October 20, 2021

Gay Pan(dem)ic

Lust and fear and lays and lies

panic n sudden overpowering fright, extreme and often groundless, inspired by a trifling cause or misapprehension of danger, accompanied by unreasoning or frantic efforts to secure safety {Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, Copyright 1971}

This substack — in case you haven’t caught on — is part memoir, part rant, part rave, and part me being unable to afford counseling. And so, about that panic-problem I’m having . . . here we are, going.

In November of 2016, along with millions of others, I realized that the world in which I thought I lived did not exist. My dysthymic disorder and intermittent anxiety issues were triggered and exacerbated by the daily news, until, for the first time in more than five decades of coping with my psychological and emotional issues without benefit of medication, I stopped resisting the suggestions of doctors and agreed to start taking Wellbutrin. I had hoped 2020 would bring some relief, but, then came Covid, and worse yet, people’s reactions to Covid and the 2020 election. And, this time, worse than having realized the world in which I thought I lived did not exist, I realized the world in which I feared I lived might be even worse than I’d imagined. And between the screeds of hate being spewed by people who were elected to govern (albeit, likely with the assistance of hostile foreign governments), and the violence and calumnies committed by their followers, and the unbelievably idiotic deniers of science and truth refusing the Covid vaccine — intermittent anxiety turned into full-on, nearly full-time panic. And that panic triggered and wakened all the memories of panic from throughout my life. And, so, before I start experimenting with increases in medication, I thought I should try to figure these things out for myself, see if I can train myself to take a deep breath, stop, wait, hope.

So, Gay Panic.

I’m not talking about the agita and social media tsunami that happens every time a FOLLIES1 revival cast is announced; not talking about the gnashing of teeth and wasted Viagra doses that result when Grindr goes down; not talking about the discredited and disgustingly vile gay-panic defense used to excuse homophobes who’ve committed crimes against the LGBTQIA+ community.

No, specifically, I’m talking about the kinds of panic that have pissed me off, taken me by surprise, made me ashamed, threatened my life, and just generally were experiences I could have done without.

HOOKUP PANIC

Here’s the thing about hooking up, not unlike the the little girl who had a little curl (and revivals of Stephen Sondheim’s FOLLIES), when they are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are horrid.

Much to the chagrin of my brother, when I was young, my little sister and I played MYSTERY DATE obsessively. The thrill of the game was the panic you felt about which bachelor was going to show up when you opened the door: Tuxedo Guy, Bowling Guy, Beach Guy, Skiing Guy, or Dud. It is telling that even at that tender prepubescent stage, I preferred the Dud. Hook-up apps are not unlike Mystery Date in that — despite having traded pictures and info ahead of meeting up —- there are (many) hookups where the person looks nothing at all like their picture. And those hookups where you walk into their place and realize they’re a hoarder, a slob, a sport fanatic, married with young children, or republican. You never know what you’re going to get with a hookup.

And for a period in the 1980s, what you got could be a deadly virus.

I was just starting my second wave of aspirational hooking up when what would eventually be called HIV/AIDS began its reign of terror. During my post-Mystery Date teen years I was sexually precocious but isolated in a small and small-minded area, I had very few opportunities to develop my natural aptitude for erotic adventure into the 2knee-weakening mastery I would later achieve. I made the decision to pack up and leave that less than queer-amenable town because my heart had been broken and another show had ended its run (how frequently those two events coincided) and so within 48 hours I and a fellow-heartbroken “we’re better than this town” friend had rented a U-Haul and headed toward New Haven, the two of us without prospects, jobs, or apartment lined up, or, really, any idea what the hell we were doing. We chose New Haven because New York was a delusion-too-far, and when my sister lived briefly in Connecticut I had visited the city and thought the three bookstores she took me to the best I’d ever seen. And, too, my co-runaway had always thought she’d go to the Yale School of Drama, and this way she’d at least be in the same city.

