Come Back (12 page)

My boyfriend is very beautiful but very shallow. His inside doesn't match his outside. I don't know if he was ever a good person. He is very lovely, but empty; he is blond and slender and he looks like he is about fifteen years old. He is in fact twenty-three. He was born in the Yukon. There is something of the Yukon about him — he is remoteness itself. His name is Jason Swallows. That's his name; I didn't make it up. His name is a pun, because he does swallow — other men, not me. I lie about him to all my friends. I tell them that my boyfriend and I used to have sex but we don't any longer. The truth is that we never had sex. He won't let me. I don't measure up. At least he is honest, and I know where I stand. I don't care; it's the hopelessness of my love for him that keeps the relationship fresh. I will never be close to him because he won't let me, and because even if I could be close to him, there would be nothing for me to be close to. He embarrasses me in
all
social situations. I just can't be with him in public. People stare at him, and me, they can't believe we're together — but we aren't, not really. And they can't believe that I'm madly in love with him, or that we have anything in common. Well, we don't. What do I get out of the relationship? I'm free to pursue other sexual relationships. He doesn't interfere with that, because he doesn't care enough about me to care. What does he get out of our relationship? He gets the privilege of hanging out with someone who is a very prestigious member of the gay community. He likes that. I would say he was a star fucker if he were actually fucking me.

I'll tell you what we do in bed. (You wanted me to write something, anything, so that's what I'm doing.) I like to lie beside him and kiss his pale white shoulder. And then I jerk off. I jerk off while I'm looking at his body. Occasionally he lets me run my hands over it. Then he lets me cum. I make a little puddle on his thigh. And he just lies there. Dead, for all intents and purposes. But mainly he's just bored. I don't mind. You know what else we do? Sometimes when I'm in the bathtub and he has to come in to take a leak, he pees on me. He pees on me, and I drink it. This can't be healthy. Why? Because my boyfriend is
HIV
positive. We will never have sex, ever; there is no chance of it, because of this. He is perfectly unattainable. He will also probably not be alive for much longer. His health is good now, but it won't be long, until . . . You see, he likes to practise unsafe sex. I like to try and practise safe sex on my nightly escapades, but these days, especially, when life is pretty bleak, I find my only solace is a nice stiff drink or two and some poppers and a young body that will remind me of Jason. Jason Swallows. Other guys — not me. That's probably how he got
AIDS
. After all, he likes to take it up the bum from gigantic bodybuilders who are much more
adequate
than I am.

So that's my life. Do you think I can work that into a thesis? Or perhaps I should turn it into art. The only problem is that nobody wants to read anything I write anymore. I'm not telling you this so you can save me. I don't want to be saved. I remember when I was young I didn't want to be a homosexual, and the reason was because I had a vision in my head of an ugly old man sitting beside a table in an empty apartment staring at a single light bulb, wanting to commit suicide. I never wanted to become that man. But somehow I have become him. Thanks for listening.

The letter is unaddressed and unsigned and the barrenness of it is devastating. One wonders what it would have been like to know this unpleasant individual. I expect he was, at this point, the type of person who truly lived only in his alcohol-induced, nitrate-driven sexual fantasies. It's interesting to me also that he does not mention Shakespeare. Yet this is certainly his most Shakespearean moment. The letter is like a Petrarchan sonnet, though the style is mundane. Dash wants nothing from his lover, nothing in return. This stretches the medieval notion of courtly love beyond its wildest dreams — until it becomes the Elizabethan ideal of courtly abuse. One sees echoes of Blanche DuBois in his description of himself; the lonely man sitting in an empty room is Blanche's “ever since then there has only been this one candle.” It is more than masochism; in the context of homosexual ethos, this is the death of a culture that is suicidally obsessed with the worship of youth and beauty. So much so that Dash can do nothing but lie in bed beside beauty and kiss its shoulder. Finally, he allows himself to make an embarrassed, sad puddle on beauty's thigh.

