Not but a week or two ago I opened a satchel from the back of the closet and found twenty years worth of correspondence, drawings, posters for marches long past, writing, notebooks. I was meant to be cleaning out the closet. I did not. I sat on the bed and read letters from friends living and dead and then I ate my lunch and read a one act play I wrote when I was twenty two. Time and forgetfulness had not improved the thing at all. It was still not a very good play. When I was done I sent it to live on a farm with the not very good novel I wrote when I was thirty.
Just today I opened a drawer in my dresser and I found for no reason a nude photo of me. I was looking for something else — it really doesn’t matter what — and there it was -- there I was -- under all the other junk, the keepsakes and whatnots: myself naked on someone else’s bed, smoking, frankly carnal or more probably postcoital. Rather startling there amidst the antique valentines, stopped watches, and old eyeglasses. How did that get there?! It is an actual print, this nude, not a Polaroid, which means, for anyone too young to know or care that it was taken with a camera and the film was developed by someone else, probably at a camera shop or drugstore in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There’s a time-stamp on the print that tells me that the photo is roughly forty years old, so I was not exploited in any way when it was taken, in case that was anyone's first thought (Nobody made Coco take her blouse off this time, honest.) Still, it was a daring thing to have done then, take a nude photo and get it developed commercially. Lucky no one noticed or reported it. We could have been arrested, me and the photographer. From the pose it's pretty obvious I did not take the photo, and just as obvious that I didn't mind it being taken.
Bless whoever did, or rather his memory. I confess here and now to not remembering the gentleman's full name. Pretty sure he's long dead so it frankly does not matter now to anyone but me. Frankly I'm glad to have it. It’s not like I posed for a lot of nudes. Wish I'd posed for more! Interestingly, I don't remember being given the photograph and I don't actually remember posing for it, though that looks like a lot of consent right there. Of course I remembered the photo as soon as I saw it, but it's not the sort of thing one keeps by the bedside or framed in the guest room. I don't remember putting it in that drawer either. As for where else it may be in the world, I rather doubt I was his only model. Perhaps there is somewhere a whole album or shoebox extant of like mementos. So old as to be of historical interest now, I should think. Still, if anybody finds that negative and wants to exploit that windfall, have at it. The hair and glasses cause my only blushes now, and they date it almost as accurately as the time-stamp. Not sure who the audience would be, but you never know. Turns up on some vintage porn site, you let me know. I'd be thrilled.
It is not the photograph in the photograph I made to go with these words. The picture above includes another photo I found in that drawer, a snapshot of my late friend Peter on a beach in San Diego where he lived at the time. Peter died of AIDS a long time ago/yesterday and will always now be young. I really like this photo too. Don’t remember the dogs. Dogs four and two footed simply found Peter. Dogs, children, cats, people bumming cigarettes, friends, strangers with no reason to confide in him other than his smile, they all found Pete. He had an open face, very attractive, easy to love. Lord knows I did. I chose this picture of my friend because he was so beautiful and we were young then together, if not so young as I was in that nude shot. Still, Peter is youth, forever.
He can be that here as well.
We were something, once, the pair of us -- which is just another way of saying we were young together.
At the time of Peter's death there were still a handful of stunning Polaroids that I dutifully, regretfully destroyed as he'd asked me to some time before. He was breathtakingly beautiful in some of those. At best in my one nude, I look young. I might even go so far as to say cute. Happy. In Pete's he always looked deadly earnest; determined, concentrated, poised. I look damp. Pete looked dewy. I looked sated. He looked insatiable. Comparing those remembered photos with the one in my hand, I'd say the primary difference is that he was a dancer and completely in his body and I was only very briefly forgetful of mine.
Just so you know, I’m not showing anybody my nude — not that anybody’s likely to ask, but just to be clear. I’m not ashamed, not of having posed for the picture, not of anything in it, not of keeping it. Actually I'm thrilled to see how good I look in it, how unselfconscious. I nevertheless decided not to share it. Not online. Not at all.
A few years ago I posted a black and white picture of my young father holding his firstborn baby, my older brother. Clearly taken at a summer picnic, my father was shirtless in the picture. My brother is in a blanket. Facebook took it down for nudity “not meeting community standards.”
Primitives, these commercial censors, these algorithmic aunties, prudish and lazy and dumb. Homophonic too. Fuck ‘em — yeah, but maybe not pick that fight again today. Can't win. More important battles now anyway, some in the streets.
The other reason not to share my nude isn't anything to do modesty or embarrassment, or even privacy as some abstract absolute, come to that. A retired acquaintance who has recently taken up writing and started his first novel asked me if, in my opinion "great writing" needs to be "ruthlessly honest." Don't entirely remember my answer but I hope I had the sense to back away as quickly and as gracefully as I could from any suggestion that "ruthless honesty" was among either my virtues or my vices, or that I had ever aspired personally to "greatness." Maybe that sort of thing is necessary to art. I could not say. In my small experience though all art isn't necessarily about ambition or expectation, just work. To my mind, that's where the ruthless honesty might best be applied. Nobody said your novel has to tell all the truth, honey. It just needs to be better. As for integrity, there's more than one may to measure that too. Everything I've written, most of it now in the first person? There are still other people, living and dead that I would rather not hurt. If that's a curb on my artistic integrity, well so be it. Why not tell all? Show my ass? Shit, who am I still trying so hard to impress? My parents are dead. Doesn't mean all my business needs to be in the street. My ass, honey, is my own.
