A Difficult Celebration : A Voice From ‘the Generation of the Incomplete’ Contemplates the State of the Gay Nation 25 Years After the Stonewall Uprising That Launched a Movement

As we come up on the 25th anniversary of Stonewall--that is, the June 28-29 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, the watershed moment in the struggle for gay and lesbian freedom--I find my own capacity for celebration more subdued than I would like. Tempered by caution, almost rueful. Not that I ever cease to honor those nights of resistance, the bottles lobbed and the air thick with catcalls as a ragtag band of bar queens made it clear they’d had enough of police harassment.

Nothing would ever be quite the same afterward. The wall-eyed thugs in NYPD blue proved to have an abysmal feel for historic moment. They never seemed to get it that they’d overstepped their bounds on a Holy Day, that the queers were inconsolable that night, having just heard that Judy Garland--the divas’ diva--had taken her last vault over the rainbow.

As for Stonewall 25, I’m afraid it’s entirely personal, my sense of being a wallflower at the festival. Recently, I tottered home from Italy and 10 days’ cavort in the ruins of Rome and immediately took to bed. A bad mix of back spasm and a siege of bronchitis, a cough that kept my sacroiliac in a constant state of white-hot pain. And not much comforted by my doc’s assurances that this nexus of symptoms, at least, wasn’t an AIDS complication.

Oh really? Then the 10 days’ course of antibiotics should’ve been a breeze--except it wasn’t. Didn’t stop the cough and fevers and managed to eat my stomach raw, like the eagle who came every day to devour Prometheus’ liver. No problem, though. They switched me over to seven days of Antibiotic 2, a veritable prince of a drug. Which left me feeling that I was living on Drano, tossing my cookies and racked with cramps and diarrhea.

And that one didn’t work either. So I am 10 days into Antibiotic 3 and finally sounding less consumptive but so battered by the eagles that I am something like a scarecrow, 25 pounds shed in less than a month. Thus prey to a withering lack of perspective and not much inclined to be blowing up balloons and festooning the gay pride parade with pompoms and paper streamers.

No, my bid for inclusion in Stonewall 25 has taken a darker path, as I’ve struggled to put into words some clock-driven reflections about the state of gay and lesbian life and my dwindling body. A romantic presumption, admittedly, having as its source “The Last Tycoon,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel--cut short by a coronary in a house about six blocks from me in the Hollywood Hills. Leaving behind a mere scatter of notes as to what would’ve followed and ending with his famous dictum, all in caps: “ACTION IS CHARACTER.”

But of course, that book was published anyway, filled out with notes and literary guesswork, especially poignant by the very fact of its incompleteness. I was under no illusions that my own maundering-in-progress would qualify for the Scott and Zelda treatment, stamped in gold by Scribner’s.

Yet it wasn’t just inappropriate self-puffery that proved such a personal goad to “work, for the night is coming,” as the Protestant hymnal has it. No, it had more to do with a whole generation of the incomplete to which AIDS had consigned me--and a legion of my fellow queer novelists from Robert Ferro and Bo Huston to Allen Barnett, the last of whom had left a single volume of brilliantly harrowing stories, “The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories.”

All of them snatched mid-sentence, as it were. My beloved friend Vito Russo, a triple feature in the flesh, who knew every homo nuance in a hundred years of film--from “Sylvia Scarlett” to Brando’s lisp in “Reflections in a Golden Eye.” Or John Preston, who entered Death’s ice shadow even as I started to write this, who triumphed over years of being dismissed as a hack pornographer to become our primo anthologist. Working under the gun, every one of them.

Just like I am, two years now with full-blown AIDS. Leashed to three separate IV drugs and a small mountain of oral medication. It was suggested to me by well-meaning types that I should just keep a diary of AIDS, one man’s eyewitness report from the front lines. But I felt as if I’d been doing nothing but that for years, and I didn’t have the stomach for “World War III, Part V.”

