I don’t know where to start. I am quite beside myself. Which calls up the image of another me sitting here. And to some degree that is the problem, I think. I have been trying very much to be a good girl and live the life that has been set out for me. But I don’t know if I should do it. I’m champing at the bit. Not because I’m spoiled or selfish — something you might say. I honestly don’t know how you expect me to take what you say lying down. It’s completely unfair, especially for someone like me. You may say it comes from all those years at MGM, of being told that I was special. Well, there you go again, like everyone else, making assumptions about me. I don’t understand why I can’t be treated like everyone else. Just because I happen to be talented — or did happen to be talented — doesn’t make me inhuman, does it? Well, I’ve always been treated as non-human or subhuman or superhuman. I really feel I’ve reached the point where I have nothing to lose with you. I can’t even get an image of you. What I get is words, just words. That’s all that comes back.

I’ve had it with syntax. In one of your theorizing moments you said — referring to Wittgenstein (or maybe it was just the whole last century and language theory in general) — that you can always tell when I’m in trouble. Apparently I start using bad language, or just bad syntax. You think that’s what’s happening now. And you went on and on about this as we academics tend to do. You wonder which came first — the syntax or the emotional problems. Oh my, maybe the disintegrating syntax caused my emotional problems.

How very post-structuralist of you.

Well, it’s like this. The garbage you sent me is, yes, garbage. And I can make threats, too, you know! What you sent is full of fucking threats. Do you know what threats do to me? Do you have any idea? I’ll tell you what she did to me. You know who I’m talking about. I’ll never forget it. Since time began, it seems I’ve had to read this shit about me being abandoned by my homosexual father. And then the amateur psychologists chime in — “This created a longing for an abusive relationship with a man.” Whatever. I wish those armchair psychologists would just spontaneously combust in their fucking La-Z-Boys. He never abused me, emotionally or otherwise. He was a wounded bird and the world didn’t understand. Does he have to be a villain just because he was a homosexual?

Listen to me. She was the villain. Has anyone ever done a fucking study of mothers? We get a dumb rep. And by that I mean a good one. In other words, we can never be really bad because we’re mothers. But mothers are the worst; worse than any knifing or torture. What that fucking bitch did to me! I know you’ve heard this story before. But before, I always gave the nod to your suggestions that perhaps it was not true. I let you think it might be exaggeration. Well, I’m not exaggerating.

I was there. I was tired, I was worn out, I was eight years old and I was complaining about the vaudeville act. To my mother, this was heresy. I had good reason; it wasn’t just that we were going to have to get up early the next day and haul our asses to some godforsaken town outside of Pasadena to do an afternoon show. It was because the last time we performed there the crowd was terrible. There was no one there — and the sad little group that finally turned up abused us. They fucking threw things at us. I mean, people don’t like the act? Fine, big deal. We all don’t have the same taste. But do they have to throw things?

And so my mother wakes us up with the “Upsy-daisy, girls! It’s never too early to shine!” She knew I didn’t want to get up that morning. She just loved torturing me with her fucking fake cheeriness, loved making me unhappy. It’s as simple as that. Now, why would that be? You know, there are some women who just don’t like other women. No, it’s true, they don’t. And these women-haters are not necessarily femmes fatale. Jesus, I’m the femmest fucking fatale there is, and I love women — especially if they’re smart and have a fucking edge.

I used to love Marlene. I couldn’t stand June Allyson. But the difference is so easy to see. You put the two of them together and it’s evident. But, you know — one of the reasons might have been Marlene’s clit. June Allyson didn’t even have one; I doubt if she even had a boat, never mind the little man in it. But Marlene had a gigantic one; it was like a small dick, I swear. She showed it to me. (Noël Coward was very impressed with it, by the way. He offered to go down on her, but Marlene said it would be incest.) Marlene wanted me to go down on her. But then again, Marlene wanted everyone to go down on her. I’m really not into that. I mean, I like women, but . . . And she absolutely understood. I think she was just pulling my leg. She really liked to shock people. But, boy, did that broad like blow jobs. I think that’s all sex was to her — just getting a good blow job. She used to tell me stories about Mammy going down on her. You know, Mammy from Gone with the Wind — Hattie McDaniel. They met on the set of Blonde Venus. The whole movie was about sex, sex, sex — and debasement. So, sure enough, Hattie starts winking at Marlene. She said that Hattie knew right from the first moment she saw her that all Marlene wanted from life was a good blow. Hattie said that some women, just from the way they wave their cunts around, might as well be wearing a sign saying, Gimme a blow job now!

Well, anyway, Hattie really got off on Marlene’s oversized equipment. I must say, this story made me love Marlene. I didn’t hate June Allyson because she was a woman. I hated her because she was boring. I didn’t love Marlene because she had a big clit and was, therefore, a man. Don’t go all essentialist queer theory on me. Anyway, Marlene wasn’t a man. She was all woman and full of the business. And she was so smart and so nasty — but in a good way. She could make mincemeat of awful people as she would not say one good thing about them. She loved tearing them to shreds. She did it with that Nazi drawl of hers and made it sound like she was sending them to a concentration camp.

But there’s a kind of woman — usually the pinched June Allyson kind, and the kind like my fucking mother — who congenitally hate other women. Who knows why? It’s probably innate, some crazy genetic thing. I know my sister Virginia was not too fond of women either, so maybe she got it from my mother. Well, this kind of woman is always jealous, always competitive — like a man, actually — around other women. Okay, so now imagine a woman like this with three fucking daughters. What luck, eh? Well, of course she’s going to torture them. I used to feel so sorry for my father because he knew she hated us; but there was nothing he could do about it. I mean, mothers back then — and even now — those manipulative hags can do no wrong. Those evil bitches, someone should rewrite the book on mothers. Mother’s Day should be Hitler’s Birthday, and hey, how should we celebrate that? Get Hitler a nice card, congratulating him on his crimes? Why is it that women don’t commit as many crimes as men? But oh, they do. They torture their children — it’s called parenting.

So that morning we were in some sad and sorry hamlet near Pasadena on our way to another matinee. And we had to get up early after a late-night show. But mainly I couldn’t face getting hit with the tomatoes. You know, years later Sue, Virginia and I would laugh about the tomatoes. But at the time it wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t funny. And I wasn’t having a tantrum or anything, Jesus, I wasn’t lying on the floor doing a Helen Keller. I wasn’t being a fucking child star; I wasn’t even a fucking child star at this time. This was completely before Hollywood. I was just the prettier, cuter sister who could actually sing. Now, I may have been crying, but it wasn’t fake crying. And believe me, I know the difference.

