Queer Street

(PRELUDE TO A POSTSCRIPT)
RICHARD (SAULS) ROUILARD, 1949–1996

To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping

Glad from a world grown . . . filthy and demented.

(with apologies to Rupert Brooke,
once the most beautiful corpse in England)

1416 North Havenhurst. Richard Rouilard, Carole Lombard and Who-Investigates:

Author approaches the Colonial House again, some years later, to be with the man he had learned to call his Philoctetes: Richard Rouilard, the rhapsode of Lost Angeles. He’d had Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow in mind, in a perhaps not altogether whimsical connection to RR’s famous collection of bow ties, assembled for a book he’d been planning on the history of the tuxedo, a subject that in his hands would, without question, have given Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a run for its stylish money. And he considered the dilemma of their disposal in bequests, and the haunting image of an inner man, stuck away somewhere, not in a beautiful white bedroom in the apartment once inhabited by Carole Lombard, there on the border of West Hollywood, and not at the Venice beachfront house either, but as if in a remote cove on the far side of Catalina, a place he had spoken of as a refuge, a place he and Bob (Cohen) had found one time on a sail from Malibu. In Sophocles, Philoctetes, in giving away the bow, is brought back to be cured of the suppurating wound. There seemed always the chance that progress in the fight against AIDS would be made in time to bring RR back to sustainable life. It didn’t turn out that way.

QT: We’ve all heard your story in bits and pieces.

RR: That’s all my story is, hon, bits and pieces—audition pieces.

QT: You’ve been frequently tested?

RR: Frequently? Incessantly. Most recently by the Los Angeles Times. “You have everything we could want, but, frankly, we were hoping for a woman.” “Well, I can do that!” Hired.

QT: The pieces fell together.

RR: Didn’t they just. Well, falling together is the new done thing—falling apart together, like on some demented deconstructionist dis-assembly line. Yes, hon, the connoisseur vanguard is out there getting to know Death really close up and personal. Nevertheless, we won’t dwell; we’ll talk about abiding.

QT: I’m ending my history in 1985; we’re quite a distance beyond that now.

RR: Says who?

QT: You have a point.

RR: If nothing else, one must believe one always had a point.

QT: One that seems clearly the principal function of your throwaway swank.

RR: God, I haven’t heard “throwaway swank” in years!

QT: It was essentially ’50s.

RR: Hmm, and I always wondered why I was not essentially ’60s.

QT: Well, you’ve got “it.” Where do you think it came from?

RR: I think when you’ve been kicked to the curb, you try to retaliate with something disarming.

[The attempt to get RR from the life resulted in a kind of mobile abbozzo. The author said if he ever wrote a play about him, he would call him Dick Wheeler, DW, as if he were actually behind the scenes of his own life, getting Billy Bitzer to crank the camera on cue.]

QT: Tell me if you can about the secrets of queer Hollywood.

RR: The secrets of queer Hollywood. Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into . . . You know what a secret de Polchinelle is? Comes up somewhere in Agatha Christie; Poirot dwells on it. It’s a secret that, as he says, everyone is allowed to know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it—for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you. I suppose English linguistic philosophers would classify it as a paradox; the French apparently don’t bother; just life.

QT: Polchinelle is the English Punch, as in Punch and Judy.

RR: Exactly. There are a million Punches in queer Hollywood, and the number grows exponentially, but still only one Judy. Do you play bridge, by the way? I bet not.

QT: Yes, no, I don’t.

RR: I just knew it. Do you play any card games?

QT: Casino.

RR: Really? What about pinochle?

QT: My father once taught me pinochle. I used to crawl out from the bedroom into the all-night games he ran with his old high school crowd from Regis.

RR: That’s somewhere in Manhattan, isn’t it?

QT: It is; I was very verbal.

RR: Well, out here, hon, bridge is the obligatoire homosexual card game.

QT: Such things matter.

RR: Quite so. For example, let’s say you’re the declarer at a slam, and if a certain finesse succeeds you’ll make the contract. If your only way to make the slam is to rely on the finesse, your chances are about fifty-fifty, usually less. But in some deals you can do much better than to stake the outcome on a finesse. A different line of play might elevate your chances to three in four and in some cases even higher, all the way to gotcha. It’s this will to improve on chances that distinguishes the real player from the also-ran.

QT: Sounds impressive, but, sadly, I don’t get it.

RR: Well, why should you, when you’ve already played poker with Davis? It’s the same as Michael Maslansky telling you Joan was deep; it amounts to an article of faith.

QT: A faith in what, exactly—celebrity?

RR: I love doing celebrity—working it, stalking it, making it nervous; being a celebrity, no thank you. Hollywood celebrity in the ’80s is the La Brea Tar Pits full of soft-boiled shit. You either figure out a way of getting across it on a long plank—

QT: Like Venice in the winter, in high water.

RR: —or you fall in. Venice is another problem—drive-by shootings.

QT: I meant—

RR: I know.

QT: So celebrity’s sickness isn’t so much in its secrets as—what?

RR: Simply, celebrity is metastasis.

QT: The Star Soul scenario begins with the story of Baby Rouilard, illegitimate offspring of a French airline hostess, born with a raised eyebrow like a circumflex accent, adopted by the kindly Saulses and brought up in upper-middle-class luxe in the jungle of New Jersey’s Italo-Jewish trucking mafia. A little background on the New Jersey of the period. Asbury Park, the Roller Derby: thuggish bruisers and diesel dykes on wheels, all of it as big a fix as wrestling. Atlantic City, the Miss America Pageant, which you’ve re-created in miniature out at the beach as Gaywatch. Adoptive mother’s name?

