The Thinning Veil Between Worlds

I've had the oddest sense lately, making love to my partner, of the two of us being in a roomful of men.

When I say odd, I mean it's not exactly the fantasy of sharing him with a group, and sharing a group with him, that's coming forward for me. Nothing odd about that: let's be clear right at the start, the prospect turns my crank, and if it suited him as well--which it doesn't--we'd explore it.

Partly, it's the enduring presence of his former partner in his life, and by extension in mine. Bob died a little over ten years ago. His books line the shelves that cover whole walls of the house where we live summers, many of them inscribed to him by their authors, some of them annotated in his hand. His photographs hang throughout the house. A few summers back, we finally poured Bob's ashes into the bay, floating in a kayak together with Bob's first high school lover and lifelong friend, reading Whitman to each other in a light drizzle and watching a white heron flying low over the water toward an island at the mouth of the creek. I've come to say, only half jokingly, that I'm in a threeway relationship: sometimes one of us being dead makes it less challenging; sometimes more so.

Partly it's the long, slow repair of my friendship with my own former partner, now coupled up again himself, and the approaching prospect early next year of finally leaving the house I bought with him fifteen years ago, and the garden we created together before we separated. No question, I'm still in love with him too. It took me six years to admit that to myself.

Partly, it's the wider awareness of all the other men I've let into my heart, and into my pants, over the years--some of whom I dated; some who became soulmates on the short, intense coller-coaster rides of workshops; some whose names I only learned while we were having sex, or never learned at all, and never saw again. Thery're very much present in the room. Objects that represent them sit on my altar in the corner: the icon G. gave me on my fiftieth birthday; the crystal pendant cross S. brought me on a visit eight years ago; the natural phallus of stone, ground smooth by the tide, that A. found walking on the beach and saved for me; W.'s tuning fork.

Partly, it's the awareness that my partner's erotic history has been even richer and more varied than my own--and that now and then my nose is pressed to the glass with envy about that.

And in the shadow of all these, it's something else, something more. It's the sense that when we're making love, though we're two isolated individuals, we're also part of something larger, something more general. Something that embraces the other men who dwell within us: those who've slipped away, carried elsewhere on the diverging currents of our lives; even those who've passed beyond the veil of death--the"waves of dying friends" that the late poet Michael Lynch so movingly commemorated in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

I can't describe more precisely what I'm sensing so strongly of late within/behind/ beneath/beyond the experience of being with this particular man I love deeply, with whom I most intimately share my life. But whatever it is, it flies in the face of the romantic cult of the couple as a self-sufficient unit. It's radically opposed to the notion that we find one person who somehow completes us, so that anything else becomes an admission of emotional failure and defeat. I can't help but feel that our current obsession with marriage rights (as necessary politically as that may be) threatens to flatten and suppress the richness of this broader web of emotional, erotic, and spiritual connection.

Strangely, I'm reminded of what Plato said about (gay) love in the Symposium: that we start by loving an individual, progress by loving many individuals, and end (ideally) by loving what we find embodied in them all. That's one of the few things I can take away from Plato at this point in my life without vehement disagreement.

And perhaps even more strangely--weirdly, in fact--I connect what I'm feeling to this moment in the year--Hallowe'en, All Souls, the Day of the Dead, Samhain--when the curtain between what's present and what's vanished from our daylight lives is pulled aside, and we're in communion with the dead--and by extension, with the otherwise departed, and with the alternative worlds of our unrealized longings. If Bob's ever in bed with us, surely it's now. I'm glad for the thought he's there. Along with all those others, alive and dead, across town or across the continent, at the far-flung corners of my life and my beloved's, the men of our queer tribe, who nestle and nuzzle around us.

Old Enough to Be Your Father

At left, James Broughton and Joel Singer. Photograph by Robert Giard.

I’ve been taking inventory lately of how many of my friends are at least fifteen years my senior or junior. I'm attentive to the question because of an intensified sense of my own aging—a function of increasingly exuberant aches and pains, but these last months ratcheted up as well by the number of friends, in most cases people my own age or younger, now facing life-threatening diagnoses. 

A woman I’ve known for over twenty-five years, my closest friend during the time we taught together in San Diego, is twenty years older than me. She has a great gift for intergenerational friendship, of which I’ve been only one of many beneficiaries. I don’t think it’s even a stretch for her to reach out socially to those young enough to be her kids, or even, at this point in her life, practically her grandchildren. It just seems to come naturally.

 I’m six years older now than she was when we met, and I find myself thinking, I should do so well—but in particular, I should do so well in bridging the intergenerational chasm in my relationships with other queer men. As a kid, like so many all-too-well-behaved little gay boys, I gravitated naturally towards adults. In my mid-twenties, determined to embrace a fully gay life, I fell into a narrower cohort of men who saw their place in the world more or less as I did, shaped as we were by the twelve or thirteen years between Stonewall and the onslaught of AIDS. Most of us were deeply energized by the politics of coming out, though not all of us were equally radicalized.

I was insufferable in my impatience toward older men who’d mastered the finely calibrated arts they'd needed to survive a world far more uniformly hostile than the one we had to face, for all the homophobia we confronted and opposed. When these older men and I did befriend one another, I was often patronizing and more or less blind to the treasures of their wry irony; their hard-won but less complicated sense that their personal lives were nobody’s business but their own; their ability to let go of battles that weren’t worth fighting; the flexibility with which they could finesse the very questions of firmly declared sexual identity that my emerging view of the world was based on. My connections with such men often didn’t survive my inflexible judgmentalism. I’d say now that my life was the poorer for it.

Befriending the young, on the other hand, didn’t even seem an option. Any solidarity we might have ventured in the 1980s toward anyone under twenty-one was hysterically denounced as recruitment and predation, and many of us chose the easier and safer path of sealing ourselves off from the next generation's pain and isolation—but also from their promise and energy. Meanwhile, the young learned to fear the stereotyped rapacity of older men. (Later, the drag queens would come home to roost: at least some of those a generation younger than us would use their different experience of AIDS as an excuse to write us off as summarily as we’d dismissed our pre-Stonewall brothers.)

I’m beginning to think that perhaps the single most damaging effect of homophobia on gay culture is the opprobrium it heaps on us, even today, when we risk reaching across age cohorts . The generational segregation that’s become endemic to North American society is all the more absolute in the solitude and misunderstanding that far too often divide gay men now in their fifties and sixties from those in their eighties, as from those in their teens and twenties and thirties. We need queer elders to reassure us that we are in fact part of something more enduring than our own moment; we need queer heirs to whom we can pass on whatever we’ve created of lasting worth. We need networks of friendship and mentorship to help us make sense of the passage of our own lives and to impart meaning and dignity to the mortal condition shared by old and young alike.


If we need these roles and relationships, we need as well the resolve and social means to foster them. We need ceremonies to make them visible and honor them. Amidst the overwhelming attention that gay marriage now commands (for better and for worse), we need rituals to recognize bonds between elder and younger friends, between protégés and mentors, outside the structures of the nuclear family to which even same-sex couples are now pressured to aspire.