Longer Views (30 page)

Mike and I became rather friendlier now—when we were not directly engaged in sexually encountering one another. If we met outside the theater on the street, we said hello and nodded. If we passed in the theater stairwell, we might exchange brief small talk. There were no words at all, however, about what we were doing. It was clear to me that Mike did not want to flaunt his practices before the other patrons, with some of whom he was rather more friendly than he was with me. Among the theater's younger clientele were a number of hustling drag queens and pre-ops: their teasing and joking could be intense. And these were the people who, in the theater, were Mike's conversational friends.

Running shoes, at least the brand I'd bought at that time, do not last as long as they should. Soon it was time to replace them.

I thought of Mike.

By now, though, I'd glimpsed him several times get as involved with other men's running shoes or sneakers as he could from time to time with mine. I felt nothing but empathy and goodwill toward him. But clearly some excited him more than others. The specifics of his preference, however, I hadn't been able to piece together. How, I wondered, do I ask about such a thing? How do I put such a question into language?

Not much later, when I was getting up from my seat in a legitimate 42nd Street movie house where I'd gone to see some genre horror film, I saw Mike—also leaving. We smiled across the crowd and nodded to each other. I decided the best thing to do was to be as open and aboveboard about my curiosity as possible.

“You know,” I said, as we joined each other, walking toward the lobby, “I've got to get a new pair of sneakers, one of these days soon. What kind do you think I should get?”

He seemed not to have heard me. So I persisted: “Is there any kind you like particularly—some kind you think are the best?”

Mike stopped, just inside the lobby door. He turned to me, a look blooming on his face that, in memory, seemed a combination of an astonishment and gratitude near terror. He leaned forward, took my arm, and whispered with an intensity that made me step back: “Blue . . . ! Please . . .
Blue
!” Then he rushed away into the street.

I'd expected an answer at the same level of fervor I'd offered my question. But, I confess, that afternoon, with an anxiety that, somehow, did
not seem all my own but borrowed, at Modell's Sporting Goods I purchased a pair of blue Adidas.

Two days later, when I wore them to the theater, however, Mike was not there.

Nor did I see him on any of my next dozen visits.

After a few months, I realized he had dropped the place from among his regular cruising sites. Three times over the next year I glimpsed Mike in his green jacket with the yellow letters, now on a far corner under the marquis at the Port Authority bus terminal, now by the subway kiosk at 72nd Street, now with his hands in his pockets, hurrying down 45th Street toward Ninth Avenue. But I never saw him in the theater again. I've wondered if our encounter in the second movie had something to do with his abandonment of the first: I can only hope that, among his friends, he might be telling
his
version of this tale—possibly somewhere this evening—for whatever didactic purposes of his own.

A few years ago, however, when I first wrote about Mike to a straight male friend of mine—a Pennsylvania academic—he wrote me back: “If you can explain the fascination with licking sneakers so that I can understand it, you can probably explain anything to anybody!”

My first thought was to take up his challenge; but, as I considered it, I realized all I could explain, of course, was
my
side of the relationship. I'd found Mike desirable—well before I had known of his predilections. Using some formulation by Lacan—“One desires the desire of the other”—it seems easy enough to understand that, if Mike's desire detoured through a particular focus on my sneakers, it was still
his
desire, and therefore exciting—perhaps not quite as much, for me, as it would have been if it had focused on my hands, my mouth, over all my body, on some aspect of my mind, or on my genitals; but it was exciting nevertheless.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that, in similar environments, I'd actually observed many hours of fetishistic behavior by any number of men over the years, though most of those had involved work shoes or engineers' boots in specifically S&M contexts—so, therefore, I knew something quite real about that behavior. But, at the same time, I'd spent perhaps less than a single hour talking about that behavior with any or all of the men involved—including Mike.

That meant there was a great deal I
didn't
know.

What could I explain?

What could I not explain?