RR: Norma.

QT: Adoptive father’s?

RR: Unimportant.

QT: You frustrate somewhat my assumptions regarding the Orestes complex, except of course that in the case of the adopted male homosexual child, the adoptive father is really not an Agamemnon figure but an Aegisthus one, although it gets tricky with Hamlet, whom you resemble temperamentally far more than I myself—you’d certainly be more believable in the part, goddammit, despite the anguished claims I made for myself to myself back in the early ’60s.

RR: You and every other homosexual in New York under thirty, apparently.

QT: Whatever of that. Hamlet does want to be fucked by Claudius; undoubtedly the uncle is the father in fantasy—in fact I’ve always thought Hamlet Father and Claudius ought to be played as twins, so that in the closet scenes Hamlet’s howling about the two portraits—Hyperion to a satyr—could be played as deep irony.

RR: I’m a sucker for deep irony myself.

QT: So either the Orestes complex doesn’t obtain or you are in fact a lesbian.

RR: Speaking of deep irony, I think I am.

QT: Check. In any event, it seems Baby does not quite work out, chez Sauls.

RR: Not quite? Quite not.

QT: A couple of teenage suicide attempts.

RR: Unsuccessful, but nonetheless instructive; one discovered a strong distaste for failure.

QT: Essential, as I see it, to your path work.

RR: My what?

QT: Your path work. How you took the PATH to New York, what and whom you found there, and the wisdom acquired in your being taken up, such as, for example, the mystical difference—or perhaps it was a lesson in gay alchemy—between French and English table settings.

RR: Essential information.

QT: First development turn, Sauls family attempts to disown Baby Richie, who hadn’t quite worked out. Richie’s response. Finding hidden in the library the double sets of books intended to fuck the IRS, he makes photocopies. Very serious threats in both directions. Cut to clip of John Garfield—

RR: The most gorgeous Jewish leading man, bar none, in Hollywood history.

QT: —in Rossen’s Body and Soul. “What are you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies.” So Richie Sauls takes back his name, Richard Rouilard, becoming, after many vicissitudes—

RR: The only queer in Los Angeles both baptized and bar mitzvahed.

QT: Question. Seeing you’ve been bar mitzvahed, what’s your mitzvah? Apart from decorating that is.

RR: I’ll get back to you. I do believe you mentioned vicissitudes.

RR’s narration (intercut with the odd obligatory curse): Law School in Houston. First meeting with Bob Cohen.

“I’d never been south—unless you consider the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach the South.”

The Cohn-Rouilard marriage: from the first it was Richard and his powerful husband, Bunny and Bu. The San Francisco years, opening the first gay-advocacy law firm in the city, working with Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk’s murder in 1978 and the decision to come to Los Angeles. The “visualization” of Bunny Mars, a woman he’d thought up in Houston (she’s from Spring Branch) and fielding her as his alter ego, the wildly successful social columnist of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. RR, for the whole length of Bunny’s tenure at the paper, would go along as her stringer to events, always conveying Miss Mars’s regrets (IMPOSSIBLE VENIR MENSONGE SUIT), revealing her sudden indisposition due to ferocious migraines brought on by the combination of a choker sched and the dreadful pollen carried on the Santa Ana winds. And if there wasn’t a Santa Ana, some terrible spores discovered that very morning in the air-conditioning system of her pre-war Elusive Drive apartment house—where at inty little dinners, she would dispense wit and wisdom to the chosen few, discoursing brilliantly on the Hollywood of the ’40s and ’50s, the shift from film noir and domestic “problem pictures” to the post-HUAC blockbuster, wide-screen Biblical epic period, larded with such tidbits of Los Angeles faggot lore as the discovery of the spectacular Guy Madison (freshly discharged from the Navy at the end of World War II) in the tea room at Venice Beach, and a whole catalogue of details concerning Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter (“Anybody wanna fuck a star?”) and Jeffrey Hunter. This concluded with her ironic commentary on the immensely rich and successful Hollywood homosexual mafia: their toy boys picked up by trolling trolls out of the back alleys off Santa Monica Boulevard, bathed, buffed and nourished (rather like Dorothy and her friends when they finally get to the Emerald City), given new sets of gleaming Chiclet teeth, rigorous Beverly Hills haircuts, nice manicures and fetching little off-the-rack wardrobes from Old Navy and the Gap, and ferried from Central up to Malibu like so much delicatessen for consumption at the drugged orgies that have done so much to revive the glory days of Hollywood Babylon.

Finally, one night, RR, flatly excluded from a black tie event by the doorkeeper (as Miss Dean might say, “Th-th-they also s-serve . . .”) at the Chandler Pavilion (most likely tipped as to Bunny’s increasingly tenuous cover), he broke down. “But I am Miss Mars! I am Miss Mars!” The jig was up, and as RR put it, it was time to retire the rabbit.

