A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  There will be a good Christmas in this place. But for Sarah and Harriet?

  WE ARE SO RURAL that deer sometimes stray into the garden. This afternoon three of them, their movements elegant and precise as dancers, grazed for a while on the lawn. Our cat, Robert Redford, stalked them—very stealthily, flattened to the ground—then hid, or hoped he hid; behind a bush. That means his body was invisible, but he hadn’t the sense to conceal his face; or curiosity was perhaps too strong. One of the deer noticed, stared for a while, then delicately stepped towards him, horns lowered. A long, long stillness. Then deer and cat rubbed noses, licked each other, and kissed.

  THE VIEWS FROM KATYA’S: mountain soaring behind mountain. Shrouded in fog today, but majestic in a red sunrise, a gold dusk. Evenings, the lights of downtown San José in the distance, and the Santa Clara peaks beyond are pink bruises.

  THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS has proposed a new law to give the unmarried the same rights enjoyed by married couples: health insurance for the partner, hospital and jail visits, pensions for the bereaved. (The 1980 census showed that San Francisco has more unmarried people in its population than any other city in the United States.) Mayor Feinstein has vetoed the idea, much to the annoyance of the gay community, who would obviously be the principal beneficiaries. Gay San Francisco, after the Milk-Moscone assassinations, helped to vote her in and they have the muscle to vote her out. But all the analysts in the newspapers and on TV say that she probably doesn’t care, may even be glad to dissociate herself from Castro: she’s after higher things—the Democrat vice-presidential nomination. Gays are angry. Five hundred people stood outside City Hall for hours last night, shouting “Dump Feinstein!’’

  (They didn’t. In November 1983 she was re-elected with an overwhelming majority. As Hilaire Belloc said:

  “And always keep a-hold of nurse

  For fear of finding something worse.”)

  GLORIA IS THE CURRENT NUMBER ONE. A great record, and every disco is playing it non-stop. I first heard it a year ago in Paris, at Le Palace, dancing with Andy. Now I dance to it in San Francisco with Phil. The changes a year brings: all flux. Good.

  AVRIL WALKING TOWARDS ME a long way off down an endless corridor. Tall thin women in billowing skirts are like Christmas trees.

  An end-of-semester grade-athon. Thirteen of us shut up on a Saturday in a room without windows from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m.

  “Now you have the full experience of America’s Puritan heritage,” says the Department chairman, meeting me on a pedestrian crossing at 7.30 in raw cold fog. Every script has to be marked twice. By three o’clock, after reading one hundred and twenty compositions on whether people work to obtain necessities or luxuries, I’m boss-eyed and mind-blown. Our periodic discussions on standardizing marks are serious, indeed meticulous. I feel totally remote from real life: six thousand miles from roots, listening to grading instructions in Americanese. What am I doing here?

  IN THE RESTAURANT AT EMPORIUM, one of San Francisco’s largest department stores, eating a chicken salad. Phil is in Macy’s buying my Christmas present; I have time to relax after a hectic morning in shops. Above me is the roof, a glass dome, Victorian Monumental; a gigantic Christmas tree (surely the city’s biggest) fills up the space beneath—soars up so high its top is almost invisible. Gaggles of old ladies drinking coffee and genteelly toying with expensive sticky cakes: female old ladies of a breed almost extinct, rich, in furs and hats and jewellery and garish make-up. On a balcony some way off an orchestra plays; the music sounds Jewish. It’s all a bit like Chekhov.

  This superb city.

  I came to San Francisco in the 1980s as Herr Issyvoo came to Berlin in the 1930s: because it has the reputation of being the wickedest place on earth, a phoenix Sodom; me, as he, an iron filing to a magnet. This diary should be one long hymn of praise to its beauty, the fascination of its streets, the diversity of its life-styles, the joys of its fleshly pleasures, the satisfactions of sex with its men. As on so many previous occasions here, I feel enchanted, under a spell: fulfilled and happy.

  ON A PLANE, LONDON-BOUND, Eleven hours of flying. I knew beforehand there would be the ache of absence, but I was not prepared for this much.

  San Francisco. Phil. I love you both.

  Four weeks, Christmas, will soon pass.

  IX

  AND SOON PASSED THEY HAVE. California in a cool wet January, as green as England.

