Stonewall Triptych

John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” 

the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local police came in and arrested them for committing sodomy. Twice Lawrence and Garner were tried, and each time they sought to have the charges dismissed, claiming their constitutional rights under equal protection of the laws and substantive due process were being denied. Local courts disagreed and found them guilty. Appeals courts overturned their convictions, after which the State Supreme Court reversed the Appeals Court and reinstated their convictions. The US Supreme Court then took possession of the case, and, on June 26, 2003, issued their decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which voided the Texas sodomy law and all the other sodomy laws throughout the country and also overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, So now, we remember John Lawrence, who didn’t need to allow his case to be appealed to the Supreme Court and therefore didn’t need to get the kind of publicity in a conservative state that he got, putting himself in danger. But he did agree to have his case appealed to the Supreme Court and to run the danger that implied, and as a consequence, the nation is different now, and every time gay rights in the US are analyzed, historians and the rest of us speak of John Lawrence. 

This is an extremely important case for gay people, and if you don’t know about it, begin by clicking on the link above and reading what Ari Ezra Waldman, the legal scholar in residence at Towleroad, has to say about it. Then read about it everywhere. Many people say we wouldn’t have gay marriage anywhere if there hadn’t been a Lawrence v. Texas, and we wouldn’t have repealed DADT if we hadn’t had Lawrence v. Texas. So, in your personal list of heroic men and women of the gay community, please add the name of John G. Lawrence, and remember his courage.

Night before last I read something that was breathtakingly beautiful. In Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is sitting in the Opéra, observing the beautiful women in their parterre boxes above him.  “At first there were only vague shadows in which one suddenly encountered, like the gleam of an unseen jewel, the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes….” This is slow-going writing. Take it easy, give the writing time. Much of In Search of Lost Time is like this. Give in to it. And remember always that the author of this superb writing is gay.

“But in almost all of the other boxes [of the opera house], the white deities who inhabited these dark abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Yet, as the performance proceeded, their vaguely human forms began to emerge in languid succession from the depths of the darkness they embroidered, and, rising toward the light, they allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge as far as the vertical surface of the half-light where their gleaming faces appeared behind the gently playful foam of their fluttering feather fans, and beneath their purple, pearl-threaded coiffures, which seemed to have been bent by the motion of incoming waves; beyond lay the front orchestra, the abode of mortals forever separated from the somber transparent realm to which the limpid and reflecting eyes of the water goddesses, dotted about on the smooth liquid surface, served as a frontier…. Within the limits of their domain...these radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile at the bearded tritons who hung from the anfractuous rocks of the ocean depths, or at some aquatic demigod, whose skull was a polished stone, around which the tide had washed up a smooth deposit of seaweed, and whose gaze  was a disc of rock crystal.They leaned toward these creatures and offered them bonbons; occasionally the waters parted to reveal a new Nereid who had just blossomed out of the shadowy depths, a late arrival who smiled apologetically; then, at the end of the act, with no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of the earth that had drawn them to the surface, the divine sisters plunged back together and disappeared in the darkness. But of all these retreats to whose thresholds their idle curiosity to behold the works of man brought the inquisitive goddesses who let no one approach them, the most celebrated was the block of semidarkness known as the parterre box of the Princesse de Guermantes.”

The Princesse de Guermantes is one of the major characters in In Search of Lost Time. Her family—what happens to its members, what they represent for Proust—is one of the major subjects for Marcel Proust. 

“Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock, beside a wide, vitreous reflection that was probably a mirror, and which suggested a section, perpendicular, dark, and liquid, cut by a ray of sunlight in the dazzled crystal of the sea. At once a feather and a corolla, like certain marine plants, a great white flower, as downy as a bird’s wing, hung down from the Princesse’s forehead along one of her cheeks, following its curve with flirtatious suppleness, lovingly attentive, as if half enclosing it, like a pink egg in the down of a halcyon’s nest….”

Someone in the narrator’s hearing says, “That’s the Princesse de Guermantes,” and the irony of this glowing portrait of her in public is that what her family represents is failure. Failure to produce, failure to thrive, failure to cope, failure to be on the right side of the great issues her generation confronted. The youngest member of her family is the Marquis de Saint-Loup, who is her husband’s cousin and who is to die on the Western Front before the end of World War I, before the end of In Search of Lost Time, and who is gay.

Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, vol. III of In Search of Lost Time. Translated by Mark Treharne. General editor Christopher Prendergast. London, Penguin Books, 2002. 

Longtime Companion, the film by Norman René; is about a small group of men who know each other from the bars in NYC and Fire Island—that is, some of them know some of them—who are caught for a moment on Fire Island and at work and at home in the city as they digest the first news of the health crisis beginning to sweep the nation. Before any of them know what this crisis is, one of them dies, apparently of pneumonia. Then, in rapid order, we see one of these men after another sicken and die, until there are only two left—along with “Lisa,” played by Mary-Louise Parker—walking on the beach at Fire Island. 

