Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (19 page)

his meds. If he had a single hard-on in the year before he died, I felt I should stand aside so it could point at them. Partly it was because of Robert: to have two men in my life disabled by illness was one too many, and I slowly closed to Jack to protect myself from the pain of it.

And partly it was because watching another man I loved waste and die felt impossible. I do not know how I could possibly have allowed myself to withdraw from him, from any of them, but as I saw time passing, and Jack getting worse and worse, my heart shut down. I still sent him love notes. I still held him when I saw him. I did not speak to him about it, did not let him in on my feelings, did not see a therapist, did not try for closure.

My heart still leaped, when he emailed me after he was dead. If Jack had been failing because of an AIDS-related illness, they might have been able to help him. But the days when doctors eagerly try to diagnose mystery ailments in beautiful queer men are over. Now there are protocols. Now there are meds that will keep the men alive, changing their bodies into drug-mediated entities of different shape and ability—but alive—but Jack was sick with something else, something they never really diagnosed, so another one of the HIV-negative queer men, like Robert too, who dodged the bullet of the epidemic, was visited by illness just

the same.

Now all my men—Robert the exception that proves the rule—are dead.

Death let Jack use his computer, though, and he sent me one email. I’m surprised there haven’t been more—don’t you think the Russian spammers might have discovered a way to harness the dead computer-savvy queers the way the Mormons consider the afterlife their own personal religious recruiting station? I wish he would write back to me, even if only to tell me about some other

kind of software I can’t live without. I trusted his recommenda- tions about stuff like that when he was alive, too.

Most of my other men died before the Internet was a thing.

They never write to me.

2

If I had come to San Francisco when I meant to—if I had run away to Haight-Ashbury when I was thirteen, as I dreamed of doing, if I had lit out right after high school and gotten here in the summer of 1974, if I had dropped out of college and joined Will when he moved to the city he called New Jerusalem in time to burn cars in the White Night riots of 1979, I would surely have caught this bullet. I’d have found my way to the commune in the Haight where the Cockettes lived. I’d have been an SM dyke with nowhere to play but the Catacombs, like Pat Califia. I’d have fucked bi men and fags like Cynthia Slater, the first woman I knew who did get HIV, and succumbed. If I had been playing beside her, with the same people, I might have been dead before Jack ever left his small city where he was the biggest scary queer they ever saw because, like all of us, his path inexorably led him to San Francisco.

If I had come to San Francisco when I really should have come, not just for a visit during Pride Week, but to claim my city and promise myself to her when she first called to me, I would have met David Lourea at the Bisexual Center in 1981. I’d have met Steven Brown at San Francisco Sex Information not in 1989, when I did meet him there, but sometime shortly after 1973. By the time I met Robert—who’d withdrawn from the baths years before HIV shut them down because he knew enough to see that steadily rising caseload of hepatitis boded no good—I might have been HIV-positive.

Before I’d have learned, in the early ’80s, to be afraid, I’d have been unafraid, just like all the men whose sexual revolution in the 1970s inspired me from afar to try to understand from what cloth my own sexual revolution might be cut, a small-town dyke who really wanted to fuck practically every gay man she ever saw. Those men, finally unchained, had created their army of lovers, an army of lovers who could not fail: but who expected death to creep in along with the pleasure, along with the cocks-hard community-making? I came to San Francisco for the same reason they did: to fuck queer men, to make a home in New Jerusalem.

I have had the life I should have had in San Francisco, more or less. I came to partake of and foster the sexual revolution, and surely I have done some things that count for that. You should have seen us, in the early ’90s, saying Fuck You to Death, making places for people to play safely, trying to sanitize these dangerous streets just enough to keep our people, the sex people, from dying. You should have felt how hot to the touch a naked cock could be when there was no sure way to keep someone alive if they got AIDS from the load that cock shot. What it meant to negotiate to be fluid-bonded when that bond had come to promise more than any ring: naked-cock sex was now coded to mean life or death, like the words the straight people said when they got married, but everyone knows they can get out of that if they want to.

