by Hilton Als
We followed the white people we liked home. They lived, most of them, in tall apartment buildings with doormen. We couldn’t stand in front of those buildings for long without being glared at by those doormen, so we had to imagine the person we had a crush on, on the long subway ride home, to Brooklyn. We imagined them going up to their beautiful home in an elevator and going into their bedroom (their own bedroom!) and turning on their desk light and putting on a record by some singer we had overheard them talk about in the school cafeteria (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison), and then taking off their jeans, their leg hair lying flat on their legs like stockings. Our imaginings split us up—Hilton and I. We wanted to be a we with one or another of the people we followed home, so we split up to make room for those other people, who were never coming and sometimes there and whom we always partially imagined. And in this way, years passed, until I met SL and became a we with someone entirely different.
But we never actually lived together, not really. About twenty years into our friendship—this was in 1998 or so—I still lived in the Brooklyn apartment I’d rented since before I met SL. It was less a home than a place I could say I was going home to. What it was, really, was a stage set, as provisional as that, and one I longed to strike at a moment’s notice, but that moment never came. Besides, where would I go? SL lived somewhere else and frequently with someone else.
I rarely had guests. How can you host in a theater? But if you looked behind the flats where, variously, my double bed had been sketched, along with a tea cup, shower curtains, and a stove, you’d find the same dull isolated crud you’d see in any number of apartments occupied by men who could not move on from AIDS. In any case, moving on was a ridiculous phrase, given the enormous physical memory of your loved one being stuffed in a black garbage bag; that’s how the city’s health-care workers dealt with the first AIDS victims, stuck them in garbage bags like imperfect pieces of couture. So much time and effort had gone into creating this dress or that person, but it was imperfect, and its imperfections could contaminate the rest of the line, bag it up fast, seal it off, and move on.
In any case, “moving on” was a ridiculous phrase in this context, as was the trite idea of closure, and yet I was supposed to be alive, moving on, and what was that? Sometimes I moved on to a few boys who looked like the trashed and bagged loved one—especially around the eyes and feet—but they didn’t lie on my stage set’s double bed without getting paid: actors for hire.
I did not want SL to die remembering the look of a thousand garbage bags in my eyes. I loved him more than grief. So, periodically, I pushed him away into the world of living white women. The ostensible reason was ecology. Our twinship wouldn’t be a living thing without other living things. He needed to live for us because he could. (No one he loved had ever died, including the people he didn’t like very much.) SL’s favorite religious group was the Stoics. He had grown up watching two people not take love—least of all from him—and so he knew people in general could not take love; other people are always our parents. And so his self-appointed job, his brilliance, really, was in staying, and taking what you threw at him, and not engaging the crap, because that had been his job, ever since he was little: staying. That’s what made SL such a turn-on, especially to white girls who lived inside and outside the privilege of their skin, and their horror about what they shared with their white male oppressors: their skin. White girls could rant, weep, treat him like a servant, like the girlfriend in the Prince song he loved so (“If I was your girlfriend... / would u let me dress u... / If I was your one and only friend / would you run 2 me if somebody hurt u / even if that somebody was me”), and he could take it and more while styling what you should wear on a night on the town, with or without him, but there was always this unspoken, distinctly male caveat in the air: he could leave when he wanted to. That’s one reason those girls and queens loved him. His authority. He could put on his boots and leave. Even when he didn’t, he could. (When his girlfriends were annoyed with him they’d telephone and yell at me; they were too frightened of him to talk shit to him directly. One of SL’s former partners said, vis-à-vis his various strengths and enviable stoicism and love of other ladies: “What is this? Fucking Ivanhoe?”)
I remember standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Nineteenth Street with SL once, chatting. It was a sweltering summer day in 2000, and SL had on a dark blue jacket, silk knickers, and boots that went up to his knees. He was bareheaded and bare chested. As we chatted, a man rode up to us on his bike. He made a pit stop in front of SL, looked him up and down, and exclaimed, “Cute!” before riding off. SL didn’t blink an eye.