I got up and packed my suitcase and sat on it. As I say, I was crying. And Mother was in a rush like she always was. And there was a schedule. And there was just me in the room. My sisters were already in the car waiting. It was a very sad room — the room I had slept in with Sue the night before. I remember there were two single beds, and a painting of a brook and a stream and a church. A goddamn church. And there was a lamp that didn’t work on the bedside table. And, of course, a Bible inside the table, and bedspreads that had that kind of grubby feel. You know, not exactly dirty, but not exactly clean. There was only one tiny round window, and it was also dirty. And there was a rug on the floor that had some sort of biblical scene woven into it.

I’ll never forget that room.

So there I was sitting on my suitcase crying. My mother comes back up to get me. I was ready to tell her I was sorry for crying, and fully expected to do my duty and go down to the car. But no, when my mother saw me she was livid. Sometimes I think my mother actually resented me because I was such a nice person. There are people like that, you know. They feel bad because they’re not nice people, and so they hate people who are. The bad people who are just fucking bad are actually not as evil as the ones who wish they weren’t. Evil people who are just evil will leave you alone. But the ones who feel bad about being evil and wish they weren’t — they just love to torture nice people out of jealousy.

So she opens the door and sees me there. I swear she didn’t miss a beat, she just started her act. My mother was a very good actress, really she was. She didn’t get much of a chance to show it in vaudeville. But when the chips were down, man, you didn’t have a chance with her. Nobody did. She could turn it on and off like a fountain at Versailles. She took one look at me and she went completely dark. It was like a cloud passing over the sun. She said, “I’m sorry to see you’re crying.” And I fell for it and sniffled and said, “I’m sorry too.” Then it was serious shit, completely terrifying, and she knew it.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot and you’re a drag on the act,” she said. “But audiences like me,” I said, hopefully. “Sometimes they like you,” she said, “but the problem is you can’t take it. You can’t handle it. You’re no good on the road. You’re just a pain. So I’m sorry to do this to you, darling. But we just can’t have you in the act anymore.” I didn’t understand. I asked her what she was talking about. “I’m leaving you, I’m leaving you here in . . .” I remember now; the name of the town was San Gabriel. That’s right, like the angel. “I’m leaving you here in San Gabriel,” she said. I’ll never forget those words.

I was confused. I said, “Mother, how can you leave me here? I’m your daughter!” Then — I swear it — I was seven years old, remember? Well, maybe eight, but I was a young eight, at least emotionally. And remember, my father was already living in a shack. And my life hadn’t been too secure up to that time. All I really had was being onstage and singing with my sisters, and, of course, having audiences love me. So I couldn’t believe that was being taken away. But my mother really seemed to mean it. She said, completely seriously, “No, we’re going to leave you here, honey; we’re going to leave you in San Gabriel.”

And this is the part that sounds completely crazy now, so many years later. The idea that I would actually believe that my mother was going to leave me in that lousy one-horse town sounds crazy. But at the time I truly believed her. I said, “Mummy, how can you do that?” And she said, “Sometimes parents leave their kids. Daddy left all of us. Now I’m leaving you. That just happens sometimes. You’re a pretty girl and you can sing all right. Maybe someone will adopt you. And maybe, when you work for them, you won’t complain so much and you won’t be so much trouble, and everything will be all right. But right now, I’m going to have to say goodbye.” By then I was starting to get hysterical. She pretended to comfort me, which made it even more real: “Don’t worry, honey, I’m sure you’ll be okay.” At this point she had closed the door and locked me in the room — those old rooming-house doors could be locked from the outside. Well, that was it. I was alone in the room. And as far as I knew, because I was eight years young, it was forever or until someone found me. Of course, I started screaming and yelling, and my mother, God love her, that righteous bitch, let this go on for at least an hour. We almost didn’t make our gig. She almost made us miss our gig so she could teach me a lesson.

I remember how I used to hate it when people would praise us, and she’d say, “I never spank them, you know, I don’t believe in corporal punishment.” No, she didn’t. She was a good mother. Instead of spanking us she delivered the kind of torture that makes you wish you’d never been born. I will never forget what it was like when my mother left me in that room. Therapists talk about abandonment issues, and with most people it’s just abandonment in theory. They think their parents don’t love them and might threaten to leave if they didn’t measure up. But my mother invented conditional love. She made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t love me if I didn’t measure up. And, in fact, there was no point in her loving me if I didn’t sing like a trooper and turn up on time. Her standards were high. And when it came to vulnerability and weakness and all the good emotions — pity and love — well, she didn’t have time for any of that shit.

So you have to understand that when you make threats like you did, it must happen: you turn into my mother. I know I’m supposed to leave that behind. But some things you can’t leave behind. Jesus, it’s not fair for you to play on that kind of shit when you know the story. I know I’ve told you before — you know how sensitive I am about being just left. What do you want me to do, get down on my knees? You know I can’t anymore. I couldn’t even give you or anyone else a blow job.

You know what triggers all this shit? The fact that you demand I come up with an organizing argument to prove to your satisfaction that my attachment to Dash and his work is not neurotic or psychotic or whatever. What’s going on here? Aren’t you my friend anymore? I swear, if I could see your face it would make all the difference.

There were two ways you used to be stern with me. One was when you were defending your boundaries. I know you have a lot of them. When you were doing that, it was serious and scary. It was all about you, and I would have to dig my heels in and obey because you were more scared than I was (even though you would never admit fear, just show the anger). Then there were the times when the littlest smile would creep onto your face, because it was not about your issues at all. Your boundaries weren’t threatened; you were just trying to help me and teach me some lesson. I could tell by looking at you that you were just being stern with me because you loved me.

Okay, you aren’t her, all right? But it’s hard for me to remember you aren’t my mother when I can’t see your fucking face. I resent your reaction to the Dash King business — it brings up all my mother bullshit. There’s something about Dash that interests me. So? Can’t I flirt with ideas occasionally? Can’t you have unconditional love for me and accept that without demanding every observation be a chapter of a fucking PhD thesis?

Of course, you know I can go there. I can switch over in one second, and I can be the professor, the Doctor. That’s what I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life turning myself into. My academic record is, as you know, a great comfort to me. But sometimes I wonder if that’s all there is — which is an old Peggy Lee song that I really wish I’d recorded before I died. You see, I’m not superstitious about tossing out remarks that bring up the past, because that’s the whole point of being where I am today, of doing all this work, of my relationship with you. I will no longer be examined at every moment and tested. The tests are over.

