Everyone has his or her own library of that terrible time. For most people it probably consists of newspaper articles, a connect-the-dots narrative told in the epidemic’s infamous acronyms: GRID and HTLV-III and PWA, KS and PCP and CMV, NIAID and ACT UP and WHO. Perhaps you saw Angels in America on Broadway or in a regional production; perhaps you saw or read And the Band Played On and maybe one or two more books: Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man, Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. A small group of us devoured everything we came across, from the crackpot theories of Peter Duesberg to the radical epidemiology of Michael Callen, along with the hundreds of novels, memoirs, and polemics that charted the emotional, intellectual, moral, and symbolic space between these poles. To another, equally select group, AIDS literature was a catalog of titles perused on the shelves of other people’s apartments, perhaps during a cocktail party, perhaps during a hookup when the host was in the bathroom. Two or three books were regarded as a sign of admirable interest in current events, a certain depth of character even; but too many could provoke nervous speculation: Is he …? and, even more alarmingly: Should I …?
To claim that some of these ways of reading about AIDS are better than others is to miss the point of writing about AIDS. Literature facilitates empathy as well as understanding, and for that reason the mere fact of a book’s existence can effect extraordinary personal change. But because literature can only enfold the present within its scope by displacing it in time, it has the effect of rendering the events it describes contained, finished, past. As a consequence, fiction and drama, memoir and poetry and history serve first and foremost as memorials: to worlds lost or worlds that never were. For the literature of a disease whose final chapter was for fifteen years almost certain death, there was a resonant if morbid appropriateness to this translation. Many of those early texts are what might be called hopeful elegies: books in which protagonists declined and often died but a community soldiered on, and even grew stronger in the face of so much desolation. Whether you think literature facilitated the political transformation of gay life or merely benefited from it depends on how cynical you are; certainly it didn’t have the same effect for IV-drug users, nor again for Haitians or African-Americans, let alone Africans. In either case, the first decade and a half of the AIDS epidemic produced a concentrated body of books, plays, poems, and essays, many of which now seem, like the devastating interval they chronicle, a part of ancient history.
My own library of AIDS literature begins with the phrase “Mark was ill, dying perhaps; say no more” in the excerpt from Robert Ferro’s Second Son that appears in the first Men on Men anthology, published in 1986.* That sentence, hinged on the almost perversely optimistic use of the word “perhaps,” swings between the incontrovertible facts of illness and death on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea that literature might succeed in capturing the overwhelming nature of “the plague” only by avoiding it, or at least not tackling it head on. Hence the decision not to name the disease in this and many other stories and novels of the mid-eighties, as well as the fact that death, though never denied, was left out of the text far more often than it was in life. But beginnings imply endings, and for me the inevitable conclusion came with Rebecca Brown’s The Gifts of the Body in 1994. The diffuse storylines of Brown’s narrative reflected the changing demographics of the epidemic, and Brown was also one of the last writers who managed to avoid what had by then become the nearly universal practice of ennobling sick people merely because of affliction. Allen Barnett’s “HIVs” and “HIV-nots” proved the first in a long series of puns, as organizations took names like ACT UP, Body Positive, and Visual AIDS and writers titled their books Eighty-Sixed, A Matter of Life and Sex, Love Undetectable, and Cocktails. God knows I wasn’t immune to this trend: the original title of this section of this essay was “Preaching to the Converted.” It served as the foreword to an anthology of AIDS fiction called Vital Signs, which was part of Transmissions, a series of reprinted books about AIDS. I’m only grateful that I came up with the title Shoot to Kill after my first novel had gone to press.
But the main reason The Gifts of the Body comes at the end of my personal list of books about AIDS is because it was published just before protease inhibitors and combination therapy radically changed the course of the illness. These treatments didn’t obliterate mortality but they did, for those who could get them, attenuate it, rendering the already nebulous “meaning” of dying and disease that much harder to express. Eighteen years later, literature has yet to find a way to communicate that ambiguity, perhaps because contemporary writers have shirked their responsibility, perhaps because it’s still too soon, or perhaps simply because it can’t. This isn’t to say that good and even great books about AIDS stopped being produced after 1995 and ’96, but they appeared in isolation rather than in concert, fueled by individual rather than collective consciousnesses. The moral, mortal urgency that set fire to the pens of a half generation of writers tempered as death eased its hold on our lives as well as our imaginations, and though this is in many ways a victory, it has the taste of defeat. For too many, AIDS has become just one more of life’s hardships borne by other people—people who live in other cities or other countries; who lead other ways of life; who are other people’s concern, other people’s problem. But to spend too much time wishing that contemporary books about AIDS were as “good” as the ones that came out before 1996, as potent, as numerous, as widely read, is to miss what should be an obvious point: AIDS didn’t happen to make literature better. Literature just happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while. Though that body of work may not tell us exactly where we are now, it does tell us how we got here—how we wept, raged, fought, and fled; how we made space in our beds for everyone our partners ever slept with or resigned ourselves to sleeping alone; how we loved, how we lost; how we died, but above all, how we lived.
