THE BOY WHO LIVED NEXT TO THE BOY NEXT DOOR









When Kurt came down with the disease, there were three guys in our circle who were already in the advanced stages of it: Justin, Pat, and Colin, known around town as “The Three.” It was late fall 1981. The Three were handsome, well-built guys who’d all gone to Middlebury College together. They had tight bodies. They had fresh faces. They were the boys next door. Someone like me was the boy who lived next to the boy next door, forever looking out my window at my beautiful neighbor. The Three were fucking gorgeous. Then they were fucking sick. Then they were fucking dead.

The Three were always so sweet that you couldn’t even hate them for their extreme kind of beauty. I mean, the worst thing you could say about any one of them was that they were too good-looking, as if that were even a thing. Justin was known around the baths as “Angel Boy” for his “Jacob wrestling with the angel” kind of holy beauty—dark curly hair, blue apocryphal eyes, and pectorals that looked like they’d been sculpted out of Italian marble. Pat could’ve been Tom Selleck’s stand-in on Magnum, P.I. His mustache was so thick and his arms were Brawny paper towel massive. And Colin looked like Gary Ewing from Knots Landing who I’d had a huge crush on since the show had premiered two years earlier.

The Three were all staying in my rental at Fire Island during their last summer which was lucky for me because really attractive men are sort of like roaches but in the best possible way. Where there’s one you can safely assume that there are five to ten more underneath him (sometimes literally underneath him, especially at The Pines).

I was lucky enough to have had sex with Justin when he first moved to New York in the spring of 1977. I’ll never forget it. Pat and Colin graduated a semester after him and quickly followed him to the city, but he was pretty much solo when he first arrived. In my case, it was the old story of the hot new guy getting into town and not really knowing how hot he is, so he’ll sleep with anyone at first. That’s something that happens and it happened between us. Later, when we became good friends, we both pretended that it never happened which is a skill that gay men seem to hone from almost the second they become sexually active. But I certainly never forgot it. I could never forget him pumping away on top of me, his back like a smooth wide alabaster expanse that I had to grab onto, grasping for his fabled wings. I always wished that it might happen again some night when we were both drunk. But it never did.

When The Three got sick in the fall, it was I who came up with the theory that it must be some kind of virus that was only attacking good-looking guys. Hot Guy Flu, I called it. Ridiculous hypothesis, I know, but what else could it possibly be? Mine was as good of a theory as anyone else had come up with. Neither myself nor any of the other average-looking gay guys I knew had come down with it, let alone any of the wretched trolls that cruised in the dark, far away from park lampposts and streetlights. The newspapers were barely covering the story at all and when they did, it was buried twenty-five pages deep and was only referred to as a new mysterious “gay cancer.” It felt to me like the world, already disgusted with the very idea of us, could now assign a term for the kind of depraved nuisance we had put upon them. They could now openly refer to the literal plague of homosexuality. I would never have referred to the disease so glibly as “Hot Guy Flu” if I knew just how serious it was all about to get and that Justin, Pat, Colin, and Kurt as well as many others after them, would all be dead within a few months.



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At the time, I fancied myself an amateur fiction writer. I’d had one short story published in the March 1980 issue of Christopher Street and was working on a couple others. Kurt Porter was the kind of guy I most liked to write about back then: Midwestern hunks who’d been cast out of their hometowns by religious zealots. They would arrive in the city with canvas knapsacks slung over their big shoulders and an unquenchable thirst for cock and ass which would then lead them to the nearest bus station bathroom for quick relief before being spit out into the streets of New York to search for more. It was a variation on a familiar plot and theme, one I’d seen repeated in the pages of several gay novels of the period. But for me, when I wrote that kind of character, it was like I was able to inject myself into a gay male fantasia that was almost completely removed from my own experience. I could play out the lives of the beautiful untouchables, that legion of men that seemed to multiply every year throughout those glorious ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Kurt was simply in a different league than The Three. Kurt was hot on an almost international level. Men, women, children, dogs—they all stopped what they were doing in order to look at him. There was even an urban legend that a bus driver had failed to watch where he was going and drove right into a fountain near Sheridan Square in 1979 all because he had turned to stare at Kurt who’d been walking down the street on his way to the gym. So, yes, when Kurt got Hot Guy Flu, there was no question what was really happening. Without a doubt, it was only the hot men of New York City who were being infected. Exceptionally hot men—no one else.

