Come Back (11 page)

You know what triggers all this shit? The fact that you demand I come up with an organizing argument to prove to your satisfaction that my attachment to Dash and his work is not neurotic or psychotic or
whatever
. What's going on here? Aren't you my friend anymore? I swear, if I could see your face it would make all the difference.

There were two ways you used to be stern with me. One was when you were defending your boundaries. I know you have a lot of them. When you were doing that, it was serious and scary. It was all about you, and I would have to dig my heels in and obey because you were more scared than I was (even though you would never admit fear, just show the anger). Then there were the times when the littlest smile would creep onto your face, because it was not about your issues at all. Your boundaries weren't threatened; you were just trying to help me and teach me some lesson. I could tell by looking at you that you were just being stern with me because you loved me.

Okay, you aren't her, all right? But it's hard for me to remember you
aren't
my mother when I can't see your fucking face. I resent your reaction to the Dash King business — it brings up all my mother bullshit. There's something about Dash that interests me. So? Can't I flirt with ideas occasionally? Can't you have unconditional love for me and accept that without demanding every observation be a chapter of a fucking PhD thesis?

Of course, you know I can go there. I can switch over in one second, and I can be the professor, the Doctor. That's what I've spent the last twenty years of my life turning myself into. My academic record is, as you know, a great comfort to me. But sometimes I wonder if that's all there is — which is an old Peggy Lee song that I really wish I'd recorded before I died. You see, I'm not superstitious about tossing out remarks that bring up the past, because that's the whole point of being where I am today, of doing all this work, of my relationship with you. I will no longer be examined at every moment and tested. The tests are over.

Okay, okay, I hear you. You'll tell me that testing me is caring for me. That I never learned to care about myself because I wasn't properly parented. Yes, yes, it's true. I don't know how to respond when people are critical. Tests are good, and it's not about unconditional or conditional love. You are not
not
loving me by asking me to justify myself.

Okay, so here goes. I will try to answer your question. You want me to tell you why I'm obsessed with Dash.

It's not just an irrational emotion. It's not some force from the past drawing me back. Yes, there may be a theoretical basis (or perhaps I should say, paradoxically, an anti-theory theoretical basis) for my pursuance of the Dash King papers. Perhaps I've been on thin ice with you — because of the antiqueness of his obsessions and their possible relationship to my past. Also, I know you rejected all that queer stuff long ago with the rest of the world. Now we live in a post-theory — or what has been postulated as post-theory — era. And we are, in fact, moving into what might be called the post-post-theory era. I am perfectly aware of that. The truth is that my interest in Dash King can easily be related to the post-theory position. I know post-theory was justified long ago, but perhaps not in this particular way.

All right, I am willing to go there, unafraid. In fact, that should be my theme here: unafraid. I am willing to go into dangerous territories. And you are, in effect, daring me. So I will. You will probably say that what I am about to postulate has already been said. Fine, but have all the implications been explored?

The implications become clear in this next Dash text. It's about the perils of deconstruction, of theory, of constructionism, of fantasy, of fiction. . . . It seems to me that the death of homosexuality was a kind of suicide. Speaking of implications, homosexuals (and specifically intellectuals like Foucault) are implicated in this. Dash clearly has issues with Foucault. Yet I would argue that his view of the world is Foucauldian — Dash is involved with the construct of sexuality, though he would deny homosexuality is a construct. But his life and his letters prove to us, so blatantly, that it is.