HISTORICAL MARKERS ARE symbolic and often arbitrary, and the milestones of personal lives—measuring, as Didion once put it, “the distance we have come from the world”—are no less performative. For me, the suicide of the novelist Heather Lewis in 2002, virtually unnoticed by the publishing community, marked more than a personal loss, but the end of yet another era in literature. The moment I am referring to—the movement—had its roots in the AIDS epidemic, but by the time Heather and I began our careers in the early nineties it had come to shape the sensibility of a larger community. The community I am talking about was political, but it was also, hugely, artistic, and just as AIDS activists were neither exclusively gay nor exclusively male, neither was this new movement, which wasn’t even exclusively about AIDS. That’s because, while the disease itself was an affliction of sex and needles and bad luck, the epidemic was a catastrophe—in Larry Kramer’s word, a “holocaust”—of genocidal neglect. Whether you were victim of or witness to this bureaucratic delinquency, you couldn’t help but feel that everyone was fighting to stay alive in the 1980s, and to those artists who were already alienated from mainstream values the epidemic seemed symptomatic of western culture’s fascination with gluts of sex, death, and debauchery. And so, just as World War I gave us the Lost Generation, AIDS gave us Generation X, and its literary expression, New Narrative. It was this movement that inspired both Heather and myself at the beginning of our careers.
Terms like “Gen X” and “New Narrative” imply a self-awareness that smacks of backward glances. At the time there was just the fragmented reality of political demonstrations and academic conferences, independent bookstores selling books published by small presses and guerilla xeroxing for those who couldn’t afford even those cheap paperbacks, handmade zines instead of the piss elegance of McSweeney’s. In those heady days before hipsters purchased poverty like a fashion statement, the magazine of choice for young writers like Heather and me was Between C & D, an accordion fold of dot-matrix printer paper that came in a plastic bag, and toward the end there was also a press, High Risk, whose oversaturated Rex Ray collages were the antidote to the bright kitschy covers Knopf’s Vintage line was making all the rage. “New Narrative” was a term that floated around this milieu and, like the term “PWA,” only had meaning if you were already acquainted with it, and even today the genre remains hard to quantify. Less postmodern than post-punk, it had no time for the inebriating irony that had paralyzed American literature in the 1970s. Fear, doubt, and uncertainty were plowed through, not confidently, but of necessity. History had regained its solidity in the most banal, terrifying manner—by asserting its right to kill you—and in response literature returned to the Homeric mode of bearing witness. Sentences were pared down, plots streamlined, self-examination and self-expression voiced in a present tense that measured the past in punches and orgasms, metered the future in breaths rather than years. There was no choate vision of survival, nor even a belief that survival was possible, and as a result New Narrative didn’t have a universal form as much as a unifying ethos, one in which desperation tinged success every bit as much as it did failure.
Both Heather and I came late to this movement, publishing our first novels in 1994 and 1993, respectively, but we were too young to realize that the writers we admired weren’t our peers but our progenitors. Our teachers. In those days literary “generations” flashed by as rapidly as shuffling cards, and largely as a result of the efforts of writers who are only now reaching their fifties and sixties (if they’re still alive) we were able to launch our careers not with small presses but with Farrar Straus and Giroux in my case, and Doubleday’s boutique Nan Talese imprint in Heather’s. But though we didn’t realize it at the time, Heather and I were betweeners, aesthetically aligned with a group of writers who existed out of the mainstream even as we ourselves were proof that the mainstream could … what? Open its arms and expand its definition of normal? Suspend moral judgment where money could be made? We suspected the latter but operated as though the former were the case, but in the end motive matters less than results. It was only after the fact that we understood our election was predicated on the demise of the writing upon which we’d been weaned, the marginalization of it, by which I mean that critics neglected the literary merits of House Rules and its predecessors in favor of a new obsession: “victim art,” as the reactionary critic Katie Roiphe called it, an epithet that became the hatchet with which all art that portrayed personal suffering without a concomitant “hopeful” moral was cut down—especially art that dealt with sexual abuse and AIDS. The furore reached its nadir in December 1994, when the New Yorker’s dance critic, Arlene Croce, refused to see Still/Here by choreographer Bill T. Jones on the grounds that such “victim art” was “unreviewable.”
