Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  It only made more telling the startling show of support we got from the NAACP. They told us they were with us and didn’t duck the parallel with their own struggle. This was news, for they knew even better than we what an uphill fight they faced with the chorus of black preachers for whom homophobia was Gospel, who had spent a decade turning away from people of color with AIDS, to them the wages of sin. The writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would later make the telling point that Bayard Rustin, organizer and godfather to the ’63 March on Washington, had demoted himself in the leadership ranks to avoid media scrutiny. All because he was gay. He stood off to the side, an invisible shadow, sacrificed to the greater good of freedom for his black people. Now at last the shame of one hero’s silence could begin to be rectified by his other people, gays and lesbians.

  If we didn’t have Marian Anderson to trumpet us Free at last, we did have Michael Callen and Holly Near. Michael had been battling KS in his lungs for months now, and had actually been told by a medical professional that he’d be dead by March 1st. But somehow he’d made it to Washington, thin as a stick and on chemo himself. In a crystalline tenor he sang the song that had become a kind of anthem for a generation of lovers challenged by HIV. Love is all we have for now, goes the haunting refrain. What we don’t have is time.

  Holly Near—veteran activist, fighter for all women and the disappeared—gave forth with her own thrilling echo of “We Shall Overcome,” harking back to the protest songs of the Weavers and Woody Guthrie. We are a gentle loving people/And we are singing, singing for our lives. You could hear waves of people in the crowd joining the chorus, swaying with solidarity, survivors of the age of silence giving voice to their pride and dignity at last.

  Perhaps my favorite of the speakers was Sir Ian McKellen, who offered a speech of Shakespeare’s—from a play called Sir Thomas More, the collaborative effort of several playwrights that was never in the end performed. But Shakespeare’s three pages, in which More confronts the mob of the King’s men, constitute the only known example of the Bard’s handwritten composition. In the play the King’s men have passed a law forbidding “strangers” from settling in England—a slur against immigrants and a call for racial purity. Sir Ian stepped forward and trumpeted More’s outrage. So they were going to forbid strangers, were they? And where would they go when the tables of history turned, when they would find themselves the strangers? It was an oratorical tour de force, giving historical weight to the discrimination suffered by those who were different.

  All in all, a remarkable pageant of diversity. And from where I sat, the flow of force was most tellingly toward the young. Theirs was the first generation to grow up with the promise of acceptance, at least from one another, and a measure of self-respect that constituted our hard-won legacy to them. None of them had to be alone anymore, except by closeted choice. As for passing the baton to a fleeter team, I felt a measure of satisfaction—a family feeling, really—that was scarcely quantifiable. But it wasn’t one percent of me, and was encoded in my genes for thousands of years, no matter if it had no name. Or as Sappho put it, in love’s terms:

  You may forget but

  Let me tell you

  this: someone in

  some future time

  will think of us.

  For my own part, the invalid on the sofa, the phrase that kept repeating itself as a kind of mantra was the title of Coleridge’s poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” The poet had been waiting for months for a visit from his friend Charles Lamb, beside himself with anticipation of showing Lamb the glories of the Lake District. Alas, on the morning of his friend’s arrival, Coleridge “met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay.”4 So he mapped a route and sent the others out to experience the earthly sublime. And all the while they’re gone Coleridge sits in his garden-bower, which he ruefully compares to a prison cell, imagining his hiking friends as they follow his trail from mountain crag to sunset over the sea. Then the epiphany:

  A delight

  Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad

  As I myself were there!

  Unexpectedly, the loving contemplation of his friend’s adventure restores to him the beauty of his garden. The sublime is in every leaf, the dappled light on the walnut-tree: No plot so narrow, be but Nature there. Nothing so exalted in Room 404 of the Park Hyatt, but I felt the same heartened connection to the gathering of the tribe along the Mall—as if I myself were there. AIDS was my prison. Not very leafy, but sufficient to free the sympathetic imagination. Even in the throes of the viral assault, losing my body electric organ by organ, I could still make contact—no yielding yet to the isolation of dying.

