Stonewall Triptych

Fair Shaw, who is narrator of Race Point Light, finds that each new phase of his life is not what he expected. Shaw has an education, and he has some experience—he was in the Army and on the fringes of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement—but each time when he finds himself thrown into a new situation, he feels unprepared. The Army, graduate school, marriage, Stonewall, the city at the middle of AIDS. His world seems to change radically every eighteen months. It would be possible to break up Race Point Light into at least two novels, and perhaps more, divided after Fair receives a divorce at the end of Part 4, to make an entirely separate novel about a man’s life in the city in the middle of AIDS.

But that is to make of these two novels, narratives about distinct subjects—a gay man who gets married, and a gay man living in the city in the middle of AIDS—and those subjects have been written about. What needed to be written about, because no one had done it, is a man who experiences all these things during one lifetime, which is what actually happens to hundreds of thousands of gay men and women in our culture. What would make a gay person get married? What is it like being married? What would make a gay person leave a marriage? What wounds, what scars does he or she have afterward? How would he or she live after divorce? What would he or she find in the place he or she went after divorce? What are the years of AIDS like in the city? The compelling quality of such a narrative lies in the fact that all these things happen to the same person. And the question such a novel would answer would be, What would that be like? It would not be a novel about a gay man in a marriage so much as it would be a novel about a gay man who leaves his marriage and moves to the city in the middle of AIDS, and then makes a life for himself in the city with all the memories, objects, relationships, scars, decisions accumulated from earlier decades and earlier lives. It would be in that accumulation that the power of such a novel resides.

The point is You don’t start over again, ever. Everyone just has to keep going in their lives, from one day to the next, one decade to the next, down to the end, and I didn’t want to structure Race Point Light in such a way as to imply that anything is ever a fresh start. Before Fair Shaw has gotten over the trauma of his divorce, he is face-to-face with a man who is breathless with pain because he has found out that he has Karposi’s sarcoma. One loss is experienced simultaneously with the other loss. After Fair Shaw has made a commitment to a marriage in a pre-Stonewall time, gay men riot in the streets of Greenwich Village, and gay people are now out and proud. The gay person finds himself living in two distinct worlds simultaneously, the past and the present and maybe even the future. The future arrives before we are ready for it, and we bear the scars of living in our time. This is uniquely stressful on gay people who came to adulthood in the ten years before Stonewall. They made commitments and promises, and then Stonewall called, “Come out into the street with us!”

Last Sunday night I attended a concert by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus whose title was Our True Colors. The concert was influenced by the It Gets Better movement, and during the concert four different men told stories of their youth and coming to adulthood and of the difficulties they faced with unloving families and bigoted, bullying schoolmates. One man told of being pushed to the point of putting a gun in his mouth. The last half of the concert was given over to the extended piece, "Prayers for Bobby," based on the book by Leroy Aarons, music composed by J. A. Kawarsky. Bobby didn’t make it.

The question was raised by a man I was sitting next to, Why does the gay community spend so much energy on narratives of pain and sorrow? This man wanted more positive narratives. Since so many people have survived their horrors, and are now living successful, even triumphant lives, that is a legitimate question.

In fact, there was a good bit of positive narrative in the concert Sunday night. “Beautiful,” by Linda Perry, and “Firework,” by Katy Perry (and others), and the whole thrust of “Prayers for Bobby,” and, finally, the energetic and very beautiful encore, “Celebrate.”

As the concert developed from song to song, I began to realize that the chorus and its director, Reuben Reynolds, had pulled off a very difficult feat. Their concert was closer to the heart of the experience of the gay community than almost any other works of art that we have access to. For the concert had its full measure of pain and sorrow, but it also had its full measure of celebration. Nothing was stinted. It was all there, and, as I told my partner, C, it was like a richly woven tapestry with all the threads, light and dark. Or like a choral piece, in which every singer had something to add. Nobody's story was left out. We seem to find that difficult to do in the gay community.

When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun go down, talking, considering what they want the world to be like now. They’ve fought the New York cops to a standstill for two nights running, even if they don’t know what they want yet.


Bo and Andrew, who are lovers, have been experimenting, since they first met in a class on What is a man? at Alternate U on 14th Street. Andrew had said in that class, “The gender roles most of us have been taught enslave us to ways of thinking and acting that aren’t native to us. We want to be free. I want to be free, but I am not free, and that is why I am here at this class. I want to be in a room with other men, and I want to talk about how it feels, not to be free.” This suggests their method: ask questions, discuss possibilities with each other, take risks, reject the orthodox, see what works. 

But this isn’t easy, and Bo shows how hard it is. It is really natural to want the other man to make a promise. “I don’t know. I think it is hard because I want to control the future, be together always, have this always. I want you to promise me that this will never change.” They resist the effort, because it is their freedom that defines them.

Bo and Andrew gather friends, an actor who plays Caliban in The Tempest, another who plays Ariel, a woman, Belle, who wants a baby, and a street kid, who hasn’t had a home since she was kicked out when she was thirteen.

They press on. They have another night of fighting the cops, and then they have huge questions to answer. How are we to conduct our relationships now? What do we attack first, the NYPD? the SLA? the federal government? Or do we attack the idea of monogamy?

What we see, during the five days of the Stonewall Riots, is four men and two women beginning the process of constructing a new world.

Barney Frank thinks gay marriage is a wedge issue for the Democrats, and ABC reports that 52%  are in favor of gay marriage. People say this is a water-shed moment for gay people.

So, we sleep well at night, believing as we do that if you hang in there long enough, the worm turns. Has this worm turned? What are the first signs?

If the goal is to get to a politically-protected class for gay people, then that worm does seem to have turned. There are high-profile indicators, DADT the best one. Gay marriage would be another. The lifting of all inequalities in the INS is another.

But the bigger goal is to get to a point where we don’t have serious need for protection, that is, when we are more fully accepted. How close are we to that? An indicator would be the decline in the anti-gay violence statistics. Short of that, we are given polls regularly. What do people think, first, about the various laws and regulations which delegitimize gay people, and then about the more difficult-to-measure issues like attitudes. How do they feel about us?

What is happening here, I think, is the gradual getting-into-alignment of our legal system and our biological and social reality. This is true: our choice of gender object is not a significant factor in defining who we are for the legal system, but right now it still matters a lot to a lot of people, how many we don’t know. And of course it matters to us. At some point down the road, it will be possible for us to look at the kinds of differences we bring to the table—everything the gay community has learned about marriage, for example, during its several hundred years in the wilderness—and to see how much respect those differences are given when we begin to talk about them. We are not near there yet.

I read it again last night on Towleroad. The story is about Adam Lambert’s track “Aftermath” and quotes Adam’s words “about finding the courage to be honest with yourself.” We hear this so much that it doesn’t raise any comment. We even say this, without thinking what it means. The language—the courage to be honest with yourself—has been around since the earliest days of gay liberation, and it means that, if you had courage, if you were honest with yourself, you would come out now. This implies that the person you’re speaking to is not being honest with himself, and the only possible meaning for that is that this person is pretending to himself that he is not gay.

I don’t know anybody like that. I think people who hear lines like this know well enough that they are gay. Their question is What do I do about it? For many people, perhaps for everybody, doing something about it means dealing directly with a dangerous world—in your family and in your community—and that is what is problematic. A kid may not be old enough or strong enough to deal with that dangerous world. Even older boys and men or girls and women could get killed out there or could become so stressed by what is out there that he or she wants to kill himself or herself.

If you had courage. If you were honest. Even though we hear it everywhere, this is totally inappropriate language to apply to teenagers who are struggling and who deserve our support.