A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  Dr Dorner says his gender-bewildered rats lacked testosterone because of their mothers’ stressful pregnancies, and that it may be possible to “correct such abnormalities” in humans with testosterone injections before we are born. Thus providing the gay “problem”, I suppose, with a Final Solution.

  If all homosexual men were testosterone deficient, we’d have high voices, no chest hair, no baldness … and we’d probably all want to get fucked.

  AIDS HYSTERIA NOW in the British press: an article in the Observer says that thousands of British gays could already have the disease, but, because of the long incubation period, they don’t know it. Presumably they’ve caught it from Americans— I’ve heard of the Special Relationship, but I didn’t realize Anglo-American fucking was so extensive. Much of the information seems to derive from Newsweek’s sober and well-written account, but there is one amusing inaccuracy. The Observer says that most at risk are those gays who have a thousand or more sexual contacts each year—in other words, sex with three different men every single day! More likely to die of physical exhaustion, I would imagine. The Newsweek article said a thousand or more in a life-time.

  CHECK-OUT IN AN AMERICAN SUPERMARKET is much more pleasant than in Liptons or Sainsburys. The girl actually speaks and puts all the groceries in bags for you. If the queue is long you can read the various papers on offer. You’re supposed to buy them, but nobody in their right senses would do so— sample headlines: “Ted Will Marry Jackie To Make Sure Of White House”, “Queen Lets Andrew Marry Koo”, “I Had A Space Alien’s Baby”. It makes Paris Match seem the soul of rectitude.

  If the pregnancies of Martians and Prince Andrew’s sex life, do not appeal, there are magazines full of articles on how to make your body beautiful or how to improve your own sex life. One of these reports that a group of British men managed, during a period of about four hours, to make their cocks permanently bigger by as much as two inches. What methods were used, and whether the organs were flaccid or erect, was not revealed. Any withdrawal symptoms, I wonder?

  XVIII

  HARRIET, DREADING LONELINESS, does all the wrong things— as most of us would, I imagine, after the collapse of an affair of nearly twenty years’ duration. The Corona Corona monk has been wining and dining her again, and showering her with expensive presents. He’s at the monastery, he says, to keep an eye on Los Gatos, to protect us from all the murderers and rapists in the community. (We have in fact had one murder this summer—a woman chopped her husband up and buried him in their garden.) Alarmed by what she sees as crazy boastfulness, Harriet gets very cool, but this only encourages the mad monk all the more. He phones at 3 a.m. to tell her to make certain her doors are locked; there are two escaped prisoners on the loose. Which is true—he probably obtained the information from the radio. Nothing could be more calculated to distress a woman living alone, of course. He is able to give her a detailed account of exactly what she has been doing in the past week: what restaurant she lunched in, where she turned off the freeway to do her shopping, etcetera. She is terrified, she says, of being strangled in the middle of the night by this obvious nutter. What should she do? Go to the Jesuits and/or to the police, Katya and I tell her—the man is dotty, probably harmless … but you can’t be sure. At the very least, he’s a considerable nuisance. But she is disinclined to seek help from the authorities. Because—it occurs to me—she’s either making it up, or exaggerating it out of all proportion, so that Katya will take pity on her and move into her house. Harriet has mounted a strong campaign in that direction in recent weeks; her offers, however, have fallen on stony ground.

  She eventually stops badgering Katya, and at much the same time we hear no more about the mad monk. Then she decides she needs a psychiatrist, who turns out to be gay and also at the end of a long affair. Their sessions together consist more of the psychiatrist unburdening herself than Harriet doing so. The upshot—Harriet takes in, as a tenant, the psychiatrist’s exlover, who has two dogs and smokes. (Harriet cannot abide cigarette smoke—when it suits her.)

  Sarah has also consulted a psychiatrist, but seems to be coping a little more successfully. She spent much of the vacation on the East Coast with a young lesbian teaching assistant, and is looking fit, thinner, and suntanned. But with tigerish nervous energy. She returns to Harriet’s to collect some of her property, but instead of just packing up quickly and leaving, she gets involved in a heated argument that rages on all day. I go up there to help Sarah move out a bed, and I hear their voices screaming as I turn into the drive. Just like old times.

