Sometimes I find myself behaving like an arrogant intellectual, both of
which I truly hope I am not. They represent attitudes which are particularly
distasteful to me. I have known people who were so deeply buried in their
"attitudes" that they missed one of the greatest joys of being alive: moving
toward the full realization of individual selfhood unobstructed by the
effort to speak and think and be like everybody else.
I once lived with a male lover in Paris. He was my superior both in
intellect and in educational credentials, but I had a glamorous job
which gave me entree to salons of political and social power which were
closed even to a man of his caliber. His professorship at the Sorbonne
cast him among radicals of every description whose reckless individualism
was infinitely more interesting to me than the stiff-necked catering to
political and social values which hallmarked the politicos and fawning
hostesses of the ruling class.
I remember a night when he and I sat at the renowned Cafe de Flor, an
establishment made famous in the 1920s U.S.A. by American literary
expatriates like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
With us were half a dozen of his colleagues and students engaged in a din
of lively conversation that rivaled the cacophony of Parisian traffic whizzing
recklessly through the Place St. Germain-des-Pres.
Our radical friends raved on about the bourgeois "Establishment" that
promulgated the values of "sameness" and "tradition," resisting every step
toward reform in attitudes that promoted the ideals of individual choice,
of thinking for oneself, of being oneself without harm to others. We were
agreed that democratic societies in general, throughout the world, strove
to blend the masses into subservient forces to serve religious and social
notions that in turn served the comfort and progress of only a few, and
that the Communist "experiment," which at that time enslaved vast numbers
of humanity in other, even more insidious ways, was the Janus face of the
same coin.
On that night, after a heated controversy over who should be exercising
control over whom, a student from Holland leapt up to stand on his chair
and yell: "Fuck them all! I will be who I am whether they like it or not!"
He may have been a radical intellectual, but his thinking was not entrenched
in the arrogance of self-esteem. He would become an active participant
in groups which later helped liberalize laws in the Netherlands that made
it the gloriously free country it is today. He became what he was meant
to be: an individual with individual ideas that ministered to and benefited
the world around him.
It was on that night when I increased the struggle within myself to
become whoever that real man was whom I KNEW was lurking unsung within
the depths of me. I began by erasing attitudes I sometimes had to dig deep
into my psyche to find. I often uncovered "a can of worms" I had not known
were shaping my thoughts on a subconscious level. It wasn't easy, and all
of him is not out here yet, but he keeps trying. Maybe someday he will
make it. I would like to meet this guy, the real me.
Every homosexual has the same task to work out. Nearly every element
of every society is his or her oppressor and must be crawled out from under
if he or she is ever to stand up and be counted among men and women who
know themselves and are able to communicate that self-knowledge in beneficial
ways. This does not mean leaping out of the closet and whirling in a joyful
dance that celebrates being free. We come out when we are ready, when our
cue is heard on stage, when coming out is what must be done to get on with
the play, and the audience, or the people who live in our own little world,
can appreciate and understand what we are doing because they have been
educated to the point that they realize it is the only, and the right,
and the desirable, thing to do.
A young man looking at life sees it from the perspective of someone
for whom time has relatively little meaning. Decades stretch before him
in which to establish himself in a career or a relationship or a financial
position. Daily routines may be pressing, but in the long run, that is
just what life is: a long run ahead to attain whatever goals he may have
in mind. However, an older man in the age range of a Silverfox, i.e. 60
and beyond, is faced with a vastly shorter run, less toward goals which
he may have abandoned long since than smack into the brick wall of the
hard reality of the time he has left. The younger man should be aware of
this difference in perspectives when he agrees to become the partner of
a Silverfox, remembering that their time together embodies not only all
the older man's yesterdays, but his own tomorrows as well, leaving them
with but one magic time to share: the now of each new day.
