It’s Gay Day in Paris. ACT UP’s float rolls past, blasting rave music from huge black speakers. Everyone is dancing half-naked in the Place de la Bastille. There are a couple of picket signs, but mostly music.
On the other side of the world, at the same moment (give or take a dozen jet-lagged hours), my boyfriend Paul marches with his ex, Gary, in an ACT UP demo against the UN’s indifferent HIV/gay policies. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the UN, and police have cleared the street of all the unappetizing homeless to make way for the prominent arrivals of dignitaries and stars.
On French TV, intellectuals analyze the whole fifty-year development of the UN, questioning its efficacy and arriving at no intelligible conclusions. Bosnia continues to explode as world leaders took their $125-a-plate luncheons in an air-conditioned retreat from the homeless homo ghetto.
Paul is in San Francisco looking for a job—a job which will permit us to continue living legally together in the same country. He has two copies of this manuscript in his suitcase. One is his. The other one is for my ex-boyfriend, Dan. The “book” is really a packet of random documents—lists, letters, plays, drug protocols, dream sequences, pages torn from my journals, travel brochures—that trace a rough path through my existence. In two weeks I should get both copies of the book back, annotated with interpretations and comments from two of the most important lovers of my life who happen also to be the inspiration for two of the book’s central characters.
What will they make of the way I’ve summarized our lives together? Will Paul be hurt at my distant presentation of him? Or was he already expecting the legal logistics of our relationship to have wiped out the color of his eyes, the texture of his skin? Will Dan feel I’ve made too much of his HIV, helping to bury him with words? Or will he be pleased to be seen from the comfortable distance of a poetic narrative, a fading ghost with rainbow hair?
I can’t help but be amused by the drama I’ve orchestrated in passing on my manuscript, quietly retreating into the sidelines. I’ll observe what it causes to happen and record the results at the end of this text.
I’m in Paris at Paul’s desk, answering phones during his absence, visiting the occasional sauna and waiting for my pages to be returned to me.
While Paul is trying to hang on to our relationship by lining up interviews, meeting with lawyers and throwing his name around San Francisco, he’ll also be dealing with my complicated perception of him. My book will call the whole plan into question.
I call Paul at Gary’s house, early in the morning SF time. Gary answers groggily. “Let me get the monster for you.” There’s nervous whispering and suddenly “the monster” is on the line. Gary hadn’t even needed to go “get” him because he was right there. They’d obviously been sleeping together. I expected that, but not the guilty tone and definitely not the cute little domestic ritual. (“Monster?”)
Paul met Gary in San Francisco, the year before he met me. It was his first trip to SF, and Gary was his first HIV angel. The virus coursing through that lovely boy’s veins made him seem more urgent. Paul returned to Paris, desperate. How many more moments would they be able to spend together before…?
But Gary wasn’t as in love with Paul as Paul was with his own tragic-little-boy fantasy. So nothing ever came of it but lots of phone calls and a brief visit from Gary, during which Paul claims to have been left in his cold Parisian apartment with a case of scabies. Later, Paul returned to SF to see Gary (just to be sure it was over with them) and that’s when he met me. Gary still has the virus, and he’s still beautiful, at least according to Paul who’s lounging in Gary’s arms while I write this sentence.
So what do all those symbolic accidents have to offer? Nothing, maybe. None of them are going to get me and Paul dual citizenships, recognition in each others’ countries, or even working papers, that much is certain. There are some amazing poetic coincidences, though.