Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise
Page 13
Sometimes I think that the ones who hate us can’t stand the fact that we’ve won out over oppression. They can’t stand to see us leading happy and productive lives. A joyful gay or lesbian person messes with their minds profoundly. I always tell parents who are in pain after discovering their sons and daughters are gay—It’s not my fault, they say; I know it’s genetic, but I don’t want my kid to live a pariah’s life—I tell them life is difficult for everyone. The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight ahke. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for. Despite all the hate and intolerance—at fever pitch these days—I would not give up a minute of the last seventeen years of being out. I’m myself now, not somebody else. I’ve had a full and joyous life, and that even includes the decade of AIDS. I am able to be as angry as I am at our government’s indifference, as despairing as I am about how far away a cure is, and still be a happy man, because I’m so glad to be out. And because I’ve learned that anger against injustice is good for you. It sharpens your soul.
I consider the work I’ve been doing in the last six years as a kind of letter to my gay and lesbian children in the future, to them and their allies. We need our straight allies more than ever. Most of our families do the best they can to bring us up whole and make us worthy citizens. But it’s a very rare person who manages to arrive at adulthood without being saddled by some form of racism or sexism or homophobia. It is our task as grownups to face those prejudices in ourselves and rethink them. The absolute minimum we can get out of such a self-examination is tolerance, one for another. We gay and lesbian people believe we should be allowed to celebrate ourselves and give back to the larger culture, make our unique contributions—but if all we can get is tolerance, we’ll take it. And build on it.
We don’t know what history is going to say even about this week, or where the gay and lesbian revolution is going to go. But we are a revolution that has come to be based very, very strongly on diversity. We have to fight like everyone else to be open to that diversity; but I love Urvashi Vaid’s idea that it’s not a matter of there being one of each on every board and every faculty and every organization. It’s a matter of being each in one. You’ll pardon my French, but it’s not so hard to be politically correct. All you have to do is not be an asshole.
I want to say something about Primo Levi and implicitly about Anne Frank. For me they are the two greatest writers about the Holocaust. Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who was in Auschwitz for a long, long time. After he was liberated, he wrote about the camps for the next forty years, one book after another. The first of these is brilliant, and you wouldn’t have thought he needed to do it again. But he was so convinced that history would try to lie about his experience that he had to keep writing about it to make sure he kept up with his own truth.
By the mid-fifties, commandants from the camps were beginning to publish their memoirs. “My camp wasn’t like that,” they said. “We had a very good arts and crafts program at my camp.” All this surreal rethinking of history, the art of erasure—and Levi would not have that. He had too much moral force as a writer, a kind of moral fiber that I also associate with Elie Wiesel, who could face President Reagan and declare: “Mr. President, you do not belong at Bitburg. I have seen with my own eyes children thrown in the ovens. Bitburg is not your place. Your place is with the survivors, not with the SS troops.”
As I remember, the White House handled that moral dilemma by making sure that when they got to Bitburg, as scheduled, everyone turned his back on the SS graves. Not a very noble or courageous statement, I’m afraid.
I repeat, the first order of business of people who would obliterate the truth is to get the books. It’s all so precious and fragile. Aristotle’s books wound up in the great library at Ephesus in Asia Minor, of which nothing is left but an eloquent and towering facade. What happened to Aristotle’s books is that Antony stole them. He sacked the library at Ephesus and brought the books to Alexandria as a tribute to Cleopatra. And you all know the rest of the story—the library at Alexandria burned, a conflagration of papyrus and waxen tablets. So we don’t have a scrap of Aristotle’s personal library anymore.
All so precious and fragile. The only reason we have Sappho’s poems is that a copy on papyrus was rolled up and plugged in a wine jug. The jug was stored in a cave, and by the time it was found—millennia later—there was just the neck of the jug left, with this peculiar stopper still in place. People knew enough about Sappho’s writing from other sources to realize what they’d found. The blanks in Sappho’s text are where the acid of the wine ate into the papyrus.
I wear a button that says I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE. I’ve been wearing it off and on at literary events, ever since the fatwa was first declared against him. He’s apparently not an easy man. It’s definitely not an easy book, if any of you have actually read The Satanic Verses. But it’s so clearly art, so clearly rich in irony—but mullahs don’t understand that. Rushdie has spoken fiercely and eloquently all around the world, saying, “You’re all me, you know. If you let me go down, let me get murdered, then you’re murdered too.”
He’s still trying to get some governments to contact Iran and use their clout to get this thing rescinded. Canada has finally agreed to speak for him. And when he came to Washington? Well, that brilliant philosopher, Marlin Fitzwater, declared, “Rushdie? No, he’s not coming to the White House. To us he’s just another author on a book tour.”
