Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

A friend dropped by right after attending my city's Gay Pride Parade this year. My friend, I'll call him Dwayne (not his real name) wasn't much impressed by the event-- one of the two largest annual events in New England. His beef? Too many politicians. Too many families. Too much disco-dance noise. Too much of not enough important things. I commiserated. Years back, with many fewer participants, the march, as it was then called, had more punch. Now it's a family affair-- the price of acceptance, all are welcome. "Hi! Hon!"

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Dwayne likes to wear his leathers. He has a shaved head. He told me he sports a Prince Albert. He is a delightful man. This is not how he started out. Dwayne was a Southern lad. Married, had two children, climbed the ladder in the academic world and, then, sometime in the 80s, called it quits. The wife did not take it well. (She's now an elected official in a New England state). The children, Dwayne told me, liked Dad in his new role-- gay leatherman. I do not know what Dwayne's politics were in his previous incarnation, but he's very much a progressive these days. And a committed gay radical.

Only days later, I received a telephone call from a friend who now lives in London, England. I met this friend back in the early 1970s; he was 17 or 18 years old and quickly became the most active of the gay radicals. (I have a picture right here before me of my friend from a Gay Parade in 1983; he's wearing a torn "Mineshaft" t-shirt.) I think he once hitchhiked across the USA in hot pants and platform shoes-- this would have been mid-70s. My friend threw some of the wildest parties. One mutual friend, who later went on to be an important city official, noted of him: "He gave the best blow job I've ever had." (Who's to judge?) After a sequence of boyfriends-- including the most amazing cross-dressing queen-- my friend decided he wanted to find a nice woman friend, get married, and settle down. It took him a few years, but he found her; they married a few years back and are both working in London as I write this.

What can we learn from these two stories? I really don't know, and I don't propose any handy poop. One thing we could glean is this: that it is probably useful to figure out what you want in life and decide if the price is worth it. It usually is even if severe-- in Dwayne's case, he walked away from a secure university position, a set of friends, a domestic situation that wasn't unpleasant, etc. But he loves who he is now. And he's good at it, which counts.

I recall a match my father made for me back in the 60s. My step-mother, a decorator, had a friend, another decorator, who had a mad queen for a son. I was living with my father and step-mother than year (1965) and, as Dad had already figured me out, he set up a "shopping date" for me with this mad queen (it was the week before X-mas). I liked the fellow. He was fun company. We went screaming through Higbee's, Halle's, and May's-- now all defunct department stores in metro Cleveland. We returned to my father's house and had smart cocktails. I saw this fellow a couple times after this spree and then I checked out of Cleveland and started my Boston sojourn. Sometime back in the mid-90s, while speaking with my father on the horn, I mentioned this fellow and thanked my father for making the gesture of fixing me up with another gay guy. I asked what happened to the fellow, whose name I could not remember. "He got married right out of high school," Dad told me. "That's nice," I said, with little enthusiasm. "She had been his high school friend. They had a child." "I see." Dad paused. "Then what happened?" I asked. "Then he killed himself." I expressed my condolences, more than 20 years after the fact. An intolerable situation ends badly. What went unsaid in this conversation with my father was that I was still alive-- gay activism, identity, and political work opened doors. How I can explain my gay activist friends who have killed themselves-- well, that takes time, compassion and the ability to imagine what they went through. The Heterosexual Dictatorship has been pretty ruthless, both by overt persecution and inattention, which amounts to smothering. Each gay suicide is that juror's verdict.

As for my friend in London? He likes women a lot, and always wanted to be the settled-down type, with a man or a woman, and he's done it with both. I stay away from making comment on anyone who seeks to be part of a couple; that impulse is completely absent in me. I sought, in my life, entrants for two categories only: dear friends and fuck buddies. It's a business plan for gay life that has worked for me. On the other hand, for some gay men, particularly in years past, you can fool so many by having a wife, any wife. Think of Cole Porter, Paul Bowles, Rock Hudson. It's a measure of how far we have come since pre-Stonewall days: the conventional ways of behavior cannot be enforced as they were, back then to our detriment. Dwayne wrote a new script for the last half of his life. My friend in London, himself a kind of Henry James story, is very much the full author of his own story. This makes it different from my pal who called it quits-- I doubt he was co-author of anything; suicide is the one thing you get to do on your own, sort of.

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