We arrived and bacchanalia began. The apartment we found the day after arriving was in a building that when we first saw it, both my roommate and I whispered, “ROSEMARY’S BABY” because of its stone-carved, gothic, turretted frontage. There weren’t any satanic cults by which we were bothered, but there were quite a few people in treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, and conveniently on site were many drug dealers to supply them. Hardly a day went by that there wasn’t someone being dragged screaming and yelling, or strapped to a gurney, out through the front lobby onto which our apartment door opened. Our first floor hovel would be burgled three times in the year we were there, but within two blocks there was a gay bar, a bookstore, and the pizza restaurant in which we both ended up working. Directly across the street from our building was a vacant lot into which multiple murder victims were dumped during our stay in the city.

While my roomie never got closer than a block away to the Yale School of Drama, I became a regular on the campus, and while I had been in theatre long enough by then to know to avoid theatre types, I fucked (well, usually, was fucked by) as many Yale Lit majors as I could, even when I didn’t find them attractive, in order to get their coursework. It was my lit-slut period3. I knew that the closest this high-school dropout was ever going to be to getting into Yale was letting those who’d gotten into Yale get into me. And from those tricks I got Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Frank O’Hara, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Renata Adler, and others. Sure, there was the occasional dud4 who’d try to foist Phillip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow on me, but I would quickly eschew further escrewing with those types of privilege-oblivious white boys.

In order to balance out the Yalies; I also adventured in the under-side of New Haven, where we, the working poor who depended on the college for our incomes, lived in decrepitude. Those guys — who did not have the benefit of being away from home and family as did the Elis — were more often than not extremely closeted, lurking in the deep downlow where they’d angrily insist they were straight even as night after night they were doing dicking of one sort or another with another owner of a dick. I wasn’t allowed to call them. I wasn’t allowed to speak to them if I saw them in public. I wasn’t allowed to ask for anything. They’d show up across the street after I got out of work, or, at my door late at night, or, in the dark of the gay bar, and in as few words as possible get me to wherever they could shove me up against a wall, get what they wanted to get and what I wanted gotten.

I thought it was romantic. I had grown up escaping my outcast/cast out reality by living in a fantasy world cobbled together from musicals, Susan Hayward and Bette Davis movies, Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins novels, and the Roman Catholic church. Suffering, backstreet affairs, heartbreak ballads, insatiable well-hung men, abused, mistreated women, and martyrdom involving nails through the extremities and the taunts of muscled, cruel Roman Soldiers were what I thought the stuff of passion.

‘Twas ever thus. My “romantic” history was made up almost exclusively of those who would only be there for me when no one was watching, men whose biggest impact on my life had to do with their absence, their inability to actually be in my life. I spent a fortune in life-energy imagining I could save them from their fear, imagining their love for me would eventually overcome their panic about who they were. And I spent an equal amount of energy justifying this foolishness to myself; even as I, pulingly lamented and deplored their unexamined homophobia, I failed to recognize my own sniveling cowardice.

And then, while I was living in in New Haven, inching toward full-on, full-out gayness, it hit. May, 1981, the New York Native, arguably the most widely read and influential gay publication at the time, did the first article on what would later come to be known as AIDS.

AIDS PANIC

Because it was only happening to faggots (or so it was thought at the time), the plague wasn’t at first acknowledged as existing by the CDC, let alone reported on in mainstream media. But, we knew. Something was going on, or, as the lyrics of William Finn later succinctly sang:

Bachelors arrive sick and frightened.
They leave weeks later unenlightened.
We see a trend, but the trend has no name.

Something bad is happening.
Something very bad is happening.
Something stinks, something immoral.
Something so bad that words have lost their meaning!
Rumors fly and tales abound,
Stories echo underground!
Something bad
Is spreading, spreading, spreading
'Round!

From FALSETTOS, Music & Lyrics by William Finn, Book by William Finn & James Lapine

And inside this community we’d cobbled together in order to fight the panics and discriminations we’d suffered in our hometowns, we could not agree. Some of us thought it a plot, a disease spread by the government targeting gay men.5 Some of us thought it was being over-dramatized in order to make us limit what was a burgeoning newfound sense of sexual freedom and exploration. A vibrant, vital portion of the gay male community had, in reaction to decades of forced invisibility and denial, embraced and encouraged celebratory licentiousness; we would fuck in the streets, undoing eons of patriarchal demonization of sexual expression.