Let's begin with the dangers of theory (which have been well documented). I am interested in looking at extreme skepticism. Here's one, just to pick a random example: post-structuralists once went so far as to question Galileo's theory of gravity as a truism. Science tells us there have been different concepts of gravity. We know that Aristotle, when he witnessed gravity, witnessed a stone seeking out its natural place. Galileo, on the contrary, witnessed, in the movement of the same stone, the gravitationally induced movement of a pendulum. These are two different views of reality. And traditional history, before post-structuralism, would have us think that Galileo's view was the correct view, and that Newtonian physics (based on Galileo's theories) had transcended the ancient Greek view, which was mired in superstition. But post-structuralism would have us look at the two approaches to gravity as different constructs that are equivalent in value, suggesting that each view is acceptable in its own context. Neither is more right than the other. But we can see the weakness in the post-structuralist position. What does it leave us with? A world in which everything is a construct, where there is no “there” there; where there is, in effect, no reality, only relativity. Philosophers are now certainly toying with the theory that there is “no reality,” and some are going further with it. I know you have done some research in that area.

I am struggling with it. I see the perils of post-structuralism, and post theory that would deny reality. I am one of those who is — as you may have already guessed — still attracted to reality. There, I have let the cat out of the bag. I am attracted to reality. Is that the “first principle” that you wish to challenge? Well, go ahead. Or are you going to say that the reality principle is okay for some but not others? That it has dangers for people like me, people with addiction issues? We are attracted to the real world. This means, for us, doing drugs in the real world. This means living, in other words, in a fantasy world
in reality
, rather than living in cyberspace, a completely fictional world. But cyberspace would be a much safer place for us.

This brings me right back to the idea that I am some sort of special person. And I thought the idea was for me to forget how special I am (which I mainly have done). I thought I was supposed to simply function as an academic, to function within that particular reality. There is also, I think, a fallacy here. The implication that arises from the notion that I can't handle reality, or shouldn't be attracted to it, is that all reality is sordid, or sexual, or dark, or sad, or dirty. But why need it be? Why can't reality be me sitting — or attempting to — at a desk and working on theory or anti-theory? I am, for one, willing to accept that reality.

And so how does this all connect with Dash? You will see from what follows that Dash himself was the victim of a gay paradigm. That paradigm was self-destruction: suicide. As much as he resisted Foucault, it was inevitable he would be caught in this trap. What was real for Dash and so many of his ilk at the decadent “end of gay” was not sex itself or sexual choice, but some fiction of sexuality. As we know now, object choice is varied, as is gender, and this is quite accepted in the modern world.

Certainly it has been no problem for our conservative government to fund sex changes as part of our medical plans. It has been no problem for what used to be called same-sex marriages and are now just called plain old marriages. There was never any problem with this, except on the part of certain — I am not afraid to say it — fundamentalists. But as we well know, though there are definite fundamentalist elements in our government, they do not actually make the laws (thank God, and pray they never do!). But they are there, lurking. At any rate, it would be pretty hard, I think, for even fundamentalists to deny the principles of tolerance that have been written into our legal system.

Similarly, it is impossible to write away the rights of women, although the concept of woman has become pragmatically irrelevant. Biology, after all, has less and less a part to play in that concept, or in sex, sexuality or conception. But what
has
of course disappeared, and gone underground, are the aspects of sexuality that were associated with gay culture — promiscuity, drug addiction and the endless encyclopedia of weird extreme sexual practices. We all know (and I will say it again, even though it upsets you) that these things exist. Certain very sad and perverted people are involved with these things. We know that they are not healthy. And of course health, or at least survival, for the many — for as many years as possible — has become one of the ruling principles of our existence; so much of a ruling principle that we don't have to worry about it — the government just takes care of it for us.

On that note, it amazes me that cigarettes are still for sale. It's interesting that they are technically illegal. How can something be illegal, and still be taxed? Somehow this has managed to happen with cigarettes. I know that occasionally people are arrested for smoking in public and face stiff jail time, but this is very odd considering that cigarettes are legal to buy and smoke in one's own home, as long as your home is not a business or connected to another building. But you understand issues of the law and citizenship better than I.

