A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  I spent a rather miserable two weeks in Germany with Ulrich. I’m sure—and he even admitted it—that had he been alive in 1933 he’d have joined the Nazi Party. Blond, blue-eyed, obsessed with making money and intensely disliking Jews, he’d have made a splendid Hitler youth. I cannot begin to understand why anyone should dislike a whole race, a skin colour—a sexual preference. A threat to status, to certainties?

  I have at times experienced, during sex, inflicting pain or having pain inflicted on me—a similar thrill to that of Nazis torturing Jews? No. I and my partners agreed to do what we did, and we enjoyed it; the Jews did not.

  HASSLES WITH THE INSURANCE COMPANY over the payment of my hospital bills of last October. Letters back and forth, time wasted … Our socialist system is the better.

  MAYBE IT’S A PROBLEM ONLY GAYS HAVE, and only a few of them at that: it took me most of a decade to discover I was the one who needed to fuck. Why so long? The image one has of oneself? Conditioning? Thinking my body wasn’t male enough? I don’t know. My sexual desires changed when I started going regularly to a gym; when my muscles began to look like those on the bodies I fancied, I ceased to fancy them and I turned to fucking slim, youthful men. I love it still. No post-coital tristesse.

  PHIL’S CAR WAS VANDALIZED LAST NIGHT. Someone smashed the rear window, not just by throwing a stone or a bottle; it was methodically crushed into little bits and the frame yanked out. It must have taken some time, but, though the car was parked outside the house, we didn’t hear anything. Nor did Brenda and Valerie. Phil’s insurance policy says that he has to pay the first hundred dollars of any damage.

  Kids, or drunks: an isolated incident, we hope. Someone doesn’t like gays? Possible. Not probable. Easy to get uneasy in this city, even on respectable Douglass.

  I wake at 3.30 and think I hear footsteps, then someone out the back, knocking dustbin lids.

  Easy to get uneasy…

  JANOS’S MOTHER WRITES. It’s as good a letter as he could wish for. I don’t understand, she says; perhaps I’ll never understand. But I love you, Nothing has changed. And your brothers and your sister, who’ve all seen your letter, say they love you too; you’re the same old Janos. One awkward paragraph—your father is finding it difficult. And a lot of omissions; it’s very carefully worded. Janos has mentioned Jim, but Jim is not referred to.

  It’s a good start, however. He’s elated.

  REMARKABLE QUANTITIES OF DOG SHIT on the side-walks of Castro. San Francisco is so unpolluted; its buildings are the cleanest in the world. But the pavements are as dirty as those of Amsterdam.

  MR AND MRS JANCZSO SEND JANOS A VALENTINE. I think it’s been deliberately chosen—

  A son is a joy every day the year through,

  That is if he’s someone exactly like you!

  Someone who’s dear in his own special way.

  (Which doesn’t rhyme with “Because he is gay” though that, I suppose, could be inferred.) I guess they imagine his homosexuality a severe handicap, as if he had an incurable disease; that it has made him neurotic, and he therefore needs extra love and help.

  Valentine’s Day is taken much more seriously, perhaps I mean commercially, than in Britain. Not only the cards on sale, but displays in shops are geared to the event, with pink drapes, cardboard hearts and Cupids, plastic bows and arrows. More husbands, wives, lovers exchange presents—chocolates or flowers—than at home. I like this, a day to celebrate relationships. I also like the card in a Castro gift shop showing a naked man (back view) with a butch winged Cupid firing an arrow up his bum, and the card with a naked man (front view), his balls and cock covered with a huge red heart held by another man’s hand protruding between his legs. The gay tat vendors don’t miss a thing; I nearly said trick.

  TO THE SAN FRANCISCO BALLET AGAIN: Caniparoli’s Chansons de Shéhérezade, Smuin’s Stravinsky Piano Pieces, Balanchine’s Western Symphony and Kylian’s Forgotten Land. This last is danced to Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. Though the choreography throughout clearly stems from the score (I dislike dance which seems to ride roughshod over the music—it gives me the feeling any old sequence of chords will do), I wondered if it was a wise choice; the Sinfonia da Requiem is so compelling and complex that I often found I was just listening to the music and ignoring the dancers. Seeing Death in Venice at Covent Garden a few years ago produced a similar response—should I concentrate on the sets, the singing, the action, or the fascinating sounds the orchestra was producing? I just couldn’t take it all in at once.

