Knocking Off the God Stuff

“You know, I think all this religiosity is seriously affecting your mood, Marc,” said Lady. “Surely Bach must have written something cheerful? Of his two hundred whatever cantatas, they can’t all be entirely gloomy….”

“In fact, he wrote twenty or so secular cantatas,” I told her. “And I just got done listening to two of them. The first is the Wedding Cantata, and the second is the Coffee Cantata.”

“Bach wrote a cantata about coffee?”

“He certainly did, since it was a big issue at the time. Coffee was relatively new in Germany in the 1730’s, and people were still getting their heads around it. It had a buzz, everybody agreed, but was that a good thing? Was it sent from the devil? So some sects of some churches were banning it—I could tell you which, but the Internet at the café took off last night on a bender, and is lying drunk in the gutter somewhere. If you see it, would you tell it to come back? Anyway, coffee was taking Europe by storm, and the coffee houses of the day were filled with people, all arguing the latest political, social, and religious issues of the day. Must have been lively places….”

“So what’s the cantata about?”

“Well, it’s Bach trying to be light-hearted, which is about as painful as seeing Karl Marx do stand-up comedy. Anyway, a father is distraught because his daughter is spending all her time hanging out in the café, guzzling coffee, and he goes through a gamut of threats to get her to stop. No new ribbons, no new dresses, no going out or even looking out the window. The girl always says no, so what does poppa do? He tries the carrot instead of the stick, and says that he’ll run out and get the girl a husband! So the girl goes into a really lovely little aria about how good poppa is; the little minx does, however, put the word out on the street that any suitor will have to sign a marriage contract. And guess what that specifies?”

“That she can drink all the coffee she wants?”

“Right—and not particularly subtle. So it ends up with the father throwing in the towel, since if granny, mamma, and all the rest of womanhood are drinking coffee, well, how are you going to keep your daughter from doing the same?”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I told you, it’s as weak as a wet, sick kitten. But there is some nice music, though.”

“OK—one down. What about the Wedding Cantata?”

“Well, he wrote it about the time that he got married to his second wife, Anna Magdalena. And she was a professional singer, whom he may or may not have heard even before his first wife died. At any rate, it’s for solo soprano, and it’s in turn rapturous and then joyful. No wonder everybody records it….”

“So is that what you’ll play for your wedding?”

“Ugh, let’s not talk about that—I’m getting some serious cold feet about getting married.”

“Why? You’ve been with Raf for what, thirty years?”

“Think it’s 32, but who knows? But anyway, that’s not the problem. The real issue is the time and the organization and the planning of it all. Just thinking about whom to invite is a nightmare, since even if you keep it at immediate family only…”

“Yes?”

“There are little tensions in all families,” I told her. “And trying to organize Raf’s family—six siblings, many with titanic personalities—is like trying to herd cats. Anyway, I don’t even like parties, so why would I want to organize one? It’ll be thirty people at least, if everybody comes.”

“So do it somewhere where you can escape and recharge.”

“A thought,” I told her. “But it feels kind of weird, getting my brothers to come all the way to Puerto Rico to see me get married, especially since I am married—though by a justice of the peace with a couple of clerks as witnesses. Besides, we’ve been together for so long—I mean, none of Raf’s or my nephews and nieces have ever not known us. We’re sort of like the Queen, you know—always been there.”

“All the more reason to get married.”

“Then there’s the money,” I said. “And don’t tell me to keep it simple, because absolutely every couple starts down that road, and guess where they end up? Deciding whether they can afford the tray of asparagus wrapped in Norwegian smoked salmon as canapés for the sit-down dinner of Scottish grouse in a truffle sauce. The grouse having been hunted especially by gentlemen of your favorite Scottish clan, wearing their authentic kilts. Oh, and they’ll be flying over the Atlantic to serve the grouse at your table—one Scot per table—since only they know how to carve the grouse. Cheap at $75,000, don’t you think?”

“Marc?”

“Then of course we come to the little matter of the favors—you know, the little gifts you’re supposed to give the people who have spent all this money to come to this event that you have spent all this money to provide them. So…”

“Marc, I really think…”

“So that means that we have to commission Nick Quijano—since he’s a friend—to do a special silk screen for the occasion. And Nick is marvelous, as he should be, since his originals go for anywhere in the six figures. So that will consume pretty much all of our vacation money for the next sixty years, but no problem, since we’ve had so many nice vacations already! I mean, who needs more? And we’ll always have memories of our wedding!”

