by David Rees
The poll’s conclusions are that many of us are changing our life-styles. There is less promiscuity; we’re returning to dating, staying with one partner, and not tricking. I hadn’t noticed. The Watergarden, for example, is busy all week, every week.
I wonder if my illness wasn’t some form of acquired immune deficiency. The signs—says the Chronicle—can be any combination of fevers that persist for four or five days, unexplained weight loss, flu symptoms, swollen lymph glands, herpes sores that don’t heal, nerve damage, and bluish or purple spots on the skin. The first four in the list apply to me. I had recently been to the baths; the white corpuscle count dropped dramatically; and I’m not yet well. I’ve returned to work, still with eyesight and hearing problems. My classes occasionally disappear in a whirl of yellow dots, but I’m coping. Physical strength is returning slowly. The neurologist tells me the virus has damaged the middle ear; whether permanently or not is uncertain.
Was it AIDS ? 1
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1
It wasn’t. If I had known then (October 1982) what I know now, I wouldn’t have wondered for even a passing moment. It was not realized at the time—at least not by the general public—that the incubation period for AIDS is, at its most rapid, four months, and that usually it is one or two years before the victim has any of the symptoms. The AIDS fever resembles a mild attack of flu; there was definitely nothing mild about my illness.
The Chronicle reports were misleading: AIDS was not a subject that was unduly bothering the majority of gay men in San Francisco in the autumn of 1982. The bath-houses were still busy, and the Castro life-style in full swing. It was in the early months of 1983, when a sharp rise in the number of new cases—and deaths—occurred, that people began to be seriously alarmed. Between the spring and summer of 1983 media coverage was intense, and the general public, gay and straight, began to learn more about the symptoms of AIDS and what kind of sexual behaviour might lead to its spread.
The summer of 1983 saw something like a real AIDS panic in America, resulting in a decline in the incidence of the better-known sexually transmitted diseases, as gays in their thousands either abandoned or cut down on promiscuity and stopped frequenting the bath-houses. When I left California in September that year, the expected further rise in the number of new cases of AIDS had not happened; and there was speculation that the virus could have mutated into a more benign form.
The suggestion that AIDS is somehow linked to drugs has now been largely discounted. It also seems unlikely that it has any direct connection with the herpes or hepatitis viruses, though it may well be that it finds an easy victim in a body that is already weakened by these illnesses and/or drug abuse.
My own sickness, I suspect, was something more serious than flu “behaving unusually”, and though bacterial meningitis was ruled out, I feel the haematologist was probably correct when he told me that he thought it was viral meningitis.
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VI
WAKING FROM A NIGHT of good sex to the unfamiliar surroundings of another man’s room: what sort of a person is he? I glance at the books—Maurois, Gertrude Stein, The Architectural Heritage of San Francisco, Everyday Life in Ancient China. A bicycle, a TV, four jardinières with exotic plants suspended from the ceiling. He’s still asleep. Good-looking. How many times have I found myself in a similar situation over the years? I couldn’t begin to count.
At breakfast, desultory conversation. The ritual exchange of addresses and telephone numbers. He invites me to a Hallowe’en party. I think I’ll go; I like him.
He’s Vietnamese. Half-French, half-Vietnamese, to be exact—so taller than some Orientals and hairier on the legs, though his chest is smooth and the skin perfect. His name is Phil—Phillippe. Beautiful hazel eyes, high cheek-bones and sensual lips. A surprisingly big cock—thick, uncircumcised.
One of the boat people. An orphan at sixteen; his father, a schoolmaster, died in the war and his mother disappeared without trace. He lived for the next few years selling his body on the streets of Saigon. When the Communists arrived he fled, suffering unimaginable hardships on the boats. He nearly died of thirst. He works as a builder’s labourer, which has given him a mature, muscular man’s physique. Educated: well read, into ballet and classical music. But no qualifications—he can’t get a more intellectual job despite fluent French and English. He’s twenty-seven and lives in the spare room at Robert and Matt’s—old friends of mine. I picked him up in the Elephant Walk.
