I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name

When he calls me, I will answer
When he calls me, I will answer
When he calls me, I will answer
I’ll be somewhere listening  for my name

I’ll be somewhere listening
I’ll be somewhere listening
I’ll be somewhere listening  for my name

As gay men and lesbians, we are the sexual niggers of our society.

Some of you may have never before been treated like second-class, disposable citizen. Some of you have felt a certain privilege and protection in being white, which is not to say that others are accustomed to or have accepted being racial niggers and feel less alienated. Since I have never encountered a person of no color, I assume that we are all persons of color. Like fashion victims, though, we are led to believe that some colors are more acceptable than others, and those acceptable colors have been so endowed with universality and desirability that the color hardly seems to exist at all—except, of course, to those who are of a different color and pushed outside the rainbow. My own fantasy is to be locked inside a Benetton ad.

No one dares call us sexual niggers, at least not to our faces. But the epithets can be devastating or entertaining: We are faggots and dykes, sissies and bulldaggers. We are funny, sensitive, Miss Thing, friends of Dorothy, or men with “a little sugar in the blood,” and we call ourselves what we will. As an anthropologist/linguist friend of mine calls me in one breath, “Miss Lady Sister Woman Honey Girl Child.”

Within this environment of sexual and racial niggerdom, recovery isn’t easy. Sometimes it is like trying to fit a size 12 basketball player’s foot into one of Imelda Marcos’s pumps. The color might be right, but the shoe still pinches. Or, for the more fashionable lesbians in the audience, lacing up those combat boots only to have extra eyelets staring you in the face, and you feel like Olive Oyl gone trucking after Minnie Mouse.

As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddI, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.

Remember those great nocturnal emissions of your adolescent years? They told us we were men, and the gooey stuff proved it. Now in the nineties, our nocturnal emission are night sweats, inspiring fear, telling us we are mortal and sick, and that time is running out.

In my former neighborhood in Manhattan, I was a member of the 4H Club: the Happy Homosexuals of Hamilton Heights. Now it is the 3D Club: the dead, the dying, those in despair. I used to be in despair; now I’m just dying.

I come to you bearing witness to a broken heart; I come to you bearing witness to a broken body—but a witness to an unbroken spirit. Perhaps it is only to you that such witness can be brought and its jagged edges softened a bit and made meaningful.

We are facing the loss of our entire generation. Lesbians lost to various cancers, gay men lost to AIDS. What kind of witness will you bear? What truthtelling are you brave enough to utter and endure the consequences of your unpopular message?

Last summer my lover Richard died. We had been lovers for twelve years. His illness and death were so much a part of my illness and life that I felt that I too had died. I’m just back from Florida, visiting his family and attending the unveiling of his headstone. Later this month, our attorney will file the necessary papers for the settling of Richard’s estate, and I shall return to our summer home in Provincetown without him, but not without the rich memories of our many years there. And he is everywhere inside me listening for his name.

I’ve lost Richard; I’ve lost vision in one eye; I’ve lost the contact of people I thought were friends; I’ve lost the future tense from my vocabulary; I’ve lost my libido; and I’ve lost more weight and appetite than Nutri-System would want to claim.

My life is closing. Oh, I know all the clichés: “We all have to die,” and “Everything comes to an end.” But when is an ending a closure, and when does closure become a new beginning? Not always. It is not automatic. We have to work at it. If an end is termination, closure involves the will to remember, which gives new life to memory.

As creators, we appear to strike a bargain with the immortality we assume to be inherent in art. Our work exists outside us and will have a life independent of us. Doris Grumbach, in her recent book, Coming into the End Zone, reminds us of the life of books: “Let the book make its own way, even through the thick forest of competitors, compelling readers by the force of its words and its vision.”

I am reminded of a poignant line from George Whitmore, who struck a Faustian bargain with AIDS: If he wrote about it, perhaps he wouldn’t get it. George, as you know, lost that battle, but his books are still with us. His two novels are The Confessions of Danny Slocum, and Nebraska. His harrowing reporting on AIDS is called Someone Was Here. And now George is somewhere listening for his name, hearing it among us.