Whereupon Bunny repaired to her Venice beach house, where, sitting on an exquisite apple-green sofa between twin copies of the Apollo Belvedere artfully painted in the most vivid glossy shades, the better to recall the actual look of classical Greek statuary, she undertook “community service.” She had decided the Old Guard was right, “Nice women don’t work; nice women volunteer.” Giving history lessons, particularly on the theme of American post-war cultural expansion as seen from the point of view of a Sun Belt matron who knows her onions and her jewelry, to a rapt audience of the young. Bunny’s Sunrise Semester was held at noon. She wanted to set the record straight before she and the rest of Southern California sank into the Pacific Ocean.

While outside on the veranda, guests sit on the deck and do the Gaywatch routine, the musclemen parading by, holding up their rating cards, 1–10. One or two drift in to replenish their drinks and, sitting at Bunny’s knee, are caught up in her little lesson.

There followed the two years in which RR edited the Advocate, turning it from a tawdry, primitive sex-and-dish rag into a sophisticated and powerful instrument of the queer political agenda.

In depicting RR as Dick Wheeler, in the docudrama he did come to write by way of an extended eulogy, the author pictures him this way at his desk, at the end of a typical hectic day, dictating to his assistant:

“Now concerning the queer American dream. If the dream of each and every straight American boy is to stand one day tall at a podium, outdoors, right at the top of a white marble staircase in the nation’s capital, freezing his ass off in January, and declare, ‘I do solemnly swear’—Sonia, don’t look alarmed by me; I know what I’m saying. ‘To discharge the office of’—et cetera. How does it go? I played it once in Perth Amboy. ‘To uphold, protect, defend’—whatever. Yes, ‘the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,’ then so help me God, the dream of every red-blooded American queer is to stand indoors halfway up a townhouse staircase in a black taffeta Edith Head gown and bark, ‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!’

“Queer America is Margo Channing. The homosexual knows the answer to the question can chess be played without the queen? [pause] However [pause], all the same the Homintern must agree to realize that if you’re out for America’s true love—all the lip-smacking Presbyterian compassion the great heart of the nation can give—then you must be prepared to die, and die valiantly—remembering that great newspaper adage, ‘If it bleeds it reads.’ Nothing else will suffice. Got that? Good. [aside to the audience] Meanwhile, who says you can’t take up one of history’s most terrible human catastrophes—the AIDS plague—compare it to another—the Holocaust—and make of it the plot of a Hollywood melodrama called He Learned to Love, a remake of Dark Victory. You can—you heard it here in the City of Angels, fountainhead of the Gay Liberation Movement—thanks to Harry Hay and the Matachines—the jesters—and not to Ross Hunter and his ’50s Universal closet fags. [riffles through copy]

“All right. Now get this. About those other two. Out them both. Dish her but kill him—and be vish. You can do it darling—think pink triangle. Step on his face. Leave fucking Bruno Magli heel prints, darling, no jury will convict you. [to the audience] And remember, Vorstellung is performance. [looks at copy and photos]

“Right. Blow that up, downsize that and get Liz Smith on the phone—and, Sonia darling, if it’s not too much trouble to remind the dry cleaners to expedite my black tie? Then call the cocktail at AIDS Project Los Angeles and tell them I’m running a West Hollywood minute late. [to the audience] Listen, the trick of attendance at lots of Hollywood parties is simply to remember that there’s always a kitchen door.”

Concerning Chad—archetypical L. A. gayboy-on-the-make and his notorious tapes:

“I’ve heard of them. I met him once, or it it wasn’t him, then another. No, it was him. He seemed to think he was giving me an interview; he wasn’t. I took him to the Rose for lunch and told him he should lay off the mushrooms for a while, stop being drilled by handlers who read Burroughs and William Gibson and John le Carré, and start drinking black coffee and reading Dennis Cooper by himself.

“I mean, darling, this is a boy who thinks he’s a telepath because he knows the Häagen-Dazs vanilla fudge ripple is really cold in the freezer compartment, who thinks chicanery means some kind of sadomasochistic sexual practice. You begin to realize if he sticks around those Camp queens long enough he’ll be calling the doorway the penetralium.

“One thing he does have, however, that is scary—absolutely uncanny. Those monologues, complete with relative and subordinate clauses. Didn’t you wonder?”

“Well, I made a remark about the French Ventriloquist, but he didn’t get it.”

“The Chads don’t get anything, that’s the thing. This one you just came from will say one of two things or maybe both, if you brought the cocaine: that he’s channeling dead men who adored him on the astral; that when he was in Washington . . . et cetera. When he was in Washington, indeed—what for, the Reagan inaugural? And yet maybe he was—maybe some crazed Pasadena pedophile took him along as his fucking son, no pun intended. And when he was there they put a transplant—right?—in his sinus cavity or somewhere convenient, and so every time he opens his mouth he is unwittingly entrapping some derelict loose canon. What goes around comes around, what gives gets, meaning the apparatus. Then he chills out, and it’s as if he thinks he knows what he’s saying, only of course by now he’s the same as all those boys who came back from Saigon in the ’70s, where they took so many drugs at their desks that when the commanding officer would come into the room, and they’d jump up and salute, and he’d say, ‘As you were, men,’ they couldn’t remember!

“Oh, well, hooray for HollywooD: from Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy to this in two quick generations.”

“But how can any of it be possible?”