Besides, others had covered that waterfront all along. From Emmanuel Dreuilhe in Paris to George Whitmore in New York, urgent personal witness that stood on the shelves with the history of the plague, Randy Shilts’ definitive “And the Band Played On,” and the work of its various analysts, notably Douglas Crimp and Susan Sontag, as well as Preston’s own compendium, “Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS.”

What I wanted to do instead in this twilight time of mine was look at all the vectors of my queer life. People and places and politics that had stuck with me, resonant still despite the viral deluge of 12 years of calamity. How did the disease change the way I looked at things? Did anything mean the same anymore?

Not surprisingly, my rabid contempt for official religions--the Orwellian lies and the thought police--has only deepened over time. The entropy inherent in what is still quaintly called the civilized world increases geometrically; utter disintegration looms. For mine is a classic fin de siecle gloom, Henry Adams without the education, convinced the world has just about had it. Which puts me in bed with the real wackos from Waco, the millennial Christian cults and the rapturists. The main difference between me and them being that the end of my civilization is as much their fault as the ozone hole or the plummet toward universal illiteracy or the opening of the hundred-millionth McDonald’s.

My ranting, in other words, is nothing new. What takes me more than slightly aback is discovering how certain people and incidents and feelings have only grown more precious over time. The stinging eloquence of my fellow Promethean, Larry Kramer, who taught me more than anybody not to go down without making noise. The undaunted altruism of Elie Wiesel and his hammering cry, “Remember”; of Audrey Hepburn’s work for UNICEF at the bottom of the world. (For my heroes aren’t all gay; not plaster saints, but the real thing.) Or the ’88 march on Washington, when we occupied the Food and Drug Administration like so many urban guerrillas, and the vast ’93 march that followed. A whole people massed for freedom, in all our ringing diversity.

Things that have mattered more and changed me more than I’ve ever quite acknowledged. Sources of affirmation and hope that reflect, as in a mirror, the self I want to be. Project 10, Virginia Uribe’s program for gay and lesbian teens at Fairfax High. The national outpouring of support from PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Justice Harry Blackmun’s soul-stirring dissent in the 1986 Georgia sodomy case, Bowers vs. Hardwick, in which he establishes once and for all that every American is equal.

NOTHING STANDS STILL. I WOULD HAVE TO ISSUE A DAILY bulletin to keep up with the burgeoning scandal of the pedophile priests, even as the anti-gay Pope has tried to shift the blame to the anarchy of permissiveness. Society’s to blame. Or, as one of the church apologists has observed, we end up with the priests we deserve. It’s our own damned fault. How’s that for spin control? Mark Twain would’ve loved the gobbledygook in all of this: Call it the spiritual equivalent of the Twinkie defense.

Fortuitously, by way of counterforce, there have been certain heartening developments. An Episcopal bishop from Boston who came for tea last winter surprised himself, I think, when he gave serious thought to my lover Winston’s challenge that he come out to the full House of Bishops. Advice he ended up taking, in his own way, of course, sending an epistle to his colleagues just before the general meeting. In part, the bishop wrote, “I have promised myself that I will not remain silent, invisible, unknown. After all is said and done, the choice for me is not whether or not I am a gay man, but whether or not I am honest about who I am with myself and others. It is a choice to take down the wall of silence I have built around an important and vital part of my life, to end the separation and isolation I have imposed on myself all these years.”

Action is character , in other words. Thus did Otis Charles become the first bishop of any mainline denomination to disclose publicly the truth of his sexual orientation. An important milestone in gay and lesbian history, and a ringing rebuke to the status quo of invisibility. The reception to his coming out can be imagined. At a recent House of Bishops meeting in Panama, several bishops embraced him for his fierce integrity while others averted their faces in shame.