Okay, okay, I hear you. You’ll tell me that testing me is caring for me. That I never learned to care about myself because I wasn’t properly parented. Yes, yes, it’s true. I don’t know how to respond when people are critical. Tests are good, and it’s not about unconditional or conditional love. You are not not loving me by asking me to justify myself.

Okay, so here goes. I will try to answer your question. You want me to tell you why I’m obsessed with Dash.

It’s not just an irrational emotion. It’s not some force from the past drawing me back. Yes, there may be a theoretical basis (or perhaps I should say, paradoxically, an anti-theory theoretical basis) for my pursuance of the Dash King papers. Perhaps I’ve been on thin ice with you — because of the antiqueness of his obsessions and their possible relationship to my past. Also, I know you rejected all that queer stuff long ago with the rest of the world. Now we live in a post-theory — or what has been postulated as post-theory — era. And we are, in fact, moving into what might be called the post-post-theory era. I am perfectly aware of that. The truth is that my interest in Dash King can easily be related to the post-theory position. I know post-theory was justified long ago, but perhaps not in this particular way.

All right, I am willing to go there, unafraid. In fact, that should be my theme here: unafraid. I am willing to go into dangerous territories. And you are, in effect, daring me. So I will. You will probably say that what I am about to postulate has already been said. Fine, but have all the implications been explored?

The implications become clear in this next Dash text. It’s about the perils of deconstruction, of theory, of constructionism, of fantasy, of fiction. . . . It seems to me that the death of homosexuality was a kind of suicide. Speaking of implications, homosexuals (and specifically intellectuals like Foucault) are implicated in this. Dash clearly has issues with Foucault. Yet I would argue that his view of the world is Foucauldian — Dash is involved with the construct of sexuality, though he would deny homosexuality is a construct. But his life and his letters prove to us, so blatantly, that it is.

Let’s begin with the dangers of theory (which have been well documented). I am interested in looking at extreme skepticism. Here’s one, just to pick a random example: post-structuralists once went so far as to question Galileo’s theory of gravity as a truism. Science tells us there have been different concepts of gravity. We know that Aristotle, when he witnessed gravity, witnessed a stone seeking out its natural place. Galileo, on the contrary, witnessed, in the movement of the same stone, the gravitationally induced movement of a pendulum. These are two different views of reality. And traditional history, before post-structuralism, would have us think that Galileo’s view was the correct view, and that Newtonian physics (based on Galileo’s theories) had transcended the ancient Greek view, which was mired in superstition. But post-structuralism would have us look at the two approaches to gravity as different constructs that are equivalent in value, suggesting that each view is acceptable in its own context. Neither is more right than the other. But we can see the weakness in the post-structuralist position. What does it leave us with? A world in which everything is a construct, where there is no “there” there; where there is, in effect, no reality, only relativity. Philosophers are now certainly toying with the theory that there is “no reality,” and some are going further with it. I know you have done some research in that area.

I am struggling with it. I see the perils of post-structuralism, and post theory that would deny reality. I am one of those who is — as you may have already guessed — still attracted to reality. There, I have let the cat out of the bag. I am attracted to reality. Is that the “first principle” that you wish to challenge? Well, go ahead. Or are you going to say that the reality principle is okay for some but not others? That it has dangers for people like me, people with addiction issues? We are attracted to the real world. This means, for us, doing drugs in the real world. This means living, in other words, in a fantasy world in reality, rather than living in cyberspace, a completely fictional world. But cyberspace would be a much safer place for us.

This brings me right back to the idea that I am some sort of special person. And I thought the idea was for me to forget how special I am (which I mainly have done). I thought I was supposed to simply function as an academic, to function within that particular reality. There is also, I think, a fallacy here. The implication that arises from the notion that I can’t handle reality, or shouldn’t be attracted to it, is that all reality is sordid, or sexual, or dark, or sad, or dirty. But why need it be? Why can’t reality be me sitting — or attempting to — at a desk and working on theory or anti-theory? I am, for one, willing to accept that reality.

And so how does this all connect with Dash? You will see from what follows that Dash himself was the victim of a gay paradigm. That paradigm was self-destruction: suicide. As much as he resisted Foucault, it was inevitable he would be caught in this trap. What was real for Dash and so many of his ilk at the decadent “end of gay” was not sex itself or sexual choice, but some fiction of sexuality. As we know now, object choice is varied, as is gender, and this is quite accepted in the modern world.

Certainly it has been no problem for our conservative government to fund sex changes as part of our medical plans. It has been no problem for what used to be called same-sex marriages and are now just called plain old marriages. There was never any problem with this, except on the part of certain — I am not afraid to say it — fundamentalists. But as we well know, though there are definite fundamentalist elements in our government, they do not actually make the laws (thank God, and pray they never do!). But they are there, lurking. At any rate, it would be pretty hard, I think, for even fundamentalists to deny the principles of tolerance that have been written into our legal system.

Similarly, it is impossible to write away the rights of women, although the concept of woman has become pragmatically irrelevant. Biology, after all, has less and less a part to play in that concept, or in sex, sexuality or conception. But what has of course disappeared, and gone underground, are the aspects of sexuality that were associated with gay culture — promiscuity, drug addiction and the endless encyclopedia of weird extreme sexual practices. We all know (and I will say it again, even though it upsets you) that these things exist. Certain very sad and perverted people are involved with these things. We know that they are not healthy. And of course health, or at least survival, for the many — for as many years as possible — has become one of the ruling principles of our existence; so much of a ruling principle that we don’t have to worry about it — the government just takes care of it for us.

On that note, it amazes me that cigarettes are still for sale. It’s interesting that they are technically illegal. How can something be illegal, and still be taxed? Somehow this has managed to happen with cigarettes. I know that occasionally people are arrested for smoking in public and face stiff jail time, but this is very odd considering that cigarettes are legal to buy and smoke in one’s own home, as long as your home is not a business or connected to another building. But you understand issues of the law and citizenship better than I.

So what am I getting at? What Dash was “fighting” for, in his own tiny mind, were all the aspects of sexuality that were related to what he labelled gay culture — drag, promiscuity, leather fetish, weird sexual practices, alternative relationships, feminine men with male bodies . . . the fictional constructions of homosexuality. This was his hopeless cause, and made his fight pathetic and bathetic, but interesting to me in its martyred superfluidity. Now, it’s true that Dash, to give him his due, was right about some things. For instance, his complaints about academia and jargon were echoed by others of his time. Remember Sokal’s famous hoax paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”? It was written entirely in fake jargon and published.