  The Sinfonia da Requiem is Britten’s only major work for the orchestra, but the mastery is absolute; it’s as rich as Berlioz. The nervous energy, the quick clusters of notes, the clashing cross-rhythms command attention; and I love the clarity—you can always hear everything that’s going on. There is a lot of self-pity in Britten’s music, especially in the operas—the mourning for innocence, the damaged child, the damaged man or woman, Grimes, Lucretia, Albert Herring, Billy, Miles, Aschenbach, himself?—but it’s not so heart-on-sleeve as in Tchaikovsky. Is it with both composers that being gay is a wound like that of Philoctetes: a sore that’s incurable? I wish I knew more about Britten’s life. The biographies skate over his homosexuality, pretending it’s unimportant when in fact it seems to be there in nearly every note he put down on a stave. Britten must have had a happier existence than Tchaikovsky; the Purcell Variations, Noye’s Fludde, the Nocturne, Les Illuminations, the Serenade suggest that he did. But they’re rare moments: his music on the whole is dark and tragic. Coming out would not have been easy for a man born in 1913, yet his relationship with Peter Pears was an open secret and it lasted all his adult life. So—what was his problem?

  The composer of Chansons de Shéhérezade is Ravel, and the choreographer perhaps found Ravel’s homosexuality reflected in his music. The dancers were two men and a woman: one sequence was danced by the men, erotic and tender, and another closed with the men kneeling, arms round each other, kissing. I wish there was more overtly gay classical ballet. Male dancers are frequently homosexual, but everything, from Swan Lake to Pineapple Poll, pretends to be as strait-laced as a tutu.

  NOT IN A GOOD MOOD. It’s pouring with rain; my sweaters disappear from the laundrette, and my attempt to join the San Francisco public library is a failure. Apart from the usual ID red tape, the library clerk wants a deposit of eleven dollars. I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous, and I say so. Eleven dollars to borrow—for instance—books I’ve written myself. The library at Los Gatos wanted neither identification nor money. And while I’m feeling bad-tempered, I might as well announce that I think Scott Smith’s attempt to get more money out of the supervisors because he was Harvey Milk’s lover should also end in failure. It was established in court yesterday that they were not lovers during the last two years of Milk’s life. If we want to have the same legal rights as married straights, we should draw attention to more credible relationships. What about it, Peter Pears?

  Did I say I wanted this diary to be “a hymn of praise to the beauty of San Francisco” ?

  My sweaters mysteriously surface in the laundry of a New Wave blond who works in the local ethnic bakery; I can always use Phil’s library ticket; and the rain cannot last for ever. So I’ll on with my hymn of praise…

  WE DRIVE NORTH OVER THE GOLDEN GATE, through Marin County to Russian River. Warm spring sunlight, emerald fields, acacias like yellow bonfires. The river is brown, in full flood, surging through pine woods; I half-expect to see logs and lumberjacks. I fuck Phil against a tree, and we’ve only just got our jeans back on when a boy of about sixteen emerges from the bushes to tell us we’re trespassing on private property. I hope he enjoyed what he must have observed.

  Dinner parties every night this public holiday weekend. Kevin, Tim, Janos, Dennis and Paul, Nils and Alan here; a phalanx of Asiatic professors at Katya’s. She has gossip about Sarah and Harriet. Sarah has left and is staying with the chairman of our department and his wife. I could wish to be a fly on that partic
ular wall… Harriet, alone and lonely, calls Katya after months of silence to see if she’ll go to a movie. Katya says no.

