In 1985, when I was thirty-three years old, I bought a studio apartment in Manhattan, near the United Nations. I’m there only very occasionally now, and have begun clearing the place out with an eye toward letting it go. The Library of Congress acquired a hundred and forty-six volumes of my diaries, which I’ve been keeping since the early nineteen-seventies. Before I handed over the mostly black-and-red notebooks in which I have chronicled my life, I scanned and downloaded the pages onto a thumb drive. The extracts below, which date from 1985 to 1988, offer glimpses of a young man trying to find his footing as a writer. They also offer a snapshot of a city in the grip of AIDS. Before moving into the apartment, I had had an affair with a young classicist named Thomas Curley (Tommy). He died of AIDS, at thirty-one, in October, 1984.
1985
Aug. 17: I went down to church [the Saturday-night gay Catholic Mass at St. Francis Xavier] at 7:30. . . . It was the usual cheerful Dignity service: lots of called-out intentions for people just dead from or diagnosed with AIDS; a boy in the pew in front of me with K.S. [Kaposi’s sarcoma] on his nose, in exactly the spot where Tommy had it; a singer who did the Communion hymn—beautifully, too—who, I later learned, is a P.W.A. (person with AIDS).
Aug. 18: [The man I was seeing was] experiencing the old dichotomy, the same one in Tommy. The better he knows me, the harder it is to have sex. He’s felt this before in his relationships, & it’s what you always find in gay men who lived through the 70s. That much he’s honest about. . . . I ask him—as I hold my breath—if he wants to call it a day. He says yes & no. No, because I’m “sensitive” & he likes being with me; yes, because he’d have “one less commitment.” Part of him would be disappointed if I walked away, but he emphasizes that part of him would be relieved—that would solve all the ambiguities for him. . . .
I went down to Louise’s [Tommy’s mother]. She gave me dinner & I cried it out on her shoulder. She was glad. Because she wanted to mourn Tommy tonight. So we drank too much & did both because it all seemed part of the same wretched whole. Why, she wanted to know, has she so carefully arranged all his Latin and Greek books? “He’s not coming back,” she admits.
Aug. 31: Went down to church in a cab. Sparse crowd—whoever isn’t dead from AIDS is out at Fire Island for the last weekend of summer. Ran into [G.J.] at the social. Hadn’t seen his easy Irish face in months. He tells me he’s got “a new little companion.” I thought it might be a 17-year-old . . . but it turns out to be a wire-haired terrier.
Sept. 10: We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword, & I’m no more lethal than anyone else. We’re either going to get it or not. Period. I hate doing this algebra in my head, but maybe it helps keep one from going completely crazy.
Sept. 14: Lizzie [Elizabeth Hardwick] and I talked about N.Y. apartment prices & the New York Times. She agrees the copy editors are awful. “If you say ‘Picasso,’ ” she said in her Kentucky squawk, “they make you put ‘the Spanish painter’ after it. . . .” I told her [about the book on plagiarism I was writing]. When Jacob Epstein’s name came up [he’d been caught putting material from Martin Amis’s first novel into his own], she turned a bit frosty. “You cain’t,” she said, thinking of her good friend Barbara’s boy. “You just cain’t. It ruined his life.” (Jacob has just been nominated for an Emmy for “Hill Street Blues.” It strikes me as a view typical of the New York Review of Books to think that this constitutes a ruined life.)
Sept. 23: I always fall for the truly cold—like [B.]—because I decide their reserve & awkwardness is really bottled-up warmth that they’re waiting for me to release—an act for which they’ll repay me with extravagant love.
Oct. 2: Took the train home. . . . First thing I saw outside the terminal was the Post announcing Rock Hudson’s death. Poor bastard. One day before Tommy’s anniversary. Poor all of us. The cover story in New York is about “the last word on avoiding AIDS.” One doctor makes me feel safe; another makes me certain I’ve got better than a 1 in 3 chance of getting AIDS or ARC. And Diane McGrath, the Republican candidate for mayor, wants to close not only the baths but the bars as well.