“Marc, you don’t…”

“Of course, you could see this as our contribution to the Puerto Rican economy—currently in crisis—since I’ve got it into my head: this is Puerto Rico, and a tropical paradise. So it’s obviously a destination wedding, which means that…”

“It’s certainly not a destination wedding…”

“…so boutique hotels—I mean, is my brother the Pulitzer-prize-winner gonna stay in a Hotel 6 or 8 or whatever the number is? Of course not, so let’s see, El Convento—with its charming atmosphere of 17^th century Spanish Colonial architecture, and its rumored ghost of the founding abbess doña María del Pilar del Zaragonza whatever she was….”

“Marc, you’re being completely…”

“Then the tours! You can’t have your guests wandering around aimlessly all day, bored out of their minds by the white sandy beaches and the azure skies and the emerald water, can you? Nay, nay—so you’ll have to hire fifteen or so carriages authentically designed to mimic the early nineteenth century style, each pulled by 8 pasofinos to go deep into the mountains, where guides dressed in authentic jíbaro garb, specially created…”

“STOP!”

“Hunh?”

“Marc, you are being completely crazy! This isn’t a destination wedding, and you don’t have to do all this stuff. We got married in a courtroom, and there was a murder trial on one side, and a rape trial on the other.”

“I remember—but wait. I thought you had a real wedding, and you put up the French side of the family at the Atlantic Beach Hotel.”

“I did!”

“Lady, how could you!”

“Well, they said they wanted something cheap, and something on the beach, and…”

“Lady, the Atlantic Beach is one step up from—wait, the Atlantic Beach is a gay bathhouse. If not—quite frequently—a brothel!”

“Well, Nico’s family was a little puzzled at how very friendly the other guests were, especially to the male members. But we assured them it was that famous, Caribbean zest for living. Anyway, they loved it!”

“Only you could get away with it. Can you imagine if I did it? It would confirm everybody’s worst suspicions….”

“The point is…”

“I finally figured it out. I don’t want to have a wedding! But…”

“Yes?”

“I want to have had one!”      
         

Musings on Marriage

“You know, that cantata—BWV 162—actually wasn’t as middling as I thought it was,” I told Lady. “And in some respects, it’s far more interesting than the other two….”

“How so?” said she.

“Well, the text that Bach chose is so unlike the text for the other cantatas for the 20^th Sunday after Advent. It actually fits much better with that dreary parable.”

“Oh dear,” said Lady. “First I have to deal with poets all week, and now you present me with parables. Remind me.”

“The king who can’t get anybody to come to his son’s wedding. And then when he does, some guy shows up badly dressed, so he’s banished and sent away, to great weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

“Ah yes,” said Lady, “a not-too-subtle reference to those who refuse to marry their soul to the son of God—and we all know who that is. Interesting how the religious so often intersects with the erotic. Look at The Song of Songs—pretty steamy stuff.”

“Yup, and that’s true for the cantata BWV 49; even the title, “I Go and Seek with Longing,” makes it quite plain. So in this cantata—which has no choir, by the way—we have the bass being Jesus and the soprano being the soul. And it’s clear, they can’t wait to get it on. It’s really less about the wedding than it is about the consummation.”

“Religion as the great sublimation of the erotic,” said Lady. “I always get a kick out of seeing a nun, and silently saying to myself, ‘ah, one of Christ’s many brides…’”

“Quite a metaphor,” I said, “if it is a metaphor. Should we do a Google search? Something like, ‘are nuns really the brides of Christ?’”

“Well, they’re wearing wedding rings, aren’t they? Though it begs the question, if nuns are the brides of Christ, what exactly are priests?”

“Well, obviously they’re not going to go there,” said Lady. “So they skip from husbandry—not the correct word, I know, but is there husbandhood? Anyway, they go straight to being fathers, never husbands.”

“Curious,” I said, “so men are not to be given religious eroticism, but women are? A woman can lust to be united with Jesus, but a guy cannot? Women—those delicate, pure, sexless people, until seduced, of course, by the devil?”

“Yup, we, the weaker sex. Sorry, bud—we get to marry Jesus, you get to venerate Mary.”