  The month away I felt neither here, nor there, but suspended in mid-Atlantic, a foot in both—camps? Ulrich, totally bound to making money in his restaurant; for him, it is not the time of life to have lovers: as good in bed, though, as he always was. My mother at eighty, confused and depressed: relationships falling apart, divorces looming. Snow in the hills outside Exeter. My house is being well looked after by Andy. Parties, drinks, dinner parties with friends: Christmas. At a disco I win a prize for the most unusual costume; I went as a San Francisco hustler, in shorts; white socks, Stetson, the words WANNA FUCK? in queenly pink on a white tee-shirt. London: digging money out of publishers whose payments are long overdue, who are taking advantage of my being six thousand miles off.

  Lengthy inter-continental calls. “Come home, baby!” he says. “Come h-o-o-o-me!” I reassure him I will, but I don’t think he’ll believe it till he sees me at the airport. San Antonio, El Paso, New Orleans, Memphis—his long car-ride to spend Christmas in Kentucky is punctuated with these conversations from motel bedrooms, and when he returns to San Francisco my phone bill mounts with the quickness of a dial on a petrol pump.

  An accidental meeting at the hairdresser’s with Gene Kemp: side by side, looking utterly grotesque—wreathed in towels, our hair sticky and hideous, full of dye, standing up all ends as the girls restore the black we were born with. Gene, another Exeter writer, won the Carnegie Medal for The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler the year before I was given it for The Exeter Blitz. The two of us, winners of this supposedly most prestigious of children’s book awards, in a provincial beauty salon looking like Guy Fawkes dummies, discuss the unprintable and slanderous gossip of the kiddie lit. world. Gossip of the gay lit. world—in London with Peter—had been, the previous week, more elegant; over China tea and Peter’s favourite brandy-snaps. And almost fit to print.

  To San Francisco, to Phil, making love, boxes of chocolates, wine, pizza at the Sausage Factory, and jet lag. Jet lag gives me bad dreams. I wake and he stirs, holds me, whispers “You OK?” and I sleep again, profoundly, without dreams. Apartment hunting. We find it, eventually; on Douglass, the ground floor of a little Victorian—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living-room—a mile east of Castro, not far from the brunch restaurants and the Habitat shops on 24th. The house is owned by Brenda and Valerie, two gay women who live upstairs. Moving in tomorrow. If all this is my heart’s desire, I’d better learn how to live with it.

  THE LEARNING PROCESS BEGINS AT ONCE. For him, I guess, there is my energy and impatience; for me, adapting to a life-style that seems peculiarly boxed in. He’s restricted himself to a permitted field of activities I find unnecessarily narrow. His week-days consist of his work, the journey to work, the slow routine of the bathroom between 6 and 8 a.m., and in the evening, as soon as we’ve eaten, he’s ready for bed, unless he has laundry to sort out. I have never met anyone who takes so long in the bathroom or who’s so fussy about his clothes. Towels are put in the wash after they’ve been used twice. Do I really want, I ask myself in a moment of exasperation, to live with a man whose chief concerns in his free time are washing his hair and ironing his shirts? What would I like that time to be devoted to? Well, certainly not discos every night of the week; I’m happy to stay indoors—to talk, watch TV, listen to music, read. Go out for a drink on occasion, a walk. So I’m not exactly losing out on anything important. It’s what has happened inside him that bothers me; this excessively thin range. A result of the tragic years before he arrived in America?

  I decide eventually that it’s not my business; his bathroom hours and his dirty underwea
r aren’t really of import to me. A weekend packed with shared activity—calling on Robert and Matt, Kevin and Ivor to dinner, the San Francisco Ballet’s fiftieth anniversary gala at the Opera House, dinner with Janos, dancing at the I-Beam, and still time enough to potter about the flat, to make love in the afternoons—and my judgements on how he fills up his days seem trivial, bossy.