  And as the evening deepened and the rally stage was dismantled, I wondered how many had watched it all from the closet—that black garden where nothing grows, death-in-life. Would it spur them to a quicker recognition of who they were, watching us march a million strong? What would they muster of courage to free themselves? Torie Osborne had said that the real reverberations of this freedom march would be felt at the grass roots, when the million of us had returned home, there to confront the intolerance of neighbors and friends and family. Shaking the politics of Main Street.

  Yet we all felt a certain reluctance to leave this crossroads moment of celebration, a recognition of the letdown that would inevitably follow in its wake. Myself, I would have to face my rage and sorrow that AIDS had been consigned to the back of the bus. The feel of second-class citizenship, even here at the top of the mountain. A fight that still had to be fought among us, over and over, so the sick would not be quarantined by a kind of AIDS apartheid. Noise would have to be made to ensure our full inclusion in the dream of a unified people.

  But one thing was sure. Nobody left that marble city without a fuller grasp of what it meant to be gay and lesbian now. All the stereotypes lay in ruins. We didn’t need our absent friend Bill Clinton to prove we had grown in political power. The torch had passed to the young, in the process lighting a million dark corners. The lonely frightened kids, trapped in fundamentalist families and all the lies of “Morning in America,” would have at least a glimpse of what had gone on here, the counter-friction and the dear love of comrades.

  In her peroration to the crowd, Urvashi Vaid had expressed it best in her charge to the heterosexual majority:

  I challenge and invite you to open your eyes and embrace us without fear. The gay rights movement is not a party. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a hairstyle. It is not a fad or a fringe or a sickness. It is not about sin or salvation. The gay rights movement is an integral part of the American promise of freedom.

  Of course, what we would take away with us from Washington was also something much more personal. For me it began in a small town in Massachusetts forty years ago—a sickness of the soul about being different. And nothing more important, not breath itself, than the need to keep it secret. The stillborn journey of my life took off at last, the moment I opened the closet door. To know how dark a place you come from into the light of self-acceptance—it is to enact a sort of survivorship that leaves a trail for those who come after. But you carry that kid with you the rest of your life—wounded as he is by hate and lies—a shadow companion who needs you to free him.

  And whatever is left of the hurt is washed away the longer you march, arm in arm with a comrade, rallying to the mustering of the tribe. Until there’s no dislocation anymore between the broken shadow of your past and the fully human presence you’ve become. You have incorporated his pain and come to understand that it is the very fuel that makes the torch burn. No matter if they tell you you are only one percent, or that two thousand years of your people have just been revised and thrown to the winds. Nothing can dim the burning light. You are home free, citizen and elder, one in a million. And there is no America without you.

  1. M. C. Howatson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford, 1990), pages 506-507.

  2. All quotations from Sappho are fr
om Mary Barnard’s Sappho: A New Translation (Univ. of California Press, 1966).

  3. Whitman’s phrase. A most suggestive reading about Lincoln’s relations with Joshua Speed is in Charley Shively’s Drum Beats (Gay Sunshine Press, 1989). And note Shively’s caveat: “The romantic cult of male friendship may have sometimes been completely non-sexual, but it provided a convenient form in which homosexual men could conceptualize their feelings for other men.” (Drum Beats, page 88)

  4. From Coleridge’s prefatory note to the poem. See I. A. Richards, ed., The Portable Coleridge (New York: Penguin, 1977), page 76.

  A ONE-WAY FARE

  WE WERE ON one of those relentless cruises—a week from Monte Carlo to Venice, around the boot—where they dropped anchor once a day in a picture-book harbor and sent us off by tender to maul the local tourist goods. Warning us severely that the last tender would be leaving the dock at one-thirty—for the ship was sailing at two, with or without us. There ‘was about all this a certain schoolmarmish insistence that we’d better stick together while ashore. For to be left behind would have the truants scrambling for a Cessna to drop us at the next port of call, untold demerits scored against us for violating the team spirit.