I did not worship cock till I got to San Francisco, because nobody anywhere else I ever found people to fuck was proud enough of their cock, worshipful enough of other men’s cocks, to override the fear and derision and tension that tempers desire with shame and dirt and mistrust. Most places, for most people, but in San Francisco? Here, fags sing hymns to cock, in Esperanto.

Besides, I was a dyke—a dyke who wanted to fuck fags, yes, but also a woman whose cultural context was so shot through

with the bias of the binary that it scarcely let the possibility exist of real love between people whose bodies were different. Only when I could find that queer-on-queer love did it feel safe, feel like home, and open me to desire unsullied by the war-between- the-sexes taint that heterosexuality so often had.

And when I came home to that love, I found it tainted with something else.

3

I remember when I met Jack.

It was at a reading at 848 Community Space, and there he was, so sexy and magical in his long silver hair. Nothing else about him was elven; it was butch—his faded 501s fit tight as I slid a card into his pocket and told him to call if he wanted to be invited to a sex party. He cut his silvery hair later and I wondered if everyone else who loved and desired him felt as bereft as I did. Now I know that was just a foreshadowing of loss, one part of him slipping away, the rest finally ready to follow. All the men he did home- care for: their brothers are still alive, but because he did not have AIDS, in 2011 he died an old-school AIDS death.

I remember when I met Steven.

He stood in front of us at the SFSI training, tall, charismatic and funny, and told us about being a sex surrogate. He thought people came to him mainly to heal the part of their lives scarred by the absence of touch: We stroke our cats and dogs, he said, not each other. Steven lived with HIV for twenty years. He said that when you have a hundred things that get you off, giving up one or two of them wasn’t such a loss as when those were the only things—naked cock in cunt or asshole, he meant—that could mean sex and pleasure.

I remember when I met Robert.

Tall, beautiful, the brightest eyes, describing himself as some older woman’s Twinkie: that’s how queers flag each other, with language and eye contact, and once we touched, I knew I’d do whatever it took to keep him in my life, and I have. “And we carried each other through it,” he said, crying a little, as I told him I was writing about AIDS. The only thing that was powerful enough to overcome the times in which we lived was lust, and we had so much of it that for some years, we seemed to float above all the pain. Funny, this is not the narration of our love that I’d have constructed, but it’s true: I wonder how many others, HIV- negative, met then and tried to create all the fuck-love in one place we felt our brothers being denied?

I remember when I met David.

Powerfully built and so very powerful in his spirit. His par- ents were Holocaust survivors; his sexuality became intertwined, even though he was a devoted sadomasochist, with the notion of
tikkun olam
, the care of the world. Only authentic sexuality
could
, in fact, carry us through the plague years—though David did not survive them. He once said that “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” a way to talk about harm reduction: every attempt, whether or not it was 100 percent successful, helped make things better, keep us safer, halt the virus more than it might have been halted if we just wilted in the face of it and did not try. David and I were like magnets, drawing each other close and then the polarities flipping, preventing our connection. For me it was the pure fear of loving someone with HIV—but I did love him, more than I was ever able to say or to show.

I remember when I met James.

A boyish, scruffy lawyer, the man who had made Oregon di- vest its investments from South Africa. On the heels of this suc- cess he joined the Willamette AIDS Council, where we worked

together to try to create HIV awareness and advocacy from the ground up. He did not stay in Oregon long—he went to New York to work with the city’s newly established AIDS Office as his T-cells dwindled and I tried to love him as lightly as I could— though we had spent his last month in Oregon necking like teen- agers, he was a gay man and I was a lesbian (well, more or less) and our love for each other was like the Scarecrow’s crossed arms: this way! That way!

He was not the only man who talked to me of his impending death without letting it become the weighty thing it really was, the millstone that would forever change the way my heart was able to beat. He did not tell me when it was time to come and see him to say good-bye. We beautiful, vital, sexual youths; we human thoroughbreds; I think we are ashamed to die.

4

Okay, so I keep telling you: I was a dyke.

