I had invited a handful of friends from Los Angeles—all gay men—to join me and my boyfriend, Kevin, for a weekend at my friend April’s home, a small ranch house overlooking the Pacific. April hadn’t previously met three of the four I’d invited, but she’d unhesitatingly agreed to host this reunion. We were a ragtag group. Jacob and Billy, in the early throes of romance, were positively moony over each other, almost to the exclusion of everyone else. Andre, struggling to sell a gay-themed screenplay, was feeling battered by the Hollywood hustle. Roger, a gregarious poet whom I’d had a distant crush on years earlier, hadn’t previously met any of the others. Only April, happy to have a party delivered to her door, seemed to connect instantly with everyone.
I don’t remember who suggested the game—it might have been me, trying to break the ice—but April was immediately handing out paper and pens. The game’s premise: Describe your dream house. How many floors and rooms? What kind of front door? Is there landscaping? Everyone scribbled down answers before the key was revealed: Your house was your personality. The number of rooms showed how compartmentalized your identity was. The front door indicated how you greeted those who entered your life. The landscape illustrated the type of people you wanted to keep close. April’s dream house was one story and sprawling, with large common areas and plenty of guest rooms—a more spacious version of the house we were in. The front door had a top that swung open, so that even strangers could be greeted face-to-face. And the landscaping? April laughed as she read what she’d written: “Fruit trees! My dream house would be surrounded by every kind of fruit tree.”
We “fruit trees,” circled around her, roared our approval.
Recalling that party recently, Kevin suggested that April was a “collector” of gay men. Wasn’t it true that she had kept in touch with several of the guys she met that weekend? Hadn’t she once claimed that her idea of heaven was a place populated by gay men (along with her husband and daughter, she had hastened to add)?
The idea of being collected, I replied, left me with a certain queasiness, as if I were an insect pinned behind glass by Dr. Kinsey, put on display for further study. “Really?” Kevin asked, knowing what an exhibitionist I am. “You don’t like being on display?”
He reminded me of the artwork that April and her husband, Dean, have collected for years. They’ve made their home an eclectic grab bag containing everything from abstract landscapes to refashioned “found objects,” such as a fetching party dress built from Junior Mints boxes.
To be collected in this way is to be selected, appreciated, chosen. To be selected means you might truly be known.
We know so little about ourselves when we are young.
I met Paul, my first boyfriend, in college, and I followed him to Manhattan, where we fixed up a rental on the Lower East Side: sanding the floors smooth, installing bars on the windows. Together, we became politically active in the queer movement; we socialized and screwed around as a couple. As my early twenties passed by, I began feeling a discontentment so strong I couldn’t deny it, and so unfamiliar I couldn’t define it. I let myself fall in love with someone who lived far away, courting this new boy with lengthy love letters. Six years after Paul and I first slept together, I told him I wanted to break up.
Soon after, on the subway, I ran into an acquaintance who blanched when I told him of the impending split. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “You guys have been my model couple.”
My stomach clenched guiltily. I needed to get away from the relationship precisely because people like this fellow couldn’t differentiate me from Paul—not physically, but conceptually. Even close friends sometimes slipped and called one of us by the other’s name.
When I complained of this to my friend Maria, she shook her head firmly, her wavy, blonde-streaked mane shimmering in the light of an East Village café. Reaching out her hand, she assured me, “I’ve never had any problem knowing where Paul ends and you begin.”
“You haven’t?”
She smiled so endearingly I could only understand it as permission to shake off my guilt. Defining moments are rare, but this was one: I was being seen for who I was, apart from association with anyone else. I was being shown how to look at myself with the clarity of an outside eye.
I had known Maria since the summer of 1987, four years earlier, when I moved to New York. I first spotted her on a sweltering evening in an auditorium where she sat several rows ahead of me. We were there for a meeting of a recently formed activist group, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP had been gaining attention for street actions protesting the lack of government attention to the epidemic. On this night, the group was planning for the upcoming Gay Pride parade. Outraged by the Reagan administration’s call for mandatory HIV testing—a thinly veiled attempt to identify, isolate, even quarantine “AIDS victims”—ACT UP would roll out a flatbed truck bearing a barbed–wire–wrapped concentration camp overseen by an actor in a Reagan mask laughing diabolically. Guards in masks and yellow rubber gloves would march alongside, keeping watch over those who’d been rounded up.