“I don’t know; there’s a theory that some of them, probably Scientology dropouts, when drugged in a certain way and plugged into some equivalent of Learn While You Sleep tapes. Or else they find photographic memory types. I never used to believe they actually existed until I got to law school. Frightening. Thank God not one of them ever seems to get elected to high office. And I’ve seen it out here a lot—although not where it might do some good, in actors, but in writers, no less, writers on contract, who can commit any old piece of scripted shit to memory in nothing flat, and rehash it over a weekend to keep the studio wolf from the door. Well, Chad would seem to have it, plus which he must be a prize example of a successful Clear, in the sense of absolute tabula rasa with no biography of his own at all, who can regurgitate virtually anything they siphon into his brain.”

“Maybe there is mind control out here, and the story that there aren’t any minds to control is a bluff.”

“It makes him seem most improbably learned.”

“And therefore oh so appealing to all these brutally ugly compulsive masturbator theoreticians and semantic studies queers being churned out of UCLA faster than Fox used to turn out starlets.

“The thing is you never know in what combinations these little monsters are going to express themselves on any one particular occasion. Yet they have no guile, no Eve Harrington characteristics at all. You really ought to get this one down on videotape, as in Sex, Lies and. In a way it’s like talking to a mynah bird. What the little bird tells you isn’t the news or even disinformation, it’s more like old jingles from radio, like ‘Eat too much, drink too much? Take Brioschi anti-acid’ or ‘My beer is Rheingold the dry beer, think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer.’ Stunningly weird.

“You know what we really ought to do, instead of cooking our queer re-write of All That Heaven Allows. We ought to get that kid and do a spin on My Own Private Idaho—call it, let’s see—yes, how about They Own My Privates: I’m a Homo. Happy ending, of course, everybody reconciled, as the sun sets over Sandy Gallen’s Malibu beach house.

“But what should we really be talking about? Power? The Los Angeles inferiority complex, the Big One, the critical importance of existential decorating, why stars always got off the train at Pasadena? About Pasadena today and Republican fags, political reality in America in relation to show business?

“About Judy Garland, and what the gay movement is doing two decades after Stonewall—les événements de soixante-neuf—to erase her memory through the slavish adoration of her troubled daughter. About the difference between the Santa Monica Boulevard Halloween parade, the Hollywood Boulevard Halloween parade and the Greenwich Village Halloween parade? About Christmas in Palm Springs and The Bu? About Raymond Chandler misty nights and old-style crime in Hollywood and how nowadays everything that happens in the so-called real world is handled as a sequence first and only later (after the editing) as an event, like the Menendez brothers, like O.J.

“I did like that kid’s little rap about American porn, because we were overwhelmed by Jack Deveau and Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, all the art-film pornographers, so I suppose I sound pretentious. When I first arrived, I used to go to these meetings down in basement of that Old Dress Extras Club—little did they suspect—where some gnome the color of the sand on Santa Monica Beach would lecture on subjects like The Redefinition of Open Space in the Films of Gorton Hall, Existential Metaphysics and the Reverse Angle in Jack Deveau’s Left Handed, Dialectical Montage in Arthur Bressan’s Pleasure Beach (starring the deeply tragic Johnny Dawes, the Tom Hanks of queer pornography). How Bressan’s Forbidden Letters, starring the Prince of Tides, Richard Locke, was intended to enforce the idea of predestination, whereas mise-en-scène in the Joe Gage Hank trilogy and especially later in the second and definitive triad of Heatstroke, Closed Set and Handsome, which, with its infernal-erotic night scenic, highway neon, dark trees/steaming manhole aesthetic, was the real masterpiece, was intended to enforce the idea of the free will.

“He said Richard Locke was so gifted he could play either condition, top or bottom, with equal conviction. He called Joe Gage a disciple of both Douglas Sirk and Edgar G. Ulmer, of both Jack Kerouac and Boyd McDonald—but we knew that.

“Finally, lauding Sam Gage as the Ross Hunter of the movement, the Gage men—all representations of retribution for the victims of the Universal purge of the ’50s—and the high art cinematographers Richard Youngblood and Russell Ballard, who were to Gage what Russel Metty had been to Sirk, he defined for history the culmination of gay art porn before the onset of videotape, on which all sex is lies. The most accomplished abstract Ophulsian film in the genre he found to be Closed Set, and the apotheosis of everything the greatest single sequence in the genre: the New York City sequence of Handsome, in which the visual/verbal Grosse Fugue Gage brings off—including the single most extravagant and ecstatic gesture in the history of such endeavor, the descent of the monolithic slab from Kubrick’s 2001, transformed into The Cosmic Glory Hole—an instance of Camp gestural definition equal to any other ever made in whatever medium: containing virtually every seminal homosexual fantasy extant and culminating in the sacramental phallic aspersion blessing the onscreen sealed-with-a-kiss nuptials of Roy Garrett and J.D. Slater, establishing Gage once and for all, insofar as all art aspires to the condition of music, as the Beethoven of queer porn.

“Whereupon the short-lived Joe Gage aesthetic gives way in the middle ’80s to William Higgins, thence to videotape, and it’s all over. It was some performance. I’ve never seen or heard of the speaker again.”

“But he was taped.”

“Oh, yes.”

(Did Richard Locke really go out into the desert, finally, and find enlightenment? Anyway, he’s dead now, as is Eric Ryan who used to skate along the esplanade at Venice, where Richard Rouilard spent his weekend for a little while more.

Richard Locke, the Gage Men, Richard Rouilard, all gone. Joe Gage alive and kicking.)

