Two Villains and a Goddess

All right, I’ll give you Wikipedia’s assessment of Jessye Norman:

Jessye Mae Norman (born September 15, 1945) is an American Grammy award-winning contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is a successful performer of classical music.

Yeah? Here’s mine:

The lady is a goddess.

A goddess who, in my case, manifested herself through the radio one day, when I was perhaps 21 and she was in her mid-thirties. She had been living in London and, in that period of her life, she was not singing opera. In fact, between 1975 to 1980 she didn’t sing opera. Born in 1945, she would have been 30 at the beginning of this—I’m sure—self-imposed exile. Thus, these were her prime years.

Norman is a singer who had the luck to have a strong education, as well as a strong will. After going to the Marian Anderson Competition in Philadelphia at age 16, she met her future teacher, Carolyn Grant, at Howard University. Grant was so impressed that she took Norman to the dean, who arranged for a full tuition scholarship.

“I know, it sounds like a fairy tale,” Norman says in one part of the interview below. But the point is that it’s not. Because consider this fact, again drawn from Wikipedia:

Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia, to Silas Norman, an insurance salesman, and Janie King-Norman, a schoolteacher.

An insurance salesman and a teacher? What that tells me is that the family wasn’t poor, but that it wasn’t rolling in riches, either. And with five children in the house, there probably wasn’t much money to spare. At one point, Norman tells the story of being given her own private radio—no sharing with her brothers!—so that she could listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Oh, and she had to clean her room, so on days when it was Wagner, wow, the room really got clean!

What else did she have? She had teachers in her racially segregated school who knew that she was listening to opera, and who let her talk on Monday mornings for 15 minutes about what she had heard. She remembers the names of those teachers, who must have been extraordinary, and also remembers the principal of the high school. That guy decided that the whole school should donate their lunch money to Norman for one day, so she’d have something to spend on her trip to Philadelphia. So the kids donated the money, and the Board of Education gave lunch free that day.

Why do it? Well, if you’ve chipped in your 75 cents that day, you own a piece of Jessye Norman—or at least a part of her trip. And it was on that trip that her teacher, who was accompanying her (in both senses, since she was at the piano for the competition) decided to see if there was anyone at Howard who might her Norman sing.

To say that Norman had a glittering career is somewhat like saying that Warren Buffet is getting by, financially. True, I don’t think she ever conquered the Opera House in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin (every town, no matter how small, had one…) but everywhere else? She came, she conquered.

And she’s a wonderful example of someone who is intelligent and articulate: two increasingly receding qualities. And why are they receding? Because, more and more, we’re slashing arts education.

I hate to say this…no wait, that’s the problem: we’re always apologizing, feeling bad for suggesting that the chorus and the band are just as important as the football team. Anybody out there seen the TV series Glee? Then you’ll know what neck is first put under the guillotine, when it’s time to start cutting.

I worked in corporate America—improbable, I know, but there it is. And I can tell you: most musicians can think circles around businessmen. Why? Because spending hours at a keyboard gives you discipline, for one thing. But there’s something else: it’s not just me saying that musicians have an edge. Google “cognitive effects music” and you get this, from Boston College and Harvard Medical School:

ABSTRACT: Research has revealed structural and functional differences in the brains of adult instrumental musicians compared to those of matched non- musician controls, with intensity/duration of instrumental training and practice being important predictors of these differences.

I told you—it was not a fairy tale, the glittering life that Norman has lead. It’s a tale of a community who had no idea that there wasn’t money for the band or the chorus, of teachers that gave up their time and money to take a 16-year old to Philadelphia, to a principal who knows that there’s a talent in his or her school, and knows that he has to get the school behind her.

And how many lives did Norman change or affect? What was the return on the investment that all those people poured into her, those people poorer, mostly, than we are, but who could still afford to give what we cannot?

Well, in my life, Norman started what would be a lifelong love of the human voice. I was in my twenties, and I didn’t—like many instrumentalists—like singers. They were artificial, I thought—all high C’s, no musicianship.

What do I listen to, now? Almost all vocal or choral music—I can’t remember the last time I heard a cello concerto. And here it has to be said, I have learned much more from the singers I have heard than the cello teachers I have paid. And when I hear most instrumentalists play, I can almost always tell who has listened to singers, and who has not. Singers, you see, have this problem or gift—they have to breathe. Cellists don’t, but should.