The meeting’s facilitator called for volunteers. “We want as diverse a group as possible inside the camp,” he said, “to send the message that the virus does not discriminate.”
A few rows up, the petite woman with the humidity-rippled hair waved her hand. “You’re volunteering for the camp?” the facilitator asked.
“No,” she replied, “I want to be a guard.”
Maria was unlike anyone I’d ever met: an intellectual whose fashion sense included leather jackets and boutique dresses, cowboy boots and marabou mules. In 1987, her nose ring seemed exotic and vaguely sinister, but her sense of humor was all embracing; she regarded everything New York had to offer as material for a (usually comic) story. She was only a couple of years older than I but seemed to have lived twice as many adventures: a girlhood in Africa, a brief stint at a Swiss boarding school, a year spent in Italy after dropping out of N.Y.U. She’d completed her undergrad education at a Seven Sisters school, where she’d had a series of tumultuous affairs with women, fueled by equal parts feminist theory and sexual energy.
Walking down lower Broadway on one of the first days we hung out socially, Maria complained about the afternoon’s glaring sunshine. “It reminds me of L.A.,” she said. “I hate L.A.! Too much sunshine makes people complacent. Plus you have to wear sunglasses, and you can’t look people in the eye when you have something to say.” Her tough talk was infectious. I also hate L.A., I wanted to say, though I’d only been there briefly. And I hate sunshine, and sunglasses, and people who don’t look you in the eye! I wanted to dispel received information as mercilessly as she did—be it about the weather, or about politics.
Maria was the first person I told about the affair I’d started; now I was telling her about leaving Paul. “I can’t do this to him,” I moaned. “I’m ruining his life, and mine.”
She narrowed her gaze on me. “Karl,” she insisted, “you’re going to have many lovers in your life.”
Her words offered the balm of perspective: You’re not ruining your life, you’re renewing it. You’re reinventing yourself. I held those words close, a raft to keep me afloat through this sea change.
“Sweetheart, you’ll be okay,” she said.
“I don’t even know where I’ll live.”
“You can live with me. Patrick is leaving in a month.” Patrick was the latest in a line of gay roommates who’d rotated through Maria’s tenement apartment ever since she’d moved in, knocked down the interior walls and filled the place with books.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
She was.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
The idea of living with a woman was a great comfort to me. I’d grown up with sisters, and in college I had roomed with three different women, the most important of whom was Theresa.
I met her on the first day of freshman year, at a small private school in upstate New York. My roommate was an enthusiastic guy from Philadelphia named Chris, whose unfamiliar accent emphasized the o’s in home and phone until they seemed as round as doughnuts. With him was a girl from the same high school, another incoming frosh. She was dark-haired and cherub cheeked, just a breath under five feet tall, with dark, serious eyes that seemed unsure about this entire endeavor. I was used to befriending well-behaved, well-liked girls who carried sadness just below the surface. The girls I’d dated were like that, projecting happiness in order to maintain their high school social status, then letting down their guard with me, often while I gave them back rubs at parties. But this girl—she’d introduced herself as Terry—was offering no false cheer, as if she, and by extension we, understood that this was all just overwhelming.
Chris led us on an energetic campus tour that concluded at a high-rise dormitory called the Tower. He brought us to the top floor, where a restaurant was open to the public. Since the campus sat at the crest of a hill, this marked the highest spot in the county. We could see miles of lush green farmland and the spectacular, long, blue lake that stretched north from the valley below. Chris pointed out the sights, then turned to go. But Terry, with a small sigh, announced that she would stay.
I took a chance and added, “Me, too.”
Then it was just the two of us, side by side, looking at the haze-blurred horizon. “I’m not ready for college,” she said. “High school sucked, but you only get to do it once. There’s a lot I’d do differently. And now it’s over, and we’re on to college, and then that’s going to be over…”
“We haven’t even started,” I protested, arms flung wide.
