“I love you.”
I tell this to Morgan in a cab as we zoom up the West Side Highway after a night spent at the Sound Factory, the illegal after-hours gay dance club where vogueing was invented and where we have spent the last six hours high on Ecstasy, our arms and legs wrapped around each other while a drag queen circled us and pretended to take photographs with an imaginary camera: “Click! Oh, yes, gorrrrgeous!”
Now, it is eleven o’clock in the morning, and the bright, flat sunlight makes a mockery of our garish outfits—my fishnet stockings, his shiny Dolce & Gabbana shirt.
“I love you, too,” Morgan replies, squeezing my hand. I feel tears in my eyes, because I do love Morgan—so fiercely and passionately that it sometimes borders on hysteria.
We are both twenty-two and Morgan is gay, but that is completely irrelevant.
Morgan and I met during our freshman year at Columbia, instantly bonding over our mutual appreciation for Madonna. At that point, having gone to an all-girls high school, I had little experience with boys; I was also awkward and shy. My strict Filipino Catholic background had drilled into my head the importance of remaining a virgin until marriage, which resulted in a twisted obsession and repulsion toward sex.
I wanted nothing more than to be with a boy, but I also wanted nothing more than to have him never touch me.
So when my roommate told me she thought Morgan might be gay, I didn’t believe her. Nor did it seem an obstacle—if anything, it was a plus! Morgan was everything I wanted a boyfriend to be—sophisticated, erudite, charming, with good hair (a caramel swoop over a tanned forehead), and about as sexually dangerous as a potted plant. He was Australian, had lived all over the world (Singapore, Paris), spoke fluent French, and yet was still refreshingly down-to-earth. He liked Star Wars and fatty mustard-laden pastrami sandwiches, as well as Alabama slammers, having spent his last two years of high school in that great Southern state.
Also, Morgan taught me how to smoke. His long, thin fingers handed me one Camel Light after another. I was a sheltered girl from the northern California suburbs who wanted to reinvent myself as a jaded city girl. Peer pressure? Is there such a thing when one is so eager to be corrupted? Morgan was a mentor and ally, and we were terrible influences on each other. Together we ran up thousands of dollars on our parents’ credit cards—charging exorbitant restaurant meals (opting for sushi and sake rather than the plebian offerings at the college cafeteria) and weekly shopping sprees at Charivari as we amassed avant-garde designer wardrobes. Issey Miyake. Claude Montana. Christian Lacroix. It was the late eighties, early nineties. Fashion was not yet the mass-market reality television phenomenon that it is now; it was the province of the design elite, the aesthete, and we wanted to be part of it.
Precisely because I was a financial aid student with hard-working immigrant parents, I wanted to shed every bit of my image as the underprivileged, earnest striver in twenty-dollar cotton sweaters from The Limited. Upon meeting my prep-school roommate, with her casual attitude toward Bergdorf cashmeres and offhand invitations to fly to London or the Caribbean on a whim, I had intimated very early on that there was absolutely nothing sexy about being poor.
My family was once financially and socially prominent in Manila but had suffered from the economic bust that affected the country in the mid-eighties. We had been forced to start anew in America. The downturn in our fortune was something I was deeply embarrassed about, and one night found myself telling a bald-faced lie to kids on my floor that none other than Corazon Aquino, the then-president of the Philippines, was my aunt (she was not blood-related but a close friend of my family’s; to me, that was close enough). I was careful to project a confident, popular persona, even going so far as to invent a devoted boyfriend at home, concocted from a senior-prom-date picture with a cute guy I was set up with by the popular girls in my class.
Only to Morgan did I confess the unglamorous truths about my life—that my family ran an employee cafeteria at Sears in San Bruno, that we rented and did not own our house, that I had absolutely no friends from high school. The photo that adorned my college pin-board of a group of attractive kids with me in the middle? Taken during the one party I had ever attended, after graduation, when sentiment overcame snobbery, and for once, every girl in our forty-person class was welcome to a beach bash in San Rafael.