We will have no test for freedom of speech if the passion for it atrophies. If we are content with sound bites and TV bullshit, there will be no words to stir our hearts or even to tell us what our hearts are for. The outsider always knows that, and gay and lesbian people have always been outsiders. And always ready to fight. For a year we battled the National Endowment for the Arts, to keep it free from political manipulation.
Were I in the President’s position, I don’t know that I would have gone forward with the lifting of the military ban as quickly as he did. To me AIDS was the more crucial emergency that needed to be addressed. But it turns out not to matter, since either issue engages the virulence of the right wing, that frightening need to dance on our graves. The step they’re going to take is to stop asking recruits, “Are you a homosexual?” Frankly, what they really need to ask is, “Are you homophobic?” Then they would know who needed some serious counseling.
I think everybody’s teachable. But that is why the most pernicious of the right-wing “compromises” is to say we won’t be asked our sexual orientation, but we mustn’t talk about it either. Once again, the silence that equals death. We’ve had ten years of a witch hunt, instituted by Reagan, and three hundred million dollars spent ridding the services of gay and lesbian people. That’s the crime.
As we reclaim our history, we don’t seek to exclude anybody. There’s a turmoil now among certain scholars to punish great books from the past for not having the right attitude about gay and lesbian. Yet those books saved my life, even though none of the classics I read growing up ever spoke my name. Despite that, their greatness as literature had something to speak to my heart.
We needn’t tar the past for the sake of the present. As long as we understand that there’s no excuse anymore. One of the great breakthroughs I made as a writer in the last ten years was to be able to write about lesbians. Ten years ago I silenced myself because I was so afraid I would get it wrong and come out with a stupid stereotype that wouldn’t help anybody. It was my friend Katherine Forrest who said to me, “We have to populate our books with one another.”
Sometimes I say to myself, “My God, we’re the freest gay and lesbian people in the world.” That’s a stunning realization in a country where people murder us at will and pass slavery laws against us. But I have an inkling of how bad the situation is in the third world and the fourth world. In some Muslim countries people are put to death for homosexual “behavior.”
So many people have written to me since I published Becoming a Man. The book has a life of its own; it’s more real than I am. People expect me to be as wise as it is, and I’m not. But so many have said it echoes their own story, women and men both, and everyone seems to conclude the same thing. We must be the last generation to suffer this stunted growing. We must somehow reach out to all our troubled brothers and sisters, reach out to their families, and stop the prejudice now.
There was a great recoil in this country from the tactics and language of the 1992 Republican convention. (I preferred it in the original German, as Molly Ivins acidly put it.) We are in the middle of Pat Buchanan’s holy war, whether we like it or not. He and his co-religionists have a real vision of slaughtering their enemies, a regular jihad. They don’t seem to understand that the Bible doesn’t give them or anyone else the right to pass judgment on how a person loves.
Two can play that game, you know. Any number of scholars have read those subhuman passages from Leviticus, and they’ve gone back to the Aramaic, explaining over and over again that this bigotry involves a staggering amount of mistranslation. If you went with all the strictures in Leviticus, we’d all be standing on our heads in sheep dung.
For me, Jesus is patently queer. And I don’t mean that as an insult to him. I’m speaking of his role as a shaman and as a healer and as a prophet. Besides, his hair is a little too well coifed, if you know what I mean. So don’t throw that book in my face, because that book doesn’t belong to anyone.
I get a lot of credit—poster child credit—for being a writer with AIDS who manages to get through a lecture without keeling over. I don’t know if AIDS has made me so brave as a writer. I don’t know whether it has widened my heart the way witnessing the world at war widened Anne Frank’s heart. Who would have thought that the greatest account of that war, the one that would sear the hearts of the future, would be written by a fourteen-year-old girl? And a fourteen-year-old who went to her death believing that people were fundamentally good. That’s where I fail, much of the time.
In the thirties, Picasso was asked: “What if they took everything away from you? All your paints and all your brushes and all your canvases. What would you do then? What if they put you in prison with nothing—no chalk, no nothing?”
And he said without a moment’s pause: “I’d draw with my spit on the prison walls.”
The winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, a woman named Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest in Burma for years now. She went back to Burma to take care of her ailing mother. She was a free woman, married to an Oxford don. But her father was the founder of modern Burma, and when the generals took over they told her she wasn’t allowed to stay and care for her mother. They wanted her out, so they could continue the repression and destruction of the society without any witnesses. And she said no, she wouldn’t go.
She’s gravely ill now from a hunger strike, and she’s told the generals that she’ll gladly leave. But she said, “I want all political prisoners released, and I want to walk to the airport.” It’s twenty miles from her prison house to the airport. And she has so rallied the spirit of her people that the generals rightly fear that the whole country would turn out to cheer her if she took that twenty-mile walk. So please think about her when you think of the politics of silence.