  Katya, who left her second husband and divorced him after twenty-six years of marriage, did not rush into doing all the wrong things. She has the love and loyalty of her children, and leads a social life so hectic it makes me feel exhausted. She has spurned psychiatrists, rows with her ex-husbands, singles bars, unsuitable partners; and in consequence she is not plagued with mad monks or chain-smoking lesbians. Her worst moments are waking up in the small hours and being without that other life in the bed beside her: but she knows quite well that the silliest course of action after break-up is to look for an instant replacement.

  TO THEATRE ON THE SQUARE with Phil, for Harvey Fierstein’s three one-act plays, Torch Song Trilogy—winner of this year’s Tony Award, and much admired by critics, gay and straight. We find it too long, not funny, all words and no action, and nearly every line is a put-down of gay life. It’s written by a gay man and it’s about gay men, but it’s full of unliberated self-mockery. The central character is a professional drag queen—that known and loved (by straights) gay symbol. The audience, mostly straight, enjoyed it, of course. We left after the second play, and had more fun drinking coffee and eating macaroons at Häagen-Dazs on Castro.

  I am really puzzled that gay critics and all my gay friends like it. Can’t they see the self-oppression in limp-wristed mincing humour? How it reinforces the stereotype, and helps to keep us where the world wants us? Gives “proof’ to Dr Dorner?

  Something similar is at work in the success of the musical version of La Cage aux Folles, which has just opened on Broadway. If gays can be seen only as men dressed as women, then the straight world feels unthreatened; it can laugh us off. The Naked Civil Servant, recently on TV here, is also insidious. Of course John Hurt’s performance is marvellous, but isn’t Quentin Crisp for much of the time portrayed as a sad, pathetic failure? The episodes in bed are the most unerotic I’ve ever seen. Isn’t it easy for the straight to deduce from this that a gay fuck is unfulfilling, second best? And that gay men are longhaired effeminate poufs; women, really, but alas in male bodies? I doubt if The Naked Civil Servant would have been half so popular if Quentin Crisp had been a macho construction worker who lusted after dishy young blonds.

  POINT REYES OUGHT TO BE AN ISLAND. It was once, and it will be again, though not in my life-time. It belongs to the Pacific plate, but aeons ago it hit the American continent and has been more or less attached to California ever since, though the 1906 earthquake knocked it a whole twenty feet north. It’s a wild, remote area of sand-dunes, marsh and sea-grasses, not unlike the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh and Southwold. The final tip of the point, thin and craggy, is a mere footpath wide; there is a churning sea and a lighthouse I can glimpse only infrequently through the rushing fog, hundreds of feet below.

  A huge grey head, a long way off, surfaces; then a flash of vast tail fins. I have never seen a whale before.

  We sit on a beach, Phil, me, Janos and Jim, in the fog, and spend hours drinking Almadén and talking about life.

  THE CASTRO STREET FAIR ONCE MORE. Which means I’ve been in California just over a year. Nothing to say of the fair that I didn’t say at the beginning of this diary. The crowds are bigger. Same drag queens, leather clones, imitation nuns. The stalls are still selling everything nobody wants to buy—imitation feather boas, imitation stained glass. Left over from last year, most likely.

  I didn’t end up this time fucking a polite Chinese. But I enjoyed myself, just
the same, seeing it all with Phil.

  SARAH WINCHESTER (1842-1922) was as batty as a fruitcake. Her only child died at the age of six weeks, and a short while afterwards she lost her husband, from whom she inherited the Winchester Rifle fortune; it earned her as much as a thousand dollars a day. Her widowhood lasted forty-two years, and during that time she communed regularly with the spirits of her husband and daughter, who persuaded her that her money was accursed. In order to atone, they said, she had to build a mansion big enough to house all the spirits of the people shot dead by the Winchester Rifle; to avoid dying herself, she should keep the builders at work twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. She did just that.