Oct. 17: This afternoon I saw Jacqueline Onassis twice within one hour. I was headed from the 86th St. station to the reservoir & saw her coming toward me. She is bone-slim, looks masked, and has hair that’s unaccountably in place without looking lacquered. She’s very tanned and looks older than her photographs. “So, honey,” I felt like saying, “how come you’re not at Doubleday? Playin’ hooky?” Maybe she’d just come home for a quick late-lunch tuna melt & to feed the cat. Anyway, I ranked it just beneath my Garbo sighting. Well, after I did my 3.2 [miles], and was heading back to the subway, whom should I see once more, walking west this time instead of east? Herself. We passed one another crossing Park Ave. I saw her stifling a yawn as she waited for the light to change.
Oct. 24: A double suicide on the news. Two men leapt from the 35th floor of a 3rd Ave. apt. house. One of them, 42, is thought to have had AIDS. He and his lover roped themselves together at the waist and jumped after toasting themselves with wine. The police found the apartment “immaculate.” There were even fresh-cut flowers.
1986
July 14: I think I see Ed Koch more often than I do my mother. He came through the crowd tonight—blue-shirted, big-bellied, thumbs up—to start the [outdoor] concert. I’d say 4 people were clapping to every one who was booing: not a bad ratio for someone surrounded by scandal.
July 18: [Paul] & Tim met at a movie—a dirty movie. Paul says he now goes twice a week to Sexual Compulsives Anonymous at the Gay Community Center downtown. In fact, he came to the movie right from a meeting. He says he only has safe sex these days but that he goes after it just as compulsively as ever—& with emotional results just as miserable.
July 23: Another hot night. And the Hitachi sign near Columbus Circle lies. It never says worse than “warm”—I suppose because they don’t want you associating Hitachi and discomfort.
July 30: Went up to Riverside Park for tonight’s Front Runners [the gay running club] run. (Struck by the # of homeless actually trying to live in the park—little shanties & cookers.) Someone else . . . led the pack tonight. He explained that there were so few people there because a lot of people were attending somebody’s memorial service.
Aug. 3: It’s been three years since I slept with Tommy. Will I make it to five? Will I stop worrying after that? Will I ever stop worrying? Part of me would love to gamble & take the test & rejoice if it turned out negative. But I can’t risk what would happen to my mind if it came back positive. I can’t do it. And a lot of doctors say one shouldn’t for that very reason: don’t risk the devastation.
Sept. 1: Labor Day, & no parade in New York. The unions decided there wasn’t enough interest and not much to celebrate, so they let everyone go to the beach instead. Ronnie [Ronald Reagan] has gotten everything he ever wanted!
Sept. 3: I realized it was Tommy’s birthday. . . . He’s been dead longer than I knew him alive.
Sept. 18: Should I kiss & make up with National Review? A few weeks ago they ran a cover story called “A Conservative States the Case for Gay Rights” and in the last issue there was an interesting, non-Neanderthal debate on the subject in the letters column.
Sept. 19: There was news today about AZT, a drug that’s having some success with AIDS patients. No cure, but it’s buying time. And they say it may be especially useful to those who have been [infected] but are not yet sick. There is so little good news, ever, that one feels almost giddy about this. God knows it’s made my day. I just hope it doesn’t have to try saving my life.
Sept. 21: I walked down to the Morgan Library to see the Housman exhibit. . . . But I much more enjoyed the exhibition of Mrs. Delany’s flowers, paper-cut collages of impossible intricacy made by an old lady in the 18th century. Yuppie mother to 8-year-old daughter: “Do you know that this lady lived 200 years ago?” Daughter’s reply: “So?”
Sept. 22: [Ted Hughes at the 92nd Street Y, where I had a fellowship]: Something about him—the voice, the boxer’s head ducked—reminded me of a Yorkshire Norman Mailer, but that makes him ridiculous & he’s not. He’s gorgeous & mean & no wonder two of his wives [sic] killed themselves. What a reading—not so much oral annotations of the poems (in advance) as great shaggy-dog narratives. Some wonderful WWI stuff about his father, and a beautiful, heroic poem about a salmon at the end. . . .