But that’s hardly the most important thing. I discovered a world of music that did more than give me pleasure. I lost my mother, my job, and my mind in a two-year period a couple of years ago. And what music accompanied me, as I lived through those days? Schubert’s great song cycle: Die Winterreise.

I said it accompanied me, but it was more than that. In some ways, the work was informing my journey, and I was spiraling down, down, down—being pulled by that music, but ultimately being saved by it as well. I took the winter’s journey, as some of us must, and got through the village and met the hurdy-gurdy man and started off. Schubert both defined and clarified that process.

I got to Jessye Norman two nights ago, after the opera, since I had seen the encore performance of the Met’s performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. The performance was a four-hour, bottomless bottle of champagne, so I came home and wondered: could I buy a DVD of the opera, in order to play it for Ilia, my mother-in-law who’s caring for an ailing husband, and who often cannot get away? So I checked the Met’s gift shop, online, and yes, there it was. And what else was there? Jessye Norman’s autobiography, which came out days ago.

And so I spent the morning looking at the clip below, and doing a bit of compare and contrast—remember that from high school? Because I had been seeing on Thursday—before the opera—a documentary about the Koch brothers, those guys who have found the way to buy the government, and who are also finding ways to buy the educational system. It’s breathtaking, in fact, the scope of their ambition.

Both clips are long—who but a blogger has the time to listen? So I’ll paraphrase—with considerably less eloquence than Norman’s unscripted remarks—what Norman says about the American dream. She said—and I have tears in my eyes as I write this—that it’s the knowledge and acknowledgment that government has the obligation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to live and, especially, to thrive. And don’t trot out that dusty line about the bootstraps, because you know what? Some people don’t have boots.

Norman was one of those people—a black girl in the Jim Crow South whose parents were struggling. Her parents, could they afford to go to the opera, much less sip champagne afterwards? Or put it this way—could they afford to go hear their child sing? I don’t know: but my strong feeling is no.

I wish that the people who are decimating public education and cutting off aid programs and perpetrating this myth of the undeserving poor would get it: it’s terrible fiscal policy. Nobody gave Norman the career she had—she worked and struggled and took risks and succeeded, gloriously.

But she also had resources that—increasingly—people want to take away. She didn’t want and never needed a “handout.”

She needed a foundation.

What kid doesn’t?

Honey, Pass the Kleenex

Well, I heard the statement that 90% of people surveyed had been moved to tears by a piece of music, but only 5% or so reported having wept at the sight of a painting or cathedral. For poetry, interestingly, it appears to go up to about 50 or 60%. So then I wondered—what about me? Have I ever wept on seeing a painting?

I’d like to say yes, but then, what would I say when asked, “what painting?” So it’s better to tell the truth, even if it makes me a Philistine. In my defense, however, I can say that some places have a history and a grandeur that almost spurs the lachrymal glands into action. There’s St. John the Divine in New York City, and there—for entirely different reasons, was the battlefield of Gettysburg. And a month or two ago, I felt something akin to awe by just being in Carnegie Hall.

But then I stopped to wonder—have I truly been moved to tears by a piece of music? And if so, was it really the music, or was it the circumstances around myself at the time, or the memory of particularly emotional moments with which I had associated the music?

Because, let’s face it: there are times of great pain and loss—deaths, divorces, job loss—when you are crying at anything. When my father died, just looking at the garlic press hanging next to the little wire that he used to clean it (it was perhaps his least imaginative invention, but who else keeps a little wire next to their garlic press? Everybody else just scrubs harder….) was enough to trigger wails. And if I had taken the press and the wire to my brother? We would have been wailing in each other’s arms.

The problem? There’s nothing intrinsically sad about a garlic press.

Then there’s music that somehow has gotten associated, either in your or in everyone’s mind, with a particular event. For a lot of people, Barber’s Adagio for Strings is 9 / 11, punto. And that, of course, makes sense, because the music exactly defines the wrenching sorrow of the event. That’s—news flash, here—why they chose it.

All right, but what about the music that is genuinely sad, gut-wrenchingly sad, music that makes you reach for the razor blades? Has anyone ever compiled a list? Surely the Internet could fly in some pieces, since at the moment I can only think of five or six that I would absolutely include.