  A STEREOTYPICAL GAY SCENE that amuses me: we’re shifting the furniture about in the living-room, getting it just right—should that plant be moved a centimetre, the clock go on the bookcase, the picture be lowered an inch?—when a quartet of enormous women (thighs and buttocks of vast size) brandishing hammers and crow-bars, begin to attack the wooden staircase that leads up to Brenda and Valerie’s front door. The planks are half-rotten; this is the demolition and repair gang. In no time at all wood is hurtling in every direction. Phil gently taps a nail into the wall, hangs a picture, and we fear for the safety of our windows, ourselves. I go outside and talk with the women; we joke about gay guys delicately arranging their ornaments while ; the lesbians roll up their sleeves and do some proper real-men- don’t-eat-quiche work. At which point a flying plank spears me in the leg and I spill the beer I’m drinking. Profuse apologies, author-queen-damaged-by-dyke-construction-worker jokes, and a great deal of laughter.

  THE BRAQUE EXHIBITION, a major retrospective, at the Palace of the Legion of Honor: the cool subtle colours of all those interiors and still lives, the quality of absolute calm at their centres. I think again of Sibelius—“the landscape of the mind”—and I feel satisfied, rewarded, as I did listening to Britten in the Presbyterian church last December: the wintry iurban Sunday afternoon becomes worthwhile.

  We look at the rest of the museum. There is among the Monets here a riverside scene with trees in full leaf: one of the great Monets, as fine as anything in Europe.

  KEVIN, AT WHOSE HOUSE PHIL spent Thanksgiving, is beaten up and robbed where Dolores crosses 18th. A gentle harmless man—a priest. But Dolores and 18th is a few blocks from the Mission; it’s the frontier between Gayville and Chicanotown. Gays have been attacked here before, particularly in or close to the a.y.o.r. ill-lit park on the corner.

  I’ve been in the Mission two or three times at night—my local cash-point is Mission and 29th. It’s a creepy, sinister district, its poverty all the more obvious from being so near Castro’s painted middle-class Victorians, but as far east as 29th it’s relatively safe. Eighteenth, however, is another matter. I’d not feel safe on foot, alone after dark, on 18th north of Sanchez or Church—by Dolores it’s definitely a no-go area.

  Matt tells me Robert was leaving a bar on Folsom late one night and a car drove straight into him. It was a deliberate attempt to murder: a lot of sick people haunt South of Market. Robert was thrown, by the impact, over the car roof and on to the street, miraculously unhurt except for severe bruising. The driver accelerated off into the distance.

  Kevin was mugged on a previous occasion, outside a bar on Harrison. But the assailant was caught this time; Kevin pinned him to the ground while Robert phoned the cops.

  These stories bring back the old unease, astonishment that such violence simmers just under the surface of this city, the fear that one day I could be the victim. And if the victim is selected because he’s vulnerable, then how much less macho Phil looks than me.

  HARRIET AND SARAH spent Christmas together in Mexico. But Katya has no idea of what sort of Christmas it was; the silence from up the road is deafening. I miss Los Gatos, the view from Katya’s windows of garden, trees and mountains. The rural quiet, the deer. “You must think of this house as your second home,” she says. She was worried, after my move to San Francisco, that she’d see little of me. But I’m there two or three times a week. Talking and drinking with her, our bridge games with Janos and Tim, are an important part of my existence.

  Much as I like the flat I’ll get bothered when the weather is warmer. There isn’t a place I can sunbathe and write out of doors. It sounds trivial, but I know it will be a major problem. I’ll write, perhaps, in Katya’s garden; but it’s more than fifty miles off. I can’t do that every day of the week.

  Yet there is such pleasure, the rare mild hours we have this February, in walking about San Francisco. Always new corners, new vistas that please. Acacias in full bloom are fountains of dazzling yellow; daffodils, camelias, red hot pokers, montbretia, lilies blossom in Castro front gardens; oleander is already in bud outside the window of our apartment. Used to the place as I am, I still look at houses as a tourist: a Hammer-film folly on Douglass and 20th, an elaborate pink-and-white delicacy on Eureka, a sundae quite literally all colours of the rainbow on Clipper. The care, the attention to detail on every intricately patterned façade! The turrets, gables, friezes, frescoes, cornices, mouldings, pom-poms, curlicues and fol-de-rols all of wood— nowhere else have I seen the skill of the wood-carver so magnificently displayed as it is in San Francisco. With an unlimited supply of wood and a city to construct, the Victorian builders could have made as much of a desert as they did with stone and brick in any British suburb; but here they took pride in creating, with almost every house, a work of art.