WELL. WHAT AMERICA can’t exclude it absorbs, dilutes, mutes. The quasi-religious fantasy that a pattern hiding behind the chaos will emerge occasionally into view (i.e., the Joycean epiphany) reared its head yet again, and denied New Narrative’s single existential truth: that the end of life implies nothing more tangible than an earlier beginning, and art can do little besides measure the distance from the loss. In the end, New Narrative’s effect was different from what one might have expected, as a varied cohort of writers incorporated aspects of its sensibility into a neutered postmodernism. Much of the New Narrative writing it superseded has been denigrated to second-class status now, while most AIDS writing teeters on the verge of being forgotten or lost. When, in 2011, I created a Wikipedia page listing about 250 books with significant AIDS content, the page was soon deleted, with the justifying arguments ranging from “Are any of these books bestsellers?” to “I do not see any encycolpedic [sic] value for such a list” and “The Category:HIV/AIDS in literature [which at the time listed all of thirty-two books] suffices for works that are of note.”
What does survive shows up here and there like pieces of samizdat from another era, another world even, another life. I’ve always loved samizdat. The romance of the phenomenon, yes, but also the word itself, largely because the first time I remember hearing it was at ACT UP. The term was applied to the vast stacks of photocopies that we picked up on our way into the Monday night meeting: treatment guidelines, drug studies, bureaucratic analyses, meeting schedules, action plans, contact lists, party flyers, and announcements of events ranging from performances and gallery openings to house parties and memorial services. This collection was never referred to as anything other than “the table” (even though it usually spread over two or three), a twelve- or eighteen-foot-long print banquet down both sides of which several hundred gay men and lesbians, nearly indistinguishable in their Doc Martens and Levi’s and sloganned T-shirts, bent their spiky or shaved heads and served themselves and one another with the ordered geniality of an Amish wedding. I was a pretentious but undereducated twenty-two-year-old who didn’t want to admit he was unfamiliar with a term that had the clannish (ap)peal of jargon, the ignorance of which marked him out as neophyte or, worse, interloper. What I mean is, I heard the word in my head as “same-as-that,” or “sameasthat” really, which led me to think of it as an assertion of status: though these stapled stacks of paper, most written by people with no political background or scientific or journalistic training, lacked the credentials and durability of bound books, they were nevertheless the lifeblood of AIDS activism. Sameasthat: most of the table’s contents survived for only a few hours or a few days, ended up buried in boxes in closets, attics, garages, but to me they were the real library of AIDS, and the glossily jacketed books that trickled out of FSG and Nan Talese were the table’s supplements rather than the other way around.
The single most significant piece of sameasthat in my life, however, and by far the most resonant document of my AIDS library, came into my world about nine months before I joined ACT UP. It was 1989 and I was in my last semester of college. I worked in a used bookstore, ostensibly to save up for my impending move to the city, though in fact most of my salary went right back into my boss’s till, since I must have bought three or five or a dozen books every week I worked there. At some point that spring Frank, my boss, brought in a cache of hundreds of opera records. The jackets were faded and tattered and spotted with mold, the discs filthy but, beneath their layer of dust, nearly pristine. Their condition attested to a long period of heavy but respectful use and a second interval of less than benign neglect. Each disc had to be taken from its sleeve and washed by hand, a delicate but monotonous job for a twenty-one-year-old who had zero interest in opera, and I was relieved as much as intrigued when five wrinkled sheets of onionskin fell out of a gaudy sixties or seventies-era case containing Bizet’s Carmen. The sheets were as well-worn as the cardboard that had held them, unruled and covered with florid and, as I thought, old ladyish hand-writing, still bright blue despite the fact that the date at the top of the first page read 26 September 1965—the day written before the month, in the European manner. “My dear Gino” was the only other thing I was able to make out before I put the letter aside and returned to the task at hand, and I didn’t decipher the rest until later that evening, alone in my dorm room, my heart quickening as each successive sentence revealed a love story that seemed as stark and gaudy as an opera, as melodramatic and doomed and unreal. Except this love, between a man named Gino and another named Jean-gabriel, was real, or at any rate it had been, twenty-four years earlier, and the next day I asked Frank—as nonchalantly as possible, and without mentioning the letter—if he remembered the name of the person whose records he’d purchased the day before.