That was a large part of SL’s fabulous allure: his resistance to his audience’s self-dramatization, especially when it came to their desire for him, a single twin who did and did not want to be wanted. As a husband who longed to be a wife, one of SL’s favorite movies was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Petra is a German fashion designer who falls in love with Karin, a young model. Karin torments the besotted Petra with tales of her other lovers, specifically a black man with a large penis. While all of this is going on, Petra’s assistant, Marlene, who never speaks, goes about the business of running her abusive boss’s life, down to coming up with the designs that have made Petra famous. One thing and another happens, Karin leaves Petra in a cloud of degradation—the tormentor is tormented—and, thus chastened, Petra turns to Marlene, longing to treat the woman who was in effect her slave as an equal. But Marlene will not have it. Moments after Petra reaches out to her in a human and humanizing way, Marlene packs her bags. She doesn’t want freedom and equality. She’s gone.
SL said a number of things about himself through his movie stories; that’s how he talked his desire. (SL on sex: “If you have to talk about it, it’s not happening.”) Marlene: was she part of SL’s love, or identification? For SL, those two things weren’t mutually exclusive; he loved Marlene because he felt he was, or wanted to be, Marlene: a silent wife to other wives, a wife who could play what looked like degradation because he could not be degraded more than any woman, including his mother, whose marriage had degraded him.
But I could not be Petra. I had learned about love at home, too, but in a different way than SL; despite my parents to say the least interesting ideas about intimacy, I never felt they equated it with brutality, or lies. My parents didn’t stay together for the sake of the children because they weren’t together, not in any traditional way; mundane daily closeness would have hurt their mutually lonely skin too much and encroached on their independence of mind. This was light stuff compared to what SL observed of love at home—he called me, somewhat condescendingly, a brilliant normal person; oh, what hadn’t he survived! Oh, what had I not survived!—an experience that prompted him to say to married friends who were intent on teaching their children how wrong love could be by staying together when they shouldn’t, but their vanity said otherwise: Don’t stay together for the sake of the children. Look at me.
I loved looking at him. I loved listening to him. In 1999 he said about me to me: “You have infant schema. Children and animals will always love you.” In 2000 he said: “The downside about what you’ve written is the special pleading angle. You’re not greater than the subject.” In 2001 he said: “Are we codependent? Beyond.” He also said: “I don’t care.” In fact, “I don’t care” was his most frequently spoken phrase. That was the worst kiss ever, I don’t care. I’m so glad you like my pictures, maybe the world at large will never see them, I don’t care. From 1999 on I wondered how I could make him care. I saw our twinship dissolving in words I could not control, words that stressed SL’s Billie Holiday, don’t-careish attitude, even as my I stressed itself on page after page. Neither of us could stop himself: by 2002 we were breaking out of our we casing through an explosion of self-expression, and the disavowal of self-expression the world would not look at his pictures, and his love, the world, would see me no matter how much I tried to hide in my univers
e of stage sets and the crud behind it. I would not leave him, and yet he felt I had already left him, the words were going out into the world more and more frequently from 2003 on, even as I loved SL’s pictures, body, and voice, more than my words, and always more and more; but that wasn’t the point, the attention I received wasn’t happening to him, and in any case, SL implied, as our talk went on, even as it dried up, that, as an unreconstructed seventies lesbian, the commercial world of magazines and praise was corrupt, why would I want any part of that, why care, I don’t care.
Blame it on capitalism. Despite SL’s Laura Nyro–like abhorrence of business and his utterly touching and captivating struggle with modesty, he tied himself up—as he tied himself up in a Comme des Garçons shirt, or lovely turban—in a debate about the meaning of his I, the ego as a form of aggression. He would not put that fellow—his I—forward; he gave SL the spiritual creeps. And yet there was his I, who was a superior artist, and art must be seen for it to matter to other people. In any case, what colored person has ever handled attention well? For years there was no Michelle Obama. And the colored people we saw become famous—Jean-Michel Basquiat and the like—could not reconcile all that love with their former degradation. I could not handle the attention I received for my writing; it was not separate from SL’s relative invisibility on the art market. Despite the fact that SL always married stars who knew he was a star, the world can absorb only the obvious, and for whatever reason I was more obvious to the world at that time than my twin, the same as me, only different.