But, some of us thought it would be best, life-saving even, to stop having sex until we knew what was going on. That cohort was roundly, loudly, and abusively derided by those who insisted we not surrender to fear, but continue to celebrate our bodies, sensualities, and unrestrained erotic adventuring under the mirrored balls, in the backrooms and steambaths, in the alleys and on the piers, at the weekend parties and tea dances on the decks of the elite amongst us. And, that cohort was roundly, loudly, and abusively derided by those who thought we ought practice celibacy until answers were found.

I was in the gay-panic crowd. I stopped hooking up. And despite the dancing and dicking I had done, I was among the very lucky ones who had not been exposed to the virus. But it was quite a while before we had a reliable test telling us that was the case. In the interim, when hooking up had become even riskier than it had been when all we had to fear was being harrassed, fagbashed, fired, evicted, and disowned, when it was clear every hookup might be a possible death sentence, panic ate into some of us, like me; it whittled away at the hedonic nature I’d cultivated and left me again, as before, in fear of expressing my physical desires.

Many of my friends and cohort died. The losses on a personal and world-wide level were incalculable. The arts especially suffered devasating casualties; to think of the shows and books that were never written, the songs unsung, the innovations in design and direction unseen, it is cataclysmically sorrow-making.

And almost nothing was done. Since all the right people were dying, the government and churches and society at large cared very little, were even, at times, heard to say, “Well, you asked for it.” And so not only were you in constant mourning and fear, too, you had to process that pain and fear and panic, knowing how little-valued and how much-despised you were by so many.

SURVIVOR PANIC

I let panic — lowgrade and metastatic — constrain my selfhood. My self-awareness. My self. I shut down entire regions of my being. After having run away from home, I then ran away from AIDS, which meant to me I would go home, where I’d come from and where I’d never had much luck at hooking up.

Somehow, in my panic constructed of leftover Catholic guilt and fear of the new scourge of homophobia, I conflated having been spared the virus with an obligation not to do anything at all that might occasion me being exposed. I convinced myself for many years I was not missing anything by not connecting on a physical-sexual level.

I distracted myself, and filled my life with being there for others in other ways. I was a friend, a best friend, a confidante, a son, a brother, an uncle, a nephew, a teacher, a director, a counselor, a ride or die, a substitute mate, a substitute parent, the reliably there at 3 a.m. person to call, a ride to or from, a loan, a bail you out, a whatever role I was needed to play in your life kind of person.

And it wore me out. And down. And then within a six month period, my aunt — who’d been the one who’d always thought me magic and perfect — died. And then the last man I’d loved — who’d made denying me his life’s work — killed himself. And then my dearest male friend — two days after having had to be the one to tell me about the last man I loved killing himself — died from surgical complications.

And then my dog died.

When these blocks were pulled from the already wobbly Jenga-tower of emotions that was me, I toppled. I considered not rebuilding. Or, more accurately, I stopped considering much of anything at all, I languished in despair, those losses the kinds for which there is no remedy. The aunt who’d known me and adored me since the first day of my life; the man who I’d have happily died for who loved me in a way that killed him; the friend I’d had since I was 12 years old with whom all things sexual could be talked about and with whom I’d learned how to trick and who made me laugh more than anyone else in the world; the dog who I swear could talk to me; they were foundational. They were essential. There was no one left to fill any of those empty spaces or assuage the aches left in the abyss of their absence.

And it was, for me, far too many never agains. It was die, or get back to living.

OLD AGE PANIC

I had missed a lot of years, and lost a lot of love by choosing a circumscribed life and so I determined it was time to let that life go. I walked away from the things (and people) that had kept me in a holding pattern of sorrow, and started over.