It was a time in my life when omens seemed to appear everywhere, conflicting, confusing, beguiling. “You have terrible taste in literature,” my boss told me after perusing the stacks of books I’d set aside (almost all of which had been published within the last five years), and he gave me a copy of Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time. My boss knew I wanted to be a writer, but there was no way he could have been aware I’d applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, still less that I’d receive my rejection letter, signed by Conroy, on the very day I finished his memoir (which I loved, and which made the rejection feel personal and portentous). Then there was the matter of sex. I’d waited a long time before coming out, and on the very day I finally allowed myself to have sex my watch stopped. This was the only watch I’d ever owned, the watch I’d bought when I’d come to college two and a half years earlier, the watch that signified my desire to be on time for my adult life, and its battery gave out while I was getting fucked without a condom, and practically at the witching hour to boot: 11:57 P.M. And now there was this letter, which I wanted to see as a totem not just validating my sexuality but repudiating the augury of my watch’s stopped hands. Which is to say: my first sexual experience a year earlier remained my only one, and my conception of “the gay life” was mediated entirely through literature. I was the same age as the letter’s recipient and, like him, lived in New Jersey, but my sights were trained on the “N.Y. temptations” to which I would be immigrating in little over a month. What I mean is, I didn’t know if I wanted to meet Gino or to be Gino, only that I didn’t want my fate decided by a $30 Swatch.
He died of AIDS! Frank told me brightly, then blushed and dropped his eyes. He’d seen the obituary in the Times, he remembered, and somehow this didn’t surprise me: the fact that Gino was dead, I mean, not that he’d merited a Times obituary. The condition of his records, for one thing, and the fact that they were opera, which I associated with death (not with funerals per se, but with death scenes in movies, the kind of murder and mourning and revenge that insists on a soundtrack). And then, well, forty-four-year-old gay men were dying in legions in 1989. It was something Italian, Frank continued. Gianni, no, Gino, that was it! Gino … Gino …? But he couldn’t remember the last name. He looked for the paper but it was gone. He racked his brain but the only other things he remembered were that Gino had appeared in a Warhol movie, and that later he’d had something to do with music, though Frank didn’t remember in what capacity. As it turned out these were clues enough, though I didn’t realize it for another five years—five years during which I moved to the city and joined ACT UP to end the AIDS crisis and left ACT UP to start my writing career. The signs continued to appear, the most significant of which occurred when the magazine I was working for went out of business and I ran into Derek Link, who offered me the ticket to San Francisco that he’d bought for his boyfriend (the boyfriend he’d dumped me for), who’d just dumped him. It was a trip I couldn’t have taken if I’d had a job, and while I was away my agent got an offer from FSG for my first novel. My new editor’s assistant turned out to be a Warhol fan, which prompted me to mention the letter I’d found—to mention the date and the name Gino and his appearance in Warhol’s films—and without pausing Jennifer said, “Gino Piserchio.” Are you sure? I asked. I think he did some music too. This only strengthened Jennifer’s conviction: Gino Piserchio was the boy on the bed with Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s Beauty No. 2, she told me, and, later, the composer of the music for Ciao! Manhattan, which, like Carmen, and like Bizet’s own life, and Piserchio’s, was yet another story of early death—in this case Sedgwick’s, whose obituary appears at the end of the film. As a final confirmation we looked up the date of Piserchio’s death: March 22, 1989.