SL’s struggle for recognition became my own. I didn’t mind. In fact, I loved the process. It all felt like an Earth, Wind & Fire song, full of effort and hope. One helps, and there is sometimes less of oneself, or one’s I in the effort. SL and I were comrades, we would get through it, the world would love him as much as I did. But the world would not. Once, after we became friends and SL moved on from the weekly where we met to a magazine that was part of a big, lady-centered corporation—they published magazines whose major themes were weddings, eyebrows, and the like—SL would describe how few black men worked there, and how they never talked to one another. Some time later, I got a job at the same company—by then, SL had quit to pursue his own work—and as he waited in the lobby for me one day, SL looked on as I talked to two black men who worked in fashion. As we walked away, SL exclaimed: “Oh, my God, when I saw that, I couldn’t believe the building didn’t explode!” Presumably the city’s cultural life—which, after 1980 or so, was dominated by white female gallerists, curators, critics, and the like—would have exploded if it had accepted SL’s photographs and video work along with my praise, and that is how they treated him: as being too much. In 2001 his pictures were too much. In 2002 his appearance was too much. In 2003 his morals showed people up too much. Where was this man of high principles supposed to fit in the highly unprincipled worlds of art and fashion that he aspired to and disdained, a world where success was based as much on personality, body type, and eye color as it was on any recognizable skill (sometimes more so)? And by aspiring to those worlds, was SL not returning to Europe in a way, hankering to love that which he could not be, which is to say a white woman?
Since I have always preferred to live in the next generation of hope, it was the children of those art-world ladies who worried me. Living in their male-identified world of having it all, the mothers who toiled in the corridors of photography and literature and the like couldn’t be bothered with feminism because what is feminism but humanism; they didn’t want their children—particularly their girl children—to make the mistake they’d made at Brown or Yale or Berkeley or whatever, which is to say believing feminism and thus humanism had any value at all, and would get them anywhere in this stinking world. So they let their daughters say whatever they wanted under the guise of free “self-expression,” but what amused those mothers—the same mothers who would not mother SL’s longed-for career—was listening to, and watching, their daughters’ aggression. One such little girl told me that if I shaved my beard, I’d look like CeeLo Green. Another little girl told her mother that she didn’t like the way I smelled. Another asked how I could be happy, considering that I looked like a gay Unabomber? These were the children of the mothers SL longed to kiss, and protect, even as my wounds would not heal and shall never heal because now I have the hatred of a white woman and if SL doesn’t think his unconditional love of them and ultimately wary love of me didn’t contribute to the immense loss of our love, he’s crazy.
* * *
But by 2006 my pain was becoming less real to SL; he was struggling for his own survival, but how do you do that when you’re a twin? Or what I believed to be a twin? That was one reason I encouraged SL to leave occasionally, and join the world of living white women: our twinship not only needed other blood to survive, but, until the end, and even now, we believed our twinship could take it. Our we could survive anything, including this fact: that SL knew perfectly well that my I liked skating on the edge of abandonment, it had always been that way, there was my father in one direction, and my mother in another, and it was their coming together at certain times—to protect me from a homophobic teacher when I was in elementary school, taking turns rubbing me with witch hazel as they tried to bring one of my childhood fevers down—that I relished more than anything else. But there had to be a split first so I could feel the full power of their subsequent Socratic fusion. I loved smelling the glue. I believed in destroying a home to make a more powerful, integrated home. So from 2000 on, and maybe once a year or twice, until 2006, when we parted, I would encourage SL to leave by introducing him to someone else. He was reluctant and obliging: surely he could meet white girls on his own? But that wasn’t the point: the ones he could meet on his own had nothing to do with me, just as SL saying that one reason he loved me was that I was such a respite from his normal life, why get all mixed up with his desire to begin with? But who doesn’t long to be mundane? To say who they are through domestic complaint? To have love every day? (SL laughed and loved me more than he could say when, early on in our relationship, I said how marvelous it must be to be married; you could have sex whenever you wanted it. What did I know? I didn’t grow up with anyone who had been married in any conventional sense.) Having not grown up hearing complaints about the old ball and chain, I longed to be one; what a novelty, to be a source of love and irritation, all at once.
But I must have been, especially when SL, to accommodate me more than anything else, went out into the world of living women; he did it for me, our we, and yet it was my I who stood at the threshold of our imaginary house with blood in my eyes when I saw, upon his return, the long hairs across his teeth, and toes.