My illness caused a six weeks’ absence from San Francisco. On the deck at Robert and Matt’s in the late October sunshine drinking coffee, talking, looking at their brilliant vivid flowers, the coloured toy city spread out below us; we’re all in shorts or just our underwear—it’s still that hot. Eighty-two degrees. The best kind of lazy Sunday morning.
THE NEWS TONIGHT says that at least two people a day are being admitted to hospital with acquired immune deficiency illnesses; that it has begun to attack the straight population; and that two hundred and forty-nine deaths from all AIDS-related diseases have now occurred in the United States, thirty-five of them in San Francisco.
Perhaps because heterosexuals are now suffering, the authorities will pump money into research: it isn’t just a matter, they may start to think, of a few promiscuous drug-mad faggots finding the fate they so richly deserve.
I’M MORE OR LESS back to normal. Occasional eyesight problems, nothing else.
PHIL. Fucking him was superb.
THE HOUSE IS SO QUIET. Sarah and Harriet only talk to each other when they have to; the quarrel rumbles on. “I must reorganize my life,” Sarah says to me. “But how?” Harriet looks grim, and when she isn’t at the university she lives almost entirely in her bedroom. “It could be worse,” Sarah says, but her face suggests that it couldn’t. Maybe my being around is a useful buffer; I don’t know, for neither has poured out her troubles to me. Nor, as far as I can tell, to anyone else.
I’m getting fed up with it. Harriet only speaks to me in monosyllables. Sarah occasionally stops and chats, but I force her into those moments. They have remarkably little consideration for me, the third member of the household. I’d hoped to enjoy living with gay women. And learn something—I know few lesbians, none of them well. This opportunity … it’s ceasing to be an opportunity.
Did Harriet fancy me? Sarah hinted that she did. Harriet’s realized at last that I won’t get into her bed? A selfish, immature person. She’s treating me as if I were some kind of insect. She likes the rent money, of course.
I’d move out if I knew where to go.
DINNER WITH JULIAN. I enjoy these sessions; I’ve rarely met anyone with whom I have so much in common. Our conversation is mostly of relationships: the errors we made with lovers, why love ended, why nothing in the future will last. When I say that the pattern will not necessarily repeat itself, he’s gently mocking. We always repeat ourselves, he says.
On the way home I listen to the old-fashioned, well-modulated tones of Quentin Crisp on the car radio. His voice is British movie actor of 1930s vintage. Hostesses like to invite a few gay friends to their parties, he says. We’re so well behaved. So amusing. Because we’re an unpopular minority, we have to work extra hard to be accepted. That’s why we don’t cause problems and why we enjoy entertaining others.
Yuck! What century, what sort of closet, does he think we live in?
A WEEKEND IN SAN FRANCISCO with Phil, who’s quiet, gentle, amusing; it’s good being in the city with another man who’s not exactly an acquaintance, not yet a friend but a … lover? What word should I use? Friday we go to dinner with friends of his who live on Sanchez; Saturday we idle away a damp grey morning, eating a slow breakfast with Matt and Robert; the afternoon is spent drinking gin at Dennis and Paul’s; and in the evening we eat out, Italian, at the Sausage Factory on Castro. It’s Hallowe’en—the party he’d invited me to was postponed, so we wander up and down Castro and 18th, hand in hand, look
ing at people. By ten o’clock a big crowd has assembled, most of them in fantastic costume. It’s even more of a carnival than the Street Fair, though nothing is organized by anyone: it’s a spontaneous celebration. The crowd soon grows to a vast size and the cops appear, not to disperse us, but to close the street to traffic. Once again the Village makes its own rules and wins. “A perpetual circus,” Dennis called it this afternoon. (He and Paul, just back from a trip to Puerto Rico, New York and Atlanta, were in great form despite bad colds and Paul having lost a front tooth eating muffins,)
I see witches on roller skates and a dozen Satans; a troupe of black men with spears and grass skirts war-dancing outside the Pendulum; a drag Marilyn Monroe whose gestures, arms and facial expressions are almost superior to the original; hundreds of ghouls, ghosts, spooks and spectres gibbering, squeaking and howling; even parrots, monkeys, a unicorn. In the Elephant Walk we meet up with Tim, Maureen, Matt, Robert, Nils and Alan (who’s rather the worse for drink, in a sweet silly state; wearing a poncho and ostrich feathers so large he nearly removes several people’s eyes). Parties in all the flats above the shops and bars, the guests thronging the windows and staring down at the street crowd which must now number thousands. Someone at a party pushes two loudspeakers on to the second-floor window-sills above Castro Station, and music is blasted into the crowd who all begin to dance: “I’ve really got it together; people will see me and cry … FAME!”