Fortunately, the Internet came through, and with some surprising choices. Oh, and I must say at the outset that two of the three lists I consulted had ten selections, the other one had only six.

OK—time to guess: what was the piece—and the only piece—that made all three lists?

“Dido’s Lament,” from the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell.

In fact, it made my list as well, among other reasons because I cannot get through the piece, even if I’m manic, without sobbing.

Curiously, Dido is on all three lists, but not one piece of music is on any two lists, which is to say that there are no duplicates. And here, starting more or less from earliest to latest, is what there is:

Miserere, by Allegri—hmmm, absolutely beautiful, to be sure, but sad? Sad enough to move me to tears? In this period, I can think of wrenching music—an Amen, for example, from the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin by Monteverdi, or some of the William Byrd sacred music.

Bach, predictably, makes the lists, but different pieces. “Come, Sweet Death” is on one site—but the piece is for organ, and guess what? I neither like nor dislike organ music, it just doesn’t get in. So I skipped it, after a minute of listening. Then there was “Cum sancto spiritu” from the B Minor Mass, which posed an interesting question: are we to include music that is so joyful that it makes you weep? That’s what the site says, and I’m willing to buy in. But following that argument, I’d vote for “Et in terra pax,” also from the B Minor.

The rest were, if I may say so, outliers. OK—there was Albinoni’s Adagio, which is pretty sad. There was Mozart’s Requiem, as it was depicted in the movie Amadeus. Then, there was Adagio for Strings.

The rest was all over the map, from the lento movement of Shostakovich Fifth, to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Oh, and speaking of Tchaikovsky, his violin concerto—or at least the second movement—lands on another list. An interesting pick was Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for strings; confession—I didn’t know it, I tried three minutes of it, and decided that not knowing was the preferred option.

Orchestrally, what’s not there? What piece would you expect that is strangely out behind the building, taking a cigarette break? Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony.—I just started to listen to it, in order to make sure it was what I thought it was, and yes, there are tears on the keyboard.

And what about opera, surely good for a cry or two? Well, La bohème makes it on two of the lists, but on one it’s the first aria of Rudolfo, and on the other list it’s the last aria of Mimi. On another list, Verdi’s V’ho Ingannato from Rigoletto appears; Wagner turns up with the funeral music from Siegfried on the third list.

Chamber music? Well, there’s the second movement of the string quintet of Schubert, which yes, definitely would be on my list. Besides that, there surprisingly little chamber music.

There were pieces I didn’t know—most particularly “Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,” from an astonishing poem by Neruda. Here, it’s sung by the composer’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died less than eight months after the recording.

Lastly, there was a song by George Butterworth based on the text of A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad.”  The song did nothing for me, but it did lead me to Vaughan Williams’s treatment of an old folksong, “Whither Must I Wander” And if you are dry-eyed at the end of it?

Check for a pulse!!

(P.S.—here are the links:

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/10-classical-music-tear-jerkers/

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/07/10-best-classical-tear-jerkers-fiona-maddocks

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2010/09/27/130157375/the-saddest-music-in-the-world-7-tunes-to-make-you-tear-up  )

When Perfection is not Enough

It’s unfair, damned unfair, and I won’t have it.

Everybody knows that I’m totally hooked on Joyce DiDonato, but then again, who isn’t? It could be that such simplicity is the highest art, but she gives you the impression that, yes, she really is your long-lost sister. And so she’s not easy to like: she’s impossible not to like.

But Renée Fleming?

She’s certainly at the top of her game as well; in fact, both women are. Fleming is a lyric soprano about whom one writer—in a blog called RenéeFlemingAdmirers.net, and the fact that there is such a thing speaks libraries, not volumes—said….

The New York Times writes about her as The Beautiful Voice. In France she is presented as La Cantatrice Rayonnante, when in England she is bearing the name Double Creame. Die German leading newspaper has given her the tittle Schaumgeborene Sopran-Venus. To aloud (sic, very sic) to address to her as Celeste Renée was my proposition. She confirmed it favoring me with her incredible, charming smile. 

OK—be fair: I have the sense that English may not be the writer’s first language, or cradle tongue, as we say down here in Puerto Rico. The point is that Fleming has a gorgeous voice.

Ooops, sorry, but it’s not.