There was a whole new world out here. And ways to connect — hook up — that had not existed when I mostly withdrew from that part of my life. But one thing hadn’t changed: in gay-male world, every year past age 25 was a strike against you. I was almost twice that.

There was only one thing to do: Lie. I instituted the rule of Minus 10: 10 years subtracted from your age, 10 pounds subtracted from your weight (Full disclosure: This would now be more accurately called the rule of Minus 11/Minus 25). It didn’t take me long to realize I was not alone in applying this deca-deduction deceit. In fact, many a fellow-fuckbuddy on the hook-up networks boasted bios and stats so fabricated as to rival Pinocchio, only, their lies resulted in shrinkage rather than extension.

And I found myself, feeling as if I’d missed much of my prime, panicking about making up for lost time before the day (or, more accurately, night) came when I couldn’t pass for being in my 40s no matter how dark the room.

And it was mostly fun. Except when it wasn’t.

Which leads me to the story with a boy/man-main character, the haunting memory of which prompted me to want to write about gay panic this week, the journey to which has taken 3200 words and turns and digressions I had not meant to take when I began. Maybe it’s because I’m a little afraid of the story; much as I want to be as courageous and no-holds-barred, to share my naked truths in prose as trenchant as Garth Greenwell, I don’t write as prettily or incisively, and so I fear seeming like the blog-equivalent of that drunk at a party who confesses at length their shabby trespasses to an audience of horrified acquaintances.

Of course, you can just close this page out right now if you don’t want to know my naked truths. Or, you can believe me more novelist than memoirist; I warn you, I’ve always thought novelists far more honest than memoirists.

GAY PANIC

I didn’t know his name. They don’t use names, these boys. We don’t use names, we men who in our liaisons with these nameless boys look for what we lost, missed, sacrificed, and threw away before we became the one in the hookup who was being done a favor, who was — often — a last resort, a compromise, the reliable yes.

I call them all Bosie. Not to their faces. (Or the other body parts with which I come into more intimate contact.) I assume they would not know who Oscar Wilde is, let alone Bosie, and once upon a time, many, many years ago, before AIDS, before I was aged out of good-gay-trick, when I still thought I might one day find real love, a companion, I said to one of the more-likely candidates for ever-after 6 , “It’s like something out of Balzac.” His reply was something along the lines of, “Is dick the only thing you ever think about?” delivered with a disgusted curl of his beautiful Mick Jagger lips — which, honestly, were what most attracted me to him — and I didn’t try to clarify “Balzac, not ball sack” because there was no way to win. I should have known he wouldn’t know who Honoré de Balzac was, and he was sensitive about being dumb (Which he was; but those lips. And that dick) and he had previously accused me of trying to flaunt my abdundance of useless information so people wouldn’t think less of me for being a high school dropout (Which I did, because I was), and so it was better to let him denigrate me rather than have him think I was denigrating him.

But this more recent Bosie was not someone with whom I spoke. This was a modern-day hookup, negotiated through Grindr, the terms of the transaction set in advance. No conversation required or desired. He was STR8 DL BWD: translation Straight Down Low Big White Dick. 22. 6’2” 145 pounds. Tattoos. Have GF. No talking. Suck me. No reciprocation.

It was very late the first night he messaged me. “Wanna suck me?” To the point, that. My reply was equally breviloquent7, since his profile was just a name and a blank frame I asked: “Pics?” He sent me his face. Which, if you’re not on Grindr won’t seem odd to you, but it is not usually the pic someone sends first.

And he was the kind of beautiful for which I have ALWAYS had a weakness. Large mouth, full lips, gorgeous bright, white teeth. A Greek nose, thick of bridge, between the bottom of which and his upper lip was a wispy mustache, not quite as sparse as the scruff on his chin, and brown eyes that — along with his full-face smile, gave me the feeling he’d never had a deep thought or worry in his entire life. And, the most intriguing and erotic feature, that night, in that pic, was that he was wearing a white hoodie with satin trim framing his face, and the lighting was intense, the background shadowy, and me being me, I thought, Oh, chiaroscuro, a Caravaggio portrait come alive in the 21st century.