Dash has wholeheartedly bought into the tragic paradigm of homosexuality. It is his fate. Whether he has chosen it or not is a deeper philosophical question. I would say he is certainly trapped in it. I think that after the death of homosexuality, its most noxious obsessions were usurped by mass culture. Certainly what the Christian fundamentalists saw as the dangers of homosexuality did, in fact, become a part of our cyberworld. Nothing that is “old” or “ugly” has any place in our culture now, except of course in the musty groves of academe. Here, monsters like me are kept alive by those few who imagine we might be valuable artifacts. But even that is being questioned. You have told me that some have questioned your work with me — that the grant you received to encourage me, and to examine me, has been challenged. This is despite the fact that you were careful to place the work in a modern context, and certain to make it evident that it was not a “historical” project.

I have no proof for the assertion that when homosexuality died our culture effectively ate the values of that culture. For instance, I have no proof that the homosexual obsession with youth and beauty had any influence on us. Indeed, what was so important when those we used to call “the terrorists” won was whether or not tolerance was still to be a cultural value. Would the government brook no quarter for homosexual culture? Looking back, which I know is dangerous, I wonder if what saved people like us, and various kinds of human difference in general, was when the cyberworld became sacrosanct — when web activists decreed that it was exploitative and unfair to police the web. At this point, the powers that be realized it was simply impossible to control cyberspace. Cyberlife was to be unquestioningly protected. Now anything is permitted on the web; nothing is permitted in reality. Everything is allowed as long as it is not real.

I'm sure this has relevance to your concerns about my visit to the Tranquility Spa. Let me put it this way: there is no death penalty anymore. And what would death be to me, anyway? Aren't I too old to murder? When the prospect of my demise hangs over my head daily like the sword of Damocles, the worst that will happen to me is that I will be incarcerated indefinitely for my crimes. I have not committed any crime
yet
. But I speak facetiously. I will not commit any in the future. And anyway, I can't imagine the government locking me up; I am a cultural artifact. At the very least, my body will undoubtedly be carefully saved and ransacked by cyberbiogeneticists after my death. More than that, my present existence is already a kind of incarceration. It is so difficult for me to walk, and my monstrosity certainly makes the possibility of human contact a grim and unlikely prospect.

But for once I didn't mean to digress. I want you to be aware that I don't think my little bar visit is the melodramatic issue you have made it out to be. That's why I want you to understand the scholarly value of Dash King's papers. Please don't worry any further about some return to my previous addictions.

So let's return specifically to Dash and the issue of the death of homosexuality. What's clear to us now is that
AIDS
not only killed homosexuals, it killed homosexuality. We are none the worse for it; no one misses it. Dash was prematurely grieving its death, eulogizing it with a kind of negative capability.

If one examines the male love poetry that was connected with Virgil and the pastoral poets, one observes a melancholy that morphed into A. E. Housman and his elegies for soldier boys. It's not only twentieth-century gay literature that is suicidal, countless plays — from
The Children's Hour
and
The Green Bay Tree
, to
The Boys in the Band
—
all featured tortured, self-flagellating, suicidal queers. This tradition is transhistorical in Western culture. In fact, it is my suspicion that if Dash is right, and Shakespeare was de Vere, and was trying to escape his own doomed pederasty, he may have avoided, in his sonnets, the direct homosexual address of one of his contemporaries, as it may have become inflected with an already clichéd pathetic flavour.

Little is known about Barnfield, a much-forgotten poetic contemporary of Shakespeare's. To imagine, as Foucault does, that there was no homosexuality in Early Modern culture is naive. Barnfield, in his blatantly and clearly homosexual poetry, talks not only of sodomy (Foucault's favourite concept) but of love and affection and even possible partnering between men. But the tone is invariably sad, melodramatic and tragic. So there is reason to imagine that Shakespeare was all too wary of the pitfalls of a homosexual aesthetic. Whether he was de Vere or not, Shakespeare may have been writing about a homosexual love affair (or more likely a pederastic one) in the sonnets, but he is deliberately cagey about it. This is not because it was forbidden. Barnfield's odes can attest to that. (He does apologize for the homosexual content of his poems in an introduction to one of his books of poetry, but this hardly indicates that he was persecuted, or that his work was banned for being homosexual.) Perhaps it was merely that Shakespeare didn't want to write bad, melodramatic, bathetic poems that — like Barnfield's — were drowning in pastoral excess and melancholy. He didn't want to write bad Elizabethan homosexual pastorals.

