track of him. The Arthur 2 I'm talking about is the boy who was born to make love. Not expertly. Not “experimentally.” And certainly not “dangerously.” Making love to Arthur 2 was as comfortable as curling up on a sofa. He'd keep chatting away. Lord only knows about what -- just a constant stream of happy verbosity through all the kisses and caresses. The voice was well above a whisper, but not quite as loud as standard speech. Almost like an interior monologue that had elected to make itself slightly heard.
I remember being up at Arthur 2's apartment one night. (Was it really his or just a "friend's" place he was staying in?) Nothing specific about the interior. It's just that it was on the West Side -- very high in the New York air. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find Arthur -- a Lower East Side boy. It was a tad more (but at the last not quite) suitable to that other Arthur, Loeb. But that Arthur was an East Side sybarite, not an object of either romantic fixation or political note. But what I'm trying to remember, and can't, is what Arthur Evans 2 was saying -- as much to himself as to me -- as we made love. Maybe I can't remember because it wasn't anything "special." The lovemaking certainly was. It was as if he had no body at all. It was as if he were just pure feeling -- an embrace producing a kind of tenderness that once expended swiftly eases into sleep.
“We should do this again,” I said.
“What?” he asked dreamily.
“We should do this more often.”
“Oh yes, let’s. If you want to.”
“Of course I want to.”
Of course I did. But I didn’t. You can’t repeat a dream, as much as you try. You just find yourself drifting off again. And in that memory of sleep I find myself dreaming wide awake. And in this dream I remember something else. We were dancing.
We were swaying back and forth in a kind of stoner waltz to (of all things) Buffalo Springfield’s "Expecting to Fly." But in my waking memory I hear another tune with a different refrain:

Soave sia il vento
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri desir

Allen

2005-10-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

It all seemed to have been executed in one swift continuous motion. Run up the stars, knock on the door, throw him on the floor, take off his clothes and fuck him.
Could it have been that easy? Surely not. Surely there was some slight tremor of resistance (either real or feigned, it really doesn't matter) on his part. Not on mine. I wanted to fuck and he wanted to get fucked. Afternoons were best. Always. We were both awake and alert by then and just bored enough to ache (ever so slightly) for a soupcon of physical release. There was no emotional release -- either sought or achieved.

Allen was pretentious. Hell, I was pretentious too, but no quite like that. He, for example, insisted that Jean-Paul Sartre was gay because Simone de Beauvoir used to pass her girlfriends on to him. "So who was his boyfriend?" I'd ask. Allen wouldnever say. He'd just laugh. He was always one for great vague pronouncements about the future (or lack of same) of one thing or another. And when he spoke to me he always seemd to be looking every so slightly away -- as if he was trying to attract the attention of someone else in the room. But there wasn't anyone else in the room. Not much in the way of furniture either -- which was typical of the lower east side in those days.

"But a chair is not a house
And a house is not a home
When there’s no one there to hold you tight,
And no one there you can kiss good night."

Just big and well-swept ( the equivalent of "clean.") It was his soap box, as it were. He seemed to chatter almost incessantly. Almost because the sex would shut him up. itwas as if someone had left the bathtub running and I'd rushed in to stop it just before it overflowed. Rather proud of myself for being able to do so. But then ever so slightly annoyed. Then truly annoyed. No, no, this couldn't go on.

It didn't.

Complete strangers can (sometimes) be so much more comforting than friends. Especially "friends" like Allen who didn't really need me at all.

Or maybe he did.

"This life's a play from the start,
It's hard to play thru a part,
When there's an ache in your heart all day
I have my dreams 'til the dawn,
I wake to find they are gone,
But still the play "must go on" they say.
When I pretend I'm gay
I never feel that way,
I'm only painting the clouds with sunshine.
When I hold back a tear
To make a smile appear,
I'm only painting the clouds with sunshine
Painting the blues beautiful hues,
Col ored with gold and old rose;
Playing the clown,
Trying to drown
All of my woes;
Tho' things may not look bright
They'll all turn out alright
If I keep painting the clouds with sunshine."

