Stonewall Triptych

I read A Single Man—about George Falconer’s grief—when I was in school in the late sixties, and I don’t think I liked it much. At twenty-five I didn’t know what grief was, so I didn’t know it when I stumbled on it. I also didn’t know what this story had to do with my own life, even though I was losing things all around me and part of the huge burden I carried around with me every day was grief. On Tuesday I was in Border’s, looking for DVDs. I had a list on my phone, and I worked my way down the list, seeing what I could find. Not a one. Then, as I was about to leave, I saw Colin Firth’s grief-stricken face on the cover of the DVD for A Single Man.

I told C, my partner, that if I had read this book when it first came out, in 1964, and had been receptive to it, my whole life might have been different. This book is about George, whose lover, Jim, an architect, went to visit his parents in winter. Driving on an icy road, Jim loses control of his car and is killed. The book is about a day in the life of George Falconer eight months later, as George goes about the ordinary things people go about—he gets up, he fixes breakfast, he sits on the john, he notices the neighbors, he teaches a class at the university, he notices the tennis players’ sweaty torsos—while devastated by the loss of Jim and losing his grip on his own life. In my early twenties, I hadn’t read a book like this, that treated the love of one man for another so tenderly, so respectfully, with such understanding and caring, and with such importance. The book came out in 1964, and that was exactly the year that I most needed to read this book. I needed to be taught that there was a man who believed that the love of one man for another could be treated tenderly, respectfully, with understanding and caring, and with importance. Some years later, when I did read it, I still wasn’t ready to hear what Isherwood had to say about the love of men for each other. I still wasn’t grown-up enough.

When I saw the DVD in the store on Tuesday and watched it when I got home and then watched it again, then went to the store and bought a copy of A Single Man and read it, I differed from my earlier self in that now I am aware of loss and now I know what grief is, and it seems as if George Falconer is speaking directly to me, making it possible for me to know now why my life would have been different if I had read this book with understanding then. 

My novel, Race Point Light, is about a guy who knows from childhood that he likes men. He never wavers about that, all of his life. He has a magical affair with another soldier in 1959 in the most beautiful meadow on earth, on the higher slopes of Mt Rainier. He goes to graduate school and has sex with a graduate student in psychology, and he is passing out leaflets to integrate a greasy spoon when John Kennedy was shot. Later, in 1965, when he is about 25, he gets married to a woman he met in a Victorian Literature seminar. He and his wife have children. He gets his doctorate, they live in a big house, his children are beautiful, but he never forgets the men. Then, after about eighteen years of marriage, my guy says his marriage is over, moves to Boston, and finds himself surrounded by the AIDS epidemic, with its great commandments, Do no harm, and Help. He spends the next twenty-five years writing gay novels. In 1990, he meets a guy in the local leather bar—he is one of those sexy bartenders with a leather armband and a harness—and they go home together. They never promise anything about what they feel for each other. They don’t swear to be together always, or to be monogamous, and they never ever try to control the future. But they are together ever after, and their love for each other spells Freedom for them.

My guy—he is the narrator of Race Point Light—is named Fair Shaw, and he spends all his life looking for love, not in the wrong places, but in the places that are available to him. And during his life, he does what he has to do, he loves his children, he writes his novels, he holds his sexy bartender, and, at the end of the novel, very late at night, he is walking in the surf on Race Point beach, near the lighthouse, when one of the others says, “Fair?” And the novel ends.

Fair’s life is the life of hundreds of thousands of American men and women of his generation, filled with conflict, filled with anguish, filled with drama, confronting the big questions of civil rights, personal failure, work, doing what has to be done, and, from time to time, touched with transcendent happiness. And through it all, he never stops loving his partner, and he never stops loving his children. Fair?

Like many men and women of my generation, I was interested in the Stonewall Riots. Like most men and women of my generation, I wasn’t there. I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the summer of 1969, but I read the initial reports in the Times, and then I watched the national press as the story developed and then later as the story about gay liberation began to develop.

Many of us seemed to understand, even in those early days, that what was happening was new, entirely new, and our lives were going to be different because of it. But it was not until much later that we began to understand something else, that a new world was being created in those early meetings in the West Village in people’s apartments, in churches, and in the meetings of the Gay Liberation Front. We were creating our world.

The Stonewall Riots need to be studied just because they are the beginning. We need to know more about the men who were present at the beginning. And we need to know more about what their options were and what their decisions meant, because we are still living in the world they created.

But if there is suffering that cannot be forgotten, there is heroism, too.

The mythic narrative that we tell ourselves is that we suffer, and then we rise up and refuse to suffer any longer. This is the great narrative of the American Revolution and of all subsequent revolutions. It is also the narrative of the AIDS years. We were dying, and nobody seemed to care. And then, because nobody cared, the gay community set about caring for itself. It was when Gay Men’s Health Crisis was founded in New York, and when AIDS Action Committee was founded in Boston.

It is also the narrative of the Stonewall Riots. We suffered abuse, and then on the night of June 28, 1969, we refused to go quietly into the paddy wagon, and we rose up and fought back, and we’ve been fighting back ever since.

It’s the narrative of the summer of 1984, in Bangor, Maine, after Charlie Howard was murdered. Gay people who had suffered quietly walked out of the Unitarian-Universalist Church and walked down to the center of town letting everyone know that they were there and were not going away.

Most of the people who walked out of the church in Bangor, straight into the glare of the lights of television cameras, had not come out before, and were now choosing the most public possible way to come out. There were many people who weren’t, and none of us knew what we were walking out into, when we exited the church.

There is drama to that narrative, and the gay community has played it out over and over during the last fifty or sixty years. The story has everything for the novelist—suffering, anguish, anger, refusal, heroism. Every time someone comes out, he or she acts out this narrative again. It’s a universal theme, and it’s another way we show our common humanity.