eyes and on the surface of our bodies, by the air we must never stop breathing, by the food and water we take in, by the contacts that generate sensations that run from the surface of our skin to our brains, by the pheromones and bacteria we transmit imperceptibly to each other by air and contact, by the smells that are tiny particles we have inhaled, by the myriad species of beneficial bacteria in our gut and elsewhere that constitute so vast a portion of a human body that self is something of a misnomer or at least a crowd and maybe a party. If you were truly impenetrable you’d be dead in minutes, and there was a kind of deadening inertness that was part of the equation of imagining you could be so.
James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.” Redefining women and their roles redefined men and masculinity and vice versa. If the genders were not opposite but a spectrum of variations on some central theme of being human, if there were many ways to execute your role or refuse it, and liberation for each gender was seen as being allowed to take up what had been considered the proper role and goods and even feelings of the other or find some third (or seventh) way, then the citadel would be broken and everyone could travel freely.
Heterosexual masculinity has often seemed to me a great renunciation, a repudiation not only of the myriad things that men are not supposed to like, but even a plethora of things that they are not supposed even to notice. Many of the gay men I knew noticed, and one of the pleasures of conversation with gay friends was an acute awareness of emotional, aesthetic, and political phenomena, an ability to weigh minute things and evaluate nuances and fine degrees of differentiation.
These men knew that words could be festive, recreational, medicinal, that banter and flirtation and extravagance, that humor and wryness and anecdotes of the absurd were pleasures worth pursuing. They knew that talk wasn’t, as many straight men seemed to assume, just transactional, a way to dump or extract information or instructions. It could be play, riffing on ideas and tones; it could give encouragement and affection; and it could invite people to be themselves and to know themselves in order to be known. There were so many kinds of love at work: the love of vivid and exact description, which was sometimes poetic, sometimes skewering wit, sometimes deep insight, and of exchanges that wove connections between speakers and ideas.
If humor consists of noting the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are—and much humor of the nonbrutal variety is—then those least invested in things as they are supposed to be, or who are actually adversaries and victims of conventionality, are most inclined and able to celebrate those gaps. The straight man is a figure in humor, the one who doesn’t make or get the joke, and straight suggests linear thinking and conventional paths as well as heterosexuality.
I think of how for years when I encountered the great artist and graphic designer Rex Ray, who designed my first book, I’d shout “LambCHOP!!!” and he roared back in his rich, amused, rollicking voice, “CUPCAKE!!!” or of how when I was first getting to know the young architect Tim O’Toole around 1990, we’d greet each other with a caustic “HELLO, Kitty,” bearing down on the first word, swinging back up with the second, so that the phrase was like a secret handshake, a badge of belonging. Of how I was free to be funny or dramatic or preposterous around them, and of how fun it was, and how much we laughed, and how there was room in there to be sad and bereft too. Even that could become something whose absurdities and excesses were occasion for more wit, because heartbreak and loneliness have their comic sides, and finding them can be key to survival. How it let me be someone I might not have gotten to be elsewhere. Not that all my gay friends were campy or even culture mavens. Bob Fulkerson was a rugged outdoorsman and political organizer, a fifth-generation Nevadan devoted to his state, but he was and is someone who calls me up sometimes just to leave