Blaine's Brother

2005-08-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

Under more conventional circumstances, Blaine would have been marked as "the most popular girl in school." She was blonde, "pert," lively and "fun to be with" -- even when standing around the halls talking about nothing in particular. (A very important quality for any High School girl.) If she "stood out" at all it was only slightly. For Blaine was in many ways exemplified Communist Martyrs High, Class of '64. Yes she was "popular." But then so were a lot of people. There weren't any favorites or ruling cliques. In fact I don't recall any cliques at all-- just loose assemblages of the like-mind, constantly circulating around one another, combining and reconfiguring with mad abandon. Blaine, the Belle of all Balls, embodied the casual sophistication common to the offspring of monied BoHo parents (they, and the house they lived in, had much in common with The Royal Tenenbaums )

If Blaine stood out it was because of her voice. Not so much loud as clear and determined. Yet she wasn't being pushy or overbearing. She was a kind of adolescent "social lion" because she "knew everyone" and her boyfriend Howard went to Bronx Science -- which for some reason was well-respected by all of us. Or maybe that respect came after the party -- THE Party.

Blaine had invited everyone over to her house, a beautiful brownstone on the upper west side. Howard had invited everyone he knew. So that meant on a lovely Spring evening more than half of the student bodies of two New York high schools wer jammed inside this one brownstone. Odinarily it could manage a good number of people. But this was well over that limit. We danced, we drank, we smoked pot, we made out. More important, we all found ourselves suddenly "adult" overnight. Sure we'd danced, drank, smoked and made out before but in a different context -- sneaking off away from our parents to do so in clandestine rendez-vous of our own devise. Here we were in a "real" house -- not some back alley.

Blaine's parents were upstairs - technically "present" in order to "supervise" but far too cool to get in our way. I can't recall what Blaine's father actually did. I think he was "retired" -- like Ozzie Nelson, only hipper. He was definitely a beat of the old school. Something vaguely University of Chicago about him as I recall. Blaine's mother too. Anyway we were having a fine old time. So fine that the neighbors called the cops about the noise. I was just getting up a good head of flirting steam with Nelson (who doubtless was eyeing Steve on the other side of the room at the time) when it all came down. Blaine's father spoke to the cops and they left. Obviously they felt everything was OK if a parent was present. About a half hourlater the real trouble began. Few of us found out until the next day but the party had attracted vandals who tried to break into the basement. Blaine's father confronted them and there was a fight -- which he won. But one of them had hit him with something and there was a cut on his head. He stood at the top of the great stairway, blood dramatically trickling down his face, and told us the party was over. So well all left. But not at all regretfully. Nothing couldtop such drama and THE Party became part of igh School legend. My one regret was that I had just begun to chat up Blaine's brother Jimmy.

Jimmy (a younger, prettier, even livelier male version of Blaine)was more like an Arab street urchin as Irving Rosenthal would imagine him. He'd show up after school at Commie Martyrs from time to time, talking a mile a minute, never settling in one place very long, and seemingly amused by everything and everyone. He dazzled and frustrated me. Jimmy was always laughing, always bounding about like a hyperactive puppy. And always with a knowing smile. Andre Gide would have adored him. Naturally I wanted him (that was my Dirk Bogarde in Victim ), but he moved far too quickly for a sentimental slow-poke like me. Once he did light long enough, however, to give me for my birthday Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival, an album that proved as crucial to my literary education as Mike Nichols and Elaine May's Improvisations to Music and Severn Darden's The Sound of My Own Voice.

Would I have "known what to do with him" if I'd had the chance? Certainly not. He was there. He was gone. Of course rumors abounded: he was dealing pot and did jail time, he was hustling and did jail time, and (best of all) he'd run off to Tangier. Were any of the rumors true? Well as Sydney Pollack says to Tim Robbins in The Player, "All rmours are true."

Back in late 80's I ran into Blaine on the IRT. She hadn't changed, though she was just divorced. She was as bubbly as ever.

She didn't know where Jimmy was.

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé

2005-05-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

When was it that I first saw Bresson's film ? During my high school years (1961-64) or very shortly thereafter? I expect it most probably was the latter, for by that time I had resolved to be precisely who I was: a free gay man in a prison of a social order. When the key to the door arrived in 1969 with Stonewall and the activism it inspired, I was ready to use it.

Bresson's characteristically idiosyncratic recreation of the real-life adventure of French "Resistance" fighter Andre Devigny from a German-run prison in then-occupied Lyon in 1943 has every physical detail right, but is far from either a "realistic" drama or a documentary of the least conventional sort. For while nominally based on Devigny's fist-person account, as critic/impressario Richard Roud noted in his Cinema: A Critical Dictionary that "In the original one of Devigny's major arguments in persuading Jost to escape is that he will take him to a brothel. Natually, there is nothing like that in Bresson's film -- not only because of Besson's delicacy, but because of the slightly ambiguous nature of Fontaine and Jost's relationship."