QT: To paraphrase Anna Russell and Randy Shilts, what did the boys in the band play on? And tell me why his “Patient Zero” fable was so destructive to queer politics.

RR: Some snowy night—

QT: In front of the fire. I do know you edited Shilts at the Advocate; what would you say now that he’s gone home?

RR: [directly into the camera] I said I’d outlive you, Randy, if it was the last thing I did.

QT: Martin Duberman, it is said, is generally disinclined to experience life west of the Hudson. What is he missing?

RR: A metaphysical question. Like who really got what they wanted out on Fire Island. And if almost nobody got what they wanted on Fire Island, that truth is nothing compared to today’s air-ferry to South Beach. Rich old queens in white shantung pajamas, silver lamé beach clogs and Panama hats to protect the face from the lacerations of the cruel carcinogenic sun that once they worshipped as freely and as wantonly in their daring white sharkskin Jantzens as now do the luscious carefree young they’ve come to ogle—cunning and frisky as they are in their sailor tops, grass skirts and Ray-Bans.

Nice manners people have in burdensome times. And they all want ladies’ rosewood kneehole desks and Chinese Chippendale foot stools. Don’t ask me, I tell them, ask Chuck Pollock. Privately, I wonder what on earth for, when these ladies—all fat ladies, darling, who don’t even sing, so with them it’s never over. Give them a Chinese Chippendale foot stool, they’d sit on it, and they could hardly get one fat knee in the ladies’ kneehole hole, never mind two. As pieces of furniture, they do make nice little cubbyholes for dogs to snuggle up in, that I grant you—the rosewood desks, I mean.

QT: My version of that is this. You can now catch the Hampton Jitney on the corner of Queer and Lonely, not far from the boarded-up Adonis Theater, but next to nobody ever gets a round-trip ticket; most board with a single bag, and although they may promise, in the words of the ’40s movies, to send for my things, they never do.

RR: Under the circumstances, there are limits to the things people may wish to understand about themselves.

RT: What circumstances are those?

RR: In California, any and all circumstances. The viscosity of quicksand increases with shearing. Rate times time equals distance is not a universal law—there are conditions under which it doesn’t apply.

RT: Marcel Proust said something like that.

RR: Ah, yes, Marcel Proust. Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our hearts. He said that too. He said a lot, when you come to think of it.

As for me, I have stood around and walked around and fucked around and drunk and drugged around with ex-con (you know, from the Big House) transvestite hookers on West Street and rough trade in the trucks, and all day every day all they were saying was, “Fuck them!”—by whom they meant what it has become convenient to call The Establishment (but they wouldn’t have gotten—and didn’t get—so fancy; all they said was them). And if you had asked any of them (the them I knew, not them, right?) if they harbored in their waterfront minds the slightest idea that they would give a dead rat’s ass or lift a fat fucking finger—so much as a polished, diamond-ringed pinky—to help them (us) in any kind of mortal crisis, they would have honestly laughed in your face and said, “What are you, fucking crazy?” So, I’m sorry, but none of this rhetoric about how they want us dead makes any real sense. Yes, they want us dead. You want to make something of it, other than reality? You want to make something of it it isn’t—like morality?

We hold this truth to be self-evident: it is not sufficient that the state of affairs novelty’s promoters promote should be simply better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be manifestly sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

What I’m getting at is, after you have adopted the refusal to buy into the paranoid stance (above), then do act as if everything outlined in that stance were the absolute truth. Then and only then are you an effective activist or politician, and then and only then will you avoid—escape, really—being consumed by your role.

I mean those very few—and unless I’m completely crazy, they are a little on the increase each year as the AIDS crisis goes on—nice women who never worked but regularly volunteered. Nuns. Priests even. And cops who understand the existential buddy thing. And fireman who understand it better.

There is a certain honesty in gay identity politics. Once gay identity faced itself and realized that it is both ontologically meaningless and epistemologically spurious, there was nothing else for it to do but turn political—to some purpose, if you take Lambda Legal Defense into account.

On the similarities between Italian and Jewish men:

RR: It is very hard to find one who is absolutely homosexual, and not interested at all in women sexually. It is also a commonplace that nearly every Italian man is available, at least to every other Italian man—and then there is the Mafia penchant for drag queens. It is obvious that in the clinical terms now operating, nearly the totality of Italian men have been sexually abused by their mothers: the prevalence of phallic worship in the Mediterranean, et cetera. So in Italy, fundamentally nobody really gives a shit about homosexual behavior, but the Dantesque proscription of sodomy is very seriously upheld. This is hypocrisy, yes, but it is something obviously fundamental to the Latin psyche.

As for the French, I don’t know, but it is very well documented that Louis XIV was as an infant exposed and masturbated by court ladies and gentlemen too, and look what he grew up to be. Also, when Louis Malle made Murmur of the Heart and cast Lea Masari, a beautiful Italian woman, as a character who intiates her shy teenage son into sex, nobody objected for a minute. What would happen now?

Serve us all better to plug in and amp up, if you ask me. And by the way, how can we read the lapping waves, closely or otherwise from this side of the double dune—where we belong?

One has earned one’s place out of the sun—and a considerably safer one it is too, something which I for one always seem to have known. One is no longer wildly distracted by the future; one’s attention is, along with one’s disbelief, simply more evenly suspended.