Sunday. The weather’s cleared up; it’s as hot as August. Phil and I go to a restaurant on 24th for brunch; November, and we’re eating out of doors. Eggs benedict, and glasses of plum brandy mixed with cinzano. The whole city seems to want to eat out, fearing, perhaps, that it may be the last weekend before winter; so brunch queues everywhere, particularly for tables on side-walks and in gardens. What are they doing in London, I ask myself.
Later, we amble along the streets—shirtless, it’s so warm—looking at shops and houses. Noe and 24th are all health foods, Eastern exotica, books on yoga and meditation; a whole store, gentle harp music on tape as you enter, is devoted to astral planes, star signs, supernatural knick-knackery. The houses: I have never seen a city that has so much beautiful, well-preserved, nineteenth-century domestic architecture as San Francisco. No house is of the same pattern or shape as any other; each is an individual creation. Street after street in Castro and Noe Valley is a delight to the eye. Trees, flowers, shrubs finish the picture. I could,live here: with the right man, that better class of blond; a house on Noe or Castro or Douglass or 21st, 20th, 26th, Diamond, Valley, Elizabeth, Liberty, Sanchez, a score of others …
On the cliffs to the west of the Golden Gate this hot, sunny afternoon, high up above Land’s End. The ground is tortured and fissured by mud-slides and earthquakes. A rough blue ocean crashes in white spray against the boulders. In the calm, on the other side of the Golden Gate, the little white yachts tack and drift. Where we are, seals bark. Sandpipers scurry after the waves with ludicrous speed on spindly legs. We lie on the rocks in each other’s arms, exchanging biographies. He likes my body, he says many times; my muscles—the arms, legs, chest— “have good definition”, he tells me. Nothing wrong with his definition. Sex this weekend has been … I can’t think of a suitable superlative, and I realize, with some amusement, that I only record in this diary sex when it’s good. Why haven’t I mentioned the bad times? Want to forget them I suppose.
“I need,” Phil says, “not the baths and the Castro life, but quote marriage unquote.” What does he dream of with me? I’m a transient.
GARY PHONES at 6 a.m. His father has had a severe heart attack; he’s returning to Omaha to be with Dad. I shan’t be able to come to Spearfish for Thanksgiving.
NOVEMBER 2, 1982: mid-term elections. California shifts a little to the right—a Republican Governor and Senator are elected with tiny majorities. The nuclear freeze proposition is passed, but there’s a resounding no to the idea of banning handguns. Presumably Californians hate dying in a nuclear holocaust, but they don’t object to being shot dead in the streets.
At Katya’s I watch it all on TV: the same excitement as at a British general election. The TV does it well, which surprises me, for news coverage on American television is abysmal compared with ours.
CARTER v. REAGAN: it was Tweedledum versus Tweedle-dummer.
I’VE MOVED OUT. Just down the road to Katya’s, where I have a makeshift bed in the hall and very little room to store my property; but it’s good to be in a friendly house with a congenial person who has time in the evenings for conversation and alcohol. I’ve said little about Katya, but I’ve spent many hours with her: except at weekends I’m at the university in the mornings; the afternoons are for writing; then when I’ve eaten I need to talk to another human being. Not possible with Harriet and Sarah—sulky, silent creatures shut in their separate rooms night after night. Katya is always ready to pause, as I am, in the evenings. She’s radical, feminist, left wing, immensely curious about people, ideas, and literature. Together we’ve consumed gallons of wine—outside in her garden on hot summer nights, and recently in front of a roaring log fire.
