The French love nostalgia. Every chanson is carefully written to send one charging down memory lane, every lamp is lit at the exact shade and hue of a sigh, and every gesture is infused with a slight longing… But what the French have never factored into its affected atmosphere is the effect it would have on foreigners. Besides establishing Paris as the undisputed tourist hub, the city’s many romantic devices ensure that foreign residents exist in a constant state of longing for home.
From where I’m writing this in my gray Parisian office, for example, San Francisco seems like paradise: Black nights with the twinkling orange lights on Twin Peaks; stray club kids shedding their sequins in the empty Safeway parking lot; glamorous bag ladies chanting mad poetry to Macy’s shoppers who sometimes listened; soldiers beating each other off in a tangle of flowering bushes under the Golden Gate Bridge; cheery queens on pastel porches hiding silver Liberache coffins in their parlours; lunatic transvestites applying makeup in the back of orange cable buses that struggled up steep hills; Chinese families pigging out at a Polk St. restaurant without blinking at the crewcut lesbian couple beside them sharing vegetarian stir-fried mock duck with the same pair of chopsticks.
That was San Francisco. Faggy and free. Yes, it’s a queer thing, really. You can’t help but see it as much else if you are one yourself. The queers of San Francisco had built something pretty much like a culture that had permeated every aspect of society and yet remained its own thing. That was just plain amazing, whatever your take on the shallower aspects of the gay world.
But however cool that micro-world was, you started getting used to it, then you took it for granted. That was when you became a real San Franciscan—when the thrill you felt at passing ice cubes from the delicious lips of one boy to those of another in a dimly lit sauna ten minutes away from your apartment became such a regular part of your life that you ceased to feel any fear or restraint, only gratitude. There was an endless bouquet of little moments you’d always hoped to live out but never thought possible—moments of pure, shameless pleasure only heightened by the awareness that many of the people you were making love to at that moment would surely be dead if not within five years then ten…
In San Francisco there has always been a tremendous sense of the heavy universe weighing down upon it. Perhaps it’s the thickness of the fog. You can, however, build a neat little illusion of security and acceptance there, which is the promise that first lured me. That and the opportunity to lie naked on Land’s End in the cool SF sun, getting burned while the violent, repetitious waves crashed beside me.
Is it still possible to be naked in SF, Dan, or have the tourists taken over the little paths winding down to our beach, the one where I listened to my French cassettes while you painted watercolors and counted down our last days together before I left you for Paris?
Shit, here I am, not even 30 years old yet, and I’m sitting in a dusty Parisian office reminiscing about my early twenties in San Francisco, as if I’m about to die. Why am I dwelling on Dan and San Francisco? And why is there hardly a word about Paul, my boyfriend for the last two years now?
For starters, my personal life with Paul has been literally consumed with the fight for a visa in each other’s countries. Since we can’t get married and take advantage of full immigration rights in either my homeland or the country Paul has called his home for the last 13 years, I’m living here in France with him as a second-class citizen, working in a menial job in his small business. Since we have to work together to live together, Paul fills the role of colleague more often than he fills the role of lover. At the moment, he’s off trying to find a better opportunity in the U.S.A., so we can live on more equal footing back there—though there are no guarantees that plan will work any better. In short, we’ve been cheated by the homophobic world at large.
Damn, I promised myself not to whine about it. But it pisses me off! Just as I’ll never know if my problems with Dan would have been surmountable had it not been for his HIV infection, I’ll never know how my life with Paul would have been without the incessant struggle for the right to live together as equal citizens of any given nation.
But what am I getting so defensive for? I have to admit that there are times I suspect that our struggle for a national identity as a couple is the only thing that keeps us together. We speak in a neutral third language—French—about our different cultures—German and American. We argue over music, art, fashion, food, politics, history, business, money, time, design, travel, religion, ethics, sex and education. We are never sure if these arguments have their basis in our different cultural foundations or if they represent fundamental differences in our personalities. And are our personalities separable from our cultures, anyway? Besides, how much of Paul’s foundation is German and how much is French? And how many of our differences come not from being born on different continents but from being born in different decades? Is it those nine little years that make him love the music I hate?
Our domestic disagreements have grown so predictable and repetitive during our first years together that we’ve begun to feel like a family. Ironically, this familial closeness may be the very reason Paul has receded into the sidelines of my memories—a familiar presence at the periphery of each image. If he offers a comment now, it’s a comment I’ve already anticipated. If he supplies a gesture, it’s a gesture from his catalogue of gestures—movements I’ve seen employed in so many other contexts and settings to mean similar things. He has become a hum of static—a bit of white noise.
When you’re living with someone—building your life together, brushing your teeth next to each other every morning—you’re so used to being around each other that you don’t have time to really notice how you are together. Just as you don’t really notice how you are yourself until you take a good long look at yourself in the mirror, and even then…
Well, who the hell am I anyway? I mean I know I’m American, but I need to get more specific. For starters, I never really know what to say when I was asked where I’m from. Having lived in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Paris, the answer isn’t simple. I need a timeline to situate myself:
2 October, 1967 – Born at a hospital in Chicago
1967-? – Lived in Chicago
1971, 72, 73 (?) – Moved to Downers Grove, Illinois, a Southwestern suburb of Chicago
1974-1981 – St. Joseph School, Downers Grove
1981-1982 – St. Vincent’s High School, Lemont
1983-1985 – Downers Grove South High School
1985-1989 – Columbia College Chicago
June 1989 – Left for New York City at age 21
1989 – 1991 – Brooklyn College
Jan-March, 1992 – London
1992 – 1993 – San Francisco
September, 1993 – Paris
The first thing I notice about this timeline is that it begins by depicting my life in terms of academic placement, giving it the sense of direction that a resume or biography is supposed to convey. I wasn’t aiming for that when I wrote it. I guess it’s just that my life was structured by periods of schooling right up through my “adulthood,” so I perceived my earliest years according to my level in school. Qualifiers such as “5th grade” and “6th grade” simply meant more to me than mere dates.
Beginning in 1985, I notice, my timeline abandons school and career movement in favor of geographical placement. In other words, it lists the cities where I lived, not what I was doing in each of those cities. Again, when drafting this timeline, I made no conscious decision to break my life into such divisions. These were merely the points of reference that seemed instantly important given the minimum reflection.
But if I look again at the early entries, I see that physical location was actually a determining (if less immediately visible) factor, even during the school years. Though the text of the timeline seems to calculate the path from one professional arena to another, it’s really more a crude map through the physical spaces occupied most frequently by my body.