"Slightly ambiguous" ? Oh come on Richard, don't be coy. We all know what you'e driving at, and Bresson couldn't be any clearer. It's what overwhelmed me when I first saw the film. Francois Leterrier, arguably the most beautiful of all Bresson's leading men (and that's quite a line-up, including as it does Claude Laydu, Martin Lassalle, Francois LaFarge, Guillaume de Forets and Antoine Monnier), his eyes perpetually peering up towards our own, seems complete in and of himself. That's the way the character he "models" (Bresson's term for actors) has been concieved. Fontaine is an unambiguoulsy good, brave, and most important of all resolute individual. He constantly encourages his fellow prisoners to "resist" -- to fight against the forces that emprison them. And while some of the other prisoners (a Protestant minister in particular) may speak of God and prayer, (clearly as Bresson's way of framing him as an incipeint Saint), Fontaine says nothing of the sort himself. His becoming modesty likewise forestalls any formal mention of his loneliness. It's up to Bresson's imagery to make that clear -- the taps on the walls of his cell to contact others, shy glances over the communal sink -- like a schoolboy trying to flirt while knowing the teacher may be looking. And so, as a reward, one might say the "God" gives him Jost (Charles LaClainche), a young, scruffy deserter from the Franco-German army. "God" gives him a man to love. That it's love is quite clear."Oh Jost!" Fontaine gasps embracing him after they've scaled the final wall. Obviously they were going off into the night to make love.
And I followed their lead.

Le vent souffle ou il veut

Arthur

2005-05-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

Journalist: What do you call that haircut?
George: Arthur.
-- A Hard Day's Night

Sometimes it's as clear and bright as Palm Springs in August. Sometimes it's as cloudy as Malibu at dusk. And sometimes it looks clear enough, but the sound's too low to hear -- like a TV set whose volume knob you can't reach. That's how I keep seeing/hearing Arthur Evans. Or rather Arthur Evans II, as we all ended up calling him. For Arthur Evans I is almost a historical figure by now -- the Gay Liberation movement's most famous firebrand. Loud, brusque, taking no shit from anyone whatsoever, Arthur Evans I was always in the front of every demonstration, or meeting, or press conference, because he belonged there. Arthur Evans II was someone else.

Arthur Evans II was a G.A.A. member as well -- hence the numerical distinction. He went to all the meetings, served on several comittees, and joined in any number of "zaps." But you couldn't mistake him for Arthur I if you tried. Easy to recall this small, soft-bearded, long-haired, figure in floppy clothes standing at the edges of everything, smiling. Arthur always seemed happy. And as far as I know he always was happy -- at least until AIDS took him away like so many others. But that was years ago, back in the 80's when I'd lost track of him. I'm talking about Arthur II I knew. I'm talking about the boy who was born to make love. Making love to Arthur was as comfortable as curling up on a sofa. He'd keep chatting away. Lord only knows about what -- just a constant stream of happy verbosity through all the kisses and caresses. The voice was well above a whisper, but not quite as loud as standard speech. Almost like an interior monologue that had elected to make itself heard.

I remember being up at Arthur's apartment one night. But was it really his or just a "friend's" place he was staying in? Nothing specific about the interior. It's just that it was on the upper West Side -- very high in the New York air. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find Arthur -- a Lower East Side boy to the manner born. A tad more suitable to that other Arthur, Loeb. But he was an East Side man to the manner born. And not an object of either romantic fixation or political note -- just wit. But what I'm trying to remember, and can't, is what Arthur Evans II was saying -- as much to himself as to me -- as we made love. Maybe I can't remember because it wasn't anything "special." The lovemaking certainly was. It was as if he had no body at all. It was as if he were just pure feeling -- a loving embrace producing a kind of tenderness that swiftly eases into sleep. And in that memory of sleep I find myself dreaming wide awake.