With Morgan I felt safe enough to be myself because he had secrets of his own. His aunt had committed suicide. His parents didn’t get along. He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t unhappy, either. He never thought my not having money was a barrier to living the high life. In his mind, we were young, smart, and attractive, and should have New York at our feet. Morgan always figured out a way to get on exclusive nightclub VIP lists, or invited to cocktail parties at swanky penthouse apartments on Park Avenue, or asked to art exhibits in vast Tribeca lofts. We ogled celebrities together (Isaac Mizrahi! Christy Turlington!) and availed ourselves of numerous open bars. When we weren’t out, one of our favorite pastimes was to talk on the phone for hours and eviscerate everyone we knew in common—catty character assassination that only two people who weren’t getting any action could excel at.
He was my very best friend and the most important person in my life. By junior year, I had accepted his avowed asexuality. Part of me knew Morgan was gay, but another part didn’t accept it. I was still holding out for the day when he would realize we could be everything to each other. In the meantime, I began dating a sweet boy, a year younger than me and as inexperienced as I was. Next to Morgan, my feelings for Kevin seemed wan and puppyish, though it was nice to have someone to kiss. We would be fooling around in my stuffy dormitory room, the two of us half-naked and sweaty, and I would find myself wishing I was watching Beverly Hills, 90210 with Morgan instead.
Did I wish I were kissing Morgan? I’m not sure. In the fantasies I spun in bed at night, we were entangled in the most romantic and erotic of love affairs; yet when I saw him in the morning, reality would blow those gauzy images from my mind. Morgan was a good-looking guy, but there was no sexual tension between us. If any did exist, it was a one-sided projection of mine. Still, I persisted in the illusion that I was Morgan’s quasi girlfriend. I even got him to admit that if he ever felt like dating a girl, the only girl he would date would be me. He had a series of complicated excuses to explain his monklike behavior: wanting to focus on school, not feeling ready for the next step, cherishing his independence. It was such a shame, since we made a good-looking couple. Everyone said so, and even if our so-called romance was as fabricated as the air-brushed images in the glossy magazine pages I modeled my life after, it was enough to sustain me.
It never occurred to me to raise the issue of his sexuality, not even when we spent every weekend checking coats at the Lesbian-Bisexual-Gay Coalition dances together our senior year (yes, he was literally still in the closet). Nor did I find it odd that our circle of friends grew to include several flamboyantly gay men, all of whom told me in no uncertain terms that they believed Morgan was gay. They could see I was hopelessly in love with him, and nothing good could come of the situation. I was blithe, blind, and refused to listen. I convinced myself that Morgan was simply an open-minded straight man, a quality I cherished in him, albeit mistakenly.
When Morgan came out to me the night before commencement, I crumpled to my knees and cried. (Later he would tell me my reaction was worse than his mother’s.) I was shattered and in my grief proposed a Bloomsbury-type union: We would marry each other but allow ourselves lovers (although we were still both virgins at the time). He happily agreed, and the thought of such a European-style arrangement made us feel very worldly indeed. That evening, it even briefly occurred to me that I might be a lesbian. What could explain my complete and total denial? Was I so repulsed by the idea of sex with men that I was hiding a nascent homosexuality that I subsumed in an attraction to a man who had no sexual feelings for me?
Yet the next day, during the graduation lunch attended by both of our families, when we exchanged presents—gold cufflinks for him, Tiffany earrings for me—I understood that it could no longer be the two of us against the world. The look on our mothers’ faces said it all. They were already planning the wedding, and I couldn’t be part of such a farce. I didn’t want to play Dora Carrington to his Lytton Strachey. I was a bourgeois girl from San Francisco. I would have to make new friends, get myself a real boyfriend, and leave the cozy cocoon of glamour and gossip that we had built for each other.
