Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (2 page)

Anyway—contrary to the activists who want the world to believe not only that Gay Is Good, but Gay Is Better—gay life does have its sadness.

Your novel might serve a historical purpose—if only because the young queens nowadays are utterly indistinguishable from straight boys. The twenty-year-olds are completely calm about being gay,
they
do not consider themselves doomed. Someone should record the madness, the despair, of the old-time queens, the Great Queens whose stories, unlike Elizabeth of Austria's(!), have never been told: Sutherland, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and Epstein—the true loonies of this society, refusing to camouflage themselves for society's sake.

However, I don't think a novel is a historical record; all a piece of literature should do, I think, is tell you what it was like touching Frank Romero's lips for the first time on a hot afternoon in August in the bathroom of Les's Café on the way to Fire Island. If you can do that, divine!

So I think your task is nearly impossible, but send it on. I'd love to sit under the Spanish moss with a glass of lemonade and some pecan pralines, and read a novel written by a dear friend! How very southern! And I grow more fond of the South every day. The only part of this country with any manners whatsoever, and it's merely because people have no manners anymore that they are going to blow themselves up. I enclose one azalea, a faded shrimp color; I don't know what it will be when you get it.

Hélène de Sévign
é

Midnight

The Lower East Side

Delirium,

Just returned from an Episcopalian priest, who is apparently very popular with his congregation in a little town in Connecticut
—trés chic,
of course. The man is so handsome, and so witty, and so charming—he recited psalms for me, and then had me beat him up with the butt of a machete and spit all over his face (the strain of being popular, I guess). And
then
I went to the Pierre, where lives Duncan Uhr, a boy with one of the biggest trust funds in New York,
and
one of the biggest dicks (a double legacy). He is quite intelligent, but he sits in the Pierre all day eating spaghetti and watching reruns of
I Love Lucy
and having callboys come over; or he goes to the Baths at night. It was rather embarrassing, however, because WE KNEW EACH OTHER AT CHOATE! However, he had forgotten this till I reminded him,
after
our transaction was complete.

I do not know whether to use as a quote to open my novel a line of Nietzsche or the Shirelles:

Life can never be

Exactly what you want it to be.

(from "Dedicated to The One I Love")

In fact, I don't know whether the novel should be done along the lines of
Auntie Mame,
or
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;
it has elements of both.

About your objections—which I appreciated—agree with Ramon, everyone's attention span
is
too short, and that
is
what's wrong with the world; however, as to nobody wants to read about fags!

I can't help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time—remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?—I am a doomed queen.

I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I'm not! I am completely, hopelessly gay!

In fact when Stanford sent me a questionnaire asking what was the peak experience of the past ten years of my life, a voice inside answered without hesitation: sucking Alfredo Montavaldi's cock. (It certainly meant more than Professor Leon's Chaucer seminar.)

But let me reassure you, my novel is not about fags. It is about a few characters who just happen to be gay (I know that's a cliché, but it's true). After all, most fags are as boring as straight people—they start businesses with lovers and end up in Hollywood, Florida, with dogs and double-knit slacks and I have no desire to write about them. What can you say about a success? Nothing! But failures—that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives
right
off the cliff! that fascinates me. The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer, and who fall into degradation and sordidness! It was those whom Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH! (One of my clients has an account with a potato chip firm—I sit on his face.)

So you see I've written about a small subspecies only, I've written about doomed queens.
Capisce?

It’s very cold again; I passed the woman who lives next door coming up the stairs—she was drunk, as usual, and had to grab the railing to keep from falling over. She has such a sad face, the faded face of a woman who was once pretty, and now her face is just resigned, and it gives me a chill in my bones. THAT is what I want to write about—why life is SAD. And what people do for Love (everything)—whether they're gay or not.

Victor Hugo

High Noon

Chiggers & Spanish Moss

Life Itself,

Just came in from picking strawberries—big, beautiful ones—it is so good to work in the earth, dearest, to have Dirt under your fingernails—and not coming through the telephone, for a change! (Oh, that greasy receiver!) I cannot tell you how peaceful it is outside in the yard. It is high noon, love; everything is stunned by the heat; perfect silence, even the birds are napping; a faint wind blows through the screen, a wind far more caressing than any human lover's lips; and I feel at perfect peace with the universe. And how much there is in it! Yesterday I cleared some grass around a palm tree to fertilize it, (the farmers down here use banana skins, it gives the soil potassium) and I uncovered the glistening, almost liquid body of a baby snake—a striped, gray, wet body, which until then had been growing in a little cavern of grass and earth beside the palm tree trunk; I found, too, a turtle egg, very white and veined, like marble, or hard sugar; and a beautiful boy in a rowboat, fishing in the weeds offshore, with a hunting knife in his belt, in all the stillness and the heat.

