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By Root 1233 0

a certain style—a deep pleasure in the delights of every day, a warmth that was never mièvre (French for “mawkish”), a fierce loyalty to the inner circle, never the slightest hint of disapproval toward me or other loved ones, though both of them were terrible snobs. Both of them liked to entertain and to go out, to hear the “latest,” to meet the current genius. David was always up on intellectual currents and Marie-Claude on literary ones. She was a professional reader who read three or four books a day; she read French books for Knopf and English-language books for Gallimard. David, who was half-blind, was a keen observer and had a novelist’s interest in how stories turned out. David was divinely silly—a dimension that Marie-Claude lacked and deeply regretted (she often referred to the much envied “English wit,” a phenomenon that exists vividly in the French imagination if not in French manners).

In my twenties I courted people, much as I’d learned to do in high school; only in my thirties and forties was the goal not to make friends but to enjoy them. In the 1970s gay New Yorkers had decided to separate out friendship, love, and sex. The friend, the lover, and the fuck buddy were three different people, not the same one, as they would become in the eighties. This division of labor in the seventies gave the starring role to friendship. We assumed that love affairs would be stormy and temporary and cause more pain than pleasure. We seldom knew or remembered the names of our sex partners; indeed, we were bewildered in the early days of AIDS by the surprising (and pointless) injunction “Know the names of your partners.” No, our friends were the ones we cherished and pursued and cultivated. We could say strategic things to lovers and seductive things to tricks, but a friend deserved the truth. With a friend we had to get things right.

At the end of the 1960s I was in despair over my writing. I was going nowhere quick. I had a drawer full of unproduced plays and unpublished novels. By the end of the 1970s I was on my way as a writer. It had taken longer and was less rewarding than I’d anticipated, but like a character in Balzac I’d always been a monomaniac—just one great obsession, to be published. Friends had helped me all along the way. Richard Howard had arranged for my first novel to be published. David Kalstone encouraged me at strategic moments. Marilyn and Stanley would listen over the phone to every word I wrote. Keith McDermott was a constant inspiration through his own unflinching dedication to a bohemian life of art. At times I wrote to amuse my nephew. My editor, Bill Whitehead, became a real friend, though he died young from AIDS. Susan Sontag arranged for me to win awards and gain recognition. The members of my writers’ club, the Violet Quill, encouraged one another to explore fearlessly this new gay subject matter.

The Romantic American myth is that the artist works in solitude and that he can create as well on a farm in Vermont as in New York. But I recognized that the artistic climate of a particular city and milieu was crucial to the development of a writer; after he found his way, perhaps he could go off to that barn outside Burlington. I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of “coffee shops” as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who were impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know. The seventies saw the last gasp of the old bohemian Greenwich Village, but this time with more of a gay aspect.

I got to know New York better by spending long periods in San Francisco and Venice. In contrast with those more decorous cities I could see how consumed New York was with ambition, how little urbanism or planning of any sort prevailed in New York, how improvised and transient all of New York’s arrangements were.