“There’s something seriously screwy about that. Anyway, I think BWV 162 is much more on track, psychologically speaking. Because the bass aria that begins the cantata puts it right out there: He’s going to the wedding, but he sees the bread of life and the poison of the soul. And he continues the contradictions all the way through the piece. Heavenly beams and hellish flames—you know, that sort of thing….”

“Not sure I follow,” said Lady.

“Well, every wedding represents the birth of a new person, because marriage changes you. You know that. And isn’t it obvious that a bad marriage will be more about hellish flames than about heavenly beams?”

“Absolutely,” said Lady, “and I see what you mean. I look at Nico, sometimes; his marriage to me certainly put his life on a different track. Yes, he’s happy with me, but sometimes I wonder: how would his life have been if he had stayed in France?”

“Or if you had moved to France….”

Lady shuddered.

“But the effects of a marriage are more subtle, I think. So subtle that no one ever knows—even the couple themselves—exactly what is going on in a marriage. Though I do have this theory: you can tell when a person has been physically loved. Don’t know how, but you can.”

“Something about the energy, I think,” said Lady. “But I know what you mean. I would have been an absolutely different person, if I hadn’t married Nico. And even if I had married somebody just as good—well, I’d be different.”

“It’s such a risk, when you think of it. You’re tying your life to another person, but what will happen to him or her? There was a point when I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis—just as Raf’s mother does—and one of my first thoughts was how much his parent’s lives had been changed by that disease. So how would it have changed ours?”

“Well, there’s also the possibility that your spouse could win the lottery,” said Lady, always of a more cheerful mind.

“Very true,” I said. “Raf’s been trying for years, up to the point of consulting an astrologer, who told him the precise time to obtain the winning ticket. So there he was, in the bodega in Chicago, and the lottery was something obscene like 60 million. So what does he do? Joins the line—which has snaked up and down all the aisles of the store—and then, when he gets to the cashier, he announces that he’ll have to wait for three minutes, since the time wasn’t auspicious….”

“No!”

“Well, we were younger then,” I said. “Though I nearly went from being married to being widowed. Chicago is a hard-scramble town….”

“So I’m told,” said Lady. “Anyway, are you telling me that you now like the heaven-and-hell cantata better than the religiously erotic one?”

“I think they’re both good,” I said. “And both valid, though for some, one may be more valid than the other.”

“Well, I’ll go with the religiously erotic,” said Lady. “That’s how it worked out for me.”

“Me too,” I told her, “not that there haven’t been a hellish flame or two….”   

   

Death, More Than Life

When death comes, life comes as well, like a gale blowing through the house. The tears are closers to the eyes, then, but the laughter as well; the stories of good times, of joys shared, of triumphs too are as much a part of grief as the sobs, the wails, the wrenching loss. I know that now, I knew that then—but after my first wife María Barbara died, I felt a grief I had not suffered in all my life.

She was as much a part of my life as—well, as I was. Which meant that with her death I had died, too; who, then, was this shadow that was left behind? Who was playing the music, directing the choir, fighting the bureaucrats, testing the organs, conducting rehearsals? Couldn’t they see that I was dead?

A death that can be shared is a death that can be tolerated, but who was it who could share this death? María Barbara’s sister, of course, was in the house, and was grieving as well, but she had had a month or two to adjust, as well as the chores of raising her nephews and nieces and running the household. And she had a sharp temper, accompanied by a biting tongue that never was fully kept in check.

There were friends, of course, and there were those greatest of remedies: work and routine. And so I resumed my daily tasks, and to the outside world, I was little changed. Ah, but inside! I had lost not just the woman who had borne my children and raised them, but who listened to me as I protested the many indignities I had endured.

“Think,” she would say, “think, Sebastian, before you send that letter.”

And then she would explain that the prince or the elector or the town council—whoever it was that had enraged—may have had very good reason for doing whatever they did. At last, I would agree not to send the letter until I had reread it the next day. And how many of those letters did I send? Few, very few.

She calmed me. At night, there was no greater pleasure than falling asleep next to her; I would feel her gentle breath against my chest, as we embraced, and I would marvel—what great fortune had sent her to me? For she understood me both as a man and as a musician: as my second cousin, she knew the family tradition of music-making well indeed.