And in this dream I remember something else. We danced. We swayed back and forth in a kind of stoner waltz. Most likely it was to something by Buffalo Springfield. Oh yes, I remember it now, it was "Expecting to Fly." But in my waking dream I hear a slightly different refrain:

Soave sia il vento
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri desir

Love Story

2005-01-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

It's fairly obvious that the sight of Steve pulling himself out of Central Park lake and rushing up to me as I headed (at a leisurely pace) toward the Rambles will stay with me forever. Never learned why Steve fell (or was he pushed?) into the lake. He was so happy to see me -- unusual in itself. In school we talked, but not that much. We weren't "friends" in any real way. He was "nice enough" yet somehow never held my attention. Perhaps it was because he didn't seem to need it. Steve was very assurred. Or rather he seemed that way. "Hail Fellow Well Met" defined him. Deep voice, hearty laugh, moved through the halls with complete control. The world was his -- or so it seemed. For anyone pulling themself out of Central Park lake can't really be called "assurred" or "controlled" -- even though everything else about Steve's manner was as before. But there he was suddenly wanting to talk to me -- suddenly wanting to pour his heart out to me about Nelson who he'd loved and lost years before. This was 1975. Their affair had come to a very dramatic halt in the mid-sixties. That he's known Nelson at all seemed so strange. Nelson was a Golden Boy -- the Perfect WASP. Blonde, tall, snotty, impervious, impregnable, gorgeous-beyond-belief. Steve was a Mook. Everyone wanted Nelson. Steve got him. In the yearbook there's a photo of Nelson and Steve, leaving the building one fall afternoon. Nelson is to the right of the shot staring directly into the camera. Steve is to the left staring at Nelson and gesturing with his hand, much like a figure in a Caravaggio. Behind them and approaching fast is Margot -- looking partially at the camera and partially at Nelson, who she wanted. I recall a party this future Wiccan priestess and NPR commentator gave at her mother's apartment where several kids were invited over only to find that its real purpose was for Margot to try to find a way to get herself alone with Nelson. Rather embarassing -- but that's what adolescence is about, isn't it folks? Steve wasn't at that party. Steve was seldom seen in Nelson's public presence -- which is why the yearbook photo is so rare. It's almost like a snapshot that the Red Squad (perpetually parked in front of Music and Art to keep an eye on the "Red-Diaper Babies" who went there) would have taken. It complimented Steve's tale of woe -- getting thrown out of Nelson's wedding, with Nelson locking himself in the bathroom until Steve was shown the door. How do you love a man who didn't love back, who didn't known how to love, only how to fuck? Needless to say this was the last time I saw Steve. In the yearly class announcements he's listed as "missing." Nelson's still around somewhere. He didn't show at the '99 reunion (the last one I went to), but others did. And none of them knew a thing about Nelson and Steve.

I am the keeper of this love

Day for Night

2005-01-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

It's a late afternoon in the early 70's on the Upper East Side of New York. I'm walking on Fifth right alongside Central Park. I stop in at a townhouse owned by someone whose name I can't recall. How I met him I can't remember either. Or what he does. But he's generally available in the late afternoons for a fuck. He doesn't want to admit he enjoys it as much as I do. He connects joy with loss of "masculinity" and hence loss of power. Silly of course, but I tolerate it because I love fucking in the afternoon.

In some ways it's just like fucking late at night. Time stands still. Context vanishes. Just bodies moving together for pleasure that is at once mutual and distinct. What is he thinking? Does he care that i wonder what he's thinking? Possibly. For a moment sex makes him present as it won't be once the moment passes. In that moment he's alive. And real. And provisionally mine.

It's late afternoon on the Lower East Side and I tumble into Allen's apartment for a quick fuck. Allen's much nicer than the Upper East Side guy, but his apartment's much tattier. And in a funny way he's just as remote. No "masculinity" games with Allen, but power games nonetheless. He wants to think of himself in control of the situation, and I don't protest. Why? because he's so pleasant. At least superficially. For subtly he pushes me around in his mind. And with his body too. It's like wrestling in many ways. I pin him. He pins me. And he laughs all the while.How can I object? Still he recedes. Much like the Upper East Side guy-- whose indifference cum hostility is at least honest.

But one gets what one doesn't pay for: a nice fuck. They remain "inviolable." I maintain my solitude. I drift off into the city, and the next thing I do -- which can be as banal as buying a book (a Huxley novel, a collection of Mallarme prose poems) -- seem exciting. It's like the sudden rush after a good meal -- but without the slight sense of bloat. I am satisfied and I am alone in the half-deserted city.

Thoughts race. To love without being "loved" is not without value. O you who've "given yourself to me" without really doing so -- my love. Stay as you are, "untouched." Inviolable in your "power." I love you all the same. Just as much.

Now it's night.

