City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [132]
The woman was jolly and voluble, and although I never saw her again and hadn’t caught her name, I was so riveted by her story that I remembered it in great detail. She was one of Susan’s lesbian friends.
Susan could be sweet and melancholy. She was often “out of it” in social settings, never getting the joke and needing everything to be spelled out. Her laugh was mirthless and heavy. She lacked spontaneity. Elle n’était pas bien dans sa peau, as the French would say. One of her girlfriends in the 1950s talks in a journal of the period about how maddening the young Susan could be, lecturing her on Hieronymus Bosch, manufacturing enthusiasms at the flea market, throwing her big, awkward body at her. Susan could be little-girlish and tender at times, though normally she was brusque, lordly, dissatisfied. Someone who might have been trying too hard would walk out of the room and Susan would wrinkle her nose and shake her head dismissively.
She should have been given the Nobel Prize. That would have made her nicer. She was friendly with lots of Nobelists, including Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Derek Wolcott, Czesław Miłosz, all writers I met through her—not to mention her personal favorite to win, the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš, who wrote Garden, Ashes. Danilo should have won the prize and would indeed probably have if he hadn’t died rather young from lung cancer. (Susan would die too young as well.) Around all these people Susan was wonderfully natural, and they perceived her as their equal, even their superior.
She had terrible manners. She picked her teeth after dinner. She yawned and looked almost haggard with boredom when ordinary people bothered her with their defensive chatter. She wanted to be one of the big boys but I don’t think she really liked men. That had never occurred to me at the beginning but slowly I came to realize that she was the counterpart to an old-style gay man who didn’t feel comfortable with women. She once said late in life that she only liked young, beautiful men, who were unavailable to older women, but I suspect she was deluding herself. She would have preferred an ugly, gifted, aggressive woman to a pretty boy. She did befriend her Italian translator, who was younger than her son, not handsome but wonderfully winning. He was also, of course, very smart.
AIDS first started to be mentioned in 1981. No one had ever heard of it before then. Larry Kramer, a screenwriter and producer (Women in Love) and novelist (Faggots), convened a meeting of gay men in his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square. We were addressed by Dr. Friedman Keene, who’d studied several cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that usually appeared in old men of Jewish or Mediterranean origin. Suddenly it was showing up in young gay men, as was an unusual and virulent form of pneumonia. Soon this new cluster of diseases was being called gay-related immunodeficiency or GRID.
Larry invited five or six other men, including me, to discuss forming an offensive against GRID (which a year later was renamed AIDS, since we quickly discovered that gays were only one of several “at-risk” groups). We decided to call our group the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. We wanted through the name to make it clear that this was not a lesbian condition, since we’d all had so many tussles with lesbians during the culture wars of the 1970s (though later in the 1980s, as many gay male activists were dying, lesbians came to play a larger leadership role in the movement thanks to their generous feelings of solidarity with gay men). We wanted to emphasize that it was a “crisis” and not a permanent condition, since gays were not eager to be equated with yet another medical diagnosis.
We were naïve, but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague. Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone before.
Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien said to us that he thought we should give up sex altogether until researchers understood a little more about how the disease was transmitted. We looked at him as if he were mad.