Enraptured as I was by the face, inching toward suspecting this was another fake about to ask for a Venmo payment before meeting, I didn’t respond right away. So he sent his dick pic.

And the deal was sealed. BWD indeed. I met him. He didn’t say hello. He walked to the bed, I followed, and with his back to me he took off what little he had on, and after removing his Fruit of the Loom, blue plaid boxers , from which his already impressively alert dick leapt, and his white, ribbed tank-t, he said, “Do you have a blind fold? I wanna wear a blindfold. ”

Well, no. I don’t happen to carry any equipment with me. And, for the briefest of moments, I thought I ought to be insulted. But, he was beautiful, and hung, and smelled really, really good. Not cologne. Soap. Just showered sort of not completely dry clean. “How about your t-shirt?” I made it work. I wouldn’t want to look at me either. In fact, I don’t. I haven’t stood in front of a mirror since … maybe 2010.

He asked if I’d give him a massage first. Sure, once I’ve gone to the trouble of getting ready to meet someone, risked my life walking in the door, gotten past the first few seconds when they might mumble, “This isn’t going to work out” after seeing me in person, I am all about making it last as long as possible.

I go into every encounter reminding myself this might be the last time. There will come a time when I’ll be unable to subtract the years and the pounds and get away with it, and when there will be no option but to Venmo, which I refuse to do. Not because I have any moral compunction about paying for sex, but because I am very, very poor, so it’s not really an option. So, the end will happen. There will be a last time. And I don’t want to miss another one.

I’ve had a lot of bad last times. The last time I saw the only man I ever loved was in a parking deck where he’d pretended not to know me and I got ugly about it and two weeks later he killed himself. The last time I fooled around with the boy in my junior high school class who I thought I loved was very, very intense, like two fourteen year old boys can be, and it was a week later when he told our peer group that I was a fag who’d tried to grab his dick, which got back to me via my best female friend who had, two days earlier, accepted his invitation to be his girlfriend. That was also the last time she ever spoke to me. My sister died the night before we were supposed to meet for coffee the next day after not having seen each other for a few years, not having seen each other in a difficult circumstances sort of way. I don’t remember the last time we did see each other, only that last time we didn’t.

So I am attentive to being with people, in every way, because, those. That. And so, yes, I gave him a massage. I am trained in massage therapy and so my bodyrubs are not your five minute pummelings and ineffectual strokings, no, I know from effleurage and petrissage and tapotement, and I go deep, I find knots and work them out, I am committed to giving pleasure and relief on the way to release.

And as I did, he asked, “Can you work my ass?” Which, as it turned out, was why he claimed to be hooking up with men. His girlfriend (If she actually existed, which I am not sure she did. Does.) didn’t like to touch his ass. Or taste his ass. Or anything his ass. And he was very interested in anything-ing being done to his ass.

And so it went. That time. By the time he flipped over so I could access his topside, very little time passed before he’d finished. And when he had, it was clear I was to get out in a hurry. I did. And I was pretty sure that would be the last time he’d message me.

I was wrong. But for months, timing was bad. I was never able to when he was. He was not around when I was able to meet up. Until, finally, the planets aligned. Or, Satan had a free moment to set me up for a fall.

This time he had a blindfold. And massage oil. I stripped to boxer-briefs and t-shirt8 and he, in blindfold, positioned himself face down. I did what I had done before. More slowly. And when he turned topside, I pushed the envelope. With my hands I was working his shoulders, his chest, and then I started to kiss his chest, and in true porn-clip style, forcefully raised his arms over his head and went for his armpits, and he was moaning, and said, “Yes, baby.”

Yes, baby.

Which was soon followed by him lifting his blindfold off one eye, then the other, and closing his eyes but reaching for my dick, through my boxers, and then pulling off my boxers, and then pulling me up to kiss him, and then he moved his beautiful mouth down my body and took me in his mouth. And soon, he exploded. Not before he had called me babe and baby and said all the “oh yes” and “fuck yes” and “do it” he’d no doubt learned from porn.