So what am I getting at? What Dash was “fighting” for, in his own tiny mind, were all the aspects of sexuality that were related to what he labelled gay culture — drag, promiscuity, leather fetish, weird sexual practices, alternative relationships, feminine men with male bodies . . . the fictional constructions of homosexuality. This was his hopeless cause, and made his fight pathetic and bathetic, but interesting to me in its martyred superfluidity. Now, it's true that Dash, to give him his due, was right about some things. For instance, his complaints about academia and jargon were echoed by others of his time. Remember Sokal's famous hoax paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”? It was written entirely in fake jargon and published.

But it is when Dash gets into his own area of queer theory, and into his own incredibly warped, complicated and self-defeating arguments about gay life, that his tragedy, being hanged by his own favourite construction and strangled by his dearest fantasies, becomes clear. It's also interesting, in the following passage, that Dash talks so much about
AIDS
, and that his lover challenged that paradigm by practising unsafe sex. But, paradoxically, his lover also fit quite neatly, by doing so, into a much larger and more dangerous construct — that of the suicidal homosexual. Unsafe sex was very dangerous at the time, in fact illegal. Today we have simply made promiscuity illegal — at least,
real
promiscuity. Promiscuity in cyberspace is, as we know, ubiquitous.

So this text, which was probably sent to his supervisor, Antonio, although it is not addressed to him specifically, is tragically prophetic — especially when viewed in the context of the rumours around Foucault (of which you are probably aware). It is significant that no one knows whether or not these rumours are true, and probably never will. They are in their own way constructs or fantasies. But, at any rate, there were people who said that Foucault, who died of
AIDS
, practised unsafe sex. Of course, when he died, safe sex itself was a relatively new concept. But the notion was that Foucault, who ultimately believed in a shifting vision of history and fact, was not himself convinced that there was such a thing as
AIDS
. How could he be convinced when he did not believe that science, history or facts themselves were anything but fictional constructs? Though it has never ever been proved that Foucault practised unsafe sex, it is nevertheless an interesting theory that slips Foucault into the suicidal paradigm that Dash inhabits so neatly. But you can see for yourself:

I have had it with the idea of writing a thesis. There isn't any point; I don't want to go on and can't go on. Instead I am writing you this. This belongs in the garbage or in my memoirs. Do you think anyone would be interested in the memoirs of an old fag like me who created one of the world's premier gay theatres? No, no one is interested in that now. I wouldn't even try. It would be like casting pearls before swine. I have decided that if you want me to write something for you, and not “give up” writing, then I have to go on academic strike, and by that I mean I am unable to write another essay or weave any more theories. They have nothing to do with reality. And I'm not going to play the game called “What is reality?” Anybody who comes to me with that kind of question I would class with the philosophers that Bill Cosby talks about in his comedy. The philosophers who ask, “Why is there air?” ask a question as valid as “Does reality exist?” Any dummy knows the answer to that: it doesn't matter if reality does not exist, it's all we've got. So I'm not going to even try filling this paper with anything that resembles jargon. And I'm not going to talk about Shakespeare anymore. I'm going to talk about myself. This is going to be very embarrassing for you, I'm sure. But it's much more embarrassing for me to write. But since you said, “Don't stop writing, write about anything,” it's your fault. How embarrassing will this be for you? Well, you said you lived through the sixties and that that time was more embarrassing than anything — you took part in nude sit-ins, the whole bit.

Okay, so not only am I going to be personal, I am going to be as personal as possible. I am in love with an impossible person. He is an impossible boy. And he doesn't love me back. He never will. And that is why I love him. I love him more than anything and I get absolutely nothing in return. There's a novel by Barbara Pym called
No Fond Return of Love
(that is a quote from some poem). Okay, I admit it, I'm a big fan of Barbara Pym. And Philip Larkin. Yeah, Philip Larkin. There's one for you. I can't be bothered to look up the Pym quote and I'm not going to. The novel is about a woman who is in love with a man and follows him around everywhere but doesn't expect anything back. The man returns her love by falling in love with her daughter and trying to seduce the girl because he's basically a pedophile.