I read somewhere that Jascha Heifetz, when people told him, “oh, your violin sounds so beautiful,” would put his ear to the instrument and say, “funny, I don’t hear anything….” So yes, it’s true that Fleming’s voice is beautiful, gorgeous, polished, and all the other adjectives writers like to heap up. But—surprise—there are lots and lots of gorgeous voices out: it’s not that rare a thing. What is rare is the incredible amount of discipline, work, thought, stamina, and luck that went into getting that gorgeous voice to do what Fleming can do with it.

Is there anything more difficult than singing opera? Because really, there’s the sheer athletics; one tight muscle will very likely produce a tense sound. Then there’s the attention to text, and how many actors, by the way, have to master German, French, Italian, English, and—increasingly—Russian and Czech? And speaking of actors, it’s no longer enough to haul yourself onstage, open your mouth and blow everybody away. Remember Joan Sutherland, whom the opera buffs at La Fenice dubbed La Stupenda? Well, stupendous she was, but in her early days, she had one gesture; a gesture her drama coach called “generally pained expression,” or some such thing. (Every time he saw it, he would shout “GPE, Joan,” and she struggled to change it.) And as if all this weren’t enough, you are called upon—if you’re crazy enough to do it—to spend up to six hours, in the case of Wagner, screeching over 100 musicians who have the advantage—besides numbers—of sitting between you and the audience. Thanks, guys!

Oh, and have I mentioned a final detail? Yes, generally speaking, the polite British and the friendly Americans will look the other way—with perhaps a generally pained expression—as you have your off night. Because look, part of the work you’ve put in is to assure that, by and large, you have a consistent product, one you can roll out even after fighting with your husband on the phone for two hours right before the performance. But that may mean that you’re delivering “good,” but not “great.” But the Italians?

Good, you see, is not good enough in Milan. And there is a group called the loggionisti, who are about as fierce—and certainly as loud—as alley cats in heat. And here’s what happened to Fleming when she sang there:

Quite what Fleming's offence was is unclear, but certainly her opening night as Lucrezia was not the luckiest of performances. The tenor had dropped out and been replaced at the last minute. Then the conductor fainted with a thud at the end of Fleming's first aria. Finally, at the end of her final cadenza, which deviated somewhat from La Scala convention, the gods erupted and Fleming was booed to the goldfretted rafters. It lasted for the whole of her closing scene and afterwards, she wrote, "I began to shake and I shook for days."

Right—you want nice? Stay in Minnesota….

Fleming has, you see, stage fright, and what happened after that experience very nearly derailed her career. Because she knew: if she “took some time off,” she would never go back on a stage. So she had her voice coach walk her to the stage and figuratively push her off the branch and onto the stage. And then, while onstage, she relaxed and could perform. It was the days and hours before the performance during which the anxiety rose to near panic.

It’s surprising, the number of performers who are afflicted, and who nonetheless go on to make great careers, in spite of it. And though it got better for Fleming, it never entirely went away: she was petrified about having to sign the national anthem at the Super Bowl. And why not? She fluffs one line—she would wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “oh shit, who manned the ramparts?—and that will be in the first sentence of her obituary:

Renée Fleming, the brilliant lyric soprano whose career was marred by an unfortunate lapse of memory while singing the Stars and Stripes…..

Oh, and just to increase the pressure, she was singing to football fans, for God’s sake, who are almost worse than the loggionisti. I mean, at least those guys love opera….

There are things you can do to reduce stage fright. First, of course, you can be sure you’re really prepared, that you’ve studied the score, that you’ve put in the work. Then—especially in the case of singers—you got to be sure you’re in physically good shape: hydrated, rested, warmed up. But a surprising amount of it is mental.

It involves a curious paradox—but it’s not about you. Yes, they’re coming to see Renée Fleming, but Renée Fleming as Rusalka. And if you’re singing a song recital? Well, it’s the music, or it’s the character in the song. But it’s not you.

Mostly, it’s the inner critic that somehow, in some way, has to be, not banished, but gently told to back off. Because what will happen if the critic is screaming, “DON’T GET TIGHT! DON’T TENSE THOSE NECK MUSCLES!”

Guess what—your neck is probably tight right now….