But it is when Dash gets into his own area of queer theory, and into his own incredibly warped, complicated and self-defeating arguments about gay life, that his tragedy, being hanged by his own favourite construction and strangled by his dearest fantasies, becomes clear. It’s also interesting, in the following passage, that Dash talks so much about AIDS, and that his lover challenged that paradigm by practising unsafe sex. But, paradoxically, his lover also fit quite neatly, by doing so, into a much larger and more dangerous construct — that of the suicidal homosexual. Unsafe sex was very dangerous at the time, in fact illegal. Today we have simply made promiscuity illegal — at least, real promiscuity. Promiscuity in cyberspace is, as we know, ubiquitous.

So this text, which was probably sent to his supervisor, Antonio, although it is not addressed to him specifically, is tragically prophetic — especially when viewed in the context of the rumours around Foucault (of which you are probably aware). It is significant that no one knows whether or not these rumours are true, and probably never will. They are in their own way constructs or fantasies. But, at any rate, there were people who said that Foucault, who died of AIDS, practised unsafe sex. Of course, when he died, safe sex itself was a relatively new concept. But the notion was that Foucault, who ultimately believed in a shifting vision of history and fact, was not himself convinced that there was such a thing as AIDS. How could he be convinced when he did not believe that science, history or facts themselves were anything but fictional constructs? Though it has never ever been proved that Foucault practised unsafe sex, it is nevertheless an interesting theory that slips Foucault into the suicidal paradigm that Dash inhabits so neatly. But you can see for yourself:

I have had it with the idea of writing a thesis. There isn’t any point; I don’t want to go on and can’t go on. Instead I am writing you this. This belongs in the garbage or in my memoirs. Do you think anyone would be interested in the memoirs of an old fag like me who created one of the world’s premier gay theatres? No, no one is interested in that now. I wouldn’t even try. It would be like casting pearls before swine. I have decided that if you want me to write something for you, and not “give up” writing, then I have to go on academic strike, and by that I mean I am unable to write another essay or weave any more theories. They have nothing to do with reality. And I’m not going to play the game called “What is reality?” Anybody who comes to me with that kind of question I would class with the philosophers that Bill Cosby talks about in his comedy. The philosophers who ask, “Why is there air?” ask a question as valid as “Does reality exist?” Any dummy knows the answer to that: it doesn’t matter if reality does not exist, it’s all we’ve got. So I’m not going to even try filling this paper with anything that resembles jargon. And I’m not going to talk about Shakespeare anymore. I’m going to talk about myself. This is going to be very embarrassing for you, I’m sure. But it’s much more embarrassing for me to write. But since you said, “Don’t stop writing, write about anything,” it’s your fault. How embarrassing will this be for you? Well, you said you lived through the sixties and that that time was more embarrassing than anything — you took part in nude sit-ins, the whole bit.

Okay, so not only am I going to be personal, I am going to be as personal as possible. I am in love with an impossible person. He is an impossible boy. And he doesn’t love me back. He never will. And that is why I love him. I love him more than anything and I get absolutely nothing in return. There’s a novel by Barbara Pym called No Fond Return of Love (that is a quote from some poem). Okay, I admit it, I’m a big fan of Barbara Pym. And Philip Larkin. Yeah, Philip Larkin. There’s one for you. I can’t be bothered to look up the Pym quote and I’m not going to. The novel is about a woman who is in love with a man and follows him around everywhere but doesn’t expect anything back. The man returns her love by falling in love with her daughter and trying to seduce the girl because he’s basically a pedophile.

My boyfriend is very beautiful but very shallow. His inside doesn’t match his outside. I don’t know if he was ever a good person. He is very lovely, but empty; he is blond and slender and he looks like he is about fifteen years old. He is in fact twenty-three. He was born in the Yukon. There is something of the Yukon about him — he is remoteness itself. His name is Jason Swallows. That’s his name; I didn’t make it up. His name is a pun, because he does swallow — other men, not me. I lie about him to all my friends. I tell them that my boyfriend and I used to have sex but we don’t any longer. The truth is that we never had sex. He won’t let me. I don’t measure up. At least he is honest, and I know where I stand. I don’t care; it’s the hopelessness of my love for him that keeps the relationship fresh. I will never be close to him because he won’t let me, and because even if I could be close to him, there would be nothing for me to be close to. He embarrasses me in all social situations. I just can’t be with him in public. People stare at him, and me, they can’t believe we’re together — but we aren’t, not really. And they can’t believe that I’m madly in love with him, or that we have anything in common. Well, we don’t. What do I get out of the relationship? I’m free to pursue other sexual relationships. He doesn’t interfere with that, because he doesn’t care enough about me to care. What does he get out of our relationship? He gets the privilege of hanging out with someone who is a very prestigious member of the gay community. He likes that. I would say he was a star fucker if he were actually fucking me.

I’ll tell you what we do in bed. (You wanted me to write something, anything, so that’s what I’m doing.) I like to lie beside him and kiss his pale white shoulder. And then I jerk off. I jerk off while I’m looking at his body. Occasionally he lets me run my hands over it. Then he lets me cum. I make a little puddle on his thigh. And he just lies there. Dead, for all intents and purposes. But mainly he’s just bored. I don’t mind. You know what else we do? Sometimes when I’m in the bathtub and he has to come in to take a leak, he pees on me. He pees on me, and I drink it. This can’t be healthy. Why? Because my boyfriend is HIV positive. We will never have sex, ever; there is no chance of it, because of this. He is perfectly unattainable. He will also probably not be alive for much longer. His health is good now, but it won’t be long, until . . . You see, he likes to practise unsafe sex. I like to try and practise safe sex on my nightly escapades, but these days, especially, when life is pretty bleak, I find my only solace is a nice stiff drink or two and some poppers and a young body that will remind me of Jason. Jason Swallows. Other guys — not me. That’s probably how he got AIDS. After all, he likes to take it up the bum from gigantic bodybuilders who are much more adequate than I am.

So that’s my life. Do you think I can work that into a thesis? Or perhaps I should turn it into art. The only problem is that nobody wants to read anything I write anymore. I’m not telling you this so you can save me. I don’t want to be saved. I remember when I was young I didn’t want to be a homosexual, and the reason was because I had a vision in my head of an ugly old man sitting beside a table in an empty apartment staring at a single light bulb, wanting to commit suicide. I never wanted to become that man. But somehow I have become him. Thanks for listening.