  Winchester House, San José’s most spectacular monument, is a bizarre Victorian folly, and consists literally of hundreds of rooms, staircases and corridors. Some of the stairs lead nowhere—they stop at walls and ceilings. Cupboard doors open, but there may be no cupboards; revealed on the other side is, for example, an eight-foot drop into a kitchen sink in the room below. The house was severely damaged in the 1906 earthquake, which was caused, Sarah believed, by herself not building quickly enough. She redoubled her efforts, but outwards instead of upwards. (The top three floors collapsed in 1906.) Rooms that were partly destroyed were shut up and left in disrepair (no one knows why) and can be seen to this day, exactly as they were after the great jolting.

  She was an almost total recluse, and saw nobody except for her twenty servants and the builders. It sounds like a conscience so guilty (for rather ill-defined reasons) that the personality, in order to survive, retreats into a kind of harmless derangement. One cannot say that she wasted her money, even though the vast majority of those rooms were never used; she has given pleasure to millions of tourists ever since and thus, ironically, earned the immortality the spirits said would be hers if she did what they told her to do.

  The house is built in that same exquisite Victorian good taste that makes San Francisco such a delight, but the unnecessary over-organization that is part of a visit to most American historical monuments destroys all sense of atmosphere. You can’t be left alone for a second; a guided tour must be taken, and three howling babies are included on mine. There is a dreadful gift shop with space-invader machines, and all over the garden loudspeakers blare out folksy reminiscences by Mrs Winchester’s surviving employees. Tacky!

  I OBTAIN COPIES OF THE MEDICAL RECORDS of my illness— how open America is compared with Britain! I cannot imagine being allowed to read a doctor’s notes and a specialist’s report in Exeter. My fever, my headaches and my large quantities of protein, it appears, were of little interest to the doctors, and it’s nice to know that my brain, eyes, ears, nose, throat, lungs, heart, genitals and so on are “normal”. Nice, too, to be described as a “well-developed” male. Which part of the anatomy were they thinking of? What did interest the doctors was the peculiar state of my blood. I had leukopenia, neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, lymphocytosis, a sedimentation rate of six (twenty is usual) and a count of seventy-six thousand platelets (instead of the customary two hundred and sixteen thousand.) Which suggests too many lymphocytes, not enough white corpuscles, and something like haemophilia. The doctors weren’t sure this was viral in origin. The final blood test showed everything as it should be, except for an excessive quantity of lymphocytes. (A blood test, taken a year later, however, showed that the production of lymphocytes had returned to normal. )

  What on earth does it all mean?

  WHAT’S UP DOC? second time round is nothing like so funny. It’s just a bit too mad and improbable, though the car chases remain some of the best of all time. Streisand and O’Neall are not brilliant at any point: the star of the show is Madeline Kahn as O’Neall’s neurotic fiancée—she is funny. And convincing. I saw it before I ever came to San Francisco, so wanted to see it again for locations I now know so well. My memory has deceived me; very little of the film takes place out of doors, and what there is of the city flashes by so fast that, with the exception of a few obvious shots of the Crookedest Street in the World, Chinatown and a token cable car, it’s impossible to know if we’re on Powell, Hyde, Leavenworth—it could be a steep hill anywhere.

  IN A BAR ON CASTRO I MEET CHUCK, a twenty-two-year-old blond. It’s a hot evening; we’re drinking outside on the terrace, and he’s stripped to the waist. A light dusting of gold hair on his suntanned chest. White, white teeth. Brown eyes that look both young and very defiant. He’s from New York, but went to Atlanta where he graduated. There he decided to come out as gay, and he fell in love with the first man he ever had sex with. But this man couldn’t, or wouldn’t, offer the monogamous “marriage” Chuck desired, so, hurt, he left and came to San Francisco. He has been in the city a month, washing dishes in a restaurant and living in a dilapidated room on Polk.

  “I don’t see why a gay relationship shouldn’t be exactly like a heterosexual marriage,” he says. He hopes to find the lover of his dreams here. In four weeks he’s made about thirty acquaintances, no friends, and not found love—just sex; one-night stands and three-ways.

  Physically I’m his ideal, he tells me—the moustache, the dark hair, the fit muscular body. The high cheek-bones. And he just loves my British accent.

  Physically he’s my ideal, too. And I’m attracted to (and appalled by) that wide-eyed innocence: so many gay kids, injured by hostile families and environments, come here, hoping the streets are paved with gold. Castro will hurt him more than the guy in Atlanta—I’d like to protect him from that. I can’t, of course. I don’t even suggest we spend the night together, much as I’d love it. It would only add to his hurt. I wish him well, say I hope he finds what he wants, and kiss him goodbye.