Kurt’s initial symptoms: at first, he became thinner. Nothing that was too noticeable on someone with his hulking body. In fact, in the beginning, the weight loss leaned him out in a way that only made him appear more attractive. But then his cheeks began to sink in too much. His bright blue eyes—those eyes that you would’ve done anything to find pointed in your direction not even a month ago—sank deeper and deeper into his face until they looked like someone had pushed them in with their thumbs. They were still that same bright denim blue, but now they were also blood-stained and kind of distant. Fearful and vacant.

The last person who saw Kurt, right before Christmas that same year he died, described him in purely Gothic terms. He was practically a ghost, they said. Sitting alone on the subway, staring straight ahead at his own terrible reflection in the window of the train-car. He was barely recognizable. A hushed whisper of the beautiful man he’d once been.

But what was it that made the better looking people more susceptible to the virus?

“It’s the pheromones. The virus is somehow attracted to their very special pheromones,” said Doyle at a small gathering he was having in his apartment the Sunday before Labor Day. “It’s those same pheromones that attract us to them as well. Just think of the virus as a kind of extra-intuitive cruiser on the hunt for the hottest trick.”

Doyle worked as a hospital administrator at St. Vincent’s which led everyone to believe that his thoughts on medicine and disease were above inquiry from gay hoi polloi like me, a salesman at a used record shop on Jane Street.

“But how are you supposed to protect yourself from getting it?” asked Logan, who had been Kurt’s roommate.

“Right now, you should stick with fucking 5s and 6s. Lower if you can find them,” Doyle replied.

“I think we all know where we can find those,” said another guy, someone who I didn’t know. He was wearing jean cut-offs and a tight t-shirt with a banana on it. He was gorgeous.

“Until you hear otherwise, don’t stick your dick in anyone remotely attractive,” said Doyle. I could feel the guy in the banana shirt looking me up and down.

In the early fall of 1981, the medical establishment informally began calling the disease Hot Guy Flu or, HGF. And just like that, I had my second copyright.



*



I went to see a matinee of Only When I Laugh at the Orpheum on a Wednesday. It had been billed as a comedy in all the previews I’d seen beforehand, however I walked out of the film feeling unusually depressed. Marsha Mason had played the same neurotic actress character she had portrayed in The Goodbye Girl, but this time she was also a drunk. Joan Hackett, who played her friend Toby, reminded me too much of the stale older women for whom I’d walk dogs occasionally for extra pocket money. So obsessed with the loss of their beauty that they’d transformed themselves into these bejeweled zombies shut up in their Park Avenue pieds–à–terre, removed from any concept of the real world outside. And, my God, James Coco was just so desperately gay, playing Marsha’s most trusted homosexual friend, that you just wanted to shoot him right in the anus. I had gone into the theater for a little afternoon pick-me-up and walked out desperately wanting to have a drink and possibly hang myself.

As I walked down the street thinking more about the film, I spied Anthony, an acquaintance of mine, coming toward me from a half a block away. As soon as he spotted me, he put the back of his hand up to his mouth and affected the most consumptive cough I think I have ever seen outside of a theatrical performance. He looked like he was auditioning for the lead role in Camille.

Anthony was very, very average-looking. Not ugly but certainly not anywhere approaching attractive. He was normal looking to a fault. He had a kind of dull, boring look. Nice skin which he clearly moisturized. But he had this very oddly proportioned face. His eyes, for example, were much too far apart, appearing almost alien-like. He had a rather unfortunate nose that most resembled an ancient rocky precipice that had recently lost some of its rocks in an earthquake. No one dreamed about Anthony at night. No one projected Anthony into their nocturnal fantasies or even had him as a distant understudy in their spank bank.

Needless to say, it was with some very firm trepidation that I even ventured to say hello to him as we passed each other. For, without a doubt, saying hello to him would be opening myself up to acknowledge the fact that he was coughing (again, dramatically) at a time when the only gay men coughing on New York City streets were guys with Hot Guy Flu. Anthony was the first instance I had encountered of a mystifying new trend: pretending to have HGF.

It seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone pretend to have a deadly disease, especially one that you could get through sex (thereby rendering yourself virtually un-fuckable)? I had to admire him for the boldness of his tactic. But Anthony was really just one in a long line of a history of outcasts mimicking what the popular people are doing.

“How are you, Anthony?” I asked when we locked eyes. He looked around in a world-weary way as if he wasn’t quite sure it was him I’d been addressing.

“I haven’t been feeling very well. Then I woke up this morning and discovered this.” He indicated a purplish mark on his left forearm. It was a new symptom of the disease that hadn’t yet been circulated in the newspapers. Doyle had told me about it the week before. I could see that the mark on Anthony’s arm had been partly smudged off, perhaps by a passerby on the subway.

“You really should take care of yourself, Anthony.” We parted in a foggy, disjointed way and I continued walking down Second Avenue. When I looked back, Anthony was doing his anemic shuffle down the street, looking even more wan, it seemed, from behind.



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When I walked into J’s Hangout one night in February 1982, there was a guy there who looked exactly like Steven Carrington on Dynasty. He had blond wavy hair, a preppy tan cashmere sweater, green eyes that could either look intense or warm depending on the angle with which he directed them toward you. There was something clean and ambrosial about him, like he was a department store mannequin that, usually stationed next to the fragrance counter, had been animated for the night, set free to roam the city. He was leaning up against the bar chatting with the bartender, an older man who’d been working there for years. The bartender kept drying the same glass, so clearly enthralled with Steven Carrington. He had never smiled at me once in all the years I’d been coming there. Not a single time.

I walked past the two of them and made my way to the end of the L-shaped bar so that I might be more visible to Steven Carrington. I took out a cigarette and acted like I was looking around for a light. The bartender, of course, couldn’t be bothered to offer me one even though I could see his own cigarette behind the bar sitting in a large glass ashtray with several scrunched up butts. But Steven Carrington immediately saw what I needed and excused himself to go over and offer me a light.

“Thank you,” I said to him.

“You’re welcome,” he replied, smiling which made his eyes open up wider than the real Steven Carrington’s ever had on Dynasty. The bartender moved to the corner of the bar to wait on another customer.

Hot Guy Flu had suddenly made impossible scenes like this possible. The average looking, the homely, and the downright ugly: all now sexually desirable. Non-carriers of the disease. It had rejected us and now we, the rejected, were the chosen ones.

“I’ve never seen you at this bar before tonight,” he said, putting away his yellow Bic lighter.

“That’s funny since I’ve been coming here for over five years,” I answered, perhaps too hastily and with too quick of an attitude.

“I’m sorry. I probably sound like a dick.” He brushed his hair back, and rolled his hand down the back of his head to his collar. I suddenly got the sense that he was maniacally horny in that way all men can get.

“It’s okay. You just might never have seen me here before,” I said.

But he had seen me at J’s Hangout before. I know because I hit on him back in ’78. He had just put Brainstorm on the jukebox, “Lovin’ Is Really My Game.” It’s a song that has always turned my entire body on. It used to make me feel like I had just been dipped in liquid fire. I would dance to it at Studio 54. Dance and dance and dance. All night. The sweat pouring down my back and pooling in the creases of skin around my body, settling in gulleys around the cushion of back fat that had started developing once I’d hit my late twenties. Just hearing that song that night, I’d felt emboldened enough to hit on Steven Carrington who’d had his left elbow resting on the jukebox and his pert ass sticking out in faded Levi’s for all the bar to see. When I asked him how he was doing, he looked at me like I was a busboy or a barback. I have a “service industry look” one particularly cruel date once told me. Steven Carrington looked at me that night like I was in his way.

Now he looked at me like I was the only man in the room.

“Hey, let’s get out of here. I live around the corner.”

He had his shirt halfway unbuttoned before he’d even closed the door behind us with his foot. His studio apartment was small and dark, but very clean. A small lamp on a stand near the bed revealed the shadows of a hi-tech style.