And paradoxically, even positive comments derail you, because it’s like what the Buddhists, trying to attain pure consciousness, call the “I’m doing great, wasn’t I!” moment. Which is all to say that it’s not just tennis that has an inner game; opera has a huge one as well.

And sadly, Fleming has paid twice, if not three times. First, there’s all that work she put it in to get that voice where she—and all of us—want it. Then she had to pay again with nearly immobilizing stage fright. And the third slug to the emotional solar plexus?

“She seems so fake,” said one friend.

“Her smile could give you a suntan,” wrote one reviewer.

Guys? That’s what I meant, a thousand words back there, when I said it wasn’t fair. Because as you can see in the master class below, Fleming is both professionally very helpful and wonderfully kind and supportive. Perhaps she learned what not to do from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who reportedly terrorized her. (If so, Fleming is not alone—seeing her on YouTube was like opening the freezer door).

DiDonato has been blessed with a kind of candor, openness that—on the face of it—Fleming doesn’t have. And yet, in comments and interviews, Fleming is remarkably candid about what her career has cost her; at one point, she muses about how much ego strength a man has to have to be “Mr. Renée Fleming.”

In one of his novels, Robertson Davies remarks that the person one has struggled to become is much more the “real” person that one started out as. Why can’t we accept that this extraordinary singer has polished her persona as much as her voice?

Standing with Dr. Proudie

Living in Puerto Rico, it didn’t seem surprising that I knew someone who knew Andrew Solomon, since everybody on the island knows everybody else. Still, why should I have run into someone who not only knew Solomon, but had been to his wedding at Althorp, the family home of the Spencers, of which Diana, Princess of Wales, was one?

The guy explained—they were childhood friends, since Solomon’s father had been head of a pharmaceutical here on the island. And so they had remained friends, though Solomon had attended Yale and later Jesus College, Cambridge. Solomon’s story had similarities to my own: we’re both gay, we’re both depressives, he had written a book about the planned death of his mother, and I had written a book about my mother’s life and, especially, death.

More, his book on depression was titled The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression, which was a phrase I had encountered when reading up on acedia. So I had contemplated reading the book, but decided no; it was too recent, you see, my own last bitter bout with the disease.

But I’ve returned, over time, to consider the disease, or the condition, or perhaps just the mindset of depression. And the fact that I can write that depression may be a quality or state of mind indicates how tricky, how elusive, depression can be.

Because Solomon is right—in some ways the world of depression seems like the real world. Really, is there any sense cleaning your house? It’s just going to get dirty again, as will your body, so showering is out, and eating? You’d have to open that refrigerator and get a nose-full of all that rotting food you’ve not had the energy to throw out, and besides, getting out of the chair? Too much work….

Following this logic leads to tumbling down the very slippery slope that ends up—as it did to Solomon—with his lying in bed, unable to get up, and unable to extend his arm for four hours.

As Solomon remarks in the clip below, depressives in some ways see the world more clearly. Most people, for example, overestimate their abilities, and certainly most people underestimate the amount of time and trouble that things will take. And that was one of the problems you had—or at least I had—in the university. Of course I can research and write a fifty-page term paper the day before it’s due! Hey, no problem!

And so the cheery optimism that most people arm themselves with is highly adaptive, but not necessarily real or true. It may be true, as Thoreau said, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but a great many of those men—and women—get through their days by telling themselves that everything is fine, and will get better.

Will it? Not for a depressive, or at least not for a depressive who cannot do the simple, rational thing: pick up the phone and call a therapist. Because paradoxically, the farther you have sunk into the pit of depression, the less likely you will somehow manage to crawl out of it.

And Solomon asks the question: is there anything to be found in that pit? Any diamonds, or even lumps of coal? Isn’t depression linked to creativity?

I don’t think so. Yes, the depression I endured may have lead to more compassion, more understanding of suffering in others. Yes, for philosophic reasons, I have to embrace my depression, since it’s part of me, it’s part of what shaped me.

But when I was severely depressed, creativity was impossible. And even if it had been there, would I have had the patience, the endurance to learn a Bach suite or write a book? Those are more than acts of faith, they’re inherently improbable shots in the dark. And the likelihood that anyone will hear the suite or buy the book? Not high….