I have no wish to be remembered, thank you, much less mythologized as something that never happened but was always so. Merely to be recognized as an authentic presence in penetrable space, in an authentic time frame—put up with by those concerned, few as they are.

QT: Edmund Burke said manners are more important than laws. “Upon them in a great manner, laws depend. The law touches us but here and now, and now and then . . .”

RR: [takes a long drag on his cigarette] The law hasn’t touched me in years, I’m happy to say.

QT: Shall I say, don’t press your luck?

RR: I’m happy to say I never press anything—it’s another thing I haven’t done in years.

Remember Lionel Trilling? Jewish. Hated being. He said of somebody, “We expect of him that he will involve us in the enjoyment of moral activity through the medium of a lively awareness of manners, that he will delight us by touching on high matters in the natural course of gossip.”

May I cause no harm, and leave music and beauty behind when I return to Forever.

Liberals may have fancied fags as part of their own agenda, but if red is at the far left of the spectrum, surely violet is at the other end—was there ever really a left-wing queen? It just isn’t in the job description.

What “the unexamined life is not worth living” has come to mean for queers is an exaggerated version of what it has come to mean for everybody else. That unless you are under some small degree of public surveillance (the opposite of what the philosophers had in mind), unless, in the culture of self-promotion as heavy industry, you make it, at the very least, into the office newsletter, unless you have a cause of any kind at all that can be publicized (for the common good, supposedly) then your life is not worth living. And the most pathetic of all such “unexamined” lives is, of course, the anonymous one. To do any good at all—or even to involve oneself in an erotic enterprise of whatever degree of aesthetic value—that is not available to a camera or recording device of some kind, or cannot be reported on the Internet, is, well, pointless—even subversive.

It has as a consequence been said of us, by queer theorists and historians of the era, that we embodied within ourselves and created in others a kind of transcendent yearning for the possibility of redemptive change of a highly suspect sort—wielding an assumption as a predicate, wish-fulfilling “as if” into “so that.” Yet no mirabilis cornerstone myth can ever take without the presto-change-o suspension of time and history, and what could we do? Religion had offered for our inspection the gift of the spirit as the promise of a future life—not as a present essence and source of happiness, but on the installment plan, as a vague deposit to be protected by moral behavior of a stringent kind.

Although to be scrupulously fair, it must be admitted that to replace a world that does not understand you with the model of a world you do not understand, really, is a poor if compelling advance, all told.

One realizes one’s reached a certain plateau in life when the answer to the question “What do you do in bed?” becomes “I eat, sleep, read and watch television.”

I have a new tape. James Dean as John the Beloved Disciple in Father Peyton’s Family Hour, so that you can stub out your cigarette on him, the way he used to ask johns to do—an enactment in the modern age of the habitude of St. Sebastian. Was he the end or was he not?

Entirely happy. Who said perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge?

QT: I don’t know— Schopenhauer?

RR: Schopenhauer or John Latouche. Well, I sometimes feel truth and youth and beauty are the last things I want to think about—then it occurs to me they probably will be just that.

When young, all living things are passionate, and their passionate hope of mastering the world is what makes them attractive; especially to predators.

I don’t in fairness see what more there is we can ask of life. Except of course hair color that’s continually true, uniformly beautiful and long lasting. Coloración completa.

Sooner or later—and we do run out of time—every career homosexual reaches zero point. The hard heavy years have worked us over, and comes the moment of sudden loathing; the season of storified sorrow—in which the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold shallows . . . at riptide. [pause]

Then almost immediately you are Joan Crawford striding despairingly in sequins into suicidal water. Where nobody is allowed in. When I’m there, but—nobody sees me in that condition. Nor do I emerge until I am fucking ready to be looked at.

And in case you think this thing overtakes you at a moment when you are either actually being rejected or in a moment, such as on the shrink’s couch, where you are paying money to re-enact some primal rejection, wrong. It’s never then. When it attacks you is in the middle of the night—and not in the weeks after your diagnosis, when you wake up screaming or in night sweats. By then the scene hasn’t the shame to further complicate your woes by co-opting the symptoms of actual dissolution—and anyway you’ve got your support group, your railing, and you are not allowed to have the scene. You don’t go there.

But of course you don’t have to, and you know that. And because the memory of it is so indelible . . . you take a pill. But this is how it happens.

One night—no point in overdoing . . . just say it’s Christmas Eve, after midnight. The presents are all unwrapped; you’re in bed; the dishwasher has stopped; all is calm, all is bright. Or better: you are holy/all is clear/they are loved/it is perfect. A full moon has come up, and, yes, when you looked up at dinner—and just before, when you turned around in bed—there he was, so you’re not just something with a French provincial office, a box full of clippings and a white telephone with what used to be a Crestview number. That’s gay—but right then, right there in the stillness, not a creature stirring, the rather too emphatic scent of Caleche in the air, it hits you. You’re still not a woman—and there’s no trick will ever make you one.

Next thing you know, you’re sitting under the tree with all the wrapping paper—maybe it’s been neatly folded, maybe it’s just crumpled up all over the place—and you’ve picked up the cashmere sweater—yes, Versace—and you’re holding it to your cheek. You haven’t put the tree back on, but moonlight is streaming in off the patio, hitting the tinsel, reflecting off the ornaments, and as you look at them you see the pool reflected, and when you turn and look out the french windows, there in the silvery light . . . and no matter what, you’re still not a woman.