I was twenty-one when we married, but how much had I done already? I had secured an appointment at Weimar as court musician, later become organist at St. Boniface’s in Arnstadt, and then given that up to study, for four months, with the great Buxtehude. And so I fancied myself a man of the world; I had no doubts about my abilities, whether recognized or not.

But who was I, as a man?

Every wise man knows it: a man is nothing until he marries. And the truly wise know something else, as well: a woman mothers a child, but the wife mothers the man.

Yes, she taught me as much in my manhood as my mother taught me in my childhood. Did I know death? I thought I did: it had first entered my life when I was six. A few years later, it carried away first my mother and then my father. There was, I felt, nothing it could teach me. But how little prepared I was for the years 1712 and 1713!

The first two children had come earlier: first a girl, and then Wilhelm Friedemann.  And can there be any greater pleasure for a man than holding his first child in his arms? But almost from the start of her third pregnancy, it was obvious that something was wrong. She gained little weight, and seemed more fatigued than she had with the other pregnancies. She would stop in her chores, gasp, and look far off, as if willing herself to be somewhere else.

“You must tell her to rest,” said Friedelena Margarita, and I did so. But did I persevere? Did I insist that she take to her bed, when she laughed and said that she would later, or the next day? No, I was busy, with a man’s affairs of providing for the family, coupled with my own daemon of composing. And so I assumed that all would be well, and no man need bother himself with what were, after all, women’s affairs.

I did notice, however, that Friedelena Margarita was watching her closely, and often I came upon them when they were arguing quietly about some chore or other. But was I surprised? No, they were as different as could be: María Barbara gentle and uncomplaining, her sister harsh and demanding.

Soon there was tension in the house, as the sisters seemed to grow both closer and yet more angry with each other. I began to hear Friedelena’s voice get sharper; as well, I imagined that I could hear muffled sobs? Could it be that María Barbara was crying? But why?

“She must see a doctor, and if you won’t see to it, then I shall,” said Friedelena.

It was late in the evening, I was yearning for bed, and I was impatient, too, with the tension. Was I not master in my own house? Was I to be treated so by a woman—admittedly a second cousin—whom I had taken in when nobody else had done so? And was there to be no peace in my own home?

I spoke sharply: “My wife will see a doctor when and if she pleases. Who better than she knows what is happening in her body? She must be the judge of whether to go to the doctor or not!”

To this argument Friedelena was deaf.

“Indeed, she is the last person to know that she needs help. She doesn’t want to trouble you, or to put you through the expense of a doctor’s visit, or the expense of hiring a woman to care for her and look after the house when the doctor tells her—as he surely will—that she must take to her bed.”

Her voice was rasping at all times; now, it was particularly unpleasant. And is it any wonder that I—already the greatest of Bach’s, the preeminent musical dynasty of Germany—would be especially sensitive to the qualities (good or otherwise) of the human voice?

And so we argued bitterly, and as always in an argument, neither side became less adamant. At last I rose to go to bed. She, of course, would have the last word.

“Be it on your head, Sebastian, when those babies are born still, if born they ever be at all!”

I very nearly ordered her out of the house. I went to bed trembling with rage, and it was there that María Barbara found me, perhaps an hour later. She sought to appease me, and pleaded for me to forgive her sister. But had not my authority in the house been challenged? Had I not been virtually ordered as to how to act in my very home? Was it not she who should apologize. Still raging, I turned my back on my wife’s pleas, and tried my best to sleep.

The days that followed were awful. The two sisters were barely speaking; Friedelena and I ignored each other. Worse, I grew impatient with my wife: could she not see that she should side with me, her husband? How could she plead her sister’s cause, when it was I who had been insulted? Shouldn’t she cleave unto her man, as the Bible bade her to do?

Any man knows—a pregnant woman can be moody, changeable. And a man also knows that all things blow over: was I to stay at home amid the intolerable tensions of two sisters, one of them great with child? Wasn’t it easier to stay a bit later in the church, inspecting the progress of the organ restoration, which was being done at great expense? Wasn’t it in fact my obligation, since it had been I who had convinced the church and town to pay handsomely for the work?

Did I absent myself deliberately? I wish I could say no, but it pains me to admit that yes: I had grown tired of the tensions and the squabbling and the suppressed anger. Friedelena at last chose to speak.

“You have abandoned your duties as husband, Sebastian. Never before has your wife needed you more, and where are you to be found. Smoking your pipe and drinking beer with friends in a public house, while your wife languishes at home, too tired to drag herself to bed. What manner of man are you? How can you treat your wife thus?”