Then to the party for him at Shelley’s on W. 70th Street. And who should be there but his big ugly sister Olwyn, with whom I had that tetchy correspondence over the Plath journals. At about 11:00 the party was beginning to thin & I feared I’d get into a position where I’d have to introduce myself. I decided it was time to leave, but she was between me & the door. So I told Shelley my name was Fred, & she said gotcha, & she showed me out, saying, “So glad you could come, Fred!” and I made my escape into the Manhattan night.
Sept. 30: Came home to a phone message from Greg. Dinner tomorrow night may fall through because Joe Norton, one of the guys we saw “The Color Purple” with, has died of AIDS. He was 24. I can’t even remember his face—only Louis, the lover’s. Oh, God help us all.
Oct. 1: Greg and I left phone messages with one another throughout the day & talked tonight. He went to the hospital. It turns out Joe won’t be dead until tomorrow. (Now, there’s a hell of a sentence.) They won’t get the 3rd flat electroencephalogram until then; and only then can they unplug him. So his parents & Louis have begun to grieve while the machine is still beeping. And Greg tells me that the volunteer group he works for (doing wills for AIDS victims) wants him to go to the Bronx; that’s where they’re dying fastest now . . . and the yuppie lawyers don’t want to go up there.
Oct. 13: Listened to Reagan’s speech about Iceland. Despite what the media say, I think Reykjavík may have been his finest hour. If Star Wars is such a will-o’-the-wisp, as the TV boys keep saying, why are the Russians so dead set vs. our having it?
Oct. 17: So I went down to Charlie’s and wound up flirting with someone named Chuck and wound up going home with him and sleeping with him in such a way as to put me (probably) in no physical danger, just more psychological peril. Is this the way I’m going to live the next twenty years, assuming I get to live them? . . . Just hoping that something wonderful will come along, but then, after another month or two has gone by . . . going out and finding something brief, and exciting, just plain releasing. Is this the only alternative to celibacy? . . . I seemed to need nothing in between all through my twenties. But I wasn’t here in N.Y. then, & I wasn’t psychologically out of my teens then.
Oct. 18: Going home in my dark glasses by late-morning light & sleeping it off. Sleeping off sleeping together. Frightened by how unmomentous this has become. . . . Do you know what this morning’s conversation was mostly about? My lost sock.
And in a few days my body will start feeling hungry & I’ll wonder if I shouldn’t call him.
Oct. 19: Still trying to feel chastened, tidy, penitent, self-sufficient. Would I feel different if these weren’t dangerous times? Or is there something about this loathing that has nothing to do with panic? Am I just, now and forever, a nice Catholic boy?
Dec. 14: In the evening Doug & I went down to the G.M.H.C. Christmas party at the Saint. Very festive, even though most of the food ran out while we were still in line. A # of straight people there. Older women, especially. Mothers of dead sons. A few brave souls walking around with heaped plates and obvious K.S. on their faces. And bits of the old days, “the scene,” too: arrogant, beautiful bartenders, etc.
Doug left at around 10:00. He had a 7:00 a.m. meeting to look forward to. I stayed on for a while. A very cute, 34-year-old ex-policeman from Houston—he’d even been shot once—flirted with me & asked what chance there was we would leave together.
Dec. 17: It was getting late—I had to meet Greg—and so I dashed to 2nd Ave. for a cab, and it was one of those winter coming-home-from-work hours, when New York is swimming in light and movement and relief, and I felt glorious; wouldn’t exchange any life for mine. I felt ready for Christmas. No one should be entitled to live in Manhattan before the age of 30. One can’t appreciate or deserve it until then.
