I enter the darkened maze of plywood and mirrors, barely lit with red bulbs. I’m on a black box in a pair of boots and underwear, masturbating. A guy comes over to me, rubs his crewcut head against my chest, growling slightly, almost purring. I lift his arm up and put my head in that soft warm space where he keeps his smell and I take it in with my nose and tongue to feel the life there.
Dan is on the left, watching, masturbating. He comes in closer and kisses me, under the arm, our tongues take in the man’s essence together. Or maybe that was another time, another city. Maybe this guy rubbed his stubbly face against mine for a long time, while Dan was kissing someone else. A guy comes over and touches my butt cheeks lightly to see what they’re like. Just touches them and that’s enough. Eventually, I’m licking a guy’s balls. Maybe they’re Dan’s or Paul’s. No, because I hear, “Yeah, lick those balls.” Neither of them would ever say that. It ruins something, as do the mirrors and the fake walls, which try to be “sexy.”
It’s the ritual which interests me here: the incessant prowling along these corridors, the sniffing out of another person, the crashing of desire against each other’s flesh, the exploration of the other’s whole aura —physical, sensory, “spiritual” —all of it actually materializing in the best of cases. At the end, someone shoots his sperm, and the others stop to watch with a collective “Oooohhh.”
• • •
Paul and I went to the funeral of Cleews, the president of ACT UP Paris, near place de la Bastille. It was like Jean-Paul Sartre or Dalida had died all over again. A mass of bodies around the door of the Gay and Lesbian Center marched solemnly toward the coffin under a black silk flag with his name in white and the inevitable pink triangle. The préfecture de police de Paris waited, almost suspiciously, to take the box away in their station wagon to Père Lachaise. Smirking at our private petite drame de folles parisiènnes.
I saved the glossy brochure with Cleews’ picture for my album. What did he represent to these people? He had announced before his first opportunistic infections that he would soon croak with AIDS, and now he was a hero. Never silent, but always the victim of the system—the French system—the queen in pink chiffon under the politician’s shitty boots, screaming in high-pitched protest, but crushed under the boot nevertheless.
The people piled up on Cleews’ tomb were not there for him or for AIDS or for ACT UP, but for the same reason that people have always gone to funerals: to believe that death had happened and to try and understand what it meant.
In the case of people in the “AIDS community” there’s an extra urgency to the follow-up questions: “Who will be next?” and “How will it happen to me?” Parading behind an AIDS queen’s casket in public means “I might be next!”
It had all made so much sense back then: building our coalition together to storm the FDA, the pharmacies, the prisons, the schools, the churches… demanding retribution and justice from the oppressor.
But the movement died quickly and surely like the friends who’d formed it. Bob and Derek and David. And nameless faces I’d found strong and beautiful at Monday night meetings in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., London, San Francisco…
• • •
Dan sent me a photo from San Francisco after he returned home. His hair was rainbow: bright, brilliant colors, fading into each other, toping-off his pink face almost naturally.
His boyfriend, Mike, had taken the picture in Kansas where they’d visited Mike’s best friend from high school, a guy who’d been permanently paralyzed from the neck down by some fag bashers tried to kill him with a gun. “I’m sorry for whining about my problems,” he’d told them, “you guys have your HIV stuff to deal with.”
God, to think that’s still where we’re at!
I try to catch a glimpse of Dan in his environment. There he is now, hanging off a cable car by his boyfriend’s hand, his tropical fish hair tracing a spectrum against the foggy breeze. Later he eats a crêpe at Ti Couz on 16th and Valencia where a humpy guy cooks up Galettes de Bretagne for lovely young tattooed things with shaved heads and nose rings. Dan buys art supplies with the leftovers from his disability check at a craft shop on Haight Street, lugging them home on the bus to his apartment where he strings them into necklaces, sculpts them into pins, and layers them into thick paintings—canvasses which more than vaguely resemble the birthday cakes he once frosted at Carvel’s ice cream in New York on his first summer job.
The recurring characters in Dan’s paintings and comic strips are: the Fish (which was sometimes supposed to be me—always screaming and angry), the Box Chicken (which was sometimes supposed to be Dan—open, inquisitive and victimized, yet persistently ironic), Octagon Owl, Dice Cat, Little AIDS Lulu… I wonder whom these characters represent to Dan now that I’m so far away.