OK I was jealous as soon as I read an interview in the New York Times with Paul Lisicky, a gay writer whose earlier work was unfamiliar to me. How had he managed to publish HIS memoir of surviving the HIV epidemic in Provincetown for a couple of years during the early 90s? My curiosity intensified when he cited Joni Mitchell's unique voice as an inspiration. That's a level of perceptive honesty that few writers achieve.
Lisicky's account of living in "Town," as he refers to the literary community that embraced him resembles the Pines in its rigid hierarchies and seasonal ebb and flow. He describes it well if you don't mind the flavor of overly workshopped writing but Liskicky barely makes himself interesting let alone his friends and colleagues. He likely pulled his punches because he didn't want to hurt their feelings or sully the memories of the dead. His book is also woefully lacking in incident aside from the day he dressed up as an ice cream cone to support the lover with whom he no longer has sex and marching sourly in a main street parade.
I look up to see the people I know – Jim and Al, for instance, look at me with pitying smiles. The pain’s about them, too, as no one‘s exactly having fun. The look in their eyes suggests we’ll remember all this but we’d prefer to remember something else. Joy, for one, but joy doesn’t etch its letters on your brain. Rather the brain wants hurt, wants to hold onto it, as it contains the possibility of work, negotiating with it over time.
Hurt clearly turns him on.
That feeling hurt: Hurt is my biggest drug, even though I don’t often say that to myself. It’s always so tempting to go there, to get that surge, that fix. What else out there, aside from sex, makes me feel more alive from the inside out? What else tests my resilience, reminds me of it?
I, for one, don't have much patience for someone who lets the negative push the positive out of life. As traumatic as the epidemic was prior to the development of effective medications, watching how people dealt with HIV taught me an important lesson about human nature: joyful people generally have better endings than the Debbie Downers they leave behind.
Lisicky also seems pretty uncomfortable about his sexual proclivities. Instead of embracing the freedom from responsibility that gay life offered to men who observed safer sex techniques, he throws shade.
Slutty: bad word in these years. Slutty gives you sickness, slutty makes other people sick. Slutty makes you die, even if we know you could practically be Saint John of the Cross and still manage to seroconvert.
Slutty is low class which is possibly the worst thing to be in the United States of America.
Still, he's not entirely blind to the ego boost semi-anonymous sex can provide.
It’s always daunting to slip down the street to the Boatyard, even in the middle of the night. Someone could be walking by, usually it’s a group, laughter brought on by too much booze. But what if it’s someone I have a routine casual banter with, say the lady in the health food store, the guy who signs me in at the gym? All sorts of people call themselves sex positive, but they might think differently of me if they saw me rushing down that notorious lane, hands in my pockets, steeling my shoulders, as if I’d just shoplifted a pork chop and held it under my arm. Guess who I saw going to the Dick Dock? that person might say. And the unspoken shared belief involves stereotypes of unmanageability, trashiness, self-disgust, disease sharing, and a pitiful sense of: couldn’t he do better? They’d never see me the same way again.
Even in a sex positive church, sluts are not always viewed as high priests.
Of course once I’m walking among the boat hulls I feel uncannily safe, even if I could possibly trip on an iron spike, conk my head against a low beam. Though it’s all in the dark, it’s all pretty easy-going and respectful, with bursts of group intensity. The sex I see is what’s called safe sex: blow jobs and hand jobs. If horniness weren’t narrowing my perception, I’d be able to step back and see how cinematic it is. All those bodies moving—it is like a scene out of Fellini if Fellini had been queer. No wonder the moon likes it here, shining a trail on the harbor from the Truro bluffs to this very spot. There’s a swirly, muscular bull, with the face and demeanor of a bouncer. He’s reportedly a famous night club promoter. People from every corner of life show up here. I’ve tried to catch his eye all summer, but it’s been hopeless. I’ve even given up on looking at him when I pass him on the sidewalk, if only out of self-respect – I don’t want to think of myself as a creep, the kind of person who leers. I’m not his type, clearly. I don’t have big enough muscles, don’t have big enough attitude. My swagger would never match his, which was probably cultivated by his relatives on the streets of Napoli, then Bensonhurst. Possibly he wants someone with classic features, more all-American, the polar opposite of him. But in the dark he’s a different human. His eyes practically tear up when I touch his neck. I crouch down to suck his dick but he really wants to suck mine, and I back into a post and concentrate on his mouth. I close my eyes. I am as happy as if I’ve published a book.
Lisicky eventually found a home in academia, the perfect refuge for a man who lives more in his head than out of it. Sour grapes? Maybe. But I'm pretty sure his connections explain the publication of this very dull book.
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