  We drink excessively, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night. Mardi Gras disco at Los Desperados, dancing with Phil. I wonder how we’ve got there (though I was at the wheel, I have no recollection of the drive) and I take all my clothes off on the dance floor. Drunk …

  READING A LIFE OF TCHAIKOVSKY. He and Brahms once found each other staying at the same hotel—what on earth, I wonder, did they talk about? Brahms disliked Tchaikovsky’s music: “His seams show.” Tchaikovsky had a great admiration for Berlioz. I’ve always thought the Fantastique the matrix of the Pathétique—similar adolescent yearning, frenzy, drawing the listener into a spell he at first wants to reject; the second movement the best waltz Tchaikovsky did not write.

  A LETTER FROM SPEARFISH. “A gay person could die of loneliness in a small town. I am so sick of going to a cinema on my nights off. I want to feel I belong somewhere.” He’ll be working in Las Vegas for the summer, then he will move, permanently, to Dallas. “I so wanted to meet you,” he says, “but I guess life doesn’t always take the direction we wish for.” He encloses a recent photograph; older, his face a little more filled out than when he was a teenager. We’ll meet before I return to England, of that I’m determined. For one night at least. As I’d like an hour with the blond who lives on Collingwood. I’ve never spoken to this guy and I don’t know who he is, but I sometimes pass his house on my walks round the city. Slim, butch, long curly hair—like Dan. He sits at his window and we stare at each other; last week we got so far as a mutual friendly wave. If only he’d invite me in…

  Phil says I should ask Gary to visit when he’s en route for Las Vegas. It would be crazy, he adds, never to meet him. If he really does look like his photographs, I answer, I’d want him in bed. Phil says that’s OK. So I write to Gary and suggest he comes.

  WE’RE PULLING UP AT THE LIGHTS where 18th crosses, and a bearded nun dashes up to the car and hands me a poster advertising a disco. “Slow down,” I say. “We can gaze at the men as we drive past.” They’ve all crawled out of the woodwork

  this warm, sunny Saturday afternoon. I glance at Phil, who is looking into the mirror and fussing with his hair. Phil is the only gay in the world who’d drive through Castro watching his own reflection.

  I still find his obsessive concern with his appearance, the hours in the bathroom, the perpetual dithering, hard to adjust to. His life is slipping by, and he does nothing. We’re complete opposites. “Opposition is true friendship,” Blake said.

  MISSING—A GREAT FILM. Uplifting, harrowing.

  A performance of Mahler’s ninth. Ecstasy always out of reach or lost in the past; a man at the point of death trying to make sense of his life. Too long, too bitter-sweet—though it grips me, moves me.

  Joe Orton acted by Americans is a strange experience. Loot|s anarchy should be universal in its appeal, but it’s an obstinately British piece of theatre: the Wilde influence makes it untransferable, too reminiscent of cut-glass voices, of Lady Bracknell et al. A second-rate production, slipshod and over the top, none of the accents right, the gay theme skimmed over; but I enjoy it nonetheless—it’s such a good play.

  Phil, and most of the audience, are bewildered. They can’t see it as funny.

  XI

  I DON’T THINK I WOULD SAY that since I came out, since I’ve led a completely homosexual existence, I’ve always been happier—apart from the pleasures of thousands of orgasms— than when I thought I could be heterosexual. There have been tragic moments. Heart-breaking experiences. But I’m a damn sight more comfortable inside my own skin.

  Coming out freed me as a writer too. If I can go on finding beautiful male bodies, and if I can write all the books that I have inside me, I’ll not gaze back with Mahler’s bitter-sweetness, but think, yes, it was worthwhile, all of it.

  So far so good.

  PHIL, IN A CLINGING MOOD, worries that I am leaving him at the end of my California year. He’ll never get over it, he says. He will, of course. And each succeeding time become a little bit tougher, more immune to hurt, find eventually that the only security is in himself.

  He is so vulnerable. But the most attractive vulnerability is a man undressing.

  WITH PHIL, ROBERT AND MATT to the Kezar Pavilion to see the gay basketball team play the University of California, a jamboree put on. by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters, in full regalia except for very brief black and white mini-skirts, are cheerleaders and sweepers-up: scampering about the gym, their wimples flying, they look like busy spiders. The Gay Men’s Chorus, the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, the Oakland Raw-rahs: there’s more entertainment than basketball. We watch a new nun being invested. What qualifications are needed to become a Sister, what is the purpose of the organization? To bring some colour to our lives, I suppose. They stage-manage gay functions, perform cabaret; they’re political—in the city council elections last November Sister Boom-Boom got twenty-three thousand votes—and they are noticed, get gay life noticed.