Really, the worst part of the depression I suffered was the loss of so much joy in the world. But it was more than that. For decades, I was starting ten feet behind everyone else in whatever race we were running. And the effect of losing so many races meant that I was pulled farther and farther behind everyone else. The feet became yards, the yards miles.

Most people…well, let me copy and paste from Wikipedia’s article on the epidemiology of depression:

People are most likely to suffer their first depressive episode between the ages of 30 and 40, and there is a second, smaller peak of incidence between ages 50 and 60.[8] The risk of major depression is increased with neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis and during the first year after childbirth.

My depression started when I was in my teens, and may have stemmed in part from knowing that I was different, fearing that I was gay, and enduring the isolation that bearing that secret entailed. But more than that, the depression occurred when I was forming—quite literally—my adult self. As such, it became part of the warp and weft of my personality; in those periods when the black dog—Churchill’s metaphor for depression—had trotted off somewhere, I was still depressed. However good I might feel, I knew the dog would be howling and butting his head against the door and sighing, and I would have to rise and let him in again.

I grew up and became a fatalist—the marriage would end, the audition would be botched, sickness and death were right around the corner. And I had no baseline of happiness by which to gauge my depression. It was the only land I knew; reports of other territories I deemed anecdotal.

Had the depression been treated in my teens, what would my life have been? I might have been happier, would I have been the same? Would I have sacrificed some sensitivity, some knowledge of suffering?

If I believe that, aren’t I saying that people who have not suffered depression are less sensitive than we who have, or who do? I’m not sure I’d go there.

Nor am I sure I’d trade the decades of silent suffering for decades of euthymia, the technical name for feeling good. I think I feel as Dr. Proudie did, when his wife died: the good Lord had sent the affliction (to paraphrase Trollope), the Lord had banished the affliction; blessed be the name of the Lord!

Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

The Unmentionable Odour of Death

It was written nearly thirty years ago; it was controversial then, and it’s controversial now.

Or it may be that the author, Larry Kramer, has a peculiar talent for rubbing people the wrong way; in his book Faggots, he criticized the disco-loving, druggy, superficial lifestyle of the seventies and eighties. News flash—it was a period when some of us were having a lot of sex with a lot of people, not all of whom we knew.

So when Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, in 1985, he had already pissed off a substantial portion of the gay community by making a quite unequivocal statement: gay men were going to have to stop having sex.

OK—let’s back up and revisit those days. For a generation now, AIDS has been a chronic and manageable disease for—you listening, here?—those people blessed to live in developed societies and blessed to have health insurance. But it really isn’t possible to imagine the sheer terror and fear that some of us lived with for the first decade of the epidemic.

Consider the times: Stonewall, yes, had happened a decade and a half earlier, in 1969, but having gay sex was illegal in many, many states and cities. In 1998, for example, a Texas sheriff arrested two gay men who were having sex in their bedroom—the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which at long last threw out the sodomy laws in 2003. And in how many states was sodomy still a crime? Ten.

But it was hardly that being gay—or acting on it—was illegal. Being gay was treated as either the darkest sin imaginable, or as the most horrifying consequence possible of bad parenting. It was shame, dishonor, a disgrace. Oh, and did I mention that if your parents ever, ever found out, it would crush them, ruin them, flail them for every minute of their—very likely—now shortened lives?

“You must never tell the parents, it would kill them,” wrote Eric, my eldest brother, when I wrote to tell him I was gay.

It has to be said, coming out is as much an internal as an external process. Which is to say that you have to weed out a number of prejudices, assumptions, habits, ways of thinking. We had come out to everyone, or so we thought, but had we shed all those years of crushing negativity?

The other problem? We were having a lot of sex in a lot of sleazy places—parks, bathrooms, the baths, and of course, the backrooms of bars. And a lot of us didn’t feel too good about it; there was a good deal of shame and guilt left in us, which came stinging back to us those mornings after those nights of drugs and orgies.

To be fair, there were relatively few outlets besides the bars and the baths: they were virtually the only outlets for gay men, besides the gay choruses. And to come out was to put a wall between you and the straight world—yes, you had straight friends, whom you saw and with whom you hung out before…

…you headed out to the bars.

Since it was denied us, we had decided that we didn’t want it: marriage, we argued, was a heterosexist, patriarchal system enforcing submission and subjugation on women (in heterosexual relationships) or on the more compliant party in a gay or lesbian relationship. So unbridled sex was part of being “liberated,” of fighting off the repressive, heterosexual stereotypes that we had decided we were above living.