Of Jean-gabriel’s identity I remain ignorant, although I have to confess I’ve never searched for it very hard. His letter is beautiful and forlorn and beseeching and even a little creepy, but it is also a failure, at least in its intended sense. I’m forty-six now, two years older than Gino when he died, I’ve outgrown my youthful resistance to opera; and Gino was a musician, and an educated one at that: he went to Mannes College of Music and did graduate work at Columbia; he’s considered one of the first musicians to fully exploit the Moog synthesizer. He was, in other words, a music connoisseur, and a connoisseur wouldn’t keep Jean-gabriel’s letter in a copy of Carmen if its suit had been successful. Carmen is the girl who says, When will I love you? I don’t know. Maybe never, maybe tomorrow. She’s a liberated girl, or at any rate a lawless one: she works in a factory, she smokes, she slashes the face of Manuelita to end a fight that she—Carmen—started, then flirts with her guard until he lets her out of jail. When Don José is imprisoned for freeing Carmen she takes pity on him, even thinks she’s falling in love. She asks him to turn his back on his duty and join her as a gypsy, a vagabond, an outlaw. Circumstances keep them together for a while but Carmen quickly grows bored: Don José is, clearly, a good citizen, and Carmen is a free spirit—or, as she puts it in the opera’s most famous aria: Love is a gypsy’s child. It has never known the law. Soon enough Carmen throws Don José over for the bullfighter Escamillo and, in the grip of a madness that can only be whipped up by spurned love and a full orchestra, Don José stabs Carmen rather than relinquish her to another man. It is I who has killed her, he confesses to the crowd, Ah Carmen, my adored Carmen! The opera’s last lines have eerie—icky—resonance with something Chuck Wien says at one point in Beauty No. 2. Edie jostles Gino and he chokes on his drink. “Nice Gino,” Chuck admonishes Edie. “Don’t let Gino die. Sweet Gino. We’re not going to let him die.” “He won’t!” Edie protests, a little petulant, a little forlorn, her upper-class consonants crisp despite the amount of alcohol she’s consumed. “He won’t?” Chuck prompts, and Edie shakes her head. She looks at Gino. “You won’t want to die,” she says, consonants crisp, vowels round and full as embroidered bolsters even as the words formed from these cultured phonemes don’t quite make sense, and in response Gino lays a hand on her naked calf in a gesture that could mean anything, or nothing at all.
Jean-gabriel says in his first paragraph that he’s responding to a letter Gino wrote him after two years of silence, and one can’t help but wonder what made Gino reach out after all that time to a man he met only once. It’s 1965, remember: Beauty No. 2 has just come out, and Edie Sedgwick has been declared Girl of the Year. Twenty-one-year-old Gino must have basked in the glow she and Andy and the other Superstars gave off, must have felt like one himself. (Edie: “And then you said he wasn’t Beauty No. 1.” Chuck: “Nobody said he wasn’t Beauty No. 1. But that’s true, now that you say it.”) But he is beautiful. Everyone, men and women, want him, and more than a few get him, but through them all he remembers the French boy he fled from two years before and, in a fit of guilt or hubris or, who knows, genuine romance, decides to write him. Who knows what happened by the time Jean-gabriel’s answer came back? Another man maybe (Chuck: “The new is better. That’s what we live for. The new.”) or maybe a woman—Piserchio and heiress Gillian Spreckels Fuller married in 1972, then divorced three years later. At any rate whatever impulse had prompted Gino to write didn’t survive long enough for him to succumb to Jean-gabriel’s heart-on-his-sleeve, cards-on-the-table reply. But the urgency of the Frenchman’s words triggered something in its recipient, nostalgia maybe, a curiosity about what might have been, a desire to be worthy of the kind of love it offered, and eventually the letter took up residence in the sleeve of Carmen. I imagine Gino pulling it out every once in a while, intentionally at first, then accidentally, when he reaches for the case and the thin folded pages fall into his hands. I imagine him reading it while Escamillo and Don José and Carmen herself sing of a love that, because it has been recorded, can never die, but, because its object is dead, can never be consummated. When he does this he is nineteen again, twenty, twenty-one, in my head, in his. His fifteen minutes are still on the clock. His life isn’t ticking away from him. And isn’t that what art does? Transforms you, in your eyes, and in the eyes of the people who look upon you? Locates you at the beginning of a journey filled with possibility rather than at the end of the road? “I wonder if you are ready to build something ‘marvelous’ with a boy who did not forget you,” Jean-gabriel asks toward the end of his letter, and I wonder if Gino heard this question as Don José’s half-crazed For the last time, demon, will you follow me? or as Escamillo’s more equivocal invitation as he heads for the bullring: And whoever loves me will come there. Or had time and age and illness distilled the experience to the aria:
Love is a rebellious bird
that nothing can tame.
And you call him in vain,
if it suits him not to come.
…
The bird you hoped to catch
beat its wings and flew away.
Love stays away; you wait and wait;
when least expected, there it is!
All around you, swift, swift,
it comes, goes, then it returns.
You think you hold it fast, it flees;
you think you’re free, it holds you fast.
Oh, love! Love! Love! Love!
Sunday 26 September 1965
My dear Gino,
What a wonderful surprise! You cannot imagine how much you made me happy receiving your very long letter. Not too long, of course. I was feeling 2 years younger and happy. Thanks, thank you very much. Go on. I am always astonished with your letters: I cannot understand how a so young boy like you is able to write down so lovely and intelligent letters.