It was now very late in the pregnancy; we were all very much on edge. But did I pay more attention to my wife? No, even though I came more and more often upon her as she stood, breathing shallowly and rapidly and looking far away. And I noticed that more and more often, there would be a dampened rag in the bathroom.

She told me later—while I had been at the public house with my friends, she had repaired to her bed, the rag clenched between her legs to try to stanch the flow of blood. She knew something was wrong: there were pains she had never had with the other two pregnancies. There was the blood—minor on some days, worse on others. And there were the contractions that would come and go—contractions that shouldn’t have been there.

And so it was no surprise to her when she gave birth to twins; the boy, Johann Cristoph died within moment of the birth. The girl, María Sophía, lasted barely three weeks.

It was then that I discovered whom I had married.

            

  

More Palaver about Parables

“You know, it almost comes as a relief to hear a cantata that isn’t particularly inspired,” I told Lady. “It’s reassuring that there were times when Bach relied just on skill, as well as a tried-and-true model. Because otherwise, he would have been running around Leipzig on a perpetual inspirational bender. I mean, you do have to sober up once in a while….”

“So what was it?” said Lady.

“BWV 162, also known as Ach! Ich sehe jetzt da ich zur Hochzeit gehe.”

“’Ah, I see, now as I go to the wedding,’” said Lady, who knows no German. She is, however, a resourceful girl, and has probably stumbled onto the same website as I—bach-cantatas.com —which is as exhaustive as it is unpolished. Want to remember what the web looked like when you had dial-up? Check out the site…

“The good news is that the other two cantatas are knockouts,” I told. “Which is somewhat surprising, given that the texts for the 20^th Sunday after Advent are really pretty nasty. First we get Ephesians—and if I’ve ever read Ephesians before, this will hardly lure me to start again. We have to walk circumspectly, and not waste time, and not get drunk, and sing songs of praise and give constant thanks to God for all he’s done for us.”

“Well, I’m generally on board with that, though I do have a glass of wine occasionally with dinner. Oh, and beer with lunch.”

“You are perilously close to falling into the sinner’s path,” I told her. True, but it has to be said, when it comes to drunkenness, I virtually marked the trail.

“Anyway, I walk circumspectly, I think,” I told her. “But the rest of the reading is pretty appalling. It’s another parable, and trust me, there’s every reason it’s not better known. Try this: Jesus said that heaven is like the marriage of the king’s son.”

“Say what?”

“So the king prepared the wedding for his son, and sent out all the invites. But guess what? Everybody ignored them…”

“What kind of idiot would ignore a king’s invitation? I’d be out shopping for something to wear….”

“Of course you would, but so sunk in depravity have these heathen fallen that they ignore the king’s invitation.”

“Totally stupid.”

“And it gets worse, because some people, travelling well past Ignore get to the town of Murder. OK—the King James says it better: And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them.”

“Are these guys total morons?”

“Things like this happen in the Bible, and anyway, it’s all metaphor, unless, of course you’re evangelical, in which case every word of the Bible is divinely inspired and thus true.”

“But the Bible is full of contradictions,” cried Lady, “starting with the little detail of where Jesus was born!”

“OK—but now the king gets really pissed. OK, in the King James, he was wroth, which you have to admit is not where you want your king to be.”

“Most certainly not,” said Lady, “and you have to promise me, Marc, that you’ll never be wroth with me….”

“How could I be wroth with you when you just texted me yesterday, ‘Just to let you know that I’m thinking of you.’”

“Indeed I was.”

“Though I did find it curious that you then said, ‘now I’m going to take a nap.’ Is thinking of me so tiring an activity? Or worse, so boring?”

“Never,” said Lady. “It’s just that you tend to call me after I text you. Admit it—you’ve figured out how to receive texts, but not to respond!”

“The feet of ancients tread slowly in the meadows of technology,” I told her. “Anyway, I certainly would have sent polite regrets to the king, even if I hadn’t gone to the damn wedding.”

“Hey, what happened to those guys?”

“Next verse: he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.”

“Good for him,” said Lady. “He’s clearly both kingly and Biblical at the same time!”

