Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  Yet underneath it all there was a far more serious matter to be pondered: Was there a gay sensibility? The question would be asked in a variety of guises—but always uncertainly, as if fearful that an affirmative answer would leave us all ghettoized. Yet I agreed there was, without any hesitation, even if I had to stumble to put it into words. Yes, we wrote with an outsider’s angle, and we wrote from a place of invisibility. More than most people—especially the straight white male variety—we had to invent ourselves out of whole cloth. There was a certain naivete about us, pugnacious but with a wild aim, that marked the delayed adolescence which attended our coming out. One thing was sure, this gay sensibility was a good deal more complicated than doing fabulous windows at Bendel’s or sewing bugle beads for pop divas.

  We asked more questions than we answered in those early years of the seventies, as a literature slowly began to coalesce around our fundamental uniqueness as a tribe. Gay Christianity, gay teen suicide, gay substance abuse, gay Meccas, and gay families. Our differentness had as many departments as Time and Newsweek put together. It was only in 1973, after all, that we ceased to be a disease, when they finally dropped us from the diagnostic manual of crazies. We were still a fair decade or more from the tangles of Political Correctness and the locked horns of Queer Theory, the essentialists butting heads with the social constructionists. So there was a window of time where we had the freedom to self-define, a sense of ourselves as recording and witnessing what had only been shadows before; present at the creation of something unheard of.

  This situation gave us the ground to consider whether gay men and lesbians could ever be brothers and sisters. Did the passions of radical feminism dictate that we would always be on separate tracks? As to the further business of whether a truce between gay and straight could ever be achieved, the jury was still out on that. I can’t begin to say how many times I was asked: Are you a gay writer or a writer who happens to be gay? Definitely the former, though many of my friends weren’t ready to bite that bullet yet. To them, gay writer sounded more political than literary.

  Sometimes the reviews and interviews exhibited a certain bitchiness, or a pettiness nursed by free-lance journalists who had a novel or two of their own in a desk drawer, longing to be clothbound. Sometimes, to the contrary, the critical judgments of the gay press were far too lenient, so much puffery. There was a tug-of-war between a genuine critical rigor and a well-meaning enthusiasm that owed a good deal to the shiny domain of the press agent.

  But at least the coverage was by our own, and so we gave it a lot of latitude. I sold first serial rights to The Gold Diggers to Blueboy magazine, which printed the chapter about Sam the hustler in two parts, two consecutive issues. It was a bit of a stretch, I admit, to see my pages of limpid prose tucked between photo spreads of donkey dicks and fantasies of getting it on with telephone repairmen. The aspiration to Isaac Singer and the Booth cartoon still had its hooks in me somewhere. But then, there was a certain camp lightness to the Blueboy juxtaposition—definitely a turn-on for a man like Sam, and no less so for his creator.

  Memory has mercifully blurred the details, but I still cringe when I think of the interview I gave to After Dark, a sort of all-purpose entertainment guide from the seventies with lots of pictures of dancers stripped to their tights. Gay was the unspoken subtext, though it dared not speak its name. My interviewer was the redoubtable Norma McLain Stoop, an eccentric gargoyle of a lady whose gushing fealty to show biz was nonetheless infectious. So excitable she could barely sit in her chair, maybe fifty-five behind all that rouge, and with a proprietary feeling about her boys in the business. What the cruel and limiting argot of the times would have called a fag hag, which did no justice to her overflowing loyalty and sense of fun.

  We talked for a whole afternoon, her tape recorder reeling, and I was juiced at the thought of expressing myself to what was at least a tributary of the mainstream. I was full of insufferable opinions, I fear, grand and glam and playing to the balcony. What appeared about two months later was a two-page profile called “Proust on the Pacific,” the most excruciating aspect of which was that the title was a direct quotation. I argued that the mythic realm of Hollywood was ripe for a troubadour (me) who would seize its jeweled heart. I sounded like … well, Norma Scoop herself, overblown and blowsy and insufferably precious.