These issues were rarely dealt with in discussions of the master poet. And now that Shakespeare has become irrelevant, these issues may never be dealt with again. But though his work may be unsalvageable, ancient and written in what is essentially a foreign language even to those who speak English, the sexual politics of Shakespeare's period
are
fascinating. The epitaph for Shakespeare's sonnets was written by Northrop Frye when he said, and I am paraphrasing here, “If we took the sonnets literally, we would have to believe that Shakespeare was in love with a stupid teenager, which is simply impossible.” Impossible indeed. Truth is impossible — always has been, always will be. Perhaps you and I can at least agree on that.

At any rate, this is the vast tragic homosexual aesthetic legacy, and when
AIDS
appeared, we saw a depressing march of
AIDS
plays and novels from the homosexual community — not depressing because of their subject matter, but because they were so badly written. As Susan Sontag rightly observed,
AIDS
did for the theatre exactly what tuberculosis did for it — and by that I mean absolutely nothing. I am convinced that the dance of death that people sometimes spoke of as having followed
AIDS
was not the return of promiscuity. (Although this happened in the early part of the last century, before sex became almost universally — as they used to call it — virtual.)

But the birth of gay marriage — the kindly gay priest swathed in rainbow colours — this was normalcy; the dance of death for gay identity. For gay was, and always had been, tragic. Gay was Blanche DuBois,
Death in Venice
, the coughing, sputtering Greta Garbo in
Camille
. Those who lived, married and somehow managed to produce a successive generation were no longer gay. Certain post-
AIDS
fags quite hopelessly clung to the tragic paradigm. Dash King is perhaps not the most brilliant, but is certainly the most characteristic, example of a generation of men who, though there was undoubtedly a medical cause for their disease (which has now become only as serious as diabetes), were also seduced by a suicidal paradigm that
AIDS
fit right into. I am not the first to theorize this; I have found an obscure essay by Casper G. Schmidt, a psychoanalyst from South Africa who died of
AIDS
in the 1980s. He theorized that
AIDS
was a kind of mass hysteria, a suicidal complex shared by gay men as a result of their treatment at the hands of the religious right. In
The Stonewall Experiment
, Ian Young proposes that gay men have believed their own negative publicity to such an extent that they marched to their own death.

This is not to say that
AIDS
didn't exist. But one notices that the construction begins not to be associated with homosexuals after the turn of the century. This is because homosexuality was at this point dead as a cultural force.
AIDS
had become, along with the cancer battle, anti-terrorism and environmentalism, a global issue. This means it became a family issue — focused on hope and the future, as all issues are these days. We know now, of course, what happened to environmentalism. One wonders not so much at the stupidity of mankind but at its naïveté and self-centredness. It was sentimental to imagine that we could save the world or that our human lives were, in fact, the centre of it; instead we had to settle for science and cybernetics, which has allowed us to live on a dying planet in unreal bodies that, increasingly, do not require air to survive.

And then, unfortunately, the so-called terrorists won. (Well, I know they were not really terrorists, but they were Arabs, and dressing like terrorists, so they might as well have been.) But that may not ultimately have been such a bad thing. No one could have run the world without some compromise. I am trying to fit my analysis of Dash into a larger worldview. You have deemed it essential that I prove I am obsessing over him because I have something of scholarly import to say, not because I am neurotically and perhaps dangerously attached to his story. Well, here goes. . . .

Dash's life proves both Wilde and Foucault correct, while at the same time establishing an emblematic example of the failure of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory: our constructs eat us. What is the next step once we are aware of this perilous fact? Are there to be no more constructs? Or must we simply acknowledge those constructs? But how do we do that when they are so hypnotizing? This is what post-post-theory must deal with. But the fact that I have finally, through Dash King, arrived at the threshold of post-post-theory is, I hope, for you, promising. I will even go so far as to say that your concern over my actions actually warms my heart — what's left of it — despite my fear of abandonment. When I finally banish the panic, I can see your affection for what it is.