“I hate saying good-bye,” she continued. “I hate it so much it can be hard to say hello.”
“Do you have a hard time meeting people?” She looked at me, unsure. “Because I do. If I feel comfortable with someone, I’ll just start talking, but there are a lot of people who make me nervous, you know?”
She nodded. She knew.
“At least the view is incredible,” she said.
“On a clear day you could see forever,” I joked.
She brightened immediately. “Do you know that movie?” I nodded. “I love Barbra Streisand,” she added.
“Well, hello, Terry,” I sang.
Our interaction was the only substantial one I had that weekend; still, when the fall semester arrived, our friendship was postponed. I would spot her in the company of the guy she was dating—a skinny preppie with thick hair and a stuck-up attitude—and I’d think, We were supposed to be friends. But I—not yet out, even to myself—was also absorbed with a new love, Petra, a moody film student who took my virginity and made me over in her image. Petra introduced me to Fellini, Plath, and the Violent Femmes; she wouldn’t abide Streisand. Then she dumped me without explanation before spring break.
During a melancholy campus walk, I ran into Terry. She was in the midst of her own blue mood; her romance with the preppie was on the skids. Already nostalgic for the summer before, we decided to take the elevator to the top of the Tower to see if the view had changed.
I fell for Terry over a single conversation; I fell for April before I even met her.
Long before she started hosting Southern California dinner parties, April was a theater producer in Marin County, and I was a receptionist at an arts nonprofit in San Francisco. The organization was searching for a development director; it was my duty to process the applications. One after another, I scanned the staid cover letters, each outlining, in workmanlike prose, a commendable level of experience. Then one day I opened a letter beginning, “There are several reasons why you shouldn’t hire me, but by the time you’re through reading this, I hope I will have dispelled them all.” The paragraphs that followed were saturated with so much personality that I walked the letter directly to my boss, announcing, “Here’s the one.”
April’s first week on the job coincided with our annual two-day staff retreat. She showed up in overalls, with her shoulder-length auburn hair in pigtails, as if ready for summer camp. In the midst of one of those getting-to-know-you activities, she revealed that at age twenty-seven, she’d already been divorced, remarried, and excommunicated from the evangelical Lutheran church. April, it turned out, was fond of costumes, games, and self-disclosure for the sake of a story.
She quickly became my confidante at work, where she would escape from her desk to join me in the reception area with a bottle of blue nail polish. We’d fan our wet fingertips, gossiping in a cloud of cosmetic fumes. Soon we were hanging out after work as well, usually at my apartment. The first time she sat down on the toilet to pee, and left the door open so we could continue our conversation—something Maria used to do at our apartment in New York—I knew this was a friend I’d hold on to.
April and Dean’s marriage was that rarest of things, a heterosexual union with a degree of permitted sexual openness. This meant April was free to pursue an occasional fling; she usually chose a butch, brooding dyke. Soon she developed a crush on Lucy, one of our part-time technicians. They would disappear together after work, and the next day I’d hear about the charmed, urban adventure April had cooked up: an evening walk through Golden Gate Park, a cliffside visit to watch the sunset. One morning, April arrived at the office in the clothes she’d been wearing the previous day—overalls again—her hair looking storm-ravaged. The night before, she’d been knocked over by a wave on a beach walk with Lucy. Drip-drying back at Lucy’s apartment, April fell asleep. She awoke in the morning to an empty bed and a note from Lucy reporting that she’d run off to be with the woman she was really in love with. Then April somehow managed to lock herself out of Lucy’s apartment without her shoes. I looked down, and sure enough, she’d come to work in her socks.
April didn’t last long as our development director. Within a year, she had given notice and returned to what she did best—producing theater.
I’ve never wanted to be a woman, but I’ve often emulated the women in my life.
Maria was outspoken when I needed to discover my own strong voice; she was already the fearless activist I was determined to become. Theresa was able to articulate emotion in the midst of the superficial, party-centered life of a college campus. April brought me outrageousness when I was locked into routine. My women have unearthed in me the very qualities that I admire most in them.