1987
Jan. 8: [Met a friend] at the Hors D’Oeuvrerie, part of Windows on the World. We spent $50 for a couple of rounds of drinks & nibbles, but it was worth it—the night was gorgeously clear and all of N.Y. was below us (107th fl.). Such is my geography that I only later realized what I thought was an exceptionally rural or blacked-out section of Queens was probably Jamaica Bay.
Jan. 17: [I’d been on a few dates with a lawyer.] It turns out he’d already made plans for us to go to dinner with some of his friends. So I spent the evening at the apartment of 2 gay psychiatrists on Central Park West. They barely speak to one another, and then only to criticize. One of them spent a lot of the evening in another room. There was another couple there—& one of them was a psychiatrist, too. I was the youngest there by at least 10 years.
Some couples stay together for the sake of the children. I got the feeling our hosts stay together for the sake of the apartment—a huge thing into which entirely too much thought and work has gone. Just as too much thought and work goes into the food, the cats, the music. By eleven o’clock the opera singer had come off the turntable in favor of Barbara Cook, and then the telephone rang and one of the psychiatrists got a call with the news that one of his closest friends had just died of AIDS out in Los Angeles.
I felt I was getting one-two punches: the worst of the Old Homosexuality and the worst of the New.
Jan. 22: We’re in the middle of a blizzard. I trudged out of the Y at about 5:30 & learned that there were no trains running south of 86th St. on the Lexington line. So I caught a bus at 84th & 2nd—one of the few running. It was packed, and we moved no faster than a block a minute. I kept looking at an ad that said 1 in every 100 people is schizophrenic. And naturally the 1 on this bus carrying about 100 souls was standing and shouting right next to me.
Jan. 28: The track around the reservoir had a hard pack of snow on it, but it was amazingly unslippery. My wind was good and I ran well. And at last this cough that’s been hanging on seems to be going. I’ve been thinking more than usual about AIDS. Another part of the cycle everyone goes through, I suppose. On Monday, after I got the news from Katrina [my editor, saying my novel had sold], I thought: will I live to see it come out?
Now Liberace. And of course the usual denials. It’s pernicious anemia brought on by a watermelon diet; it’s emphysema; it’s heart disease. I saw him on a talk show over Christmas at Mom’s. The second I saw his emaciated face on the screen, I thought: he’s got it.
Jan. 29: The N.B.C.C. Awards. I went to the Publicists’ lunch in the old 5th Ave. Hotel. . . . It’s the lunch they give for the reviewers each year. They are a raucous lot, really. Pushing Barbara Pym or “Thin Thighs in Thirty Days”—it’s pretty much all the same to them. I sat between Ben and a friend of his named Michelle, who works for Franklin Watts & who’s loud and funny. She talked about that . . . woman who was finally arrested for pretending to be Aristotle Onassis’s sister, but only after she was able to pass a mint’s worth of phony checks. “I’ve gotta take a urine test to do business in my own bank,” Michelle says, “and this one’s buying out a whole Radio Shack with a rubber check and no I.D.”
Jan. 31: I went into Caswell-Massey this afternoon to buy ear plugs & came out with a $45 hairbrush. And I don’t even brush my hair.
Feb. 3: Liberace is dying & the Disease Control Center in Atlanta is talking about having everyone admitted to a hospital be required to take the AIDS test. So there will be lots of people breaking some ribs and leaving the next morning knowing they’re antibody-positive? Wonderful.
Feb. 12: How I think these days: Just give me time enough to finish “Stolen Words.” Draft “Aurora 7” [my second novel]. Then I can get sick. Just as a year ago I was making a bargain with God: just let me finish revising “Arts & Sciences.” Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can keep this up for 40 years.
Feb. 13: Went to Howie the dentist this morning. A thorough cleaning and no problems. But my AIDS fears travel everywhere with me. Why, I think, is he asking me how my “general health” has been? And when he tells me that the remaining 2 wisdom teeth . . . will eventually have to come out, I think: what if I have it done overnight in a hospital? And what if by then they’re giving the AIDS test to everyone? Will I wake up to hear a nurse tell me that my wisdom teeth are out & that, by the way, I’m antibody-positive?
