As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself. And Malone was crazier than I. You could tell from his face how deep the disease had eaten into his system. The life of his flesh dwindled, but his spirit ascended like the angels into a perfect love--and yet he was still stuck with his mortal body and his mortal lusts and mortal loveliness: You can't live on the promise of a casual smile which passes while you sit on the stoop waiting for the breeze from the river--demented queen! You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks--no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.
What lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored in his imagination? Or any of us, for that matter. We were lunatics, I'm sorry to say. Our lovers weren't real. Wasn't that finally the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? We were just queens in the end. We would not even speak to most of them--were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there? If that was the case, then we were fools: for being romantics. You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that's why I left--the madness of it all offended me, finally, I wanted a real porch, a real front yard with real live oaks and real flowers in real pots--and that is what I have now, dearie, retired faggot that I am, content with the quiet pleasures of life. Even as I put down this pen (my hand is numb) I can hear the mockingbirds in the gardenia bush outside my window, and there is, croyez-moi, no sweeter sound on earth.
Andrew Holleran,
Dancer from the Dance
Y otra vez, pero en español:
How could i have lived on the periphery of the 70s boys-in-the-band culture, yet missed such rich language? Amends must be made.
Holleran was a revelation to me, too. He works with the same scene and themes that Larry Kramer worked with in Faggots (to the point of sharing specific anecdotes which obviously had a basis in the reality of the NY party circuit), but with much more lyricism and a lot less voyeurism. I'm looking forward to reading his other works.