The letter is unaddressed and unsigned and the barrenness of it is devastating. One wonders what it would have been like to know this unpleasant individual. I expect he was, at this point, the type of person who truly lived only in his alcohol-induced, nitrate-driven sexual fantasies. It’s interesting to me also that he does not mention Shakespeare. Yet this is certainly his most Shakespearean moment. The letter is like a Petrarchan sonnet, though the style is mundane. Dash wants nothing from his lover, nothing in return. This stretches the medieval notion of courtly love beyond its wildest dreams — until it becomes the Elizabethan ideal of courtly abuse. One sees echoes of Blanche DuBois in his description of himself; the lonely man sitting in an empty room is Blanche’s “ever since then there has only been this one candle.” It is more than masochism; in the context of homosexual ethos, this is the death of a culture that is suicidally obsessed with the worship of youth and beauty. So much so that Dash can do nothing but lie in bed beside beauty and kiss its shoulder. Finally, he allows himself to make an embarrassed, sad puddle on beauty’s thigh.

Dash has wholeheartedly bought into the tragic paradigm of homosexuality. It is his fate. Whether he has chosen it or not is a deeper philosophical question. I would say he is certainly trapped in it. I think that after the death of homosexuality, its most noxious obsessions were usurped by mass culture. Certainly what the Christian fundamentalists saw as the dangers of homosexuality did, in fact, become a part of our cyberworld. Nothing that is “old” or “ugly” has any place in our culture now, except of course in the musty groves of academe. Here, monsters like me are kept alive by those few who imagine we might be valuable artifacts. But even that is being questioned. You have told me that some have questioned your work with me — that the grant you received to encourage me, and to examine me, has been challenged. This is despite the fact that you were careful to place the work in a modern context, and certain to make it evident that it was not a “historical” project.

I have no proof for the assertion that when homosexuality died our culture effectively ate the values of that culture. For instance, I have no proof that the homosexual obsession with youth and beauty had any influence on us. Indeed, what was so important when those we used to call “the terrorists” won was whether or not tolerance was still to be a cultural value. Would the government brook no quarter for homosexual culture? Looking back, which I know is dangerous, I wonder if what saved people like us, and various kinds of human difference in general, was when the cyberworld became sacrosanct — when web activists decreed that it was exploitative and unfair to police the web. At this point, the powers that be realized it was simply impossible to control cyberspace. Cyberlife was to be unquestioningly protected. Now anything is permitted on the web; nothing is permitted in reality. Everything is allowed as long as it is not real.

I’m sure this has relevance to your concerns about my visit to the Tranquility Spa. Let me put it this way: there is no death penalty anymore. And what would death be to me, anyway? Aren’t I too old to murder? When the prospect of my demise hangs over my head daily like the sword of Damocles, the worst that will happen to me is that I will be incarcerated indefinitely for my crimes. I have not committed any crime yet. But I speak facetiously. I will not commit any in the future. And anyway, I can’t imagine the government locking me up; I am a cultural artifact. At the very least, my body will undoubtedly be carefully saved and ransacked by cyberbiogeneticists after my death. More than that, my present existence is already a kind of incarceration. It is so difficult for me to walk, and my monstrosity certainly makes the possibility of human contact a grim and unlikely prospect.

But for once I didn’t mean to digress. I want you to be aware that I don’t think my little bar visit is the melodramatic issue you have made it out to be. That’s why I want you to understand the scholarly value of Dash King’s papers. Please don’t worry any further about some return to my previous addictions.

So let’s return specifically to Dash and the issue of the death of homosexuality. What’s clear to us now is that AIDS not only killed homosexuals, it killed homosexuality. We are none the worse for it; no one misses it. Dash was prematurely grieving its death, eulogizing it with a kind of negative capability.

If one examines the male love poetry that was connected with Virgil and the pastoral poets, one observes a melancholy that morphed into A. E. Housman and his elegies for soldier boys. It’s not only twentieth-century gay literature that is suicidal, countless plays — from The Children’s Hour and The Green Bay Tree, to The Boys in the Band — all featured tortured, self-flagellating, suicidal queers. This tradition is transhistorical in Western culture. In fact, it is my suspicion that if Dash is right, and Shakespeare was de Vere, and was trying to escape his own doomed pederasty, he may have avoided, in his sonnets, the direct homosexual address of one of his contemporaries, as it may have become inflected with an already clichéd pathetic flavour.

Little is known about Barnfield, a much-forgotten poetic contemporary of Shakespeare’s. To imagine, as Foucault does, that there was no homosexuality in Early Modern culture is naive. Barnfield, in his blatantly and clearly homosexual poetry, talks not only of sodomy (Foucault’s favourite concept) but of love and affection and even possible partnering between men. But the tone is invariably sad, melodramatic and tragic. So there is reason to imagine that Shakespeare was all too wary of the pitfalls of a homosexual aesthetic. Whether he was de Vere or not, Shakespeare may have been writing about a homosexual love affair (or more likely a pederastic one) in the sonnets, but he is deliberately cagey about it. This is not because it was forbidden. Barnfield’s odes can attest to that. (He does apologize for the homosexual content of his poems in an introduction to one of his books of poetry, but this hardly indicates that he was persecuted, or that his work was banned for being homosexual.) Perhaps it was merely that Shakespeare didn’t want to write bad, melodramatic, bathetic poems that — like Barnfield’s — were drowning in pastoral excess and melancholy. He didn’t want to write bad Elizabethan homosexual pastorals.

These issues were rarely dealt with in discussions of the master poet. And now that Shakespeare has become irrelevant, these issues may never be dealt with again. But though his work may be unsalvageable, ancient and written in what is essentially a foreign language even to those who speak English, the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s period are fascinating. The epitaph for Shakespeare’s sonnets was written by Northrop Frye when he said, and I am paraphrasing here, “If we took the sonnets literally, we would have to believe that Shakespeare was in love with a stupid teenager, which is simply impossible.” Impossible indeed. Truth is impossible — always has been, always will be. Perhaps you and I can at least agree on that.

At any rate, this is the vast tragic homosexual aesthetic legacy, and when AIDS appeared, we saw a depressing march of AIDS plays and novels from the homosexual community — not depressing because of their subject matter, but because they were so badly written. As Susan Sontag rightly observed, AIDS did for the theatre exactly what tuberculosis did for it — and by that I mean absolutely nothing. I am convinced that the dance of death that people sometimes spoke of as having followed AIDS was not the return of promiscuity. (Although this happened in the early part of the last century, before sex became almost universally — as they used to call it — virtual.)