Feb. 20: [N.] is scared of [possibly] being gay and being in N.Y., and so I sit across from him, feeling old & possibly lethal, offering my bromides and cautions & grounds for hope I certainly don’t believe in.
Feb. 22: What irony: all that worry over being homosexual. And then, not much after it began to seem okay to be so, we must learn to practice every self-restraint we can think of.
Feb. 23: In the afternoon I called Joyce [my lawyer] . . . to make an appointment to have my will done. . . . Melodramatic? Maybe the timing, though I’ve meant to do this anyway, since I do now have money, property, copyrights to think about. And consider this: she’s thinking of getting out of the wills business—too many of her clients have ARC, get AIDS, die, leave lovers who fight with parents. It’s become too depressing.
Feb. 24: I see mandatory AIDS testing coming. They won’t exactly drag one off the streets to do it, but they’ll make it a requirement for so many things—visas, hospital stays, insurance, licenses of all kinds—that it will become impossible to go much further through life without having [the test]. And millions will get psychological death sentences.
March 2: I ran. At 5:00 there was that gaudy color-photograph effect on the eastern edge of the reservoir. The sky was inky dark blue, and the buildings were as white as Marilyn Monroe’s teeth. A trick that God, the great showoff, kept up for a couple of minutes. It was spectacular. A strong wind, too—the track was sprinkled with feathers.
March 9: [Arthur Miller at the Y.] Pompous, old, overrated bore. He read from his memoirs (I counted 3 grammatical errors) & had the dumb audience eating out of his hand. Even after he called it quits rather abruptly & left the stage at 9:00. At the party upstairs in the nursery school he never even took off his coat. Oh, Marilyn, how you must have missed Joe D.
March 18: Walking on 2nd Ave. in the 60s this morning I saw a blond woman walking in the other direction. I thought: “Gee, she’s pretty.” The mind tends toward understatement sometimes. I got a few steps closer and realized it was Catherine Deneuve.
March 22: A new crush: [N. and I] went to a coffee shop across from Lincoln Center and sat and talked about everything for hours. He had a fingernail paring caught between his teeth and repeated efforts to dislodge it with a toothpick succeeded only in bloodying his gums. That I found all this adorable instead of disgusting will tell you where I am.
March 23: Mona Simpson & three girls from Paris Review were [at a party] . . . chattering amongst themselves—and only themselves—like quadruplets who’d been raised in the forest.
March 26: Greg has the Vidalian fuck-&-move-on-&-count-on-your-friends-for-everything-else view. Which I accept as his, just as he understands my looking-for-the-Mr.-Right-One drive.
April 6: Doug calls & asks if I’d like to be on a segment of “Good Morning America” being produced by [his ex-boyfriend]. It’s about love in the 80s & I’m supposed to function as a representative successful, reasonably attractive youngish gay man—filmed running in the Park, etc. Well, no, thanks. But I’m flattered.
April 20: Tommy’s book has come out & it’s brought back all the old disbelief that this ever could have happened. [Louise and I] talked about the latest AIDS horror stories in the press & I walked her home as far as 34th St., down 1st, past the bums getting ready for the night in their cardboard boxes in Ralph Bunche Park.
April 28: I opened the door at 7:30 to [G., an Italian writer], who, just as David said, is just this side of being handsome, but with a beautiful compact build and Florentine blue eyes. He has a son who’s 9. He and his ex-wife are both journalists & have been here for a year. He is charming, very smart, and very impetuous.
Yes. Satisfied? I’m no brighter than I ever was. But don’t tell me I wasn’t pushed. By 10:00 we’d killed a bottle of wine and he suggested we order in instead of going out for a meal. Well, that didn’t leave much doubt.
If you want the truth without the details: we didn’t do anything dangerous, but it was very exciting and romantic. Like with Carlo: I become very American, cute Tom Sawyer, with these Europeans, and they instantly know what little-boy buttons to push. And I was drunk & enjoying myself almost thoroughly, except I could hear the disquieting voice in the back of my head: why couldn’t you wait? why couldn’t he?