  But as Miss Brodie was wont to tell her special girls, no one ever accused Anna Pavlova of having the team spirit. It was the corps de ballet that had the team spirit.

  When we disembarked in Capri and wandered into town, Steve was content to commandeer a cafe table under the plane trees and drowse the morning away over coffee, adream in the vast cerulean of the view to the Bay of Naples. I had already had a run-in with the Ken doll who handled excursions. I’d told him I wanted to check out the ruins of Tiberius’s villa, on the steep cliffs at the eastern tip of the island. He looked as if he’d much prefer to tell me where to score the best Majolica and cashmere, but coolly noted me on his clipboard and said he’d ask around.

  About a half hour later he approached us under the plane trees. “Sorry, sir, we can’t arrange it,” he announced with a certain smugness. The emperor’s villa was miles away, and the only way to reach it was by donkey on a dusty path. And all the donkeys were sick or in the fields or otherwise indisposed. As he went away pleased with himself at having foiled an insurrection among the sheep, I looked at my watch. Exactly two hours before the last tender.

  “I think you better get going,” declared Steve, looking up from a scribble of postcards.

  “But what if I don’t make it?” I retorted. “I don’t know how far it is.”

  “Dr. Monette will make it,” he assured me. Dr. Monette was his name for my literary self—or more generally, for the intellectual dabbling I was prone to, poring over maps and monographs of the classical world. To Steve, anything east of network television constituted scholarly work. Or as he would put it, wry and tender as he watched me at my desk, filling up legal pads with a novel in longhand: “Darling, nobody reads. Don’t you know that yet?”

  I zigzagged through the tourist hordes and started uphill through the lemony air of quarter-acre groves. Having no map was another sort of defiance, and anyway I soon reached a turnofF marked with a marble plaque, “Villa di Giove,” with an arrow pointing up the donkey path that ran between the crumbling boundary walls of the lemon and olive growers. Too narrow for tourist buses, too rough and unpaved for mopeds. I struck a brisk pace and made my way in the noonday sun, not even any mad dogs or Englishmen for company.

  After about half an hour I was still plodding east along the spine of the island, still no glimpse of the ruins on the heights. Spying a black-dressed woman feeding chickens in her back garden, I leaned over the wall and waved to get her attention. “Scusi signora,” I began, but hadn’t got another word out before she pointed dourly up the steep path: “Villa di Gioue.” She seemed about as impressed by my destination as Ken the excursionist had been.

  But I persevered, and in twenty minutes had left the hillside farms behind and entered the imperial precincts—wilder vegetation and here and there a tall umbrella pine to shade my way. I could make out now the stone remains of ramparts at the top, and I broke into a trot worthy of any donkey to cover the last half-kilometer. Arriving breathless at the first paved terrace, surrounded of a sudden by the bases of toppled columns, weed-choked cisterns, flights of stairs that stopped midair. The sun was blazing, but the quiet was incredible, a windless day where nothing moved except the lizards who scrabbled about.

  There was no guide or guidebook available at the site, only a few tin signboards that gave a rough outline of the floor plan, all the labels in Italian. But frankly I didn’t care by then, rapt as I was by the wrinkle of the azure sea below. “View” is hardly adequate to describe it. I felt as if the whole Mediterranean hovered in my ken, and the mainland shore across the water seemed a vision of the whole length of Italy.

  I only knew a couple of things about this man who had lived here. That he had retired to Capri permanently in the latter years of his reign, leaving the running of the Empire to his underlings; and that he had hurled his enemies from this height, a thousand feet to the rocks below. A sybarite’s dream of a place, then, unless you crossed the chief. I studied the ground plan and walked among the broken rooms, imagining them painted in the red and ochre of Pompeii. But the site had been pretty well denuded, sifted by archaeologists—no precious fragment like the Belvedere torso to be found; all of that hoarded long ago by the Vatican emperors.