“Hey, Jorge, when did you move to San Francisco?”

“1989,” says Jorge, taking a break from mopping the floor.

“Wow—right in the worst years of the epidemic,” I say, “so what was it like.”

“Terrible, horrible. You would see deadly ill, pale, gaunt, skeletal figures everywhere. They were everywhere in San Francisco, not hidden away, but everywhere. I remember seeing this handsome guy coming out of his house, and coming down the steps to get on to his motorcycle. And then I realized—he was carrying his partner on his back, so I stopped to help. And the partner was so weak that the healthy one feared that he couldn’t hold on, so he strapped his sick lover to him, and they rode off to the hospital together.”

People were dying agonizing deaths—and very often the people who were dying were cared for, if they were cared for at all, by someone who was also infected. Friends abandoned you; family abandoned you.

Not, of course, in all cases. But a lot of gay men ended up in New York or San Francisco for a very good reason—the climate in those cities being considerably more welcoming than, say, Macon, Georgia. Not a few parents were dealing with the discovery that their son was gay at the same time that they were hearing that he had a death sentence.

“The only treatment was AZT,” said Jorge—and getting that was a struggle: any nurse who had access to the drug in the clinics was besieged with requests to steal it.

Death was everywhere, in medieval proportions; skeletons walked the streets, and had to be carried up steps. The black marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma disfigured faces; it was routine to see the bones of the lower arms under the saggy skin of the victims.

The fear was of backlash. They hated us, the thinking went, they’re terrified of this disease. The Alex Joneses of the day were saying it outright—they (for me, we) should be quarantined, for the sake of everyone, especially the children.

Hysteria time—is it safe to eat with someone who has AIDS? What about going to the beach? What happens if a mosquito bites the guy lying next to me—and he has AIDS—and then the mosquito bites me? What if a kid—often a hemophiliac—starts to bleed, and my kid comes into contact with it?

Since nobody had any idea what was going on, nobody could give answers, and so the health “experts” were issuing vague reassurances that made the situation worse.

And they knew nothing because, guess what? Nobody was funding research, because—and it was hard in the general hysteria of the time not to be paranoid—it was after all a “gay” disease, so who cared? When the Legionnaires got sick in Philadelphia, or wherever it was, how much money did they spend? But a bunch of sick faggots? Huh—they’ll let us die with smiles on their faces!

Yes, for a time, it was very much “us versus them,” and it had to be, if anything was going to change. Reagan was dozing away in the White House, the FDA was perfectly happy with a testing process that took over a decade, the mayor of New York was an unmarried gentleman—Ed Koch—whom everybody thought…well, here’s Gay City News:

He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.

The article, by the way, is titled “Ed Koch: Twelve Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in the Closet.”

And certainly one of the men who never forgave Koch was Larry Kramer, who cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and later Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And Kramer was never one to worry about getting into someone’s face and screaming. Which, in fact, turned out to be the right thing to do, as well as necessary. In the clips below, you see people “dying” on Wall Street, or in the office of the FDA or the New York Commissioner of Health. For all his stridency, for all his arrogance, Kramer had a part to play.

And so in 1985, Kramer came out with his play The Normal Heart, which features a man quite intentionally resembling the author. Which means that for much of the play, it’s an extended rant against, on the one hand, a bureaucracy perfectly content to watch the eradication of a generation of gay men, and those gay men themselves, who won’t stop fucking. And after years of having various people hold the film rights to the play, it’s finally been made into a movie, and will show on May 25 on HBO.

Not everyone is happy, of course. One critic, Charles O’Malley, notes that Kramer’s play is mawkish, sentimentalizing what was a decade long horror scene. And it’s all about upper-class gay men—no women, no people of color. And the message is anti-sexual and self-hating.

O’Malley fears that seeing this film will somehow assuage the liberal hearts of some viewers—that was then, this is now; O’Malley quotes Manohla Dargis: “it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.”

Yes or no? I won’t know until I see the film, since it’s been years since I’ve seen the play. But I have gone to reread September 1, 1939—the W. H. Auden poem from which Kramer took the title, “The Normal Heart.” And came across this fragment, which only hints at how terrible those days really were….

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.