Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Most mornings I stand in front of my apartment building, waiting for the local bus. I might smoke a cigarette and read a newspaper. I do not consider waiting for the bus to be a particularly social occasion.

This is not the case with others.

There is a woman who takes the same bus as I do, and I dread seeing her come barreling down the sidewalk. She's a big, blowsy type, with an open face­ the kind of American woman the English playwright Joe Orton made fun of in an entry in his diaries. If I am the only other person waiting at the bus stop, she comes right up to me and starts chattering away. She goes on and on about anything­ bus schedules, the weather, rehearsals at her church choir, etc. I try to be polite and when a response is necessary, I make it as short and icy-cold as I can. I've taken to referring to her as Chatty Cathy (do they still make the Chatty Cathy doll?). My iciness does not deter her, though I have noticed that if a number of other people are waiting for the bus, she will target someone other than me. All too often, it's just Chatty Cathy and me.

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Why does she do this? Why do I find her blatherings intrusive of what I perceive of as my space? (A friend who lived, briefly, in San Francisco in the early 80s had the same thing happen to him. While waiting for the bus, a woman he did not know, came right up to him and started going off on her bout of anal warts and her various treatments.)

At first, I tried to think of an explanation for Chatty Cathy's behavior­ perhaps she was lonely, perhaps she thought her life so interesting she had to share it with others. But I gave up. When younger, I had a reserve of empathy for other people. By my mid-40s and certainly after 50, the Empathy Well was tapped out, sucked dry, really, by that blotter pad called the human race.

What are the boundaries for intimacy or even impersonal interaction? Americans are, by and large, a friendly people. Visitors to the country notice this right off the bat. There are areas here and there where our citizens are less exuberant than the national average; I'm thinking New England and New York, for example. A colleague of mine just returned from a trip to San Diego and he mentioned to me how polite and friendly the folks he met were, certainly compared to Boston (maybe he should meet Chatty Cathy). When I visit my family in the Midwest, I immediately notice the casual affability of the locals.

I think the aggressive faux-intimacy of the Chatty Cathy type is a function of being normal. I think when a person has secrets, a social reticence and a respect for personal space is more evident. During my first year in college, I shared a dorm room with three other men. Very often, I would slip out and go cruising and then return. One roommate, noticing my behavior­ sudden departures and equally sudden reappearances­ commented that I seemed to come and go in a stealth manner, as though disappearing through walls. I took that as a compliment.

It's probably a stretch to generalize about gay men, but my experience­ certainly from the time I was coming of age­ is that any group of adult gay men will seem a little more stand-offish and formal in their social behavior than an equivalent group of straight men, who will be louder and more tactile in their interaction. I think this is the case because gay men grow up with so much intrusion in their lives­ nosy parents, condemnatory religions, psychiatric interventions, police raids, blackmailers, etc. As a result, we come to seek a secure and inviolable space that should only be entered through negotiation, not crashed into à la Chatty Cathy. A space of our own. There is a price for building this safe space, and it is that it takes more work to create friendships and achieve emotional intimacy, if that doesn't sound too TV talkshowish. The normal world assumes a massive cultural commonality­ conventional heterosexuality, sports talk, the trivia of popular culture. The world of gay men is absent a lot of this and in fact our culture­ because of our histories­ takes a slant askew to the dominant cultural constellation.

I recall Celeste Holm's comment a few years back. She was attending a screening, in a big old movie house (with a new print), of the campy classic, All About Eve, of which she was the only surviving cast member. The audience was mostly gay men, and they chanted along with the well-known dialogue. Holm, in a newspaper interview the next day, noted that gay audiences­ she was touring big cities with the film­ always get something different and extra out of the film than other audiences and something more than even intended by the creators of the movie. Right on, Celeste!

Chat rooms. Instant messaging. Cell phones. Talk. Talk. Talk. Yak. Yak. Yak. Silence may not always be golden, but the sterling standard to be met is saying it short and sweet and to the point­ or not to the point, as occasion necessitates.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com