Even though I'd responded sexually to Mike, I could no more speak for him than I could speak sexually for any of the very few women (eight, by my count) I had gone to bed with—or, indeed, for any of the many thousands of men.

The Freudian dimorphism in the psychoanalytic discussion of fetishism is one of the empirical disaster areas in the generally brilliant superstructure of Freudian insights: men can be fetishists but women are kleptomaniacs. And within the last two years I have heard at least one psychoanalytic critic state all but categorically that no one has ever found a female fetishist.

Those of you who have read my autobiography of a few years ago (
The Motion of Light in Water
[1988], New York: A Richard Kasak Book, 1993) may remember that my own fetish is men's hands—especially the hands of men who bite their nails. Nor do I have any problem analyzing my particular perversion
as
a fetish. This critic's pronouncement put me in mind of a gathering of artists and artisans some fifteen years ago in Greenwich Village, that included a lean, good-natured redhead, who was both a carpenter and a leather craftsman and whose hands were large, work-soiled, and (to me) sexy—and his petite, blonde wife. In the course of an afternoon, where the group was jesting with one another loudly about sex, I heard the redhead's wife declare, “Someday Todd's going to wash his hands, get them completely clean—at which point I'll probably leave him forever!”

To say my ears perked up is to use a wholly inadequate metaphor for my response. At the time, I was still trying to understand my own sexuality in these matters; minutes later I'd contrived to question the young woman as to exactly what she meant. And, while the others joked on at the other side of the table, we spoke in some detail about her own attraction for men's hands soiled from work, and how this attraction had been—and currently was—constituted into the range of her sexual life: we exchanged childhood experiences, jokes, and current observations. Granted that there were idiosyncratic differences between her object and mine, nevertheless by the end of the conversation I simply had to say: if I had a fetish, then so did she.

And unless she was prevaricating, to say it is impossible that she exists simply will not do. Nor can I think that all those leather dykes have merely snitched their jackets, studded belts, wristbands, chains, and engineer's boots.

In other places I have written that singular, empirical examples—and that is all the particular orders of narrative I indulge here can give—are the place from which to start further, operationalized investigations. They are not the place to decide one has found a general fact. And I mean it—here, too. Certainly I would like to see such operationalized study begun. And my utopian hope is that in such stories as these such study might begin. That is why I've told the tales I have.

But this suggestion of an egalitarian fetishism brings us to a truism in
the field of gay studies that, like any truism, it might be time to review. It is one that again and again, in other discussions, I have felt must stand at the head of any number of talks and articles on matters gay. Let me quote from the last time someone else quoted
me
on just this point.

Here is Teresa de Lauretis, writing in her introduction to a 1991 issue of a special number of
differences
, devoted to Queer Theory:

Delany opens his introduction [to
Uranian Worlds
] with the words: “The situation of the lesbian in America is vastly different from the situation of the gay male. A clear acknowledgement of this fact, especially by male homosexuals, is almost the first requirement for any sophisticated discussion of homosexual politics in this country.” [De Lauretis goes on:] And, as if he were reading my mind or telepathically sharing the thoughts I put into words in this introduction, he adds: “Gay men and gay women may well express solidarity with each other. But in the day to day working out of the reality of liberation, the biggest help we can give each other is a clear and active recognition of the extent and nature of the different contexts and a rich and working sympathy for the different priorities these contexts (for want of a better word) engender.”

Then de Lauretis goes on to quote my co-introducer, Joanna Russ, in her delineation of precisely what some of those differences were in terms of literary availability.

Paradoxically, it is because I wrote that—and because I still stand by it—that I want to tell another, worrisome tale.

It is a simple one. It happened on a chill, early spring afternoon, during my middle twenties, when I sat on the rim of the fountain in Washington Square with a hefty young woman about my age, who wore glasses, black jeans, a leather jacket, and who went by the name Hank.