Forgive me for boring you with all of this. However, there is no news down here, as you can well imagine—other than my turtle egg, and that the organist at church is sick, and Ramon's grandmother, too, who is visiting us. It occurred to me last night as I was bathing Señora Echevarria that the real sadness of gay life is that it cuts us off from experience like this: to be in a shadowed room at dusk on a spring evening, wiping the forehead of an old Cuban lady (who at least does not claim to have come from a Wealthy, Aristocratic Family of Havana, like all those queens in New York) while Ramon spoke to her in Spanish (alas, I know only French; and why? Because when I first came to New York, Sutherland told me there were only two requirements for social success with those queens in the Hamptons: a perfect knowledge of French and a big dick) and there was so much LIFE in that room, not the hothouse, artificial, desperate life we led up there in Gotham, but LIFE as it is in all its complexity and richness. For what is the real sadness of doomed, queens? That they run in packs with one another waiting for the next crow's foot to appear, and wondering how many more seasons they can spend on Fire Island before they have to take a house in upstate New York. Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations. My God!

Duncan Uhr is a perfect example, and he was driven mad by it years ago. You know he is crazy. He loses control if anyone rejects him, he used to break into houses at Fire Island, and climb over the cubicles in the Baths to get at people. I was once in a room at the Everard having sex with a Korean cellist, and I looked up in the throes of passion to see Duncan climbing down the wall above me like a Human Fly. He paid, "Don't mind me, just go on as you were," and proceeded to mount the Korean boy, who was already mounted on
me (
the Korean said nothing; Orientals are so polite). I asked Duncan if sex like that wasn't difficult, and he said, "No, it's all a matter of rhythm, one-two-three, one-two-three, kind of like doing the Beguiner (It was remarks like that, darling, that made me realize I had to get out of New York, divine as the city is!)

Where is the novel?

le Duc de Saint-Simon

S
EVEN A.M.

The Lower East Side

Existence,

There is no heat, no hot water, and the wind is rattling the windows as I type this letter to you after staying up all night to finish the novel. I can see right into the kitchen of the apartment behind this one, over the fire escape. The kitchen is very neat—a Japanese girl lives there—and on her shelf are lined up the following products: Tide, Comet, Dove Dishwashing, Woolite, and Clorox—exactly the things on
my
shelf!!!!

Adored your story about Duncan Uhr, and believe me, it is only one of many. He was a very bright boy at school but always desperately in love, of course. Somewhat embarrassing to see him in that context, but when you're hooking, you never know who will open the door.

Flamingo had a Black Party last night—quite a crash; live models being fist-fucked on platforms, pornographic movies on all the walls, and every leather queen in New York pissing on each other in the back room. Too decadent,
n'est-ce pas?
Also too boring—I left before two, but as I was going out the door, a voice in my ear said: "We're having a small Crucifixion, just a few friends, at Park and Seventy-fifth after the party, can you make it?" I turned and it was Sutherland, with his two Egyptian heiresses, completely covered in leather with zippers up the back and tiny holes for their ears and nose/mouth! They are indefatigable! And so chic!

So, vision, the novel is ready at last; it is, in the end, about Sutherland—and Malone. Did you expect that? People are celebrated for all the wrong reasons, I think—people should be famous for being
good—
and Malone was—and his story is the saddest of all, somehow. I've called it
Wild Swans;
do you think people will think it's about
birds?

So I'm off, darling, to mail this at the post office, and then to go on a call: a pilot for Lufthansa Airlines. It sounds like something I'd do for free! But then sex has no meaning for me anymore; it's too pointless.

Oh—I discovered veneral warts on my ass last week. Had them burned off by Dr. Jones, in that VD Mill he runs on Lexington Avenue; if you went to him with a broken leg, he'd tell you it was syphilis—too too depressing/cheers.

Oh—the azaleas arrived a dark purple. Thanks. I decided on Santayana & Yeats.

Enclosed: one first novel (I did not change the names; there are no innocents to protect!)

Yours in Christ,

Marie de Maintenon

H
E
was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter, but it was I who ended up going back to Fire Island to pick up his things. Now my father used to say, and I agree: There is nothing so unhappy as going through the clothes of a friend who has died, to see what may be used and what should be given to charity.

But Malone was hardly even a friend—something much more, and much less, perhaps—and so it felt odd to be traveling out there yesterday afternoon. It was a fine autumn day, the last week of October, and as the taxi drove from the train station in Sayville to the docks, that village had never looked more attractive. There was an unspoken celebration in the very silence of the end of that long summer season, when a hundred taxis a day like ours crisscrossed the streets between the train station and the docks, taking the inhabitants of Manhattan across that shallow bay to their revelries on the beach of Fire Island. It was a journey between islands, after all: from Manhattan to Long Island to Fire Island, and the last island of the three was nothing but a sandbar, as slim as a parenthesis, enclosing the Atlantic, the very last fringe of soil on which a man might put up his house, and leave behind him all—absolutely all—of that huge continent to the west. There are New Yorkers who boast they've never been west of the Hudson, but the exhausted souls who went each weekend of summer to their houses on that long sandbar known among certain crowds as the Dangerous Island (dangerous because you could lose your heart, your reputation, your contact lenses), they put an even more disdainful distance between themselves and America: free, free at last.