But the birth of gay marriage — the kindly gay priest swathed in rainbow colours — this was normalcy; the dance of death for gay identity. For gay was, and always had been, tragic. Gay was Blanche DuBois, Death in Venice, the coughing, sputtering Greta Garbo in Camille. Those who lived, married and somehow managed to produce a successive generation were no longer gay. Certain post-AIDS fags quite hopelessly clung to the tragic paradigm. Dash King is perhaps not the most brilliant, but is certainly the most characteristic, example of a generation of men who, though there was undoubtedly a medical cause for their disease (which has now become only as serious as diabetes), were also seduced by a suicidal paradigm that AIDS fit right into. I am not the first to theorize this; I have found an obscure essay by Casper G. Schmidt, a psychoanalyst from South Africa who died of AIDS in the 1980s. He theorized that AIDS was a kind of mass hysteria, a suicidal complex shared by gay men as a result of their treatment at the hands of the religious right. In The Stonewall Experiment, Ian Young proposes that gay men have believed their own negative publicity to such an extent that they marched to their own death.

This is not to say that AIDS didn’t exist. But one notices that the construction begins not to be associated with homosexuals after the turn of the century. This is because homosexuality was at this point dead as a cultural force. AIDS had become, along with the cancer battle, anti-terrorism and environmentalism, a global issue. This means it became a family issue — focused on hope and the future, as all issues are these days. We know now, of course, what happened to environmentalism. One wonders not so much at the stupidity of mankind but at its naïveté and self-centredness. It was sentimental to imagine that we could save the world or that our human lives were, in fact, the centre of it; instead we had to settle for science and cybernetics, which has allowed us to live on a dying planet in unreal bodies that, increasingly, do not require air to survive.

And then, unfortunately, the so-called terrorists won. (Well, I know they were not really terrorists, but they were Arabs, and dressing like terrorists, so they might as well have been.) But that may not ultimately have been such a bad thing. No one could have run the world without some compromise. I am trying to fit my analysis of Dash into a larger worldview. You have deemed it essential that I prove I am obsessing over him because I have something of scholarly import to say, not because I am neurotically and perhaps dangerously attached to his story. Well, here goes. . . .

Dash’s life proves both Wilde and Foucault correct, while at the same time establishing an emblematic example of the failure of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory: our constructs eat us. What is the next step once we are aware of this perilous fact? Are there to be no more constructs? Or must we simply acknowledge those constructs? But how do we do that when they are so hypnotizing? This is what post-post-theory must deal with. But the fact that I have finally, through Dash King, arrived at the threshold of post-post-theory is, I hope, for you, promising. I will even go so far as to say that your concern over my actions actually warms my heart — what’s left of it — despite my fear of abandonment. When I finally banish the panic, I can see your affection for what it is.

I’m going to float another boat here, one I sincerely hope you won’t find upsetting. I would like to suggest that I have a, perhaps, inappropriate attraction for what I wish to call the real. I think you would agree. Or maybe you would say that I have not fully adjusted to the cyberworld. This is my problem and a problem for anyone who loves reality: the real is being phased out. The reason most lives are essentially lived in cyberspace now is partially because living in the real is nearly impossible. No one wants to be there. It is inhospitable, whereas cyberspace is the land of pleasure. My inability to immerse myself in cyberspace has always been an issue for you. Why, especially in this advanced stage of decrepitude, shouldn’t I take advantage of the life I can create for myself sitting in my chair (or doing as close an imitation of sitting as possible)?

Of course I should, and it is for this reason that I am, paradoxically, considering making a final visit to the Tranquility Spa. I can hear a strangled cry coming from you; I know you will find this upsetting, and it might even lead to more threats. (My darling, I know you don’t and can’t mean them.) Let me be clear. The desire to go back there one final time is to prove the kind of power the place doesn’t have over me. In other words, I want to go back to prove that it doesn’t matter whether or not I go back. I want to make a practice of my resistance to the past and all its toxicity.

I did not mention something that happened just as I was about to leave the Tranquility Spa. I left it out because I did not want to upset you, and yet I fully expected to tell you. I am thinking now that, after taking in my analysis of Dash King, solid proof for your cast-iron brain of my commitment to analysis, not emotion, you will just drop the notion that I am flirting with the past. Know instead that I have arrived at a new level — one in which old temptations mean nothing to me. How am I to be a scholar if I can’t cultivate the distance between self and reality that is de rigueur? It is only by putting myself in the very centre of a ring of fire — by risking a scalding — that I can move forward and change my life.

It’s been nearly one hundred years! Think about that; it’s been nearly one hundred years since I was a drug addict. I am a different person. And it’s time for me (and for you) to stop fearing the past. As if I will suddenly implode — or explode — from my exposure to the heat. We know that the real is of less and less importance. I use the phrase the real instead of reality because it can be argued that because so many people now live in cyberspace it might, arguably, be what is now reality. After all, many no longer leave their houses, for many reasons — the dangers of temptation, difficulty breathing, even superstition. The fact is, what used to be called cities have become withered husks dotted with hypocritical museums like my Tranquility Spa.

So why would I leave my house, especially when it proves so difficult for me to ambulate? Precisely because there is still a shadow over my life — a lingering, lurking, pestilent fog reminding me that I may “regress” again. I won’t. You may say drug addicts cannot “visit” drugs. I am not suggesting that. I never would. But it is very important for me to confront bravely the ambience, the breeding ground, of so much past trouble. Those sights, sounds, smells and, more importantly, ideas are still, for me, associated with the past. To know them is to resist them — with the full confidence that such resistance is possible. When I have resisted, and know I can resist, I will be more empowered, to use an antique term, and be able to, as Wordsworth (alarmingly, I am quoting him) said, find “strength in what remains behind.”

So this is what I did not tell you. As Allworth and I were about to leave the Tranquility Spa, I heard a remark that perhaps was — or perhaps was not — delivered in my direction. It came from the woman with the cantilevered face. Whether or not it was said to me, or not just to me, and not just in my direction — and whether or not, in fact, I heard correctly what was actually said — is a substantive issue. But then again, not really. For even if I have imagined the implications of what this creature uttered (for she is definitely a creature — not of appearance, but of personality), then the power that such an imagining potentially has over me is still important to confront.