When I was stretched out on that stained duvet in my all together, you can be sure I was very much not thinking about posterity. I pretty clearly hadn't so much as a thought in my shaggy head. If I had to guess, I'd bet I was hungry. Who knows? My only responsibility to that earlier version of me is to maybe remember him less harshly than I am usually inclined to do, perhaps forgive him everything. How's that for a start? Truth is I barely remember him most of the time -- until I am reminded by something he wrote or something someone else remembers him saying or doing or until, as happened today, he stumbles ass-out into the present day and actually puts his junk right in my face.
Who are these people who seek to preserve their own youth? What really is the point of that? My own is as extinct as the Pharaohs, sweetheart. I'm not saying that I am as old as all that, just that who I once was or might have been is not indeed who I've turned out to be and that is fine. Honestly, in many ways it could not have gone better.
Because my youth was scary as Hell. People were scary. Sex was scary. Politics, strangers, family, my quaint, charming little hometown were all scary as fuck. I made it to a city, more than one, and men died all around me anyway. Some friends succeeded and others failed and some died before they had a chance to do either. Some of it was fun -- witness the existence of my one sexy nude -- and some of it was wonderful, and much of it was just shit. So what exactly would I be looking to preserve?
Was my skin ever flawless? Does anyone remember me dancing? Did I change the world?
Some of us survived. I did. All the evidence of that is sat right here in this chair. Count me: present. That is actually something.
My memories are slim enough to slip between the pages of books other people wrote. My past is in envelopes, under embroidered handkerchiefs, tucked up behind souvenirs, tangled in a string-tie I wore exactly once and a jet necklace I used to wear with a black silk blouse I bought in a thrift store when I was sixteen. I used to wear that blouse with high-waisted, wide-legged gray pants, cuffed and creased and sharp as fuck, baby.
Honestly, I remember that outfit I haven't worn in better than forty years better than the sex I had forty years ago commemorated in that photo. Who knows why? At the time I’m sure I was convinced I looked better in my clothes than out. Maybe that's why. Thinking about it nowI realize that I wish I had a picture of me in those clothes!
My memory could be better. I used to learn whole roles, I memorized poetry, Shakespeare.
But what's more tedious than some old bugger expecting sympathy for not knowing why he walked into a room? Forget about it. Who cares?
And clearly this is not how memory works anyway. That was work. Mostly this is just chat. Very different stakes. Besides, who knows what one used to know? Don't care. Maybe a sonnet, still, or two. That's something. I'm convinced that this disorderly preservation of irrelevant specifics and the not very interesting detail is all but entirely random. It is just stuff for making stories even if the only person to whom one is telling them is one's self. So far as I can understand it memory is constantly recasting even things as seemingly set as photographs into whatever narrative may suit present purpose. That's Clio who makes sense of the past, that's history's business, not memory's. Memory doesn't rate a muse, it's not an art. Forgiving the self-indulgent pun, there's no Craft in it either. It just is. "A thing of rags and patches."
As I write I am anticipating a period of adjustment in the circumstances of my employment. Not going to lie, scared. Also? Missiles are flying. There is new/old war, and rising authoritarianism and grave and great injustice all around us every goddamned day and the very worst people for the very worst reasons are making all the very worst decisions and it is awful, as you know.
Just this week, the Souther Baptist Convention, that bulwark of deep-fried idiocy and home-canned hate, announced plans to prioritize the repeal of Marriage Equality -- and why not? Fuckers are on a roll.
And it's June, so it is also Pride.
And Edmund White died. Some of my memories aren't so much mine as his. He wrote parts of my life for me. No other writer took me further in the acceptance of my self, taught me more of how to navigate the world as a gay man, gave us collectively a better appreciation of our sexuality as both the means and subject of our revolutionary movement, as well as better fucking fun than the Baptists, and the Larry Kramers, and the Andrea Dworkins could ever imagine. He literally wrote the instruction manual. No one amused me more, moved me more, directed more of my reading. No one I can think of, not even his hero Genet, did more to make us interesting to ourselves as sexual beings and with better reason than we'd ever known or assumed.
I believe he made Foucault laugh. Imagine that.
As a reader of his work since the year I graduated high school, it feels like he has always been here. And -- AND -- No aging writer in my lifetime more fully embraced his full, final, glorious, hilarious, monumental and complete disregard for discretion, decorum, and bullshit. No other writer, particularly of his generation that I know of so absolutely gave up a giving a FUCK about other people's embarrassment and discomfort and affectations of dignity. In his seventies and eighties he wrote a whole new shelf of wicked little wonders and fabulous fare-thee-wells: comedies, criticism, memoirs, interviews, and sex, sex, sex.
Of what other writer am I likely to say that his very last book may well be my favorite?!
Holding what may be the only hard evidence of me naked at twenty one, I can't say Ed White made that picture possible, though maybe he kinda did, but he certainly comes to mind as the only major American writer I'm sorry to have missed the chance of showing it to.
That's the story today for Pride, for me, my tribute to the great and good Edmund White. I wish he'd met Peter. I am grateful for the work and his example. I wish I'd shown Ed White my ass at twenty-one.
And in his memory?
Let's show ALL these fuckers our asses tomorrow.