You know, it’s really very funny about us, if you want to think about it. For years, after they stopped clapping us tout court in irons and walling us up, when they started getting compassionate, they said “This is a sickness, you must get over it; we can help you get over it. Now put on these electrodes . . . now swallow this medication.” Fade-out, fade-in, the liberators have come, have seen, have in some measure conquered—so they’re nearly all dying; that’s the price of glory. And now what’s happening? We who remain have begun to reassess the situation, offering fresh, new advice to the young homosexual, And what is that advice? “Look, darlings, it’s really no big deal any longer, being homosexual; get over it.” Now what exactly do we call that? Tell me.

SCENE SKETCHES FROM THE DOCUDRAMA

(Written on the Red-Eye Back to New York)

SCENE: DICK WHEELER, BETTE DAVIS, haunted and haunting at 1416 North Havenhurst.

DW (to the audience)

I get it now—it’s talk-show format. (nods) Can do. (to BD) I wanted to be with you in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, sitting down to tea just to hear you tell me “Daddy always said you can lose everything else, but you can’t lose your talent!”

I detest cheap sentiment.

DW (wistfully)

Do you? I used to—it was smart to. Then I got political, and was forced to recognize the salient fact that cheap sentiment, like cheap scent, is the bottom line of the will of the people. It’s their snakebite nostrum.

“But you can’t lose your talent.” How I wanted to die believing that.

The law touches us now and then . . .

Laws? Fuck laws. Phyllis Dietrichson had the right idea—throw all the blankets off the bitch, open the windows wide: it’s the only way to get what you want—to get what you have got to have if you’re going to be fabulous. (to BD) You must agree with me, you were fabulous.

Absolutely. I always said it. Fuck ’em.

Actually, you only said it once, onscreen. In Bunny O’Hare.

I always said fuck ’em. I said, “I came into this world surrounded by vicious women, I’ll exit with the Three Fates working overtime.” (to BD) Like you as Leslie Crosbie, in The Letter, with that obsessive lacework.

Her bridal veil—made for the wedding with Death.

Stitching my panel for the AIDS quilt. (calls to the Fates) In shot silk, while you’re at it. Homosexuality: just another vibrant thread in the fabric of life? Not quite.

(reflecting) One had a certain bizarre allure, it’s true. As an admonition—a token of God’s own unmitigated gall. (pause)

I’d be interested in meeting up with God.

If only to ask the following question: (smiling)

While I have you—why did you give us AIDS, that snaking, coiling, constricting, suffocating . . . just for your own goof? Or is this the way you wish to show the world that faggots have become your chosen people? (pause)

They told me when they came and got me from the orphanage, I had a rattle.

All babies get rattles—it’s what you give them.

I thought I was born with one—for, like the ancient Athenians whose aesthetic I revere, particularly their penchant for the Dionysian, I was, I am, devoted to snakes.

They rear up too in Euripides’s Ion, son of the sun god—an early take on the story of my life—in which, some Hermes—as in ties and scarfs and cologne—betook himself to some far yonder laurel close to watch and wait for me to turn up—in Laurel Canyon—which I did, worshiping my absent father in sun plays.

We gave B.D. a rattle—speaking of snakes!

Bette, they’ve already started accusing me of lack of depth! I had nearly limitless power—if on a single vector. Lack of depth, me!

It’s exactly what happened to me, my deah.

DW (mournfully)

I took too many drugs in the ’70s.

BD (nods)

I drank—far too much—and it wasn’t Calistoga water.

Thanks. (to BD) I’m a heap of chemically treated old bones, like Piltdown Man.

I know exactly what you mean. First they hacked me to bits, then the chemicals—and radiation! Microwaved like something in a fast food restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard!

This building they made us live in was no help either. Repainting it green and white; it looks like a six-story Chasens! Ripping out the historic privet was one thing—but the fretted lanterns, the tecoma bushes and the mariposa were the last straw!

I said, “This is one of the old ones they haven’t torn down yet. Of course they haven’t torn me down yet either.” Nancy Culp persuaded me to move in—said I’d be happy here.

I should never have been persuaded to leave Whitley Heights—or later the savage splendors of Laurel Canyon. Just as I had once belonged in the penthouse on Horatio Street, looking across and down at my origins in hideous fucking New Jersey, I belonged up there on Mount Olympus with the Greeks and the Birth of Tragedy—growing into my golden years surrounded, as Cukor was, but with brainier specimens—to whom I would show all your pictures, Bette, over and over. Your pictures do not wear out. Faggots, you know, tended to be family outcasts—and especially with AIDS, before people realized they could get free publicity—TV, the Quilt, all that—for their compassion. I taught them to use their imaginations, I put to them the fearful question:

What is to become of imagination

When there is nothing left to pretend to be?

We were like gods and goddesses to the audiences. I wore the red dress to the Olympus Ball in Jezebel—and the same one fifty years later on the Johnny Carson show, under the very leopard coat Farney gave me the very day he dropped dead on Wilshire Boulevard.

And here we are together at the end of Jezebel, in the plague wagon.

BD (smokes)

Of course, Ruthie insisted we should never have left Laguna.

I should have stayed in Venice. The beach! The sun . . . the surf . . . the sleaze . . . the works! The house done in what one critic called une efflorescence confusé. “Fuck you,” I said, “I am anything but confused—this decor is high Louis Seized.” All lost! On my last birthday, on a “Gaywatch” sail out to the Bu—to have yet another look at what many of us, necessarily, had to go on missing, we put a message—remember message plays, Bette?