But to my surprise, our friendship didn’t change all that much after Morgan came out. If anything, we clung even more tightly to each other. We continued to share and dissect each other’s every perverse secret, poisonous thought, or insecure assessment of our looks and personalities, and indulged in books and movies of questionable origin. The Danish art film For A Lost Soldier, a movie that celebrates the sacred love between a nineteen-year-old Canadian serviceman and the eleven-year-old Danish boy who becomes his lover and helpmeet? One of our favorites. We saw it in a darkened theater in the Village with what looked like grizzled escapees from a NAMBLA convention.
We made our way through the city and began to grow up—quitting our wild nightclubbing ways along with the coke and Ecstasy binges once we became junior professionals—coming home to a shared apartment where I would cook inedible meals that we would wash down with liters of vodka and 7UP.
We even fought like lovers, with me crying and saying I didn’t think he loved me the way I loved him (as a best-best-best-friend), and I needed him to treat me better, while he, remote and aloof, arched his eyebrow and remained silent, causing me to cry even harder. Neither of us were dating at this point; our world was still so small that there was only room for the two of us, as if we were living in a hermetically sealed bubble.
Like an old married couple, we knew how to get under each other’s skin.
“Those chairs you bought from IKEA which you think are so stylish are nothing but cheap cafeteria trash!” he would taunt, knowing I was ultra-sensitive about my interior-decorating aspirations, while I would counter with insults about his once-glorious crown of hair.
“Thinning, isn’t it?” I would sneer.
I like to think these gruesome fights were a consequence of trying to make sense of what and who we were to each other, now that he had come out of the closet and we could never have a romantic relationship. Could we simply be friends? Somehow, we understood that our relationship had become suffocating in its intensity, and we pushed and pulled on each other, alternately encouraging the other to Date! Date! Forgodssakes, date! or to meet new friends to widen our social horizons. Yet each new friend or potential boyfriend only brought a gnashing of teeth and a feeling of abandonment and jealousy.
As the years went by, Morgan remained the most significant man in my life. Now that I had finally lost my virginity, I would sleep with the guy-of-the-moment at night but look forward to brunch with Morgan in the morning, brunch being a more important meal than dinner. I had a succession of loser boyfriends. There was the failed forty-year-old playwright from Queens whose latest work was a series of technical manuals; the racist investment banker who dumped me due to a misplaced sense of political correctness (his last girlfriend was Asian, and he didn’t want to seem like he had an “Asian fetish,” so he would have to dump me, because I was unfortunately, um, Asian); the handsome lawyer with an annoyingly high-pitched, whiny laugh. But it was still Morgan whom I spoke to every night before I went to bed, his clipped, cultivated accent as soothing as a bedtime story. He was my security blanket, my other half, my conscience.
Our relationship never progressed to the physical, except for one drunken semi-orgy with two of our close friends during a dinner party in the dead of winter. It was January, and we were huddled in an East Village tenement walk-up. After we had consumed several bottles of wine and moved on to vodka, Morgan cheekily suggested we take our clothes off, so we did. As we danced to Abba, naked and giggling at our daring in Lauren’s living room, as free as wood nymphs, I thought the impromptu nudie show would be as far as it would go. Then I ended up on Leo’s lap, Leo being the ex-boyfriend of my best girlfriend and a boy I’d had a passing crush on for years, and suddenly it wasn’t so innocent anymore. When Leo moved on to Lauren, I found myself on Morgan’s lap, and we grappled tongues and touched, my hand stroking his upright member. I still remember how hard and thick it was—and how odd that after all these years, I was finally getting to touch it. But I knew Morgan’s excitement didn’t come from kissing me, but from seeing Leo naked. We were comfortable with each other and laughed at how absurd it all was. I was surprised to find that fooling around with Morgan felt obligatory, while I was more turned on by being with Leo. It was probably safe to say that everyone in the room was.
Then one night, four years after Morgan first came out to me, and eight years after we had first met, he stopped returning my calls.