The woman with the cantilevered face looks, as I mentioned, like a monster. There are things sticking out of her skin — though they’re still under — that should not be. And those projections are not bone. They are something else: plastic, spit, putty — perhaps tumours. Who knows? Of course, some tumours cannot be surgically removed. I am fully aware of that. It is more dangerous to attack them than to leave them be. I presume she had had her eye on one of the other male creatures at the bar (or those resembling males). I presume this from her remark. I think it was aimed at the handless fellow. At any rate, it was he who left just before her remark. And I thought (though I may have imagined it) that she had been looking at him out of the corner of her eye. This is an odd and funny expression in her case, because her eye really did have a corner. There was a gigantic, almost pointed, bump that jutted out of her face just atop her eye at the end of her heavily made-up brow.

Upon his listless, desultory exit, she, who was sitting in close proximity to me, turned to the bartender and said, with a committed conspiratorial glance, “There goes the man that got away.”

I guarantee I would not have remarked on this, indeed would have let it pass, if she hadn’t also glanced at me. Why? Here is the conundrum. Of course she could have done so simply because I was in her line of vision. But this is contradicted by the fact that her line of vision, in terms of myself, was obstructed by the protrusion above her eye. To look at me, she had to make a specific effort. This she definitely did.

But the meaning of the remark may depend on her age. Certainly it was impossible to be sure of how old anyone in that bar might have been. Though none are ever as old as I. If she was young, let’s say under one hundred, then it is unlikely she would be making reference to me or that song, at least not consciously. But if she was over one hundred, then it is completely possible that she knew to what and to whom she was referring.

But, another hurdle: even if her remark was a reference to the song, was she aware that the person who once sang it so famously was sitting next to her, disguised as a malformed lump of flesh in a dress? It is highly unlikely. Reflecting on circumstance like this might seem, at first thought, to be unfortunate or even, frankly, desperate. I know what you are going to say. Did I go to the Tranquility Spa expecting or indeed yearning for such a moment? Is it my fondest dream to be remembered? Is that world of fame — where I once lived and dreamed and carried on so brightly — a part of me that I pine for? And has the loss of that world made me half the woman I once was? I am certainly half of what I once was physically, barely even a woman. In fact, the quantity of real flesh and guts still attached to me is probably less than half of what there once was.

This is perhaps the most important thing for you to understand. But it’s difficult for you, for anyone, to comprehend. Fame is now so very over. Everyone is famous, and no one is famous. Everyone is an author and an expert, and so nobody is. The cyberworld makes us each at once invisible and renowned, each celebrated in our own way, though often anonymously. So I can understand how you and many others might be ignorant of the machinations of what used to be called fame.

In the distant past I made pronouncements about my duty to my fans. I think I may even have said, “My fans are my life” or “I live only for my fans.” I’m not saying that these remarks were nonsense. It’s simply that their meaning has been misconstrued in a romantic, not pragmatic, manner. What should be remembered most of all is that I was a worker — perhaps not in the strictest Marxist sense. After all, Marx had a famous disdain for performers and artists, calling them effete. Nonetheless, I am a practical person. I was brought up that way by my horrific mother and by the famous absence of my father. From the first moment they pushed me onstage until my last appearance at the Palace, I was singing for my supper. And if some saw in my performances an urgency, a life-and-death quality, there was a reason. I was literally hungry. Of course, I am not denying that there was artistry in my work. Far from it. I crafted all of my phrasing and pitched the meaning (or just threw stuff away) with enormous precision, sometimes even subconscious precision. But even the crafted pain was part of the act.

This is where it gets complicated. When you are a performer like I was, the act is not an act. It is real for the time you are doing it. You are living it. You are there, onstage, you are not somewhere else. You do not “phone it in,” as we used to say. But how can I make you understand that my all-encompassing, nearly Buddhist live presence was not fulfilling any need inside myself for love? I often think how sexist this notion is! How often do they say, still, that Frank Sinatra was enormously talented? Quite often. (He was also literally enormous, according to Ava Gardner.) But do they ever suggest he was singing because he was lonely, or simply desperate for love, or affection, from the masses watching him? I’m not questioning Frank’s honesty as a performer. I certainly don’t question the sheer virtuosity of his delivery. God knows how he found it or sustained it. But no one ever suggests that his artistry was a pathetic plea for attention. Yet they do this — have always done this — to me.

Of course, one might theorize that something transpires psychologically inside a performer after she has appeared onstage night after night, managing to be fully present. The performer begins living her life onstage as much as off. The two states become, in a sense, interchangeable. But does not the surgeon who is fully present at the operating table live in his work as much as I lived in mine? And if he was working nearly twenty-four hours a day, as many do, would he not begin to confuse his art — surgery — with his life? For what I did, ultimately, was work. It was a job. People forget that because I was so good at it that I made them forget. And by calling it work, I do not wish to demean it. I can think of nothing more fulfilling for my life or any life than to be consumed with productive work (my puritan undergarments are showing).

If I were to miss anything about being a star, it would be the work itself. That is why toiling as a scholar is so fulfilling, because it is merely another kind of work I may throw myself into or against, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. When, in interviews — and remember, publicity was part of my job, after all — I went on about my love for my fans, I was still working. I wasn’t lying. I loved those fans and needed them, because they put food on the table. One can’t understand this if one wasn’t brought up in vaudeville. The cheque from the hands of the theatre manager re-materialized as food. When my mother left me, the fear of abandonment was real, but it wasn’t only emotional abandonment that frightened me. My mother had been responsible enough a harridan to drill into me that at any moment we might all starve. My true fear of being cut out of the act that day in the hotel room wasn’t just a fear of being alone, but that I might end up dead on the street. Such lessons never leave you, especially during a depression — even if you end up at MGM.

So, am I going to try to convince you — with all of this talk about craft and work and practical considerations — that fame meant nothing to me? I will not. But it meant far less to me than you might imagine. At a certain point I realized that if I could reduce fame’s importance in my life I would develop a real personal life. During the fifties, when I struggled with my weight, it was actually a struggle with this very thing. After Vincente and Sid, I came to the understanding that both of these men were married to the “star” as much as they were married to me. There was nothing wrong with them. They were both fine fellows in their own ways. But they certainly were fellows, in my eyes, and still are. And is that the way you talk about a man you love — or did love once?

Vincente was so very much like my father in all the shamefaced debauchery that took place — though most of it was in his imagination. I knew (how could I not?) what was going on — I’m not that dumb. If you look closely at his movies, you will notice something about the male extras. They are all beautiful — like the hothouse-flower ushers that curled their tendrils around my father. In fact, that is the way one can differentiate the work of a homosexual film director from a heterosexual one: examine, closely, the walk-ons. You will notice that in a heterosexual director’s work the male walk-ons are undistinguished, hardly noticeable. But the little typist, or the girl who is passed on the street on a cold snowy night? These figures are of a radiant beauty, striking, earth-shattering, dumbfounding, nearly alarming. In a homosexual director’s oeuvre, the tiny parts played by typically young men are populated by distinctly unforgettable youths. In Vincente’s case, they were lithe and also dark — very like the ones so favoured by my father.