  Around that time, 1979 or thereabouts, I was in San Francisco to give a reading at the oldest (indeed, the only) gay and lesbian bookstore in the Bay Area. I spent an evening with an old friend from the Boston years, a writer who was in residence at a local university. He was living in a latter-day hippie commune with a half dozen other bohemian types. Amid much laughter my friend and I went off to dinner, accompanied by the young man who rented the attic room.

  A quiet-spoken, self-effacing sort, who did manage to tell me he was a stringer for one of the gay rags. All evening I thought he and my friend were an item, but I was too Waspy polite to ask them directly. I had never experienced the particular press negotiation as to what was “on the record” and what was off. I didn’t think we were having an interview. The dish flew fast and loose as I regaled them with tales out of school about Hollywood movers and shakers. We were all entertaining one another, I thought, with no holds barred when it came to being outrageous.

  On Sunday I returned to L.A., told Roger about our friend’s peregrinations in academia, and never even mentioned the tyro journalist. Ten days later the bookstore owner in San Francisco sent me a clipping from one of the alternative weeklies. The meek-mannered tyro had done me up as a feature, regaling his audience with nuggets about this glib and fatuous lightweight from Tinseltown. He repeated stories about the mating habits of stars that were never meant to go beyond the hair dryer. He painted me as a rich son-of-a-bitch, pulling zeroes out of the air as he speculated about my unearned income.

  I’d talked too much, it was as simple as that. No excuse not to have realized that a journalist, however much a dweeb in person, was always taking notes for a story. And if I was too stupid to specify off the record, then he could hardly be blamed for assuming every word I said was on—fair game, as it were. I’d forgotten the first rule of caution, most tellingly expressed in Joan Didion’s preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

  My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.1

  My comings and goings went pretty much unreported during the next few years, when I was working as a bottom-feeder in the Hollywood sewer system. At that time anyway, writers were the very last players in the fame game. Yet even then I managed to score a few points, though I hadn’t hit the ball myself, hadn’t so much as taken a swing. I had just turned in a screenplay to Universal, my first for hire. In other words, I’d launched myself into a system which would tear the pages into confetti, and the confetti into dust. All of that would take a couple of years, the inchmeal cure for innocence.

  But in the first flush of studiochat, some enterprising publicist had leaked a blind item. I woke up one morning to find myself, picture and all, in Liz Smith’s column in the Daily News. The caption under my beamish face was this: From zilch to $150,000. The accompanying story told of my meteoric rise to the heights of lucre, so sizzling was my screenplay. Not a word of it true, but so what? It upped the ante of interest among those bankable stars who could get a picture green-lighted. And thus ensued a period of delirious fallout, during which Dustin and Meryl and Faye and Warren were variously bandied about as “this close” to a deal.

  Don’t hold your breath. My screenplay would be lining birdcages soon enough. But for years afterward I would hear from marginal forgotten friends and guys I went to college with. They’d seen my Liz Smith item in syndication in the morning paper, from Baltimore to Singapore. I was congratulated a good deal more for the
item than for the screenplay—which by then had long faded into development limbo, land of the undead. The prevailing sound bite about me, whether I liked it or not, was that I was rich and famous. Well, I didn’t mind it that much. But it struck me even at the time that the press could paint an image of you without any input from you at all. And without any countervailing influence, that image took hold as the truth.

  I could see why actors and other royals went ballistic when they read the lies and slander perpetrated by the tabloid press. At the same time I could see what an easy ride they had from the mainstream Hollywood press, where the news was always soft and cutesy. A true collaboration of press-agentry and a willing mouthpiece, oiled by princely lunches and floral tributes so lush that a journalist had to paw his way through orchids to get to his computer. Good publicity was all. And of course they wouldn’t dream of mentioning that anyone was gay or lesbian. The show marriages were enshrined like the spun-sugar figures crowning a wedding cake. No one ever bothered to report that the cake was made of Eisenhower’s snots.

