Coming out: Part two

Coming out for me was not as much making an entrance as it was an entering.  In part one, a while back, I talked about the fear of walking through doors, like in Stockton's The Lady, or the Tiger?  What's on the other side?  I entered places I had never before been in.  I met a whole menagerie of people, entering into friendships, relationships, and liaisons.

There was a Greek fellow with a hairy chest who used to dance on the speakers at Chaps, his shirt perpetually unbuttoned down almost to his navel.  He would thrust his hips to show off the considerable package that was contained in his tight Saturday Night Fever jeans.  He wore Spanish heels and had hair just like Travolta's.  "I know what you're looking at," a voice behind me said.  I had been watching the Greek's torso sway a few metres from me.  I turned to see a slim South Asian fellow, holding a cigarette in the most sophisticated way I had ever seen, his forearm straight up, the cigarette between his index and middle fingers.  It hung there, languidly.  "But he's a bad lay," he said, speaking into the smoke he made. "He expects you to do all the work, like a pampered prince."*

For a whole retinue of men at that time, I'm sorry to say I can't recall the Indian's name, but he knew the dirt on everyone around me.  He was the kind of fellow who thrived on knowing secrets, whether they were true or not.  He had slept with most of the boys he commented on.  My Indian friend had a scant six months left in Canada, then he was to be shipped off on the wishes of his parents, he told me, to be set up in an arranged marriage.  He was making the most of his time left.  I would see him in the smoke and blasting scream of the speakers standing close to a friend and cupping his hand, talking into their ear.  Eyes darted, and his hand stayed raised, until he plunged again to that someone's ear to impart a catty comment.  God knows what happened to him.  One day he just disappeared.

But now I had something of a pied-à-terre in the city, Bob's place on Sultan Street, close by to Bemelmans - where one could occasionally spot a celebrity having a drink.  I would arrive on a Friday night, park my Pontiac at the Wilson Station lot and take the subway down to Bloor,  walking five minutes west.  I would ocassionally trek back up to Wilson to check on the car, to see it standing alone baking in the sun in the vast lot.  The Toronto Transit Commission maintained it for commuter parking.  Seldom checked by that stalwart union, I never paid to leave it there.

Bob was a rocket queen for Air Canada, and as smitten as I was with him, he broke my young heart.  So it should be, as I certainly know now that whosoever has a heart of stone, or has never fallen in love, is simply not a human being and can never be finished as a whole person.  Just as our bodies are mirrors left to right, so the other, whoever they may be, reflects us and completes us.  By twining with another we reach the reason why this whole fucking circus exists, by knowing another, and hence, ourselves.  Or so goes my sentimental philosophy.

Well, Bob knew a lot of men.  All over the world.  He even knew Patient Zero, Gaëtan Dugas, the famously mis-described French Canadian in Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, accused after death of planting AIDS in New York - and then the rest of the United States.  Subsequent studies have shown he was not the Typhoid Mary (excuse the pun) everyone feared, but did ride the middle wave of that Tsunami of Death.  Bob himself wondered how he survived the early 80s.  He never got tested, he was an old school Boomer who said he would rather not know.  We all lived in fear.

I remember Bob breaking it to me gently after me telling him that I pined for him when he was working, far away somewhere on the other side of the planet.  "You know," he said, "it's not that I love you less, it's just that if I see a boy I like and I want to have him, I want to know you are ok with it."*  Thanks, Bob.  The cruelty of men with each other, again.

Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large
that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

* I'm paraphrasing of course, from a fragment of memory.