It’s like all the other junk that comes in the mail, but a bit less . . . self-evident. I can’t just throw it away without opening it, the way I can the credit card offers (I already have three Visa cards, I don’t know why), the cable-TV pitches, the “emergency appeals” from charities and political groups. It might be a packet covered in black cellophane with only my name and address showing. Indications of its origins are sketchy, cryptic. An address in rural Maryland. A PO box in La Jolla. I’m sure it can’t be anything, but not quite sure enough to toss it, not without checking. So I tear it open over the wastebasket and–sure enough, somebody wants my money. It’s what I expected. But the question being asked of me is not “What would you say to three books, three bucks, no obligation?” or “How can you sit by while extremists in Washington threaten our most basic freedoms?”
Or suppose somebody were to search my garbage? Are you telling me that’s not a standard surveillance technique?
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OK, what about this: I am nominated, someday, for some high office. I am to be–I don’t know, drug czar. And my wife will be the czarina. The hearings have gone beautifully up to now, everyone has been shamelessly sucking up to me, my approval is in the bag, when some aging Republican lion of the Senate leans into the microphone and rumbles, “Suh, I have just one question t’ask you befo’ the Ame’can people: Aw you hungry fo’ fresh men?”
What interests me is the extent to which even products that have no obvious connection with sex are pitched to gay consumers as though they were French ticklers. When the only fact that retailers know (or think they know) about you is that you are sexually attracted to men, they simply can’t let go of it. They seem to be afraid that if they wandered off the subject, even for a moment, they’d lose you. So, in a clothing/”accents”/doodad catalog, the “treasured photograph” for which an advertised picture frame is supposed to provide a “perfect setting” is not of Mom, or even of a handsome, romantic-looking guy–it’s a standard neck-down, soft-core beef shot. As though this were the kind of thing gay men kept on their nightstands!
All my precautions turned out to be unnecessary. For one thing, I had underestimated the basic decency of gay men. I wanted to be left alone; they knew how that felt. But there was another, sadder reason. By the time I got there, the gay men who lived in the Castro had other things on their minds. There were only two that I had any routine contact with: the frail young man who managed our building, and an older man who kept a store on the ground floor. They were friendly enough, but both of them seemed far away, preoccupied, most of the time. Far from forcing their attentions on me, they seemed to have some trouble keeping me in focus. This was especially true of the young manager, who often looked as though he had just been crying. Every conversation seemed to cost him an exhausting effort; he was like a sick man who struggled up in bed to be polite. Maybe he was sick. Or maybe he was grieving. I never asked.