Watch on the Rhine. I demanded the picture. The wife’s a secondary part, they said.

We put one in a bottle—off Malibu.

There are no secondary parts in wartime, I said. Terrific picture.

I rest my case. Give the people what they want—

BD (guffaws)

You know they said that at Harry Cohn’s funeral!

I meant it as a kinna hurra. (pause) They want my bow tie collection—to auction for AIDS charity—plus the notes for the book on the tuxedo, a sort of “Zen and the Art of Black Tie Party Going.” Funny, when I started the collection, they said “a black bow tie is a black bow tie,” but I declared once a black bow tie has been tied around a man’s collar—one beautiful, expensive snake becomes another beautiful—then taken out around his neck into the night and tugged when it droops, then brought back at dawn, untied, removed and examined, there is already in it a pattern as distinct as a snowflake. Not that my men had much to do with driven snow—hardly a race of transparent receptacles for transcendent doctrine. I went for the standard type of homewrecker, six foot six . . . in two directions, tall, dark, and not too deliberate: the wide-eyed lumberjack dreamboat full of muted thunder. I liked rumpling their already-rumpled hair. (pause) White ties too and formals of different shades from all the years of party-party. We danced, as David danced before the Ark and prophesied.

After all that, when the plague started, the ties became my quilt. My husband’s idea was to cremate me on Venice Beach in black tie with the collection: in the other world, I’d have what-to-wear to parties and meet all those men again. As I lay dying, I got spiritual, uncluttered, for a man who revolves, escapes from space. Even so, the kinna hurra didn’t—is it true the good die young?

The good, both young and old, die unpublicized.

DW (lying down as if on the couch)

Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I want? Where am I going? Remember death. What is life to me without me? Where is the light? (gets up) Let’s face it, even before AIDS we were a line company, our heads all full of bang-bang. (he lights two cigarettes, à la Now, Voyager, hands one to BD)

The past is about to happen. The future, long since settled, now darkens it with its wings. And I have no problem with trivial information acquisition. Anyway, why sort out the signal from the noise?

Exactly. You’re so bright. (blows smoke)

No question. You know, you ought to write a play.

Dictated from the astral!

You know, when I planned my funeral, on the boat off Malibu, I said, “After all the money spent in the last two years keeping me fabulously alive, such very expensive ashes should not be treated like dirt.” People said the minute the ashes hit the water, they would reconstitute as Captain Homo, ready to fight for truth, justice, the American way and the best table at Chinois.

(he sniffs at something in the air) Do you smell that? That’s Carole Lombard. This was her apartment. She’s been in to see me a lot since I restored the decor the way I thought she’d like it.

And now these echo-visions—all the shit I told the shrink.

I never told a shrink anything!

You told Howard Hughes everything; Your second husband, Farney, taped it all—the reason he got his. Your lover had him zapped on Wilshire Boulevard.

He was a son of a bitch—but I loved him.

If I had a shrink like you—as Charlotte Vale.

BD (to the audience)

He does not much exaggerate, I was good.

The trouble is I’m more Charlotte Vale myself. Mother dropped dead, just like that. I was an ugly duckling . . . et cetera.

Et cetera at fifty bucks an hour.

Fifty? Two hundred—and it’s forty minutes. Four-O.

In tribute to the culture I leave behind, I want to produce Intolerance. On the astral. “A Sun Play of the Ages” The four stories will be (to Bette) the story I tell you, the story you tell me, the story I tell me and the story you tell you.

Griffith presented me with my first Oscar. Dangerous.

DW (as the phone rings)

My part was the Rhapsode of Los Angeles. (into phone) Who? (pause) Are we close? (pause) Sonia, would you just tell them either that I’m in prayer and meditation or else that I’m in hair and wardrobe? I’ll leave it up to you. (pause: to BD) Who says you can’t get good help?

Of course you can—

DW & BD (together)

Just pay the fucking money!

We were on hundreds—thousands—of screens at once all over the world—every place where pictures—

And have I still got my talent?

BD (turns to DW, solicitously)

Of course you still have your talent—no question. Once you’re a star, you don’t stop being a star.

Then I’m happy. (thinks) We’ll take a meeting. Bette, you’ll be Lillian Gish, all right? “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.”

Don’t talk to me about Gish. She was a pain in the ass. A great actress, no question—I give her full credit.

You will be my psychopomp.

BD (smoking)

Hah! Two things Gary always said about me. “You’re pompous, and you’re psychotic.”

[The cradle-casket is brought out.]

What is this—the casket scene from The Duchess of Malfi? That playwright has been dead for three hundred years.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!

Bette, when asked in Now, Voyager if you believed in the hereafter, you said you’d like to think there was a chance for such happiness to last. I feel that now.

And what such happiness did you have in mind?

This one. Planning . . . producing! Now I’m free of my survivors. They can take my bow ties and my manuscript too. I got them—the ties—in the first place for being—they said loyal. And as for reflection on the social wrong that art-language does to those irrevocably denied the privilege of culture . . . fuck it. (smiles)

[The bed becomes a boat, with the sheets as sails, a boat bound for Catalina.]

And don’t forget. Bette, you’re coming with me.

[BLACKOUT]