  Our team is as macho a collection of clones as I’ve ever seen, with bulging arm muscles, billowing hairy chests and thighs like sequoia trees. University, in comparison, are a bunch of anaemic wimps. But we lose. We can do anything except toss the ball into the net—a major disability.

  Afterwards a disco, our second in two days. (Last night we were at the I-Beam.) Though we’re not tired, and it’s good to dance on the great space of a gymnasium floor, it quickly becomes less than exciting because of the music—dreadful mind-banging stuff, all at the wrong speed. Everybody in the Peninsula, on the subject of disco, says the same thing—no dj now plays music that is fun to dance to, that you’re able to dance to. More and more the records are what he likes, not what the patrons want. Just as in England, I tell them. One could leave, of course; hundreds of people on this occasion did leave, rapidly. But often one stays, hoping the music will improve. It rarely does. Whatever happened to the Bee Gees, to Diana Ross?

  I get talking to some of the nuns, who all agree that the music is awful. It’s by Sister Freeda Peoples, they tell me, the disc jockey from Castro Station, and they won’t ask her (him) to do it again.

  THE GUY BEHIND THE COUNTER in our nearest grocery store says I must stop wearing shorts; my legs turn him on too much. I quite fancy him, and though I’m not really in the mood we suck each other off behind the freezer, standing up. He has a good body and a massive cock.

  Why does one do this? Because it’s there, I suppose, as mountaineers say of Everest. I didn’t need this man particularly; it didn’t matter if I had him or not. I guess I wanted to fulfil the expectations implied in the compliment about my legs; I had to show him he wasn’t wrong. And it would be absurd not to accept the offer an attractive man makes by removing his clothes for you.

  Phil is not pleased. “You have very bad taste,” he says, “That guy is loud, too familiar, and ugly.”

  “Is this wanting to do something yourself, but if your lover does it that’s another story?”

  “OK, fair enough. But I can’t halve a relationship with someone who’s doing that all the time.”

  “I’m not doing ‘that’ all the time!” I point out, truthfully. “And I can’t have a relationship with someone who has double standards. Who won’t allow me to do what I like with my own body.”

  “We’re animals. That’s what’s wrong with gay life. We look at men in the street and assess them solely on whether we want their cocks. It’s dehumanizing!”

  “Next time I won’t tell you. Which is bad—it makes it seem more important than it is.”

  The day after, he says he’s sorry and that he can’t justifiably complain about me doing what, if the opportunity arises, he does himself. I decide to dismiss the whole thing as a bout of insecurity. I hope it’s not more than that. If it is, our relationship won’t last.

  AT MASONIC HALL WITH JIM AND JANOS for an ev
ening of operatic arias and duets. Lee comes with us. He’s as hairy and hunky as ever. I flirt with him; he flirts with Phil—but nothing results.

  Masonic Hall, an impressive, comfortable auditorium, is used for recitals and chamber music. San Francisco, whose population is about the same as Bristol’s, has this and a full-size concert hall, a symphony orchestra, an opera house with an opera company that is world-famous, several theatres, an excellent ballet troupe (they are having their own theatre built at the moment), and three art galleries. It puts most cities—in any country—to shame.

  THE QUEEN (YES, ELIZABETH II) visits San Francisco in appalling weather—non-stop rain, gales, mud-slides, houses falling into the ocean, whole towns flooded, thousands homeless. In England we never really think it will freeze for days on end, and in consequence have instant chaos when half an inch of snow falls; so Californians assume it cannot rain for long. They build ramshackle houses on precarious hillsides or at the edge of the sea, then marvel that they collapse; they construct roads with little or no camber so water cannot drain off them, then they’re horrified by the bad driving conditions. As soon as the Queen departs, the sun comes out. It’s warm, and suddenly I’m aware again of the mountains, of flower scents, of trees and shrubs in bloom—stretches of magnolia, oleander, japonica, almond, blue coeanothus.