I have to tell you
You have to tell me
Love is necessary
Is it necessary to write
I have more to say
There is no question of language
And yet, in the end, that’s all there is. Questions. Language. More to say. Because language is like a sense: it’s like seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, though perhaps it’s most like tasting. It’s a way of capturing something and bringing it inside yourself. But this capture is only a beginning. Words, like food, have to be digested, and definitions are like flavors. What you taste when you eat lasagna and what I taste when I eat lasagna and what you mean by love and what I mean by love have both similarities and differences—they may even have more similarities than they have differences, but it’s the differences that divide us, and it’s these divisions that stories like this one hope to narrow. And so, to close, one more story:
My first boyfriend, Jean-Claude Robert Breach, was a beautiful man with eyes the color of a clear brown-bottomed pool of water and, when I knew him, a fresh pink scar that brought out the line of his left cheekbone. The time of our love affair encompassed a lazy summer in which neither of us had jobs or classes or anything to do besides participate in ACT UP and Queer Nation demonstrations and be with each other. I remember one of those summer evenings after a long hot afternoon together: we ended up in the Bar on Second Avenue and 4th Street—the same bar where I met Derek Link and where I broke up with Patrick Smith (RIP), the same bar that today is a fake British pub—and because money was short we bought only one bottle of water to share between us. The bottle was in Jean-Claude’s hand and he took the first drink. I expected him to hand it to me but instead he pulled me close with his free hand and pressed his lips to mine and passed me the water that was in his mouth. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t swallow but pass it back to him, and I did, and he passed it back to me, and the water moved back and forth between us, its temperature warming, its taste changing as it mixed with his saliva and my saliva, its volume shrinking with each pass as some of it trickled down our throats and some dribbled down our chins, and when at last the first mouthful was gone he took another drink and the process began again. I remember this as the most shared experience of my entire life. I believed I was tasting the water exactly as Jean-Claude tasted it and that he was tasting it exactly as I did and, though I usually think that every cell in my body that might have been affected by that water has long since been sloughed off, I remind myself that the brain is made of cells, and I let myself believe that those few sips of water did indeed change me forever. Not just mentally, I mean, but physically. In an era when the term “bodily fluids” carried a whiff of the cemetery and virtually every physical interaction between gay men was mediated by a discussion of its relative risk, the water that Jean-Claude offered me was analogue and antidote to the semen that, two years earlier, my first sexual partner had shot in my ass with no regard for my safety, or his own.
I’m not sure if this story is phrased as an answer or just another question. I do know I would like to eroticize our knowledge of the world and each other. And so, rather than conclude by writing “these words have left my mouth and entered your ear” (because they haven’t, after all, they’ve left my hand and entered your eye) I write instead: the water has left my mouth and entered yours. Now you have choices. You can spit it out, first of all, or you can swallow it. You can swallow some and pass the rest back to me. You can pass it all back to me. You can bring a third person into our chain. You can do nothing at all. There are other choices, some of which are not known to me, but, at any rate, what happens next is up to you.
(1989–2014)