Why? Because it’s unnatural to live without sex, even in the midst of this pandemic. . . .
But this is what really bothered me. He was playing my role—instantly smitten, on the verge of declaring love to someone he’d just met. And I could see the little laser point of truth somewhere behind my eyes. I’m not going to be able to feel it back.
[G. died in 1992.]
May 1: A report on ABC News tonight says AIDS may kill 50 million people in Africa. I went into one of my panics.
May 5: [Cooked dinner for N.] There were even moments tonight when I wasn’t quite sure I liked him. He seemed a little bit too much the operator, the ambitious one. . . . (Everyone I get a crush on always starts out seeming sweet and ends up seeming real.)
May 7: [At the ballet with Louise.] Is it my imagination, or does the audience seem less gay than it did back in the late 70s? Are that many of us dead already?
May 8: Ran 5 miles. Over the Walkman I heard how Speaker Wright says the Conn. congressman’s AIDS death shows we must act against the disease (i.e.—transfusion acquisition = innocence). Tonight, natch, his wife reveals that Rep. McKinney did do it with the boys. So will Wright now call for less money?
May 9: My day began at 2 a.m. The buzzer rang and . . . I leapt out of bed, unnerved in a way one can only be in the middle of the night in N.Y.C.
It was Kenny. He was coming home from a party downtown and just happened to think maybe he’d stop by. Maybe we could watch a video. He is so young and bouncy that that would almost be plausible. But what he really wanted, of course, after months, was to make love.
Yes, I should have sent him home. But what am I supposed to be? A saint? (I’ve said this before here.) So, yes, we made love. Super safely—though I had to keep stopping him from doing more. He kept saying—can’t we do this, can’t we do that, I want that more than anything in the world—and I kept saying no, no, no. . . .
What is going to happen to this 21-year-old boy a year from now? When he meets someone who won’t worry much about letting him take risks?
May 22: Picked up the copy-edited ms. of “A&S” on Vanderbilt Ave. Katrina & Larry have done a really meticulous job. Amazing how one thinks one knows how to spell & set up a story with clarity & continuity. Here and there I quibble, but on the whole I’m delighted to have people asking questions like: where did Shane’s toothbrush suddenly come from?
May 26: I’ve got another cold. The last one came only 2 months ago. So I start thinking the unthinkable for a minute or two. And then, because the unthinkable is by definition something one can’t think about . . . I blow my nose, take two aspirin and think about something else.
May 30: Greg’s on a date. Someone he met last week called Damian. He said . . . that one sign of having been around the block too many times was being able to compare someone named Damian with another Damian one once went out with.
May 31: My wonderful Italian mother: she tells me that if I meet someone I really like & we’re being intimate, we should each wear two rubbers because she’s heard on the news that rubbers sometimes break. It might as well be 1958: “Wear your rubbers when it rains.”
June 19: [At the disco Private Eyes, with Greg and friends]: spent a couple of hours amidst the inane thumping music. One feels as if one is swimming through an ocean of Clinique between buffetings by phony pecs and shoulders. . . . We left around 2:00. (I think I know why one goes at all: . . . that blessed feeling of relief when you step out into the smokeless quiet of the street in the middle of the night.)
June 21: Got up late & saw the rest of “The Right Stuff” [on VHS]. (“Finishing a movie” is something one does now in the morning, the way one used to finish the novel or magazine article one put on the night table before clicking out the light.)