  Mild days, I said; but there has been lashing rain and ferocious wind. Streets flooded, avalanches of mud, houses battered to bits by gigantic waves or falling from crumbled cliffs into the sea. Blizzards: Katya, driving for only two hours into the sierras, has to buy chains to get herself home. A gust of wind rips out the windows of 18th’s post office—the mass of splintered glass on the street is as if a bomb has exploded. No injuries are reported, but any passing queen would have had his beauty ruined for life.

  JANOS HAS WRITTEN TO HIS PARENTS, telling them that he is gay. A long, carefully considered letter, accompanied by a copy of Now That You Know (a book by Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward that aims to help parents develop positive attitudes to their gay children). We discussed, in great detail before he sent it, the pros and cons. His lover, Jim, is as important to him as his brothers’ girl-friends are to his brothers; the lies and the pretence disgust him; and if he goes home to Seattle in April to his sister’s wedding, he wants Jim to be with him.

  Phil has organized his car-pool so I can have his car for my days at the university: mine uses so much more gas. I won’t do it all the time—it’s a round trip of a hundred miles to San José and back; I don’t think I should wear out his car.

  Kindness, consideration, thinking of my needs.

  Janos says the way to find out, whether your cock is of reasonable size is to sit on the lavatory and see if it dangles into the water. (Water in an American loo-pan comes up higher than in the British equivalent.) Phil and I both pass the test… His looks almost semi-submerged…

  SAN FRANCISCO BALLET fiftieth anniversary gala performance, razzmatazz at the Opera House: flowers, balloons, fireworks. Not the most marvellous dance I’ve ever seen—too itsy-bitsy—but great entertainment. Gene Kelly in the flesh!

  The pas de deux from Act Two of Swan Lake, the epitome of classical ballet: moonlight, white tutus superior to their counterparts in Giselle and Les Sylphides. Mainly, I guess, because of the music. There are other composers who were gay or bisexual, but only with Tchaikovsky and Britten is their homosexuality an obvious, integral part of their work, its raison d’être. Les Illuminations is not just love songs; it’s gay love songs. Billy Budd is a gay opera. The Swan Lake pas de deux is adolescent yearning: the separateness of the violin and the cello solos—two boys longing to touch—love that’s doomed. It’s ironic that the straight public find such comfort and consolation in Tchaikovsky; his music is always an expression of his unhappy, unfulfilled gay self, yet he speaks to everyone. It’s a reflection of the world’s bewilderment, frustration and misery.

  The movements and the gestures of the dancers in the pas de deux are symbols of love-making; how he uses his height to shield her, draw her to himself, is as I lie against Phil, or Phil on his back, my arms round him, protecting what I see as his vulnerability.


  BRIDGE WITH TIM AT ROBERT AND MATT’S. But Matt is ill; a friend of his, Lee, plays instead. Lee is gorgeous. Big male man with enormous arm muscles; hairy chest and strikingly handsome face. I’d love to go to bed with him. To be fucked. I wonder if I can organize a three-way, but Phil is not enthusiastic. I drink instead, and eventually play my cards very badly. Tim and I go down seven hundred points on one hand. Later, I screw Phil, imagining I’m Lee. It’s good …

  X

  M. E. KERR’S GENTLEHANDS, a novel for young adults, is very disturbing. The sixteen-year-old narrator, Buddy Boyle; quarrels with his parents and moves in with his German grandfather, Herr Trenker, a kind, thoughtful, sweet man, who gives the boy all the material and emotional comfort he lacks at home. At a party Buddy meets a Jewish journalist whose sister was tortured to death by the Nazis; his mission in life is to track down and expose her killer who is responsible for slaughtering thousands of other Jews. In a newspaper article he names Buddy’s grandfather as the wanted man, and, we find, Herr Trenker is the Nazi war criminal…

  The story suddenly stops at this point, leaving the reader confused, indeed outraged. What is the author’s intention? To make us realize that Nazi murderers loved their families? To make us feel compassion for such people? If a novel for children or teenagers has to differ from a novel for adults, it is in this: the author should avoid leaving his audience in total depression or despair. Though books for the young don’t need to end happily every time, they ought to have some ray of hope. Of course the teenager has to learn about death, the fact that the world is messy and corrupt; but the final sentence of Gentlehands shows the author running away—“I just want to leave everything about that summer behind me.” I feel just as Buddy Boyle does: I want to leave everything about this novel behind me.