And the wonderful snapshots! I appreciate very much that you took care to go to the post office and to put into an envelope so nice pictures. I looked at them a lot of times and I have to tell you which were my thoughts:
The first one is that I want to see you again as soon as possible. I was hesitating to fly to this N.Y. this summer but I had no real purpose without seeing you. Nothing could enjoy me more than to take you in my arms. I would like only to be sure that it’s the same for you as it could be. I am a little bit afraid to be so excited to meet you again when I think of the short period during which we were together. I remember quite well that I cried a lot when you left me at the station on my last week-end in the Big City. Do you? And I had difficulty to forgive you to have left me alone but you explained to me the reasons.
The second one is that you look nearly the same. I say nearly, because you look taller and thinner. The surprising difference is your long hair! To any one you are still very good-looking and the most important thing is that I find the same nice boy when I have the great pleasure to see you again. I love your pictures and if you have other ones don’t hesitate to send me them. I’ll keep them very carefully. I am laughing a little bit about your long hair. Don’t consider that as a criticism but I prefer you with shorter hair. You have probably to do it for your magazine snapshots. Last week I said to one of my young accountants: “Do you want really to be one of the Beatles.” He blushed and promised to go to the hair-dresser, but he did not. May I confess that I have longer hair but still shorter than the young beautifuls in Paris?
The third thought provoked by your beautiful face is that I am pleased you are a little bit older. As you have written it you have thought of the problems of life, of love, of your way of living, of the purpose you have to follow. When I met you I was convinced after a few days that you could not arrest your attention on one person: Jean-gabriel, but that it was necessary for you, at your age, to know other boys, the gay life and all the aspects of the way of living in the world and it was painful for me. You did and I cannot criticize you. I regretted it but I had not the right to do it. You had to compare between them a lot of things, a lot of persons and only after you could stabilize yourself. This moment can happen when you are 20, 30, or 40, even more. It depends on persons. Have you now enough elements of comparison and do you know now partly what want? I hope so and I hope you have the desire to live a quieter life, a more interesting life, more attractive and that I could have a place in this life. You have to tell me frankly which one. What is the use to meet a lot of boys, to scatter his love, to kill his capacity of love finally? You have to choice your way: you have a lot of abilities: don’t spoil your life! Build something nice and great. And for that love is necessary, real love and not a lot of affairs. But with whom would you like to try? You’re more confident now because what you wrote about love and your “neurotic needs” is very well deliberated and true. Believe me, a French boy, at your age, could not analyze a problem in such an intelligent way. And I like intelligent persons. You say that you don’t live only for the “immediate satisfaction of your neurotic needs,” that it has taken for you two years to learn it. Wonderful, wonderful, but be prudent before swearing: “I’ll never drink of this water.”
The last but not least thought is about us. After such a nice and intelligent letter, I discovered great changes in you, in the good direction. I wonder if you are ready to come back 2 years sooner and to build something “marvelous” with a boy who did not forget you. I am afraid because it’s nearly impossible. At 3.000 miles, it’s, maybe, madness, but why could we not be mad? With you, it can be only lovely. I feel that there is a very good occasion of showing what we are able to do: our letters. Both of us we have to prove that we want to be more than ordinary friends and one of the conditions is to keep, until we meet each other, a very close contact. I make a proposal, a reasonable one, I feel. We have to swear to send a letter once every two weeks. At least. I think that 2 letters a month, it’s not too much. I am ready to swear it, if you do it and this vow should be valid until we meet. Don’t do again what we did two years before. There is no question of language.
A second condition is that we must tell always the truth. We must not hide anything. And to begin, I’ll tell you that I had a lover until September 10th. It was short because he wanted to see me seldom because of his family. He was 23 years old. And there was a question of money: He asked me for a lot and I did not know if he was interested about me or about my wallet. It lasted 3 months. But he had a lot of difficulties: no job, no flat. But could we accept that somebody has sex for interest?
Are you in New Jersey for a long time? It’s much better to be away from N.Y. temptations.
I understand that you could come to Europe. Tell me as soon as possible which are your plans. Is it necessary to write that you are invited at my place? I’ll get a new car next month, a convertable one, and we could do together some nice trip through Europe.
I have more to say about your music, about your job as a model. It will be for the next letter.
My dear Gino, I seldom wrote a long letter with such a pleasure. Be good. Write soon.
Love and love from your Jean-gabriel
*Ferro cut the “say no more” by the time Second Son was published in 1988, an excision I’ve wondered about off and on for the past twenty-eight years, sometimes regarding it as a kind of victory, sometimes a capitulation. I wanted to ask him why he removed it, but by the time Second Son came out Ferro was also dead.