This didn’t upset me. I was so wrapped up in my work that I had little time to be concerned about love. Although I did think I was in love with Vincente then. I think I was unconsciously drawn to him. And this is what they all say, but it happens in this case to be actually true. The closeness I desired from my father, but didn’t achieve, was certainly a factor. But this was not, as some have suggested, because Vincente was a father figure. Quite the opposite was true: I had enormous pity for him. I noticed his pain, his anguish and his shamed faces immediately. His desperation to prove himself by giving me Liza touched me so much that I would have done anything to make him happy. After all, I was making Vincente happy, not so much by pleasing him, but by loving him in spite of it all. Vincente knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

Sid, on the other hand, was the end of the line, romance-wise. I sensed I needed something, and the easiest way to get what I needed was through my work. Ergo, I married my manager. Thank God he was a helluva manager. I kind of missed the fact that he wasn’t shamefaced and vulnerable. However, those were two of the many things missing. But after Sid I realized I was over being attracted to men who wanted to manage my career. Mark was definitely the last straw when it comes to husbands who were in love with the star.

With Mickey, at last, I found someone who was responding to me. Although it’s important to remember that if you were famous the way I was, when fame meant something (I sound very old now because I am), you could not eradicate that element completely from relationships. On one level my identity — because I spent so much time onstage — was my work, my famous persona. So they would only love a part of me if a partner were to ignore that aspect. But there were still people at that time I knew — June Allyson was one of them — who didn’t believe that Mickey was in love with the “real” me. Or perhaps she hated him because he was in love with that? Nobody ever wants you to change, even if staying the same means decaying and dying. “But he’s a kid,” June said. “A sweet kid, but still a kid.”

Fuck, this infuriated me. I would like to know why the fuck June Allyson thought she should have a say in it. I mean, she can say anything she wants. But do you know who that woman married? I mean, she wasn’t above Joan Crawford–like choices. What was going on with Dick Powell’s barber — the one who physically abused her? (Or so she claimed.) How screwed up is it to marry your ex-husband’s barber? I’m sorry to be so judgemental, but she really has never been charitable to me.

Okay, fine, she was a notch above Crawford, who for years fucked anything that could walk, male or female, as long as they could further her career. I wouldn’t have put it past her to fuck a goat if it had studio connections. And then, finally, paradoxically, she got all pious and married the Coca-Cola salesman. Of all the hypocrites in the world, the pious are the most sickening. And what a thing to get pious about. “I’m marrying a big thief businessman who stole lots of money by addicting children to fattening sugar drinks that gave them diabetes.” Let me tell you, no one was happier than me when the powers that be made soft drinks illegal. Who would know that Muslims would be so obsessed with soft drinks? More power to them. It just tickled my funny bone back in the day to think about Joan Crawford bedecked in jewels and furs and giving press conferences about her marriage to that fat old thing with glasses. Nothing against fatness — it would have been fine if she was actually into fat. Many people are into ugliness, thank Christ. But no, she just realized she was too fucking old to get any hot tail, so she prostituted herself to the corporation. Congratulations, Joan, I’m so glad you fully realized, so late in your short life, that all along you were really just in love with money.

If I sound bitter it’s because I am. June Allyson and the rest of the assholes came down on me about Mickey and that pissed me off. I don’t think June Allyson actually had sex — I mean, an orgasm. What’s worse is that she wouldn’t want one. And she wouldn’t think it was right. Dick Powell, who she was married to most of her life, was a bit of a numbnut with no chin. Although you know what they say about men with no chins — God giveth and he taketh away. . . . Sinatra was a chinless wonder. June knew exactly what was going on with Mickey. In that one crazy period with her husband’s barber when she was always drunk she was probably deep down somewhere chasing sex. But she couldn’t allow herself to admit it because she was such a prude.

And everybody else knew what was going on with me too. This old lady was getting laid and getting appreciated. I’d finally found somebody I got along with. And I was just being myself for a change. And not just onstage. I finally realized there was a difference between art and life. But, of course, I get punished for it because he wasn’t a boring, fat, ugly executive with spectacles and money. Mickey was fucking hot, and he was nice to me, and it was me he was with, not you-know-fucking-who.

I’m telling you all this because of the comment made by the woman with the cantilevered face. It would really piss me off if it were to launch you on a lecture about fame and its dangers. Not that I miss it. Sure I got a little kick, a tiny jolt from it. You know, like when a baby kicks? But the way Lorna kicked, not the way Liza kicked. Liza was one crazy baby in the womb. I actually believe she started rehearsing for our big appearance at the Palace in there. Very disconcerting at the time. . . .

Yeah, when Cantilevered Lady looked right at me, there was a frisson of old pleasure. But that’s just about pride in the work, that’s not fame. Fame is pernicious and evil. If anybody tries to tell you differently, they’ve never experienced it, never been there. If they had been, they would know how hard it is to be famous and still be alive. So, once and for all, I did not do it all for the fame or my fans. I did not love them. I did not need them, dream about them. But, on the other hand, living as a recluse, pulling a fucking Garbo and getting all hysterical when someone notices the gravel in my voice or the way I smoke a cigarette, is that sensible? Isn’t it just a waste of time? Not only is fame over, but my fame is long over — and I am pleased to be rid of it.

I hope and dearly pray this discussion has done something to change your mind. It’s been overly long and involved and digressive, but I miss you so much. Sometimes I could just taste you. I hope I will be forgiven, for I am flawed. I am returning to a very old excuse, but one that is tried and true — perhaps not with you and not now. I am human, and I am not perfect. I know you are human and perfect (as you never cease reminding me). At the same time, you are much less of a cyborg than I am. I respect that. You were born a human machine though. And I know those pretty little femme girls that you enjoy whipping now and then — do, now and then, in the words of Cole Porter (who said it all), get under your skin.

I miss you and I am not lying. Can I be clearer? To the best of my knowledge I am not lying. But as Derrida says, lying can only be conscious or else we are merely misspeaking. “Have I misspoken?” she said, I think, ungrammatically.

Thank you for listening. I promise I won’t be a bad girl, and that’s all that matters — along with youth, and the future, and tolerance, and cyber-reality, technological progress and the continuous free flow of information. Am I — perhaps in this singular, coincidental instance — correct?