Aug. 21: Went down to Tom Victor’s apartment/studio near 5th & 20th at 3:00 [to have my author photo taken]. A huge loft; a movie producer’s idea of how the successful photographer lives. . . . Tom is very flirtatious & feel-copping: the desired effect is to relax the subject—in my case it has something of the opposite effect at first. But basically he’s a nice guy & I did begin to enjoy myself. Felt a little like Tammy Faye Bakker when he applied eyeliner, blusher, and lipstick to me, but this is s.o.p. Then came hundreds of snappings: on the couch, by the wall, by the bookshelves, out on the street against brick walls, against the iron railings near Teddy Roosevelt’s house. It’s a strange feeling of simultaneous self-esteem and depersonalization that it gives you: on the one hand you feel as if no one in any situation could ever again pay you this much attention; but on the other, you know that shampoo bottles must be photographed with just as much loving care for ad pages. . . . Tom clicks and says: “Oh yes!”—click—“Yes!”—click— . . . “Fabulous!”
Everyone should have an afternoon like this.
Aug. 28: Grace Schulman . . . entered my name in her address book near Bernard Malamud’s [d. 1986], which gave me the creeps. . . .
I found a letter from Mary [McCarthy] in Maine. Will see her on the 21st—at the Y, in fact. She says no one asked her to write anything on the Iran-Contra hearings, which she hopes says something about the hearings instead of herself. Corriere della Sera asked her to cover the Barbie trial, but she’s glad she didn’t.
Greg, just back from vacation in Miami, called. Of course I told him about [a lawyer I’d begun to date]. . . . The only thing that bothers him, he says, is my Hamlet complex about romance. I want it & don’t want it & immediately upon starting something find reasons to discontinue it. When Greg lectures he can be a little stricter than I’d like—but he’s right.
Sept. 11: [T.] called from Berkeley this afternoon. His test results are, thank God, negative. The swollen glands? Perhaps hypochondria, perhaps anxiety (getting sick with worry over the possibility of being sick), perhaps nothing. I am relieved, thankful, thrilled.
Sept. 17: I got a call from a woman at “Nightline” today: would I help with a program they’re putting together on Plagiarizing Joe Biden? They wanted political anecdotes, but thought the one I gave them about Disraeli was a little too esoteric.
Sept. 19: At 11:30 Greg, Michael, Steve & I got in a cab on Columbus Ave. to go out to Williamsburg for Jean-Luc’s party. The cab driver greeted our announced destination with stony silence, but we got there, going over the crumbling bridge out of the Lower East Side, for 17 bucks. . . . [T]he building Jean-Luc was in isn’t so bad. And the party was a kind of wild Blake Edwards mix: . . . some people just off a plane from Paris; an effeminate history graduate student, very sweet, named David; an angel-boy, a young Swiss drummer, . . . a gay couple wearing identical children’s pajamas passed out on a mattress in one of the bedrooms; a couple of artists, I think; little twinkies and punky beer drinkers; the sweet super of the building, from Ecuador.
Oct. 2: [My agent] called this afternoon. Michael J. Fox’s “people” have passed on “A&S” because Michael is seeking more “heroic” roles.
Oct. 28: [W]atched the “Firing Line” debate among the six Republican “hopefuls” between 9 & 11. Bush did well: he’s less inane & tinny in give-and-take than when he makes a speech. Dole looked embalmed, but loosened up later. Kemp’s discharges are all canned, but his delivery isn’t bad & he surprises people by being bright. Haig & DuPont [sic] were hapless. . . . And then there was Robertson, with the same affectless, shit-eating grin on for every sentence. The 5 others are making just the mistake with him that the Democrats did with Jackson in ’84—fawning over him, praising him for bringing new registered voters to the party. . . . This will only hurt the party in the long run—the fawning, that is; it makes independent moderates sick.
Nov. 7: Spent the evening at [the drama critic] Robert Massa’s 30th birthday party on W. 13th St. . . . [M]ixed in with all Robert’s artistic friends and colleagues on the Voice and gay activists like David Rothenberg was his family from New Jersey. His short Italian [and Irish] parents seemed good-willed and a little bewildered, I’ll-take-it proud of this son whose last piece in the Voice was about being arrested at the Supreme Court (a couple of days after the gay-rights march) during the civil-disobedience demo. (“Your shoes don’t match your gloves!” the protesters shouted to the D.C. policemen wearing plastic gloves to protect them from AIDS.) Robert’s brother James, a priest, with whom he argues all the time, was also there. A quiet lookalike. We talked for a time. I told him that those of us who would like to be reconciled with the Church are more mainstream in other ways than he may think. . . . Robert was all dressed up—he looked as if he were making his First Communion. He said . . . “Just turning 30 these days seems like an accomplishment.” AIDS, of course. It’s never more than 10 minutes away from one’s conscious mind. On my way to the party I ignored a panhandler in my usual slightly guilt-ridden way. He shouted after me: “I hope something real bad happens to you.”