“Then the king dreams up his next bright idea, which is to go round up whatever stray humans can be found on the streets, and they at least had the grace to come, although who knows? Maybe they were forced? But is the king satisfied? No, because one of the guests is not wearing a wedding garment.”

“Wait a minute—aren’t you supposed to indicate the dress code? You know, ‘formal attire,’ or whatever.”

“Now here’s where it gets interesting, since the king asks him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? Direct quote, King James, by the way.”

“Well, reasonable question….”

“Except for what then happens, which is—prepare yourself for more King James—Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

“I love this king!” cried Lady. “Just the kind of man I adore: strong, decisive, and not afraid to cause a little weeping and gnashing of the teeth.”

“You and Sylvia Plath. Remember “Daddy?”

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you. 

“Poetic license,” said Lady. “Though sadly, there’s sometimes some truth in it. Anyway, is this parable done yet? I have some casitas to paint.”

“It ends with one of the 16 zillion famous lines in the Bible: Many are called, but few are chosen.”

“Hmm, could apply to poets, too. Well, get to work. You should be able to do better than that, though I’ll give you free coffee for a week if you trump the last line.”

“Tomorrow,” I told her. After all, how much spirituality can I muster, even if it is the 20^th Sunday after Advent?  

   

  

Shattenwelt

It was a strange feeling, because there was no feeling that I could attach to it, since it wasn’t there.

That, in a nutshell, was what it was like if you were gay and born in the mid-50’s. Because if anybody was talking about sexuality, if never trickled down to my ears. Yes, Kinsey was out there publishing his famous books, but that was considered a rare bit of scholarly pornography. I now realize—any discussion of sexuality was confined to men, usually drunk. Women and children? Shielded at all costs.

So there was little Marc—age 5, blue-eyed, tow-headed, and trying to figure out how I was going to get married and have children, because something quite deeply within me told me I was different. But what was the “different?”

Maybe it’s time to admit—even very young children have sexual feelings. Did I know anything about sex? Of course not—but it didn’t stop me from thinking about men in a way that I knew other boys were not.

But was that even possible? When did I know what? When did the notion that there were gay people come into my awareness? Was it when I was thirteen, since that was the date of Dr. David Rueben’s book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but were afraid to ask?  I remember reading the book, and hiding it from my mother, which was how taboo the whole thing was. So then I found out that there were “homosexuals,” and that they / we were doomed to live out bitchy, shallow, and extremely short-lived relationships, since we / they were screwed up, in one way or another.

Or was it before? Weren’t there kids talking about “queers” and “fags,” even in elementary school? Yes—but did I know what that was? And did I know it applied to me?

There is a shadow world—the things you know but do not acknowledge, and often that shattenwelt (only the German can really express it) accompanies transitions. You are questioning the faith you were raised in, the good Pentecostal fundamentalism that would sink you into hell for your unbelief? How can you possibly question? Equally, how can you believe?

It was that state that I was in, except that two things were happening at the same time. The first was that nothing needed to be done, since nothing could be done, given my age and sexual immaturity. And the second thing was that the persecution of homosexuality permeated the air, just as the smell of burning flesh assailed the death camps.

It was as cynical as it was diabolical. Because here’s how it worked: there was no place where gay people could meet in the 1950’s. True, in the large cities, there were gay bars, but they got raided frequently, and the arrests were printed on the front page—often—of the newspaper. So even being in a large city meant that you were exposing yourself, your family, your reputation, your home (if you were renting) and your job. The wonder is that anyone did it: it’s quite a price to pay for a beer.

So there was nowhere, but the sex drive in men? It tends to be quite strong, so we took to the parks and the public toilets. That, of course, further intensified the disgust many people felt for us, because what kind of sicko goes to have sex in a john? Answer—the guy with nowhere else to go.

So in my case, it meant that homosexuals were “lurking”—somehow that was always the word—in the bushes and skulking—another word, often needlessly paired with “furtively”—around the trees of the Capitol Square. This I learned years after I needed the information.

The other thing that was happening?

The federal government, spurred on by J. Edgar Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower, was on an all-out campaign to eliminate gay people from the government. And no, it wasn’t gay people in sensitive positions who might be blackmailed by the Communists—it was people like Charles Barker, who was a clerk / typist at the US Bureau of Standards. This undoubtedly worthy agency I know nothing about and still know nothing, though I went onto their website. But that’s hardly the point; more relevant is that Barker was fired for being gay in 1971.

