City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [49]
From there he and his family had moved to Los Angeles, where Simon as an adolescent fell in love with contemporary music. During the war years, Los Angeles, thanks to its refugees, was the cultural center of the world—the home of Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, not to mention all the glamorous stars in exile such as Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Simon began to attend the avant-garde concerts held on the roof of a building in Los Angeles.
When he was old enough, he was drafted and sent off to Europe during the years immediately following the war. His Russian came in handy, but he was more serious about being a composer than a spy. He entered a competition sponsored by Marie-Laure de Noailles, but her American friend and permanent houseguest Ned Rorem won. Simon felt that no one else had stood a chance against the handsome Ned, obviously the vicomtesse’s favorite. Then Simon was commissioned to write ballet music for a small German dance company. He was horrified when he heard the results and decided to abandon an artistic career.
He returned to California and was driving through Berkeley when his car broke down. It would take several days to be repaired, and Simon decided during that time to investigate getting a degree in Russian. Soon he was accepted and dragooned into being a language teacher; within a few years he had his doctorate in Russian and was a professor in the same department.
At the time I met him in the early 1970s Simon had two great arguments with me. He couldn’t understand why we young gays would camp and call each other she, not realizing that that sort of old-fashioned queeniness had died out and was now so out of fashion that we thought it was funny. For him it was merely a disgusting reminder of the bad old days when gay men hadn’t liked themselves, had seen themselves as pathetic stand-ins for women, and had considered their only charm to be their youth. Those of us who were one generation younger thought that we’d put all that safely behind us and that now we were free to joke about it—on the same principle, perhaps, that Richard Pryor used the word nigger over and over in his routines during the same period. I’m not sure that we gays were really so sure of our new identity (neither, as it turned out, were African-Americans).
The bigger bone he picked with me was over socialism. I had routinely said in print and in conversation that I was a socialist, which made me no different from millions of American Leftists of that period. Simon would say, “If you only knew how misguided you are! You’re generous and worried about the sufferings of the poor and the marginalized, about what America is doing to the third world, but communism is the biggest scourge the world has ever known.”
“But, Simon, I’m not a communist, I hate Stalin.”
“But you think you can pick and choose, reject Stalin in favor of Lenin.”
“Well, yeah…”
“But Lenin was just as bad. There was no good period of communism. They were thugs and built into the system is an authoritarianism that crops up everywhere—in Cuba, China, Vietnam, the most different cultures.”
“I can understand how you White Russians might be bitter. After all, you lost all your wealth—”
“That’s an insulting argument. It has nothing to do with my family, which was always pretty poor in any event. No, this is just a terrible blind spot in Americans of your generation. You’re prepared to believe that Stalin was a tyrant, but you’ll see that Mao is even worse, that Ho Chi Minh will be as bad as he can be, that Castro—well. Just take gays. Castro has been running concentration camps for gays, or ‘work camps,’ if you prefer. In Russia the last public display of homosexuality was the funeral for Kuzmin in 1936. After that it was too dangerous to reveal to anyone that you were gay. And gays to this day have to get married to women