D'entre les morts

2004-11-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

It's very late somewhere in Queens, forty years ago. Ol' Bob Hamm and I are in a graveyard drinking cheap wine. Bob's telling me about his friend Joe, whose girlfriend is a drag queen named Nicole. Much undefined sexual tension between Bob and I (despite a furtive unsatisfactory blow-job one night so very long, long-ago), never really relieved -- save for the drinking. For it's this period -- mid-sixties, when I was in college -- that drinking had somehow begun to replace sex. No, take that back. They ran on parallel tracks. If I couldn't get laid I'd get drunk. And sometimes vice versa. A desire to "lose myself in the dark" was the common denominator. Cemeteries were welcome spots for the application of cheap wine to an already hazy mind and troubled soul. (There's a great cemetery scene in the film version of A Home at the End of the World )

One night Bob took me to visit his friend Joe and Joe's girlfriend Nicole in their apartment on the lower east side. A singular experience. Joe wasn't gay, by any standard I knew of then or now. And Nicole certainly wasn't a woman. Yet they fulfilled roles that redered them "boy" and "girl" in the accepted sense. Joe was just another junkie -- flegmatic and funny. Nicole another mark -- quiet, self-contained. How Bob (possibly the squarest hipster I've ever known) came to meet Joe I never found out.

The image is beginning to fade just now. Probably wasn't meant to last, hazy as it was even at the time of its conception. Like a jazz refrain played on late night FM radio whose title I never quite learned. Something by Eric Dolphy -- "You Don't Know What Love Is." It begins to fade like the identity of someone who also lived on the lower eastside who I used to drop by and fuck in the afternoon around four. Up the stairs, knock on the door, fall on the floor with him -- without so much as saying hello. The fuck was the hello. Smiling, giggling, grabbing at the buttons and zippers, coming rather quickly too as I recall. Some talk, some tea-- and then out.
Gone now, all gone. Buried somewhere down there (points to ground ), or up here (points to head.)

Night and the City

2004-09-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

For a long time I used to go to bed late. 4 a.m., 5 a.m. on the weekends. Sometimes more. Eventually not coming home to Queens at all. "I'm staying over with a friend," I told my mother, not bothering to mention that the "friend" was someone I'd just met and likely wouldn't be seeing ever again. I couldn't have stayed home if I’d wanted to. The night was much too attractive. It had a "character" of its own -- like a person.

New York at night was cozy, seductive, warm -- even in Winter. Especially in winter. The "dead" of it. I loved the stillness so much, that there was no reason to "find the courage" to walk out into it alone. I felt perfectly safe. Even in the park. Even at the docks. Even at the trucks in the West Village. Everywhere, really. I could sense that safety, like a presence in and of itself just outside my bedroom door, out of the house, down the street, across the marshes of Flushing Meadow and onto the IRT.

When I was very young I would curl up in bed to listen to "Ol' Shep" on my transistor radio into the wee smalls. When I was older my favorite became "The Adventures of Johnny Nightsounds" (John Leonard’s misspent youth) on WBAI. What John Schlesinger said about listening to "Soave sia il vento" from Cosi Fan Tutte applies here. It was "music to be listened to late at night. But in my case that music was "Mas Que Nada" which a late night WBAI d.j. (whose name I've completely forgotten) used to play with almost as much regularity as the p.a. system at the Bleecker Street Cinema used to play "Sans Toi" from Cleo From 5 to 7 and the main theme from Shoot the Piano Player.

"I would pretty much go out every night until really late. I did that for a good 10 years. And I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend it, but there just comes a point when you have to take care of yourself." -- Rufus Wainright

By the mid sixties I’d learned how to move through the city in that perfect hush of ease that’s the soft underside of the "danger" of "being out late at night." I was, in point of fact, perfectly safe. Looking for sex in the never-quite-empty streets, dropping in and out of the bars, then riding the subway home to Queens in happy solitude -- even if I hadn’t "scored." I had a set routine of places to drop in on along a route I'd developed in the West Village. A few beers at the bar across the street from the Theatre de Lys, then down to Kellers and The Ramrod, then on across the vast empty expanses of cobblestone to The Anvil, The Eagle, and The Stud. A ceaselessly revolving repetoire of characters would assemble and disassemble in suitably dream-like fashion not so much to "have sex" as to think about it. We were "up late" yet at the same time fast asleep, drifting off in a dream of sex as warm as a bed in winter after a late stroll, a nightcap, and a fast fuck

"As soon as one penetrates there, writes it, one realizes that one is in a privileged corner of the world, like a square. Mysteriously left with the abandonment in the medium of a garden; a place where the normal order does not exist but where another order, very curious, was created "-- Bernard-MarieKoltes

He was writing, of course, about the the piers -- abandoned like the West Side Highway that loomed above them. But these "empty" spaces were full of life, especially during the day. But those days -- shadowy, delicate, warm, were in many ways indistinguishable from night.

Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe

2004-09-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

Is love necessary?

No seriously, sometimes I wonder. It's so much trouble. It's so much bother. Sex, on the other hand is necessary. Sometimes. In any even it's a whole lot easier. Take Joe Drexel (Please!)

I really can't remember when we met. A play. A screening. Maybe it was at the Judson Church. Or maybe it was at a party where introductions were made by a mutual friend -- because we had so many mutual friends. One thing's for certain, it started with a lot of talk. Joe loved to argue. I loved to argue back. So "talk" consisted of long, quasi-stream-of-consciousness monologues on his part punctuated by the "additional dialogue" I'd provide by challenging him. And then we'd fuck. Intense angry fucks. A struggle for dominance? Possibly. More like clearing the air. Fucking was a way of saying "I don't love you." Fucking was a way to keep warm in his cold water flat on the lower eastside. All painted white and clean. Cozy. Joe was a dancer. What's called a "performance artist" today. He had no name for what he did back then. He had plans.

An original member of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Joe appeared in Wilson's very first spectacular The King of Spain. But not in any of the others. He'd moved on. Wilson moved on. Deafman Glance was his last really interesting work. Who could forget that performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the tropical forest, Egyptian pyramids, dancing mammies, and Jack Smith fighting his own appearance in the thing every step of the way and screaming about the penguins (a concept Wilson had of course copped from him among others.)

After that Wilson was taken up by Jerome Robbins and was off to the Big Time and shows that were about as "avant-garde" as a dinner theater production of Private Lives with Russell Nype and Betsy Palmer. (Actually that would be rather avant-garde come to think about it.) But Joe was elsewhere. And still is last I heard. I remember the last time I saw him. I was invited to Baird Searles and Martin Last's place for a party around the Christmas holidays. They were toying with the notion of an orgy. Everyone was supposed to come dressed for the beach in bathing suits. But weren't really serious about it. So Joe and I (we didn' bother bringing bathing suits) fucked in the shower, and then left.

I'm not sure why I never saw him after that. We hadn't quarelled. Perhaps we spoke again in passing once or twice. Or maybe not. People started to recede then. And so did I as New York in the 70's had begun to take on the aspect of a vast stage spectacle -- far more complex than any Wilson could devise. And I was making plans to bring down the curtain and leave for California. That's all gone now. But happy thoughts of angrily fucking Joe remain. One more curtain call before we go, Joe.

Kissing Time

2004-09-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

It was the winter of 1967 -- right around New Year's, I'd gone to a party, I forget whose, that Warren Sonbert had told me about. Several of the people he'd put in his movies, most of whom I knew rather well, Vivian Kurtz in particular, were there. One I didn't know until that night was Tom Dillow. Tom was in Warren's first film, Amphetamine where he shares one of the longest screen most intense kisses ever with Warren's friend Ronnie. They were both high as kites, and Warren was doing a rapid hand-held 360 around them -- a homemade hommage to the climactic kiss in Vertigo where the camera circles James Stewart and the iconographically reconstructed Kim Novak.

Tom was very loud and very forward and very drunk and very hot. Grabbing me in the bedroom alone he stuck his tongue right down my throat with an eager alacrity I'd never experienced before. Then, right out of the blue, he proposed we leave and go to the movies. So we went to the Regency and saw The Chelsea Girls -- which we'd both seen many times before. Being from Boston Tom knew everyone in the movie personally (Ed Hood and Patrick Fleyming in particular) and began dishing away with great enthusiasm -- all the while making out with me. I came very close to coming several times. It was a delirium of talk and sex. (Nothing like it. Wish it could be bottled. ) And each time I reached the brink he cooed in my ear to calm down and hold off -- which I did until we got back to his hotel room for what turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic in context. We were both too drunk and too distracted by then -- essentially already spent. Naturally I never saw him again. Yet oddly I wasn't crushed. I'd gotten more than I'd asked for.