One thing that occurs to me now: perhaps SL left so he could return home to the happy news of my desire. Because in all the years I loved him, I did not say I loved him, or, more specifically, how I loved him. If I did, wouldn’t that end up in a garbage bag, too? My love for SL: this wasn’t the yearning one finds in early and bad Gore Vidal, or Edmund White, or James Baldwin novels; that is, I did not worshipfully suffer at the altar of SL’s love of women. If anything, SL was a supplicant at the prie-dieu of my queerness. As such, he was beyond heterosexual. Let’s call him something else. And it occurs to me now that the vengeful queen in me—the queen who wanted to extract his revenge for all he’d felt reading all that early self-pitying or romanticized or both Gore Vidal and James Baldwin—did have a subconscious interest in his pain for loving other kinds of people more than he could love me, but that wasn’t true, and yet I wanted it to be because it justified my not saying what SL longed to be said, despite the hair across his toe: that I could not name my desire because he knew he was my desire and how can you describe yourself to yourself?
I think SL felt a very great sadness over my inability—my unwillingness—to express my desire, to say I want you, do you want me, such a basic thing, and, potentially, so beautifully expressed, as it was, for instance, by Diane Keaton, another white girl we l
oved, when she asks the Woody Allen character in 1977’s Annie Hall whether he likes her or not, but I just couldn’t do it, that meant everything was at stake, and wouldn’t someone leave or die because of it?
But in 2007 someone did die. She was one of my first I’s, and integral to all the years I’ve described. I’ve waited until now to talk about her because that’s the way she would have wanted it. She was a great believer in traditional story structure, and would say, apropos her appearance here, what readers crave most, what fills them up, is the story of love, and how it ends. As a spoken-word critic—one of the very best—she knew what was real when she read it because she trusted her gut. Indeed, she had a great interest in her gut; she was always thin, but she ate more food than any human I have ever known. (Even after she got sick she longed for me to describe a dinner party I’d attended. She licked her lips. “I’m always hungry,” she said.) She came to the first reading I ever gave, at my college, and while I read she sat in the front row with her then boyfriend, eating a hoagie. After the reading, she said that I needed more stuff behind me while I read, to lively things up. Lights? A video? But I am getting ahead of my story. She was our first home, no, she was our tree, and we hung in her young branches, our bodies swinging like flags in a permanent sweet chill, then a little sunshine through the branches, some bird sounds and maybe Jesus floating beyond the birds. No, she was our ground, and we would die to be closer to her. No, she was a white girl, whatever that means. No, she was colored because she preferred colored men to most white people. No, she was words, and they always came up short against her presence, and if you were a poet whose vocation it is to take the words out from in between other words, and relish white space, then you would be more suited to the task of relaying who she was, as Wallace Stevens seemed to do when he wrote, in 1947, twelve years before she was born, and sixty years before she died, in his poem “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”: “She floats in air at the level of/ The eye, completely anonymous, / Born, as she was, at twenty-one, / Without lineage or language, only / The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture, / Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.” What can I tell you about her that might not sound trite by comparison, well, there are mundane details that don’t diminish her, she loved proper storytelling, the details and hidden meanings and facts and all, but let me just say that the details—how we met, how she and SL met, how she died, how SL and I died—diminish me, or, rather, the whole storytelling enterprise does, words limit things, that’s what I told her once, we were sitting in her little house near a pond on Long Island, she had said good-bye to Manhattan years before but she was made for New York, she was beautiful and made no sense and made perfect sense, just like Greenwich Village, or the Bronx. We were sitting in her little house, and she was so sick, Jesus help her, and I was saying how much I loved her without telling her that because that’s how we talked—by not talking. We didn’t want speech to limit us. Instead we did things, like making a chicken, or, the first time we had SL come over to her place in New York, and to accommodate his vegetarianism, a gratin dauphinois. Sitting in her house, I could not say how much I loved her even though time and her body were saying I wouldn’t have many more opportunities to do so but we never talked much and as SL said during that time: Why start now? SL understood, intuitively, which is the best way to understand anything, my thoughts on that particular subject: if I said I loved her, it would limit her to my love just as a tree, once described, becomes just a tree, or your tree. I always wanted others to know her and cherish their perspective of her; that would mean there was more of her in the world, how marvelous, and other men aside from SL and myself who felt as one of my boyfriends felt when he said, after meeting her: Whatever that girl has, someone should bottle it.