Longtime Companion, first released in May 11, 1990, is about events in New York during the early eighties and the earliest stages of the AIDS epidemic. It is the first Hollywood film about the AIDS crisis and widely released in theatres. It was preceded by An Early Frost, directed by John Erman, which was a made-for-TV movie that first played on NBC in November 11, 1985, and by Buddies, directed by Arthur J. Bressan, which was distributed to a small number of art houses in 1985. I never saw Buddies, but I did see An Early Frost. Aiden Quinn plays a gay man who is infected with AIDS, who kicks out his lover, and  who comes home to his parents—Gena Rowland and Ben Gazzara—where he is taken care of as he sickens and then dies. At that time I was volunteering with the AIDS Action Committee, and while I was sure there were persons with AIDS who went home to their parents to die, I didn’t know any, and I never heard of any. Men’s birth families were largely outside the whole process of dying that gay men with AIDS were going through.

Longtime Companion, as I have said, was the first movie to get wide release, and it told the whole story that I was experiencing during those years in Boston. I remember being moved by it, as one after another of its principals suffered and died. The scene that people remembered was when Sean, whom we have known well since the earliest scenes on Fire Island, is in a hospital bed at the home he shares with David and is suffering badly. David seeks to relieve his suffering. He sends the nurse away, and he sits by the bed, speaking soothingly to his lover, who appears to be blind and to not know what is happening to him, and to be afraid. David speaks to him, “I’m here. I’m not going to leave you,” and then he says, “If you want, it is OK to go.” While Sean gasps for breath, David says, “It’s OK. You can go. You can let go of everything. Let go. All the pain.” And gradually Sean’s breath calms down—slows down—and the scene ends. David had eased Sean over into dying, releasing him from suffering. Some of us were sobbing. I can’t remember now whether I had heard about that happening before I saw this movie, but after I saw Longtime Companion, I heard about it happening with other men. In New York, in Boston, in other movies. 

All of the men in Longtime Companion get to know each other very well by the time the AIDS epidemic is in full blast, by the time the movie is really up and running. The audience gets to know these men too, gets to know them almost very well, and I think the audience has a sense of the men going too soon, dying before we have had a chance to really get to know them. That was the way AIDS was.  We all felt robbed. In the final scene in the movie, Fuzzy and Willy and Lisa—the survivors—walk on the beach at Fire Island and wonder what life will be like after the plague, and there, coming over the walkway, are all the guys who had died during the movie, restored to us, laughing, coming down onto the sand. It is an amazing wish coming true, at least here, in a dream. I think the scene focussed for many of us what we had lost during the epidemic—the people we had loved—when in the confusion of our lives during that time, it was possible to lose sight of what it was we had lost. This was about people and the loss of people we had cared about. All those people. 

The Boston Globe published a long article on Sunday, titled “A Computer That Thinks Like the Universe,” by Joshua Rothman. It’s interesting—it’s about quantum computing—and along the way to its conclusions, it discusses what the computers we use are and introduced Alan Turing, who is “the father of modern computing” and whose “theory of computability” is the basis for all modern computers. 

This posting isn’t about quantum computing, and it isn’t about Alan Turing and his contribution to the effort to win World War II, but it is about gay people and our tendency to forget our past. Alan Turing was a homosexual and in January, 1952, he picked up a man outside a theatre in Manchester, UK. After several aborted attempts at a date, and apparently one or two successful dates, the man robbed Turing, who went to the police and told them about the robbery and acknowledged his sexual relationship with this man. This led to Turing’s being charged with “gross indecency.” He was given a choice of imprisonment or chemical castration by estrogen injection.  He chose chemical castration. In June, 1954, he killed himself, apparently with a cyanide-laced apple.

But it is not enough to learn and to remember that another one of the great men of the twentieth century was one of us and whose treatment by British culture in 1954, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said, was “appalling.” It is necessary also to remember that Alan Turing was only the most brilliant of all those thousands of forgotten men and women who suffered the same consequences of having been picked up by the police. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of men before 1969 who were condemned to “chemical castration” or worse. Allen Ginsberg tells us something about another one in the opening lines of his poem, HOWL, where he declares to Carl Solomon, I am with you in Rockland. We have no way of knowing how many lives have been destroyed by this appalling cruelty. 

At least one of the questions that novels answer is How was it for you there? Our literature is almost entirely devoid of reference to this pain and suffering, much of it government inflicted. Chemical castration! There has been a TV movie about Turing’s life and a Broadway play, and now The Guardian says another movie on Turing’s life is planned with Leonardo di Caprio. But there are others besides Turing who suffered, and gay fiction is the art form ideally constructed for addressing this subject. Until it addresses this subject, the answer gay fiction gives to the question, How was it for you there? will be incomplete.