  Cut to 1988, when I published Borrowed Time. By then I had been in the AIDS trenches for a good five years, and my main perception of the press was nauseated contempt for their non-coverage of the calamity. To be sure, there had been an avalanche of stories surrounding the death of Rock Hudson in the fall of ’85. But their main thrust was prurient, with a scarcely concealed overlay of Schadenfreude. And of course they affected to be “shocked, shocked”—in the immortal words of Claude Rains in Casablanca—to learn that Hudson was gay.

  Make no mistake, the press was as much to blame as the Reagan/Bush genocide machine for the gloating ignorance and shame that attached to this “gay disease.” Their constitutional inability to talk about gay in any context at all—the editors were men’s men—precluded even a pretense of compassion. When I agreed to go out on the road with Borrowed Time, an eight-city tour, I was wary at best, frightened at worst. Already there had been reports of camera crews refusing to be in the same studio as a person with AIDS. The country was in full-scale panic, no amount of reassurance convincing the populace that the virus couldn’t be passed by mosquito and toilet seat.

  I went first to Houston, my virgin exposure to drive-time call-ins. Sitting across from the host in flyboy earphones, scarcely exchanging a word with him as he zigzagged from ad spot to weather to Debbie June in the traffic chopper. He had clearly never so much as opened my book, relying on the poop sheet from the publisher. “You look all right to me,” he said. “How much time do you think you have?” He seemed concerned that I might go into a coma right there in his sound booth. Always in those years one had to begin with AIDS 101, countering the stupefying lack of information. And when we turned it over to the phones, the first caller informed me that I had got exactly what I deserved, almost gleeful that the nation would soon be rid of the whole lot of us Sodomites.

  That was the general tone in the summer of ’88. In Berkeley, on the Pacifica station, which tended to have a liberal/rad listenership, a woman told me that she’d read in a book passed out in church that “you homosexamils eat each other’s feces because you’ve got the devil inside you.” I’d never given much thought, frankly, to the devil’s diet. But I was beginning to get a grip on slinging the shit right back—ticking off the dangerous lunacies of the Christian fundies and their loving dictum that we should all “Thank God for AIDS.”

  In Boston, a caller to WBZ Radio earnestly demanded that everyone with AIDS be quarantined. And how were we going to do that? “All those Jap barracks in California,” he replied instantly. “That’d be perfect. Or send all these sickos to live with the Indians, and blockade all the roads.”

  “Sir,” I replied dryly, “do you know what a concentration camp is?”

  “You’re damn right I do. It’s time we started building them again, too.”

  That tour was my first encounter with raw hate, and what was so chilling about it was how nationwide its reach was. On the whole the radio hosts didn’t challenge any of the lies, leaving it to me to extricate myself as best I could. By comparison, the print media were a saner class entirely. Over and over I’d sit down with mainstream reporters, quickly aware of how many were coming from a place of pain and shame. If they didn’t apologize directly for their papers’ sins of omission in covering the plague, they would almost always blurt out that their brother or neighbor or high school sweetheart had died of AIDS. They were determined to right the balance, to clear their own conscience if nothing else.

  I didn’t set out to be the AIDS Poster Boy, but willingly entered the breach in cities that hadn’t yet put a face to the epidemic. Rock Hudson and Ryan White were not enough, too easily dismissed with a curt Not me on the way to the sports page. There were hundreds of cases all around, but none with sufficient access to the media. In many places I was the first feature profile, certainly the first taste of nuclear rage as I ticked off the culprits at the NIH and the CDC.

  Generally, these encounters with the press were a nice curative for the drive-time citizen hate squad. Not that even the most passionate and well-meaning of them could keep up with the gay and lesbian press, which had been covering the horrors of the war since the first cases surfaced in ’81. Our own reporters had grown leaner and tougher in the heat of battle, and they’d developed a rigorous skepticism about the numbers put out by the government. For ten years we were asked to believe that the infected HIV population in the States was a cool million. Never a change in that statistic, even as the full-blown caseload climbed above the quarter million mark. It was as if the epidemic had stopped in its tracks to allow a head count, and from then on a million was the benchmark—and such a nice round number besides, so why revise it? To admit that the numbers kept growing and growing would have made them have to face the burgeoning caseload of women and adolescents.