Just this month I finally got around to reading Savage Grace; an amazing oral history of a real-life incest and murder story that Tom Kalin has been trying to turn into a movie for years. Now I hear it's going to be a "go" for next year with John Malkovich and Julianne Moore as the rich and twisted Brooks and Barbara Bakeland -- heirs to the "Bakelite" plastics fortune. An unknown will be cast as Tony -- the gay son that Brooks ordered Barbara to "ungay" by sleeping with him. To their great surprise (but no one else's) this didn't do the trick, and only spurred his hatred of her. In fact things got so out of hand that he slashed her throat in a fit of pique. He was sent to a looney bin in England (where the murder took place) and was thought to be successfully rehabbed enough to get shipped back stateside for care in a nice expensive clinic. But due to a technical screw-up he was sent instead to his grandmother. He pulled a knife on her stabbing her several times. She lived. He went to a U.S.looney bin where he eventually killed himself. Minus the murder and incest, Tony Bakeland struck a familiar chord -- An Arthur Loeb gone wrong as it were. But there was something more that popped upright into my face -- Tom Dillow. My epic trick of 37 years ago was one of Tony Bakeland's boyfriends!

You must remember this, a kiss is not just a kiss.

Old Boyfriends

2004-09-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Old Boyfriends,
Lost in the pocket of your overcoat,
Like burned out lite bulbs on a Ferris Wheel [Tom Waits]

Oh Barry Prince! Lost in the pocket of my overcoat. The best fuck I ever had.
I'm sure he’s dead by now, though I’ve been surprised before. When so many are dead it’s hard to count the living.
So its -- when? 1969? A good enough guess. Madison avenue around 59th in the late afternoon shafts of light cutting through the dusk. And I run into Barry the way I always did back then, "by chance." I’d seen him only a few weeks before walking down Fifth Ave, so "I was just thinking about you," jumped out -- which was ever-so-slightly true. I thought about Barry a lot -- but intermittently. Just a genial presence. Never anything sexual exactly. Or if so, nascent.
When did I first meet Barry anyway? Who introduced us? He was part of Peter Blum’s circle I know --like Ronnie. But like so many people back then Barry was just around. At the screenings, at the museum in the cafes on the streets. Not foregrounded ever, really. Somewhere just off to the side. Smiling. Usually there was a girl in his general vicinity. Or seemed to be. And that was enough to mark him as "taken" -- even though I wasn’t attentive enough to realize what was really going on.

"There was proximity but no relating." (Nichols and May)

So for me Barry Prince was "off the menu." But was he ever "on the menu" ? Was I was attracted to him? Sure, but not consciously. Odd to think of the "unconscious" as consciousness was such an obsession. We all wanted to be "awake" to take it all in. I had to stay "up" or I’d miss something . And I nearly missed Barry. His face was very beautiful in a Modigliani kind of way. The great bush of curls on top of the long head, like a crown. But it was his manner that got to me. Quiet. "Too quiet" as they say in the westerns. That plus the sudden realization that this was the first time I’d really been alone with him. He wasn’t saying anything much at all. Just "Hi, how are you?" But the smile was more intense than ever before. I started prattling on about some film I’d just seen, as if that were the only conversation he'd be interested in having with me. But film and literature were the only things I ever talked about with that group (Pynchon's V especially). Certainly not "personal experiences" of any kind -- for the ones I’d had up to then were brief, quasi-violent, and impossible to put into words. Yet I didn’t really think anything of it when he asked me up to his apartment -- which was just half a block away -- for "a drink or something". Yet at the same time I really wasn’t suprised when we walked in the door and he grabbed me in his arms and kissed me. Hard at first, and then softly, and then more rapidly, giggling as he did. I giggled back, and we tumbled out of our clothes and tumbled onto the couch, rubbing aginst one another, getting hard -- looking at our hardness, stroking it, laughing. And then onto the bed -- a waterbed. It was my first and last time on one. Funny to find one in Barry’s apartment. It was the end of the waterbed era and he never struck me as one susceptible to "trends." But when we started fucking it all became clear. Such a tender fuck. He cooed softly. Smiling, smiling. And I grinned ear-to-ear as well --amazed at my good forune. "Of all people!" And we rocked with the flow of water in the bed after coming. We lay and almost slept -- stroking each other and kissing some more in anticipation of the next round, and then some rest and then some more. Night falls on the city as we rock in each others arms. Time stops and the world goes away.