But who am I to call these women “mine,” even casually? Isn’t possession exclusive to the lover, whereas friendship is ecumenical? Naked and kissing, hands roaming, skin wet: Put two bodies together like this and, yes, you make of each other a possession. But I have not made these women mine in this carnal way, except one, once—an isolated, delirious incident in an otherwise platonic friendship.
Yet these three women are to some degree mine, just as I am theirs. Doesn’t Maria send me Valentine’s Day cards? Doesn’t Theresa leave plaintive voice mails saying, “I miss my Karly”? Doesn’t April start conversations with “Hi, honey” and end them with “I miss you” in the most adoring tone? Meeting each of them had the dizziness of falling in love.
My earliest friends were the girls in my neighborhood. There was always more than one sharing “best friend” status. Even when I dated girls—they tended to be Catholic virgins whose overprotective fathers waited up with the light on—we spent more time on the phone, talking out life’s troubles, than we did in person, getting busy. I related to these teenage girlfriends as I would a best friend. Now I treat my best friends with a romantic devotion usually reserved for lovers.
In college, only one friend’s opinion really mattered to me: Terry’s. Feelings were complicated, and Terry was my feeling friend. Never before had I known someone who could guide a conversation so quickly into the hilly terrain of the heart. One night during junior year, sharing a contraband bottle of wine in my on-campus apartment, I stuttered through the news I hadn’t yet told her: “Paul’s not just my friend, he’s my boyfriend. I think I’m bisexual, but I’m with him now, so that probably makes me gay.”
She responded by telling me of a night in high school when she dove naked into a swimming pool, followed by a girl named Carol and Carol’s boyfriend. The three of them wound up fooling around. “It was Carol I was most excited by,” Terry said. “She was definitely hot.”
“Would you do it again with a girl?” She admitted she would. “Have you?” I prodded. In the delay before she said no, I guessed that there was perhaps more to this story, more to Terry’s sexuality. Just how much more I wouldn’t learn for another six months.
We were in London, spending a semester abroad, living in a tiny flat with four other students. Privacy was nonexistent. Terry and I discovered a dimly lit creperie in Soho that we’d steal away to, drinking glasses of port and pecking at a single dessert crepe for hours. Here, Terry confided that the excessive homesickness that had overtaken her in England had a secret cause: She’d left behind a lover back home, an older woman, a kind of mentor whom she’d been involved with since high school. This woman, Marguerite, held a prominent position in Terry’s hometown, and had set the terms of their togetherness: No one was to know.
I was dumbstruck. The affair seemed to me politically retrograde and logistically untenable. Yet it also revealed a side of Terry so complex that my own sexual confusion paled in comparison—an ordinary weed alongside a night-blooming, bloodred flower. I wanted to know how this Gothic love had continued for so long, rooting itself in the shadows. I predicted it wouldn’t last—surely Terry, a founding member of a college club called Feminists for Awareness and Action, would chafe against Marguerite’s control—but I was wrong. It was a relationship with no future that showed no sign of ending.
I’d imagined Terry a substitute college sweetheart, our late-night shared desserts akin to old-fashioned malteds sipped through two straws at once, when in fact she was living the intricate, compromised life of an adult. In singling me out as the keeper of her secret, she’d bestowed adulthood on me, too. In return I offered a kind of antidote—an increasingly free-spirited playfulness made more wild through drinking binges and multiple bong hits, under the influence of which Terry was at her most carefree and nonsensical. During a weekend in Amsterdam, stupid on hash brownies, we explored the nightlife arm in arm, bug-eyed and laughing uncontrollably. “I’m not myself tonight,” Terry proclaimed, adding thoughtfully, “although I am,” which made us laugh even harder.
After college, living in different cities, we entered a period in which we clashed repeatedly. As much as I wanted Terry to explore her sexuality, I simply couldn’t approve of Marguerite. When Terry asked me to lie to her mother about her whereabouts so that she and Marguerite could vanish for a weekend—their first vacation together, to homo-heaven San Francisco, of all places—I refused. My life at this point was an ongoing, vocal crusade, not just among ACT UP’s activists, but as a journalist at Outweek, the magazine made famous for “outing” billionaire Malcolm Forbes upon his death. The women I was meeting, Maria most prominent among them, were didactic and commanding, aflame with righteousness. They were knocking down walls, not keeping secrets. Their influence was a gift I needed to pass on to Terry.