  And yet there was a fairly wide expanse of mosaic floor, forming a sort of triumphal path toward a grove of cypresses. Not the sort of mosaic fashioned into pictures; no coiled and rearing asps, no fighting lions or other imperial insignia. Just thousands of buff gray stones, each about a half inch square, and laid as tightly as ever after two thousand years. I crouched and ran a hand across its seamlessness, then followed the path to the cypresses which formed two stately rows on either side of the walk, leading perhaps a hundred feet to the sheerest edge of the cliff. No guardrail of any kind, just the vertiginous drop to the sea. Doubtless the place where the enemies were flung.

  I cowered back from the edge, resting in the cypress shade as I tried to memorize the place. I assumed that the downhill trip would be quicker, but I’d already passed the first hour and more. The time squeeze throbbed in my belly, affording me no leisure to spend a lazy afternoon at this lookout, picnicking in the cypress shade. All I had was a couple of speeded-up minutes to commit this glimpse to memory. I turned reluctantly away, looking back over my shoulder as the vision receded, framed by the cypress alley.

  Then my downcast eyes took note of the breaks in the pavement where cypress roots had burrowed beneath the mosaic, fissuring the surface till the beaten path was littered with rubble like a scatter of dice. I knelt and picked up a loose square of mosaic, noting how its structure was in fact a rectangular wedge, whose half-inch square of exposed surface concealed the depth of the stone, a full inch of foundation below. Presumably this shape made it easier to pack them tightly together to make a solid floor.

  I didn’t even have to think twice, swiftly pocketing the stone and casting about for another to bring back to Steve. The first law of ruins—Never take anything away—surely didn’t apply to me and my thumbnail souvenirs. The winter rains would only wash away these patches of broken mosaic, burying them in the mud and weeds. No team of archaeologists was going to bother reconstructing a footpath. And yet I felt oddly guilty as I made my way over the terraces and started downhill, prickling with the worry that what I’d done was just a matter of degree. A latter-day Lord Elgin, who “liberated” the Parthenon friezes and sailed them home to England, just to keep them safe. Or those whole temples carted off stone by stone by the Germans, for the purposes of study. Leaving the ancient sites as bare as the plains of Troy.

  Ruins get ruined, there seems no way around it. Even Rose Macaulay—in her sinfully delicious book, Pleasure of Ruins—announces with a certain breezy shrug that every ruin is in constant flux:

  … one cannot keep pace: they
disintegrate, they go to earth, they are tidied up, excavated, cleared of vegetation, built over, restored …1

  But that only makes more urgent one’s imagining, projecting the self along the “ghostly streets” of what she calls “the stupendous past.” She doesn’t say how long one ought to stay and contemplate, to make the place one’s own. But fifteen minutes hardly seemed enough, especially as I stumbled down the rock-strewn trail like a mad donkey, racing the clock to the harbor.

  Of course Steve was right. I made it with moments to spare, looking dazedly off the stern of the tender as Capri floated away. And even then it felt like a dream, my time in the emperor’s ruins. I have in the four years since managed to preserve the memory intact, or almost. The cliff-edge eagle’s perch, the sweep of the sea below. What I have left besides that blinding abruptness is this fragment of gray stone rubble on my desk, a single piece of the jigsaw.

  And of course the story of my adventure—so vivid in recollection that it convinces after all that fifteen minutes on the heights sufficed to make it mine. And yet, so perverse is the drift of memory, that at a certain point in time I had a change of emperors, giving credit for the Villa di Giove to Hadrian rather than Tiberius. That may seem like a minor glitch, though a century separates their two reigns. But it gave me leave to populate the pleasure-palace on Capri with Hadrian the aesthete, builder of libraries and founder of the Atheneum, the gathering-place for the intellects of his age. And to remember his passion for Antinoüs, the joyous comrade of his heart, who drowned in the Nile in his twentieth year. Temples went up in his memory, and a hundred sculpted portraits besides, to assuage an emperor’s grief.