In 1971, I was fifteen. I looked—and often felt like—an improbable survivor from torture by the rack, since I was 6’3” and had a 28-inch waist. And though the riots at Stonewall had taken place in 1969, both Washington DC and Madison, Wisconsin, were not particularly hospitable times to be gay. Nor was the rest of the country.

So much progress has been made so fast that we have lost some things that we might remember now, had they not happened so quickly. We went from being sick, disgusting and criminal to having the wildest, most unrestrained sex. Then followed a plague of horrific proportions. We were dying left and right, and the government was doing nothing, and that “nothing” was quite deliberate, since hadn’t we brought it on ourselves? And however much we had changed our minds, embraced our sexuality, came out of the closet, well…the men who controlled the public health system hadn’t. So that meant that we had to stage die-ins and throw ashes of our dead brothers on the White House lawn.

Then, just as suddenly, it was over. Of course it wasn’t and isn’t, but the new antivirals had made AIDS not a death verdict but a chronic disease. So yes, people with AIDS are still dying…but of heart attacks, strokes, cancer.

Then came the first decade of the21st century, during which half of the country was getting their head around the fact that their sons, daughters, coworkers or even just Billy’s parents were LGBT and neither had their heterosexual marriage collapsed nor had the fabric of American society been horribly torn. The rest of the country, who hadn’t met any gay people yet, were busy passing defense of marriage acts, and making political capital out of them.

That all fell like a house of cards, and in the space of the next decade five of the nine people in the country could get themselves to say what in the future will be as obvious as the fact that black people are not chattel. So now I am married here in Puerto Rico, as I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008, and as I have been, in fact, since 1987. That’s when Raf and I moved to Chicago and started living together.

You know all this, I know all this, but there’s something I now begin to believe is true, at least for me. Yes, I did the work of coming out, which can be external—you tell everybody you’re gay, you march when needed—or internal. And the internal is usually the most difficult: two or three years ago, on a Delta flight to New York, the pilot announced herself as Sue somebody. “Somebody” because I was so busy with the thought, “they’re letting a woman fly this plane?” that of course I didn’t catch the last name. Right, so I weeded that thought out—of course women can fly planes Marc—and went sighing away. Then, just to make the point clearer, the male captain of the Delta return flight home gave me the very glad eye as I was getting off the plane. And what did I think? Of course, “they let a gay man….”

It may be that you’re never done with it. It also may be that it has changed you and formed you, and that may not be a good thing. The Depression never left my parents; their Dutch friends who had starved during and after World War II could not throw food—however spoiled or inedible—away.

And I? What did it do to me, to have lived my first two decades knowing—I thought—that I was sick, that I was disgusting? Can any amount of consciousness-raising scrub that away? I look at the life I have lead, and the lives of others who—presumably—didn’t shoulder the burden I did for the first 20 years of my life. I am as accomplished as my brothers, though in different ways. Both of them, however, accept their success as a birthright; I am incapable of promoting myself.

I struggled for years as a musician, and choked four or five auditions for a chair in a professional orchestra. I now remember the peculiar feeling of the choke: how, during the audition, you are caught endlessly in that moment that the speeding car is about to hurl itself onto you. Your mind is racing, blaring instructions to muscles that have been completely severed from the brain. You have never played the instrument before, it seems, since you cannot even play the simplest passage.

The physical symptoms are minor—the racing heart, the dry mouth, the sweaty hands. What is terrible is the sinking feeling of shame, disgust, self-loathing. Horribly, you will have to tell everyone that you failed—all those people who kept assuring you that you would be just fine. That would be bad: worse would be when they all went to work the next day, and you would be alone in the apartment. What did I feel, on those horrendous mornings-after?

What I would have felt, if I had been a decade older, and had to grow sexually of age as a “sexual deviate” in the 50’s. And for decades I told myself that I was spared that, and that I was lucky, born just when I was, when the times were changing. I never had to live through that, I thought, the revulsion and shame and horror.

But hadn’t I?

Or rather…

Aren’t I?

The accepted truth is that I am lucky, that being gay has given me an outsider’s view, has broadened my insights into people and societies, that being different challenged me and strengthened me. Perhaps. But I have done my work, now: no one, I think, could accuse me of playing the victim. So now I can ask the question: how would my life have been, had I been straight?