  The mainstream press, like so many sheep, accepted whatever the government said. It was journalism by press release. Whereas the gay and lesbian journalists knew how to call a lie a lie and made mincemeat of the bureaucrats’ every pronouncement. The New York Native probably led the way, questioning the validity of HIV itself, accusing the establishment of fudging the basic science. Their hectoring campaign against AZT bordered on the nutty, to be sure, yet time is beginning to prove them close to the mark. Then, they were prophets without honor in a system ruled by drug conglomerates and Reagan’s Mormon appointees.

  And even as we covered the story better, withering all the government’s forays in spin control, that group of writers who had colonized the margin after Stonewall had grown into a juggernaut of personal witness. Andrew Holleran was writing knife-edge essays for Christopher Street, pulling them together in Ground Zero. Ed White and Adam Mars-Jones had collaborated on a collection of stories—The Darker Proof—alternating voices of the damned. Larry Kramer, our very own Cassandra, had written a devastating indictment of complacency, “1112 and Counting,” and followed it up with the white-hot Brechtian fury of The Normal Heart.

  Witnessing was for most of us a way to keep from going mad. In city after city, the most provincial of which now supported a vital gay and lesbian bookstore, I’d face a line of war-torn refugees who wanted their books inscribed. My lover died last week, one would tell me; and the next, a woman who couldn’t stop crying, would choke out that she’d lost two brothers in a single year. Nurses who worked in AIDS wards; the children of secret bisexuals, still in shellshock. And the sick themselves, bone-thin and limping from neuropathy, pared down to the last essential core, refined by fire until they seemed as pure as crystal, waiting to shatter. Besides being unbearably moving, they came to honor me for my writing—till I thought I would shatter myself out of sheer unworthiness.

  But as far as all the news that’s jit to print was concerned, it was all taking place in a faraway country, remote as the cloud of flies that swarmed about the starving in the Sudan. Good for the occasional wrenching update, but not the least bit sexy. And we were that country. Dying in the cor
ridors of emergency rooms because body bags were easier to fill than beds. Burnout was the general rule among those who’d stayed too long at the front, and the geometric numbers led to what they called multiple loss syndrome. So now we had two syndromes going at once, the sickness unto death and the emptiness after, like juggling a pair of chainsaws. And no one gave a damn unless we did, shouting into the din of indifference, in George Whitmore’s haunting phrase: Someone was here.

  I didn’t go out on the road again for another two years. I gave a few incendiary speeches, and in October ’88 took part in the exorcism of the FDA, working with Vito Russo as press liaison, copping a millisecond of national exposure on the CBS Evening News. I started getting called for sound bites by reporters on the AIDS beat, especially to comment on the latest cure-of-the-week. I tried to take my cue from Larry Kramer, spouting a whole laundry list of the closeted creeps who kept letting us die. If I didn’t develop quite the reputation as a crank that Larry did, it was not for want of trying. I hammered at the televangelist queens and their brain-dead flocks, and announced that I no longer considered myself an American. Reagan/Bush had erased my citizenship.

  By then the press and the country at large had found themselves a safe and tangible focus for the epidemic: the Quilt. It gave them permission to grieve and to wonder at the vastness of what was already lost. I wouldn’t dream of diminishing the heart’s force and anguish that stitched every patch of that monument. It resonated with healing power, bringing together legions of those left behind, heretofore isolated in scarred home towns and decimated cities. The Quilt shone with human endurance and the deepest family feeling. Wherever it went the minicam vans were there, close-up on brokenhearted remnants as the beat reporter provided voiceover in sepulchral tones.

  But I also understand why Steve, who’d sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: “And don’t put me in that fucking quilt!” Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The Quilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrapup. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn’t go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the “innocent” victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs.