chairs, laughing.
His art was erudite, a project of queering existing representational systems—I still have one panel from the Tarot deck he redrew in chalk on big rounds of black paper; mine shows a man from above, his muscular form drawn in a few swift lines, his nipples tiny spikes on his strong chest. David was tall, willowy, with pallid skin, an archly aristocratic manner, and much delight in decadence and transgression. I was who he called the night his HIV turned into AIDS. I rushed over to the glamorous flat he’d put together, bringing fruit juice, soup, and the fluffiest films I could find. Reclining in his bed in the bay window of his Victorian apartment, we watched Picnic with Kim Novak and William Holden, one of those movies whose over-the-top heterosexual rites were a perfect occasion for snarky remarks. We stayed up late over soup and movies, and in the morning he went to the doctor. Neither of us was equipped to talk directly about what was happening, but it happened anyway.
David fell in love again, and they toured Europe with a suitcase of clothes and a suitcase of pills. He completed his masterpiece just before he died. It was a reenvisioning of the Villa of the Mysteries murals in Pompeii, a huge installation, with life-size figures painted on eight-foot-high sheets of plexiglass: white- and lavender-complected Edwardian gay men, kissing, cannibalizing, exchanging bodily fluids; green-skinned science-fiction lesbians also engaged in transgressive erotic rites. I was witnessing his simultaneous appearance and disappearance, the former as an artist rising in ambition and visibility, the latter from the disease that killed him at forty in the summer of 1993.
San Francisco was a refuge, but far from a perfect one, and homophobic violence was a presence even here. A man named James Finn, in the course of writing about being assaulted elsewhere for being gay (and, with his powerful husband, winning the battle), noted, “When a homophobic man taunts a gay man, he almost invariably does so by comparing him in unfavorable terms to a woman.” Gay men were despised for being men who had, in the imaginings of homophobes, chosen to be like women. Like women in being penetrated, when being penetrated was seen as being conquered, invaded, humiliated. Like straight women in being subject to men (though nonstraight women who were not subject to men upset them too; they upset easily).
Which means that some heterosexual men and for that matter whole societies, notably ours, imagine sex with women is punitive, damaging, adversarial, an act that enhances his status and demolishes hers. In some cultures the man who penetrates anyone or anything, including another man, retains his stature; it’s the man who allows himself to be penetrated who has fallen from the status of a man (which has made it doubly hard for boys and men who are rape victims). An acquaintance told me about going home, long ago, with a college friend whose father was a Wall Street broker. The rest of the family was enjoying dinner in their lavish Upper East Side apartment when the broker arrived. Everyone fell silent, and he sat down and roared, apropos of his day in the stock market, “I fucked him up the ass.” Winning over his competitor was like having sex with him, and sex is hostile and punitive at one end and humiliating at the other, an interesting thing to proclaim to your wife and children at dinner.
Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman. If what a man does to a woman, or to anyone he penetrates, is imagined as violating and despoiling her, humiliation and degradation come to be indistinguishable from sexuality or a proxy for it in the puritanical imagination. So many of the thousands of sexual assault accounts I’ve read in recent years include acts that have nothing to do with the bodily satisfaction often presumed to be the goal. It’s a version of love that’s war, the enactment or realization of a set of metaphors in which men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets, and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.
Everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear, by the light shining in our