The bond between gay men and the significant women in their lives has often been painted as neutered, and thus safe: You both desire the person who’s not in the equation, the straight guy over there. I first heard the term for this type of woman—“fag hag”—in college, tossed off by bitchy theater students, whose conversations rippled with barbed phrases like “drama queen,” “beard,” “breeder,” and “bull dagger.” The fag hag’s cultural currency was so devalued that her only refuge was the company of girly men, who exploited her devotion for their own gain. This was disorienting news. Was it supposedly true that gay men kept women around in order to feel superior to them? Every woman whose friendship I’d sought seemed in some way superior to me.
I have shared with the women in my life a kind of perversity, a willingness to push at sexual limitations. These are women who have cast the net wide, sexually. They can be crude and challenging and sophisticated and compassionate. These are no withered hags. These are women to be desired.
By the time Maria and I became roommates, the headiest years of our activism were already behind us. For Maria, grassroots politics were replaced by the stimulation of N.Y.U.’s graduate filmmaking program, and in this new environment, she found her next lover. She had quietly begun seeing a man named Hal. In our queer circle, heterosexuality was deemed by some as “sleeping with the enemy,” but I found Maria’s situation romantic, a love seeking expression against the odds. And I was pleased that she’d chosen someone gentle, even dorky; a man, yes, but one who wasn’t interested in screaming at her on the street, as her last two female lovers had done.
I, too, had a new boyfriend—Benedict, the letter writer I’d left Paul for. I recall the night the four of us—Ben and I, Maria and Hal—sat on her bed watching news coverage of the racially explosive L.A. riots; whole neighborhoods were burning, sending up wartime clouds of smoke. We talked about politics and fear of the other, trying to understand. Afterward, we slipped to our separate beds, Maria’s just around a doorless corner of the apartment from where my futon sprawled on the floor. Beneath the Duke Ellington music that we occasionally blared to create a curtain of privacy, I listened to Maria getting fucked at the same moment I was.
It wasn’t long after this that I moved west, inspired by Maria to make my own leap to grad school. A few nights after I departed, she called me in tears. She was standing over a kitchen sink filled with dirty silverware; washing silverware was a task that she abhorred, and so I had always taken it on. Only now, wiping off forks and spoons, did my absence fully hit her. But there was never any doubt that our friendship would continue, in intensity if not immediacy. My future with Ben, on the other hand, wasn’t so clear. I came to realize I was more invested in a life-of-many-lovers than I was in a life with him.
I continued to visit New York in summers, when Maria rented a vacation house on Long Island, where she worked on her new career as a screenwriter. On one fateful visit, she and I found ourselves at an open-air bar for happy hour, taking in the sunset over the bay. We chatted up a couple, married New Yorkers visiting for the weekend. Greg had sleepy brown eyes and thick curly hair that bobbed as he nodded, listening earnestly. His wife, Gina, was a brunette with a lithe body and large, laughing mouth, who worked for a design magazine with a guy Maria and I knew. The discovery of a mutual friend and the two-for-one vodka martinis warmed us into camaraderie. After sundown, we invited them back to Maria’s.
We opened bottles of red wine, as marinated chicken sizzled on the grill. The corn on the cob, fireflies, and cut-grass smell of summer lent a timeless, wholesome air to the proceedings, but there was nothing innocent about our intentions. Maria and I had decided to seduce them—separately or together, we weren’t sure. We’d giggled conspiratorially as we’d driven back from the bar, Gina and Greg tailing us in their car.
After dinner, I announced that I had a joint in my bedroom. Greg drunkenly followed me. We sat on the edge of the bed inhaling smoke, while I lobbed out flirtation, but I soon understood that earnest Greg wasn’t any more seducible high than he was sober. The pot on top of the wine on top of the vodka, plus the chicken in its tangy sauce, was a lethal recipe; the only physical intimacy I shared with Greg that night was our side-by-side puking into the toilet. Gina quickly took her messy husband away.