We talked—talked from the breeze-laced height of the day till the sky above us deepened to indigo, sharing our sexual histories. We were not talking of my adventures on the docks or in subway johns or about my frustrations at trying to establish a more lasting relationship in such a context; we did not discuss her bar life or the cycle of seemingly endless hurts that were serial monogamy.

Rather we talked about the burgeonings of our sexual awareness, in the family, in school, in the street, and in the times we moved from one to the other, now in our early summer camp experiences, now on our visits to cousins in the country, or with playmates away, at last, from overseeing adults. We talked mostly of happenings that occurred before ages thirteen and fourteen, and of experiences that certainly seemed, for both of us then, directly constitutive of who, sexually, we had become.
Both of us, again and again, were astonished at how many experiences we shared, how many of the separate lessons that we'd learned were clearly congruent, and how much of the stuff of the initial awareness of the sexual—from the body out—seemed all but identical for the two of us. But, given the time we had our conversation, no one had yet told us that we were supposed to be all that different. Hank remarked on the similarities. So did I.

For better or for worse, the solidarity I feel with many lesbians is still based on such experiences. What my understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me is why those conversations are rarer for me with women than with men. An understanding of that vastly differing context allows me to translate from women's experiences to mine—when such translation is possible. An understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me why so frequently no translation takes place at all. But what that context does not do in any way is validate the notion for me of some transcendental, irreducible sexual difference between men and women, either in terms of sex or gender, straight or gay, a difference that becomes the ground for any and every social difference one might want to elaborate from it. Indeed, it is precisely my understanding of the specific complexity of the context that makes an acceptance of that irreducible and transcendental difference impossible for me.

Certainly the identification I speak of is always partial, problematic, full of mistakes and misreadings. . . . But that is my experience with any identification I feel with
any
other, male, female, gay, straight. . . .

Thus even the similarities are finally, to the extent they are living ones, a play of differences—only specific ones, socially constituted. Not transcendental ones.

Thinking about discussing this with you tonight, I was wondering at the same time about the inside/outside metaphor that common sense so frequently asks us to use—but which has come under an intensive critique in recent years.

For, in terms of the progression of my didactic narrative argument, we are about to take up the phrases “inside language” and “outside language.”

I did not tell Hank all my stories.

Doubtless, she did not tell me all hers.

I told her, for example, none of the stories I've so far told here. And the stories I did tell—it occurred to me when I was reviewing the incident for inclusion in this account tonight—were, none of them, included in the autobiography I wrote twenty years later . . . though I still remember them very well! Which is to say, they still remain largely outside language.

Diana Fuss has written, introducing the fine volume she edited,
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories
(New York: Routledge, 1991): “The
figure of ‘inside/outside' cannot easily or ever finally be dispensed with; it can only be worked on and worked over—itself turned inside out to expose its critical operations and internal machinery” (p. 1).

Fuss begins the argument I have quoted from the “philosophical opposition between ‘heterosexual' and ‘homosexual,'” heterosexuals representing the inside and homosexuals the outside. But I think there's a finer economy of inside and outside where her point is just as valid: that is the notion of sexuality itself as always occurring partly inside language and partly outside it.

I am not speaking of a hypostatized language as an unarticulated totality, beside which some sex acts occur in an ideal silence apart from the word, while others are swaddled in a constant, approved, and privileged discourse. I speak rather of language as an articulated and variegated set of discursive fields, many of them interpenetrating, but many of whose distinct levels bear a host of economic relations one to another. Some of those levels are privileged, some are not; some are notably more ephemeral than others. These levels fall into hierarchies of reproducibility, accessibility, and permanence. And some never leave that most ephemeral state—that internal speech of the individual we call unarticulated thought. In that sense, of course, all human activity is inside language. But by the very same set of distinctions, all human activity takes place inside certain orders of language and outside certain others—and that is the force of the metaphor behind what I've said about activities inside language and outside language till now, as it will be behind what I have to say in the discussion to come.