And then, very quickly, it was time to go.

An hour later. This. “That was my first time. I could get rubbed and licked all over by you forever. And do you too.”

I answered, “Yeah, that was great. Hope we can do it again.”

And he replied. “Fuck yes.”

When you are a 60 year old, 200+ pound man who is pretending to be 49 and 190 pounds and who has never been attractive, who only once in youth had anyone as beautiful as that 22 year old with his pretend girlfriend and eager ass, and when you know your prime is not only past, but actually fossilized, when you are presented with a possible regular friends with benefit arrangement it feels like a gift from beyond. And, I knew I didn’t deserve it.

And, apparently, I was right. Two days later we were both on Grindr. I said — honestly, this is all I said — “Hello.”

And this: “Don’t message me anymore. It’s never going to happen again.”

Gay panic.

His panic: He had liked it. He touched a dick. He tasted a dick. He said he wanted to do it again. Everything he’d ever wanted to believe about himself, all the ruse of “I’m really straight but my girlfriend won’t suck my dick or rim me” was blown (so to speak) to bits, curtains torn down, lights turned up, his place in the world, the future he’d been taught he should have, should want, of which society would approve, all of it called into question because I made him like sucking a dick. So, I’m a villain.

My panic: Everything I ever believed about me: true. Last resort. Someone they regret. I am what you see when you go to Urban Dictionary and look up BadChoice or Troll.

I blocked him. Before he could attack me as grandpa looking for young cock, or spout any of the other things younger gays (or, downlow straights whose girlfriends won’t rim them, sorry to have mis-labeled you as queer) think it’s okay to say to older gays, I just finished it. Erased him.

I didn’t know his name. They don’t use names, these boys. And I call them Bosie, because like Bosie sold out Wilde, so, too, nine times out of nine and a half, they’re going to turn on me, speak to me as some thing, depleted, grossly indecent, and leave me to the Reading Gaol of my own deeply inbred self-contempt.

This then, is it my De Profundis?

Nah. I’m no Oscar.

PANDEMIC PANIC

And then, Covid. And the world joined together (mostly) to find a way to stop it, to cure it. And all of us who had lived through AIDS and suffered the inattention and lack of funding and fought the fight to make any inroads toward curing, treating, preventing it were triggered all over again.

And furious.

At first because we couldn’t help but wonder, if this sort of energy and effort had been put forth toward fighting AIDS, how many of my dear ones, how many of my cohort would still be alive?

And then, more furious that given a chance to prevent it, to lessen its impact, the gopzi narcissistic lying piece of shit sociopath who stole the presidency from Secretary Clinton starts spreading ridiculous, false, dangerous misinformation, and is backed up by the spineless jackhats from his party, and his legions of hateful followers.

And then even more furious because I can’t Bosie anymore. Vaccinated or not (and I am) there are breakthrough strains, and while I might be willing to risk my own health, I have loved ones I can’t put in harm’s way. So for the second time in my life, it is unsafe for me to have sex.

And so, not only am I in a panic about Covid, and furious, I’m panicked that I’ve maybe had my last time.

And, truth, I don’t remember who it was.

Or when it was.

I guess it would be fitting if I finished with Sondheim. From FOLLIES, of course. I’M STILL HERE? Maybe. Or, the cut-in-Boston number, CAN THAT BOY FOXTROT could apply, sort of. Or, don’t say it, LOSING MY MIND.

All good. But, I think, if this was that cabaret act I sort of did (like I sort of lived my life) then I would finish with a medley of MAYBE I LIKE IT THIS WAY & HOW DID WE COME TO THIS, sung by Julia Murney, from Andrew Lippa’s WILD PARTY.9

Whatever I chose, however I finish this 6000 word post, there is not likely to be an encore for me, is there? So, instead of tricking, I take long drives in the middle of the night. I gain weight. I read even more than I did before. I Tweet. I write letters. I think too much.

And, clearly, I write too much, so, here I am, going.