I am not above bargaining for time and health. And I am troubled by the power of prophecy inherent in art. One becomes afraid to write because one’s wildest speculations may in fact come true. I wrote all the AIDS poems published in Michael Klein’s Poets for Life before I knew I was HIV positive. I was responding in part to my sense of isolation and helplessness as friends of mine fell ill. And when I published the poem “And These Are Just a Few...” in the Kenyon Review, I made point of acknowledging the dead and those yet fighting for life. I’m sorry to report that of the twenty people mentioned in the poem, only two are presently alive.

As writers, we are a curious lot. We begin our projects with much apprehension about the blank page. But then as the material assumes its life, we resist writing that last stanza or paragraph. We want to avoid putting a final period to it all. Readers are no better. We all want to know what new adventures await Huck Finn or if Ishmael finally “comes out” following his “marriage” with QueeQueg. As sequels go, I’m not sure the world needed Ripley’s extension to Gone with the Wind, but consider Rocky 10, in which the son of the erstwhile fighter discovers he is gay and must take on the arch villain Harry Homophobia. Would the title have to be changed to Rockette?

Then there is the chilling threat of erasure. Gregory, a friend and former student of mine, died last fall. On the day following a memorial service for him, we all were having lunch and laughing over our fond memories of Greg and his many accomplishments as a journalist. Suddenly his lover had a shock. He had forgotten the remaining copies of the memorial program in the rental car he had just returned. Frantic to retrieve the programs, which had Greg’s picture on the cover and reprints of his autobiographical essays inside, his lover called the rental agency to reclaim the material.

They had already claimed the car, but he could come out there, they said, and dig through the dumpster for whatever he could find. Hours later, the lover returned empty-handed, the paper programs already shredded, burned, and the refuse carted away. Greg had been cremated once again, but this time without remains or a classy urn to house them. The image of Greg’s lover sifting through the dumpster is more haunting than the reality of Greg’s death, for Greg had made his peace with the world. The world, however, had not made its peace with him.

His siblings refused to be named in one very prominent obituary, and Greg’s gayness and death from AIDS were not to be mentioned at the memorial service. Fortunately few of us heeded the family’s prohibition. While his family and society may have wanted to dispose of Greg even after his death, some of us tried to reclaim him and love him again and only then release him.

I was reminded of how vulnerable we are as gay men, as black gay men, to the disposal or erasure of our lives.

But Greg was a writer, a journalist who had written on AIDS, on the business world, and on his own curious life journey from his birth in the poor Anacostia district of Washington, DC, to scholarships that allowed him to attend Exeter and then Williams College and on to the city desks of our nation’s most prominent newspapers. His words are still with us even if his body and those gorgeous programs are gone. And Greg is somewhere listening for his name.

We must, however, guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives. As white gays become more and more prominent—and acceptable to mainstream society—they project a racially exclusive image of gay reality. Few men of color will ever be found on the covers of the Advocate or New York Native. As white gays deny multiculturalism among gays, so too do black communities deny multisexualism among its members. Against this double cremation, we must leave the legacy of our writing and our perspectives on gay and straight experiences.

Our voice is our weapon.

Several months ago the editors of Lambda Book Report solicited comments from several of us about the future of gay and lesbian publishing. My comments began by acknowledging my grief for writers who had died before they could make a significant contribution to the literature. The editors said my comments suggested a “bleak and nonexistent future” for gay publishing. Although I still find it difficult to imagine a glorious future for gay publishing, that does not mean I cannot offer some concrete suggestion to ensure that a future does exist.

First, reaffirm the importance of cultural diversity in our community. Second, preserve our literary heritage by posthumous publications and reprints, and third, establish grants and fellowships to ensure that our literary history is written and passed on to others. I don’t think these comments are bleak, but they should remind us of one thing: We alone are responsible for the preservation and future of our literature.

If we don’t buy our books, they won’t get published. If we don’t talk about our books, they won’t get reviewed. If we don’t write our books, they won’t get written.

As for me ... I may not be well enough or alive next year to attend the lesbian and gay writers conference, but I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

I may not be around to celebrate with you the publication of gay literary history. But I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

If  I don’t make it to Tea Dance in Provincetown or the Pines, I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.