Perhaps his coming out doesn’t seem like much in a culture that’s foaming with the pus of hate, where everybody’s intolerant of everybody else, where so-called men of God crucify all who are different. Where Bill Clinton, this Wal-Mart Lothario, this Bill-who-will-say-anything-to-anyone, sold my people down the river. Offering us up as a bargaining chip to that whining homophobe, Sam Nunn. Our President, we were given to understand, yet he doesn’t miss a beat fawning after the religious right.

In a cozy chat with The People in the Rose Garden, a troubled preacher expressed concern to Clinton about the military debate on fags; the mere idea of queers in uniform went against his values. And the Big Mac President allowed as how, no matter what the policy turned out to be, it mustn’t be perceived as “condoning a lifestyle.” “Lifestyle”: the Christian Reich’s equivalent of calling us kikes and niggers.

Then, after his vacation in August, the President graced us with a report on his summer reading, in which he earnestly worried that there was too much backlash against the religious view of life. Of the constitutional separation of church and state, he wistfully hoped there was room for a door in the wall. Thus the pious could bring a little hope and moral certainty to the bloody mess of politics.

Well, there isn’t room in my constitution, not for so much as a rat hole in that wall. And Sunday-school Bill, who sped to Denver to meet the hate-filled Pope--Denver, symbol of all our lost ground as gay and lesbian citizens--turns out to be just another hypocrite Baptist yahoo.

Still, for all of that, the state of the gay and lesbian union is stronger than ever. There are Metropolitan Community churches in cities all over the country where God is no longer a bigot. The Vatican does everything it can to shun the members of Dignity, the gay and lesbian Catholic group, barring them from church premises and the sacraments, and yet the numbers of the gay and lesbian faithful continue to grow and grow. The gay men’s choruses sing us our anthems. The lesbian sexual-and-substance-abuse recovery movement makes its presence felt from Maine to Hawaii, its members surviving the suicidal loneliness of being shunned by “decent” people.

And “family values”? Please, we’ve got them in spades. In the past two decades, we have forged a force whose dedication to multiculturalism is paramount. Adoptions by gay and lesbian parents continue to soar despite the din of intolerance. Winston and I are proud to know sisters who’ve conceived in vitro and by turkey baster, and they are the advance guard of a whole new morning, a whole new definition of family.

We have our own version of family values up here on King’s Road. Winston and I and Puck and Buddy, a boxer and a Labrador-ridgeback. Two unfixed males who were at each other’s throats at first, unused to sharing territory, and now they sleep flank to flank and otherwise run each other ragged with play. We call ourselves “the four dogs” and keep our precarious balance, making what stand we can against the inexorable predations of the virus. Winston has buried one lover, and I have buried two. Grotesque beyond all measure, of course, but proof that the capacity for love is stronger even than grief.

But don’t be fooled by so much domestic tranquillity. My rage at my lost country is undiminished. Yet I choose my shouting matches carefully these days, husbanding my energy and adrenaline for the war going on inside me. Meanwhile, the dying continues unabated. Michael Callen, our troubadour chanteur , stolen only months ago, mid-song as it were. And in a recent New York Times, an obit for my friend Dan Bailey, one of the founding fathers of New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, sainted teacher of the disabled, the gentlest man imaginable. And there is no one I can call for details because all of our mutual acquaintances are dead.

Or as Victor, my last best friend, is wont to observe: “They don’t understand. I don’t just want a cure. I want a cure and all my friends back.”

Indeed. And what are two more lost from the magic circle of life after Stonewall? Think of it as two more rocks flung at the vast glass house of the world’s complacency, falling short as usual. But then the numbers of the disappeared are relative at best, buried in a thicket of lies they call statistics.

Or, as the poet Randall Jarrell put it succinctly, counting the bodies of another war:

We died on the wrong page of the almanac. . . . When we died, they said, “Our casualties were low.”

AS FOR MY OWN LOSSES, THE PILE OF BODIES IS HARDLY COUNTABLE ANYMORE except in the heart--because the dead outnumber the living now. Personally, that is.