The next morning, Maria and I groaned about our foiled attempt to play Paul and Jane Bowles on the prowl in Tangier. That night we found ourselves curled together in my bed, the same one that had failed to lure Greg into a horizontal position, this time with no one to seduce but each other. One of us leaned in for a kiss, and who knows why, but ten years into the friendship, we decided to keep going, like lovers would.
All along, there have been women whose friendship might have lasted, but didn’t. I think of my rowdy college pal Melanie, who ended up at a desk job she despised, insisting it was the right choice for her career. Each time we’d speak, she had only complaints about her life and jealousy about mine, which she deemed more exciting and “real.” When I would suggest changes she might make, she inevitably answered, “I can’t.”
To say, instead, “I can,” is something that my women share. For Terry, this came, at last, when she summoned the courage to cut Marguerite off. She marked the moment with an even more elemental shift. She stopped calling herself Terry and reclaimed Theresa—“Big Theresa” was our nickname for the still diminutive but more self-assured woman who stepped forth. Her next significant relationship was with a man, a gentle giant named Guy who treated her with great care. They were married in a Quaker-style ceremony, at which guests were asked to stand and testify when the spirit moved them. When I stood, I told the story of meeting her that first day of college. I wondered aloud what that vista would have looked like through the confident eyes of Big Theresa.
For my thirty-first birthday, April took me out for a fancy meal. We ate quail and drank wine suggested by the sommelier. The dessert arrived on a plate with “Happy Birthday” penned in liquid chocolate. From there we ventured tipsily into the Fairmont Hotel, sneaking onto the ancient glass elevator for a look at the San Francisco skyline. We hit last call at the campy tiki bar in the hotel’s basement, where a band sang “Celebration” on a floating island as sprinklers spat rain onto indoor palm trees. On the walk home, I spotted a copy of the Book of Mormon in the street, and I eventually stopped kicking it obnoxiously along the curb and picked it up to bring home.
Back at my apartment, the romantic flicker of our four-star dinner morphed effortlessly into a raucous slumber party. April slipped into pajamas, and I took the opportunity to don what she’d been wearing, a mod minidress with a harlequin print. I pulled on a wig and heels from a recent outing as my drag alter ego, Brianna Cracker, and I posed like a drunken stripper against the orange walls of my apartment while giving a dramatic reading from the Book of Mormon.
The next morning, April walked to the corner for coffee while I cleaned up the night’s detritus. She returned in under ten minutes, armed with a story about the stranger who had chatted her up at the café—a gay, homeless blues musician who had escaped from Czechoslovakia during the 1968 uprising. When she finished, I marveled, “Your story lasted longer than the actual time you were gone.”
To adore this quality in April is to encourage her to nurture it. And it’s also a way to grant permission. Because when April left my apartment that day, and went back home to Dean, I knew that she would tell him stories about me.
At each crucial stage of my life, almost without being aware of it, I have looked to women to help define the contours of my identity. Extraordinary, complex women have always appeared. Does some elemental characteristic unite them? To answer “complexity” is to suggest that there is no answer at all.
For Theresa, I am and have always been the one gay man in her life, though she recently reminded me that she didn’t pick me because I’m gay, but because I helped her “drop her armor.” Of course, it was she who helped me drop mine; throughout twenty years of sentimental education, knowledge has flowed both to and from. April seems to give any gay man she meets the benefit of the doubt, assuming that with him she’ll find some rollicking adventure, some shared, misfit laughter. She’s also been the person who, at my low moments, has accompanied me to a church service, the better to stimulate discussion about belief, contemplation, spirit. Maria has lived more deeply inside the queer community, though as her identity has shifted from lesbian to “hasbian,” from activist to filmmaker, she has concluded that the only label that really fits her is “Maria.” My most recent visit with her was in L.A., where she now lives and works, and where despite the numbing California sunshine, she has found stimulation among a new group of friends.
I have pursued my women and kept them close, the better to bask in the spell of their influence. Perhaps what unites them, then, is simply that I’ve entrusted each one with my story. My women are the portrait of my history, and the portraitists, too. I am, it seems, the real collector here.
To collect is to understand, to cherish. To collect is to demonstrate what you value, what you love. To collect is to extend the self, arms open, unguarded.