Harriet gave me a month’s notice. When I asked why, she said I’m too much in the house. My presence—even alone in my room, writing—upset her. I told her I was thinking of going anyway. Our standards of behaviour were very different, she said. She was referring to the fact that I smoke, and keep much later hours than she does. She can’t complain of anything else. I’ve made little noise—no TV or record player in my room, and only twice have I entertained visitors. (With her permission, asked beforehand.) And not once have I had a man in for sex. Yes, I said, our standards of behaviour were indeed very different, and I did not need to stop for one second to consider which of the two codes of conduct was more moral. She and Sarah can now tear each other to pieces with only the young couple in the garden cottage—the violist and the Wittgenstein expert—to watch. They call the house “Saturday night at the fights.”
Sarah, trying her utmost to keep the relationship going, did nothing to prevent my dismissal. If I were you, I said to her, I wouldn’t feel comfortable about my role in all this. She was not, she told me. I understand her: years of her life have been put into Harriet-and-Sarah. Years, money, emotion. Though there is absolutely nothing left of love as far as I can see, and they would both be better off apart, to leave smacks of failure; at forty-two she finds the prospect of the unknown terrifying. To start again… she cannot do it, she thinks. But, like all the rest of us, she can if she has to.
Harriet is neurotic, unhappy, and reclusive. Alone some eighteen hours a day. Was she jealous of my friendship with Katya? Or my professional status? (Her appointment at the university is temporary—she can be fired at any time.) It was sex. She was wanting that when she let me have the room. When it dawned on her that I’d never, in a thousand years, screw her, she could only cope by turning nasty. Well … that’s what I think.
She dislikes almost anyone of either sex who is not turned on by her attentions, so Katya—and others—tell me. The pleasures of friendship are therefore always denied her.
Is this a common problem for bisexuals?
VII
THE FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER was so warm I could work at the pool-side wearing only shorts. The second week is the coldest in the Peninsula since records began in the Gold Rush years. Last night the Los Gatos temperature fell to freezing-point; unheard of, everyone says. There is thick snow on the Santa Clara summits, and also behind us, on the Santa Cruz Mountains. Route 80, the main road that connects San Francisco with the rest of the world, is closed at the Donner Pass. I never thought to see snow in California in November! In the Bay area I never thought I’d see it at all.
But by Friday we have summer sunshine again, which lasts for my weekend in the city with Phil. A party at Tim’s, a disco (the I-Beam), meals out in pleasant little restaurants. I feel very relaxed with Phil, enjoy his company, like his friends. And I like him. I can’t find any faults—yet. Though vague
ness, unpunctuality, slowness might irritate eventually. If we lived together I’d have to do all the cooking, which I would not enjoy. Why do people think I’m a good cook? I’m not. But Katya is enchanted with my meals! Her shopping-list relies heavily on bread, onions, and potatoes—and she boils up tea in a kettle, just as my Irish grandmother did. No wonder anyone else seems a good cook.
Moments with Phil when I experience an old, familiar sensation—a curious slithering in the stomach, a surge of happiness. Falling in love? He’s a very lovable person, which isn’t quite the same thing. Gorgeous, dancing with him, though any good disco sweeps me off my feet. (A silly image. I was firmly on my feet. On top form, in fact, dancing bare to the waist, sweat pouring in buckets.) The I-Beam I haven’t visited for two years: it hasn’t changed a bit. Same lighting system, same old brown paint, probably the same music. Probably the same crowd of men.
I’d like to live in San Francisco next semester. With Phil? We don’t know each other well enough to make decisions of that sort; I mustn’t allow myself to be persuaded just because I’d like to live once again with a man: a recipe for disaster.
THE PROOFS OF MY NEW NOVEL, The Estuary, have arrived. The best bit of the writing processes reading the proofs; for the first time I can see my labours as a book: it’s now a finished thing, no longer part of myself, gestating in the womb as it were; it’s a new creature, almost born. It’s still sufficiently in my head for what I had to say to seem important. But the bound, final version—the book itself—gives no excitement. It’s too long since I wrote it; my mind has moved on to other things.