The night it happened was the week I had gotten my first article published ever, and my close friends, all twenty of them (by then, I had successfully expanded my social circle), were taking me out to celebrate. I called Morgan to let him know what time to meet us at the bar, but he never called me back. I kept calling and calling, and finally, he took his phone off the hook. I was aghast. What was going on?
The article we were celebrating was a personal essay published in The New York Press. It was an incendiary article, written in the in-your-face-antiestablishment voice of the paper. It was called “I Hate White Women: A Second Banana Speaks” and detailed my anger at how society depicted women of color as secondary sidekicks to the (tongue-firmly-in-cheek here) “Caucasian master race.” I cited the movie Clueless, in which black Dionne sucks up to white Cher. It was meant to be satirical and ironic because of course, I didn’t really hate white women. Several of them, in fact, were taking me out for drinks that evening. I had shown it to Morgan before I had submitted it, and he had pronounced it “genius.”
I assumed that whatever it was that was keeping him from being at my side that night had something to do with my finding a small footing in the literary world. We had each harbored dreams of making it big in the city. For years, Morgan had been supportive as I tried, and failed, to get a succession of novels published while working a day job as a computer programmer. He was trying to crack the film and television industry but was stuck working in marketing and finance for a cable network.
A level of competition had always existed in our relationship—in college, we were anal grade-grubbers, keeping a scorecard of who had gotten a better mark in the classes we took together. For me, it was partly an economic convenience. If we took the same classes, I could borrow his books and spend my parents’ money on shoes. Later, we would compete over salaries, even though we loathed our jobs.
I assumed in my vanity that his absence that night meant it had been too painful for him to realize I had finally received professional validation for my writing skills. It was an explanation I clung to because I would have no other way of knowing why he acted as he did.
You see, Morgan dumped me that night.
He never called me back, not that night, not a week later, not ever.
I called his apartment repeatedly for weeks and left tearful, angry messages. But nothing happened. Finally I gave up.
His betrayal felt like being blindsided by a cab—I was hurt, dazed, vulnerable, weightless. I didn’t realize until then how much Morgan grounded me, how much having him in my corner meant that I could face the world confidently. Morgan’s love was like armor—he told me repeatedly that he thought I was beautiful, and more fabulous than Madonna (oh c’mon! I would say, thrilled to my bones).
More than anything, I didn’t want to be alone in the world.
But most of all, I was furious. In a rage one evening, I went through all my photo albums and tore up all the pictures of the two of us, taking out my anger on the Polaroids. How could he do this? How could he throw away eight years of friendship? Hadn’t we always said “I love you” to each other in cabs after parties? Didn’t that mean anything?
I was stunned. It was as if Morgan had died. I had just started dating my now-husband at the time, and all of a sudden, Mike had to be everything to me, just as we were getting to know each other. But my husband was a practical man; he admitted that he was intimidated by Morgan’s hold on me and relieved that he was no longer a factor. Mike knew Morgan was the first man I had ever loved, and was worried that this meant I could never love him because he was so different from Morgan. (For the record, my husband is sophisticated, charming, erudite, and has good hair, but is from Ohio, not Australia, and so secure in his heterosexuality that he is not at all threatened by our large coterie of gay friends.) He was threatened by Morgan as a romantic rival for my affections, not because Morgan was gay.
From our mutual friends—a gang of gay men who took my side after the “divorce”—I learned that Morgan was explaining his actions by painting me as a psycho-bitch-controlling-harridan. That he had felt trapped in our friendship and felt like he couldn’t get his life on track if I was always around, trying to one-up him. At the time, I was still so angry that I didn’t process any of this information in any rational way. I just saw it as name-calling and did my fair share of splattering mud on his reputation. Morgan, calling me “controlling”? When he was so jealous of every new friend or boyfriend of mine that he came up with nasty nicknames for all of them?
In the end, I won custody of the friends. Okay, so maybe they didn’t have much of a choice, since Morgan dumped them a few months after dumping me. I suppose he didn’t quite feel comfortable sharing, since our friends were determined to remain neutral for as long as possible. But I like to think that he saw the writing on the wall, figured out which way popular opinion was beginning to sway, and ceded them to me. To the fag hag go the gays.