Or think of the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya. When she was in the labor camps she would write her poems on a bar of soap with a burnt matchstick. She would write a line in the soap and memorize it; and when she was sure she would never forget it, she would wash it away and go on to the next line.
The difference between having freedom as a writer and having no freedom is as narrow as the choice that the truth is important. In speech after speech Rushdie says: “What do you want a writer to be? How much will you stand up for what a writer says?”
I had one great teacher in high school, the man who more than anyone made it possible for me to write. His name was Dudley Fitts; and oh, he was such a brilliant man. He had translated the edition of Sophocles we read in senior English. He would sit in front of the class and read it in Greek while we followed along in English, and it was like being transported back to the ancient world.
He spent a lot of time on Antigone’s dilemma. If you remember, Antigone buries her brother, collecting his body from the field of battle despite the edict of Creon the king, that she will be put to death if she does so. That is the great choice in classical literature between law and conscience. Antigone chose conscience and thus chose her fate.
“O tomb, O marriage chamber,” she says as she goes to her death. And the Chorus comes out to comment on what it all means. (Garry Wills could say this so much better than I.) “Isn’t man wonderful?” sings the Chorus. “He longed so much to speak his heart that he taught himself language, so that what was inside him could be spoken to the world.”
I was given my heart back when I came out. People say I’m too hard on myself, but if you were to read the dreary poems I wrote in my twenties, you would discover they’re about nothing because they’re not about me. They are not the truth.
So I guess what I would say to my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, especially to the gay and lesbian children of the next generation, and to all our friends and allies, is: Come out when you can. I know it’s not easy for everybody. People misguidedly try to protect their families, or they’re rightfully afraid of the impact on their jobs. I have fortunately been in a position to be way, way out on both issues—being a gay man and having AIDS.
In the meantime, even if you must keep your own life secret, hold on and support us. My friend Betty Berzon, a psychologist, says it’s not enough to come out. Coming out is just the first step, a kind of outer coming out. Then we have to begin the inner coming out, looking to nourish our own battered self-esteem.
To really be a gay and lesbian citizen, you have to also give back to your community. You have to reach out and help it. Some of the people who hate us so much think we’re out to indoctrinate their children. Frankly, we’re trying to save their children from suicide. A third of all teen suicides are gay and lesbian, and they’re all unnecessary, and we want those kids to have a chance.
To them, I try to get across the message that they’re not alone.
I’ll close with a thought that’s been terribly important to me lately, about “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Always, you understand, the right wing questions our patriotism, as if the flag were all theirs as well as the Bible. In light of which, there’s a wonderful remark Kurt Vonnegut made in one of his novels, which I quoted when I won this award in November. He says “The Star-Spangled Banner” is the only national anthem in the world that ends with a question:
Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The speaker of those words, I’ve always thought, is a wounded soldier who’s only been able to see the flag during the long night of fighting by the glare of the rockets. And yet I also see the speaker as a refugee, clinging to his place on these shores, or just dreaming of freedom in a far-off country from which he longs to emigrate.
It makes me immensely proud as a free American that Kathleen Battle was able to sing “We Shall Overcome” on the very spot where Marian Anderson sang because the DAR threw her out of Constitution Hall. All of it under the gaze of Lincoln, who prayed that we would be worthy of the “angels of our better natures.” We all stand taller because we were here on the same planet with a man as great as Justice Marshall, buried today.
I came to Washington in 1975, wide-eyed. Roger was able to get us into the Su
preme Court to hear them argue the death penalty. I was an amateur student of the Court at the time, and it was stunning to sit in the audience and see Hugo Black and William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan and Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun, right there in the flesh. Robert Bork was arguing for the government, as solicitor-general. Anthony Amsterdam was defense counsel, defending three black men who’d shot up a convenience store in the South. And the curious thing that I felt, watching them all day long, was that I never once thought about who was a conservative and who was a liberal. It never crossed my mind. I thought I was in the presence of philosopher-kings.
All so precious and fragile. Don’t let anyone tell you that the truth can’t disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, it’s that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world.
Just remember: You are not alone.
These remarks—in slightly shaggier form—were delivered in a public forum at the Library of Congress, on 28 January 1993, as part of the celebration of National Book Week.
1. After much brouhaha—during which the text of this speech was considered unacceptable to be published as a pamphlet by the Library of Congress because of my remarks on the Dorothy Allison affair—a compromise was finally reached. All parties agreed to the following footnote: The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the Oklahoma Department of Libraries strongly disagree with Mr. Monette’s interpretation of the Dorothy Allison Incident. In the circumstances, it seems more than a little ironic that an attempt was made to censor a speech on censorship. Meanwhile, I am not expecting any flood of invitations to speak to the good people of Oklahoma.