And personal is my watchword now for whatever I can manage to leave behind, even if it’s only fragments and a couple of lines in banner caps. Just after the march on Washington, a year ago now, I had a call from Tina Brown, esteemed editor of the New Yorker, asking if I would write a piece on the week’s events. I told her it was the very thing I was planning to do next but demurred because I was probably looking at 50 pages and two months’ work. Not news enough by then--not hot enough--for her purposes, I imagined.

She quickly countered that time and length were not a problem. I should send it along once it was finished to my satisfaction. She assured me she was a great admirer of my work.

Flush from so much flattery, I nevertheless replied with a poke of irony. Maybe she hadn’t heard, I told her, but her staff had already rejected two of my twilight essays.

“Who did that?” she retorted, a trifle defensive, clearly having been left out of the loop. “And why?”

“They said my work was too personal.” Oh, she didn’t like that at all, but then I hadn’t the least idea who the under-editors were who’d sent the material back to my agent. “It’s all right, really,” I assured her. “You have to understand that I spent 20 years being turned down because my work was considered ‘too gay.’ Which I came to regard as a compliment and proof I was on the right track.”

Now, due to the geometric growth of the literature of my people--the honors showered on Dorothy Allison and the “crossover” success of Rita Mae Brown--I had presumably outlived any lingering curse at being so dismissed. Except now I’d become “too personal,” which I couldn’t help but feel was even better than a compliment. For I grew up in a culture in which the personal was verboten , especially in polite company--a company in which I’ve long since sold my stock. In the end, I didn’t send the piece to Ms. Brown. So what felt like a potential rejection slip was as much a cause for celebration.

But in fact the real dismissal has come from much closer to home. It’s probably no surprise, but the gay and lesbian nation has lately spun off a particularly nasty subspecies of Neo-Con dissent. A sourpuss brand of critic who rejects the very notion of “gay.” Their homosexuality, they say, is the least of their defining characteristics, rather like having brown eyes instead of blue.

Thus they disdain gay pride and its carnival exuberance and find our activist politics rude and out of bounds, especially the unseemly spread of the gay “subculture.” For God’s sake, they shrill, can’t we be more discreet? No wonder so many decent people hate us.

These are the views of conservative men, who are the first to admit they cannot speak for lesbians, since they don’t know any. Of course they imply that AIDS is all our own subcultural fault, just deserts for our libertine ways. But which of us is the stereotype here? These meek and proper clerks and choirboys, assimilationist at all costs? “Don’t ask, don’t tell” so deeply ingrained, they can sport it as a tattoo when the camps are ready.

These men have no sense whatsoever of the legacy of Stonewall--of the multifaceted community we have forged like pioneers or the systems we have put in place to care for our own, or the common vow we have made to stop the silence. They’re welcome to their free speech, of course, and welcome to rub shoulders with the pundits and think-tankers of the right, as well as the church supper crowd.

Time alone will tell whether resistance or collaboration is more in our best interests as a people. For the present, by all means let them be not gay, not gender-variant, not ghettoized, with nary a sequin to betray them. Shunning all parades and commemorations of struggle. Prim and smug and Puritan by choice, far removed from any culture that smacks of sub.

But I give them fair warning that I, for one, am taking it all personally--too personally, in fact. Sitting out the silver anniversary fireworks though I am, tied to the blood and bone of this alien ground of my body, but standing sentry anyway at the borders of our dream of freedom. And keeping a file of mealiness, of pandering to creeps, of all accommodation with the enemy.

Meanwhile, let the Stonewall celebrants save me a piece of cake from the party, a rainbow flag and a rousing chorus of “We shall overcome.” Understand that I am far too busy tracking the enemy within. But I’m with you, brother and sister, and will be always, even after I’m carried from the battle and planted on the final hill. You must never forget: There’s no turning us back now. No more closets and no more loveless years in solitary. From now on, we have each other. Freedom is on our side.

And there is no America without us.