  He’s imposing his own private vision of things on the city, and you cannot do that: he has a long journey before he discovers some truths about love, sex and “marriage”.

  UP IN THE HILLS, behind the monastery. As it was when I was first here: fall light, pink belladonna lilies in flower, shiny poison oak, hot fumes of fennel, dusty grasses withered as dead sticks. Eucalyptus scents. Eucalyptus trees look unnatural— their flaky bark reveals a smooth polished wood like furniture, and their leaves are torpid bats hanging, or rags left on washing lines. Flies bite here. My skin, albeit delectably bronzed, is in bad condition—dry and wrinkly from too much sun, and it’s scarred with old fly bites, months old, that refuse to heal. Birds whirr unexpectedly out of the bushes, and lizards scuttle, the rustle of their movements as dry as the stones and the dust. Today is windy, so there is no fog or smog and I can see downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge, sixty miles off. The skyscrapers are faint grey pencil etchings. San José is its usual evergreens and Delphic columns, and the Santa Clara Mountains are, of course, as if basted in the ovens of the sun.

  I shall miss all this. Tomorrow is September; in three weeks I shall be back in England.

  XIX

  THE FINAL BIG TRIP, looking for Gary. Spearfish in Las Vegas. I cross the Sonora Pass to Mono, then drive south. The high sierras are on my right, their peaks still covered with snow which will not melt now before the winter storms begin. They are great jagged grey faces of bare granite, their contours clear in the September morning, but blue and hazy at dusk. Once more I can look at Mount Whitney, then Owens Lake which dried up centuries ago and left a barren salt-pan: such a contrast is uncommon anywhere else in the world—except in England. One can travel three hundred miles in England and cross several totally different kinds of landscape. So it is here: from Mono to Lone Pine where I turn east and leave the sierras is many varied countries. The stalagmites of Mono, then volcanoes remarkably like the volcanoes children draw—steep sides and jagged craters—but, though it seems they could erupt at any moment because the ash on their slopes looks so fresh, there is no smoke swirling out. From here to Bishop is pine forest. After that alfalfa fields and I stop in an attempt to find elks: the largest herd in California grazes here, by the shores of Lake Tinemaha. But there are no elks. It’s the rutting se
ason, and it’s also very hot; they’re probably in the shade of the distant trees—rutting. A rare bird, a roadrunner, hops across the track, not at all bothered that I’m so near. I drive on, through sage-brush and sand, to Independence, and at Lone Pine there is the Owens salt lake-bed. Five landscapes in a hundred and twenty miles.

  In Lone Pine I lose a hundred dollars; between paying a restaurant bill and walking to a bar across the street, a roll of twenties vanishes from my pocket. I spend a long time searching, but it’s been spirited away. Someone, doubtless, is raving it up this Saturday night at my expense. I sleep badly, annoyed by the loss and interrupted by rowdy couples returning to their motel rooms at 3,4, 5 a.m. In the next bedroom several people fuck all night long. The walls shake with the heaving of buttocks and the thrashing of limbs, and as the sperm erupts the pants and moans are as loud as blast-furnaces.

  On, to Death Valley. The vegetation thins—pickleweed and Mormon tea: it’s too hostile even for sage-brush. Greyish-yellow earth. Dust. Suddenly, the descent. Canyons open on either side of the road, huge clefts lurching down for hundreds of feet. Black volcanic rock, and rock the colour of the minerals deposited there, a dull red, a poisonous pink. The road is dangerous—hairpin bends and sheer falls. At the bottom is Panamint Springs—two or three houses, a gas station and a café, both closed. Springs? There is no water. The valley is all sand; the road crosses it as the crow flies, then twists up the pass through the Panamint Mountains. I’m not in Death Valley yet. That’s on the far side of the Panamints, which are just about the most impressive and inhospitable mountains I have ever seen, a huge barrier of utterly barren grey rock that rises from below sea level to eleven thousand feet, inimical, desolate, sun-punished, awesome. I think they are quite amazingly beautiful.