Steven Carrington propped himself up on the bed with his Levi’s pushed almost down around his thighs. The outline of his dick was pressing hard against his white underwear, struggling to be free. It looked beautiful to me. I held back though. I stood at the foot of his bed to watch him. He still seemed to me like a painting that I was only allowed to look at but never touch for fear that museum security would pull me away and throw me out into the street. That’s what the disease had done for us. All those beautiful men in the paintings had been temporarily set free from the confines of their gilded frames, to frolic amidst us mortal folk for a brief time in the cold museum corridors. Gloriously naked, three-dimensional, cut and uncut. Gods hopping off of clouds and landing right in front of us on bewinged feet. We could finally touch them with our human fingers, caress them with our flawed hands. I pulled my t-shirt over my head and slipped out of my own jeans as I walked over to the side of his bed. As I got closer, I could see that Steven’s excitement had left a wet spot of precum that was spreading like blood from a puncture wound. I wondered just how long it had been since he’d had sex with another man.

His eyes were closed. I peeled back the elastic lip of his Savile Row briefs and put him in my mouth all the way to the base of his shaft. He let out a groan that seemed to shake his entire body. He grabbed onto the back of my head, right at the base of my skull, and guided my mouth up and down on his cock. I looked up to make eye contact with him, but he was looking up at the ceiling, squinting a bit as if he just might be able to see the small cracks in the imaginary fresco painted above.



*



Back at The Pines in the summer of 1982, one year after the first cases had begun cropping up, there was a noticeable dearth of good-looking men. Of course, many of them had died during the previous year. But just as many had gone into hiding. Matthew Tone, an ex-model for Halston, had been holed up in his studio apartment for—according to word on the street—two months. Desperate to isolate himself from the disease, he’d created a kind of sealed environment where no one else could touch him. A gay boy in a bubble. Ray Fournier, a dancer for the American School of Ballet and truly one of the most stunning men I’d ever seen, had intentionally cut up his face to make himself appear ugly in order to evade Hot Guy Flu somehow. He’d also stayed inside the entire summer, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, missing rehearsals and auditions, parties and affairs.

Just walking into The Saint, on my first summer Saturday, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were maybe four gorgeous alpha men in the entire bar surrounded by gaggles of average-looking guys who looked like me. They would follow each one of the beautiful men around the bar like a pack of rats, chipping and gnawing at the heels of the fellow rat in front of him. Then, when one of the beautiful men had finally decided to give himself over to one of the rats (almost performing a kind of trust fall into the crowd, to be carried away and devoured in a more discrete location) the others would quickly disperse, crawling back into their small holes to await the promise of another tasty morsel that might flutter into their line of sight.

The Hot Guy Flu theory ended abruptly Labor Day weekend. Louis Carney, a morbidly obese felching queen who was infamously known as one of the most unattractive men in New York City (he’d even said it himself) came down with it. Very quickly. One minute he was holding court in a series of video booths at Expressions on 53rd Street and then he was literally on his deathbed at St. Vincent’s (Doyle phoned us all immediately with the news). Like a beached whale, he lay there, in hot pink pajama pants and peroxided hair, his blubber tuffeted around him like a picnic blanket in Central Park. If Louis had it, the disease was not discriminating against anyone. And it could no longer be called HGF. The media had begun referring to it as AIDS. Three letters swapped for four. There was nothing hot about AIDS. Anyone could acquire those letters now.

In January 1983, I found out that Anthony had it—for real this time. Anthony had AIDS. I hadn’t really thought about Anthony since I’d run into him that day outside of the movie theater the year before. Actually, I hadn’t really thought about the movie I had seen that day either, Only When I Laugh. I did hear that James Coco was nominated for an Oscar and a Razzie for his performance in it which really just goes to show that a person can look at somebody and see a completely different thing from what another person sees. This is something that has always been the case. Anthony left his group of friends at Danceteria on a Friday night and was dead by Monday morning having expired alone in an emergency room at Beth Israel.

When I heard the news about Anthony, I pictured him in a large, white canopy bed, just like Camille in the play. In my mind, he was wearing a champagne colored robe and staring out the window as if he was watching closely for the cabriolet that would pick him up and take him away.





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