That’s only true insofar as “dyke” is an identity that can in- corporate both a fierce love of, and identification with, women— plus in my case, a fierce love of, and identification with, fags. There really is no actual word for the thing that I was. But that is so true of so many of us; it’s the reason we now just say “queer.”

For a minute, after a youth full of bedpost-notching, the kind of frisky experimental fucking that teenagers do best, I tried to stay stable and lesbian. Well, that was never going to take, but I subsumed my desire for male bodies, my delight at sparring with men as a prelude to fucking them, into erotically charged friend- ships with gay men. One after the other, I created gay activist events and groups, my love for my coconspirators floating like oil on top of the water that was my connection with my women lovers. I might have gone on forever this way, my bisexuality

living mostly in frantic masturbation sessions fueled by gay porn. Until James. Until the gay man who should have pretended not to notice my crush instead kissed me good night until the windows of his Volkswagen steamed. Until the safely unattain- able man turned out to be polymorphous enough—or enough in love with me too—to allow acknowledged, not silenced, erotic

feeling to float in the air between us.

And how could a queer activist not take seriously the challenge and dilemma of forbidden love? We would never have wanted to be seen as any kind of straight, but the freedom to love is what our whole struggle was about. AIDS was the reason I went from lesbian to bisexual: that I might lose James made me see that the heart of my turn-on was pure love.

James opened the door to everything: queer men, queer sex, a newly (re)embraced bisexual identity, San Francisco…the person I have become. James wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied to be the first woman working at an AIDS service or- ganization—I didn’t get the job, because it was still too soon for women to really be part of the change that would change every- thing, but James said this: “Carol is more comfortable with and for gay men than most gay men I know.”

He did not live to read
The Leather Daddy and the Femme
, to watch
Bend Over Boyfriend
, to realize that I
did
walk through the door he opened. Many people offer us change, but only a few people change us as completely as James’s love changed me.

And he set up, gracefully and inexorably, a pattern I have re- tained through all the men I’ve loved who are dead: a full stop regarding intimacy, sex, a relationship with a future. When that future spells death, neither I nor they ever try to keep me on the train.

5

Look at this city.

Go up to the East Bay hills or drive the frontage road in Berkeley. Take the ferry to Alcatraz or Angel Island. Emerge through the Waldo Tunnel for that fast, stunning shot of San Francisco framed by the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, or go down to Fort Baker, where there’s a Michelin-star restaurant now instead of an Army base. Drive through the Bay Bridge tunnel under Yerba Buena Island—do you always say, as Robert and I do, “Look, we
live
there”? Climb to the top of Potrero Hill or Bernal Heights. Take the ferry from Oakland or Marin. Look at the skyline, the hills, the bridges spanning away.

Or go to the top of Twin Peaks; from one side you can see the Pacific, the blocks of houses stretching off to the west and south. But from the other side, you look right down into the Castro. If you knew where to focus, you could pick out the top of the apart- ment house where Steven Brown lived, or any one of your old lovers—it probably doesn’t happen anymore, but years ago, men who lived on the slopes of Twin Peaks could find a trick among all those apartments just by holding up a sign with their phone number written large enough to read from across the way, while they slowly worked their cocks on the balcony or at the kitchen window.

Every part of San Francisco has been touched by AIDS, but that swath of downslope, the valley below it and the hills that start to rise up again as you head south on Castro Street, that part was decimated as surely as if a neutron bomb had burned away the men who had lived there when I first came to San Francisco to visit Will during Pride Week in 1978. The next time I came, with my girlfriend Ellen, we walked the block from Market to Eighteenth Street after the parade, and it was so thick with men,

bare-chested, Izod-shirted, tight-Levi’d, chaps-assed, nipple- ringed, drunk on Gay Pride and brotherhood, that we had to cling to each other’s hands like swimmers fighting rapids to avoid being split apart and losing each other. It was the first time I had ever been surrounded by men with no feeling at all of fear. We were pressed in like a scrum of sardines, we were held securely between sweaty men, and I was so happy, I have no idea how I mustered the strength the next day to leave the city and go back to the mundane world. San Francisco
was
New Jerusalem; it was Oz.