[Robert Massa died in 1994.]
Nov. 10: The real story [of the Joel Steinberg – Hedda Nussbaum case]—the only one anyone talks about—as much as they talked about the baby in the well a few weeks ago—or the little girl who survived the air crash—is the story of the little girl battered to death by her monster drugged-up father & perhaps her mother, who was beaten for years by the father. Insane, bloody beatings on W. 10th St. “Parents” who went out of their way to adopt a child. The mother once wrote children’s books.
Nov. 21: A party tonight at John Cahillane’s on LaGuardia Place. A party to celebrate his friend Nicholas’s green card. Maybe 40 people, almost all gay men. At one point I found myself talking to a 6'5" blond neurosurgeon, Harvard ’77, a rower, a dream come true, who, in a sudden grab-assy movement—so evidently taken by my charm was he—managed to spill half a glass of red wine, mine, on that new sweater I didn’t need. . . . Alas, by the time an hour more had passed, he had goosed nearly everyone in the room with the same degree of interest and gusto. They didn’t get stained with wine, though.
Nov. 23: [Tom Victor at the Y, where he was the house photographer for the Poetry Center]: he looks awful. He’s dropped a lot of weight since I saw him last. His voice is hoarse & he does certain things sitting that you know he would do standing if he were feeling better. He says he’s been on a macrobiotic diet to lose weight. But one knows that macrobiotic diets are what scared people are going on to fire up their immune systems.
Oh, God, I hope not. He’s a nice man.
[Thomas Victor died in 1989.]
Dec. 2: One measure of how agitated I am just now, how close my feelings are to the surface: at the end of the last seminar of the term [teaching at Vassar], my standard-issue run through the [First World] war poets, I was reading them out a bit of Stanley Weintraub’s book on the Armistice (an awful passage about [a kid] shot five minutes before 11:00 a.m., 11/11/18) and I started to snuffle & break down & could barely get through it. Nothing to be embarrassed about (in fact, the students like that kind of thing), but not the sort of thing I usually do.
Dec. 5: At the intermission [of “The Nutcracker”] one realizes that the audience is, for once, overwhelmingly heterosexual. The yuppies force all their little girls into velvet and bows, a conspicuous consumption of Victoriana. The little girl playing Clara is having the high point of her life, all too early.
1988
Feb. 12: [My agent] gives me a big official-publication-day hug two days early. I walked all the way home (the rain was lighter); Friday night rush-hour twinkling. I looked up at the Metropolitan Life clock—5:40—and felt dazzled by my luck. How could I have guessed, ten years ago, that I’d have come even this far, that I’d be here, making it?
Feb. 13: Came home with the Times tonight. A front-page article on how the virus isn’t spreading to many gay men anymore (so safe sex apparently is safe)—but how a great harvest of souls is imminent. They actually say that a large portion of the gay male population in S. Fran. & N.Y. will be “wiped out” over the next several years. Everyone who got the virus in the early 80s—did I get it 5 years ago next week?—will be dying. Or nearly everyone. And you know what this means: since the virus has stopped spreading and heterosexuals are safe, the search for a cure will slow. The dying will be allowed to die—nature’s adjustment of the surplus, perverted population. Gays won’t be extinct; they’ll just be reduced & contained. In their secret hearts many people will think the shriving a good thing.
And will I be gathered in with the quarter of a million still to die? I tell myself I want only to finish these 2 books—let me see them done & out & then I’ll go quietly. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. ♦