About six years after he dumped me, I bumped into Morgan at New York Fashion Week. I was a full-time journalist by then, and he had landed at job in production at MTV. I went up to him with no hesitation. “Morgan!” I said, my voice breaking. The emotions that washed over me were complicated and strong. Joy. Relief. Pain. It was so good to see him again.
“We need to get a drink,” he said, in his cool, ironic tone. But his eyes were twinkling.
The two of us jumped into another cab and repaired to the nearest hotel bar, the Algonquin, which seemed appropriate since we had always idolized the Round Table wits. Dorothy Parker’s and Robert Benchley’s ghosts hung over us as we hashed out the remains of our friendship.
It was so easy to go back to the way we were—as if the six years of no contact had all but disappeared, we joked and laughed and drank vodka cocktails and caught up with each other’s lives. He had actually met Madonna! (Through work. The bastard. And the one thought he’d had was, I wish I could tell Mel.) I told him about covering Fashion Week and of now being privy to all those red-carpet, velvet-rope events we had always dreamed of attending, while he regaled me with stories about music industry mayhem—all the rock stars he’d had to fish out of limousines and babysit backstage at TRL.
Finally I asked him the question that had been lingering in my mind for six years: “Why?”
“Couldn’t you guess?” he asked.
The article?
The article was an excuse. Yes, it had been hard for him to see me finally published. But it was more than that. It was that I had finally landed a good boyfriend in Mike. “You said he was your best friend, after two months!” Morgan said. “So where did that leave me?”
I’d said that? And suddenly I remembered. Morgan and I were having our usual Saturday brunch (Mike was home in Ohio visiting family over Thanksgiving) when I nonchalantly told Morgan I thought of Mike as my best friend, and that I was sorry, but I couldn’t go see The People vs. Larry Flynt with him because Mike had asked me to wait and see it with him when he got back. Morgan had given me an odd, angry look. We always saw movies together—at least, before I met Mike. And what I’d said was true. I did consider Mike my best friend. Even then, I knew he was the real partner I had been waiting for in life. But what I’d said to Morgan had been deliberately unkind, although I had tried to pass it off as a casual comment at the time.
Morgan took a sip of his cosmopolitan and handed me a Camel Light, just as before, and told me he had left for my own good, since if he had stayed, he would have tried to poison my new relationship.
“It wouldn’t have lasted, if I had still been in the picture,” he said.
I didn’t think he should give himself that much credit, but I saw his point. It would have been too difficult to balance Mike and Morgan—already Mike had chafed at having to spend so much time in Morgan’s company. Ultimately I would have had to choose between them, and I wasn’t about to lose Mike. So Morgan’s pre-emptive disappearance was an answer to the question he and I had been struggling with for years: who and what were we to each other, now that he had come out of the closet and I wasn’t romantically interested in him anymore.
Could we be friends someday? I still hope so.
When we lived together in a low-income apartment (we didn’t know it was low-income at the time), on Friday nights Morgan and I would come home from our dreadful jobs, turn up the air-conditioning in his room, sit on his unmade bed, and drink homemade, heavily spiked piña coladas. We called it going on vacation because the air-conditioning was such a luxury for two people who had weathered several New York City summers without one, it reminded us of being in a four-star hotel.
We would dance around the room to whatever new house music CD he’d bought off the street, and his large conch-shell ashtray would accumulate a mountain of cigarette butts. Most nights we would hardly even bother to leave the apartment, let alone his room. We were young and frustrated, stalled in love and our careers. But looking back, those nights when we did nothing at all were some of the happiest and most carefree times of my life. Who needed St. Barth’s? We had each other.
In my mind, even today, Morgan will forever be the continental sophisticate who introduced me to a world beyond the college gates, to a city where yellow taxicabs spell promise and glamour and the VIP list always has our names on it.