Clouds with Scattered Thrusts of Light

A Memoir of Mark Thompson

William Stewart

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R E V I S E D   2 0 2 1

AS IT HAPPENS, I don’t have to describe the circumstances of my first meeting with Mark Thompson. Here, in his own words, is a picture of that evening of February 1980, extracted from his most personal book, Gay Body:

I was in a storefront loft in the Mission district, attending a reunion of radical fairies who had been at the previous summer’s gathering in Arizona. [I, William, had not been at the gathering, but was a guest at the reunion anyway – ed.] …A canopy of exotic fabrics hung over the dimly lit space, sheltering the men below who were languidly piled on dunes of oversized cushions. I felt myself floating away in the scented twilight, as if on a cloud.

My detachment was partly induced by the intoxicating spell of soft light and brotherly bonhomie cast around me, but a certain indifference had set in as well. A week before, an invitation to another event for the same evening had mysteriously arrived in my mailbox. A newly formed fraternity of leathermen was hosting an inaugural party and the announcement was my ticket in.

Finally, something in me spoke: I had to get out of the room. Giving vent to the abandoned kid inside would not happen through comfort, but through risk. With great care and attention, I needed to be ripped apart.

An expert at self-sabotage, I couldn’t resist betraying even this one honest insight. Feeling remorse over leaving, guilt for being bored, I slid off my cushion and stealthily departed the room hoping no one would notice. But once I pushed through the door onto Valencia Street, the stranglehold of suffocating emotion ceased. Crossing that threshold represented more than accepting an unusual invitation.

With methodical moves I went to my Volkswagen bug, opened the front hood, stripped off my drawstring pants, silk blouse, and t’ai chi slippers. Standing naked in the quiet alley, even for a minute, felt exhilarating.

I noticed myself becoming aroused, a miraculous thing considering the chill. My erection signaled spontaneous delight more than calculated eros, for I was being remade by the moment. I stood motionless for another few seconds, then pulled on jeans, a leather jacket, and boots, got in the car, and drove off humming, transformed and ready for whatever fortune the night might still hold.

I treasure these words, not only because they evoke the setting of our initial encounter, but also because they reveal a bit of Mark’s complexity, the competing inclinations and urges that forged his soul. It was my good fortune to be an intimate of this generous and brilliant man, from the time of our first date in 1980 until his death in the summer of 2016. During those thirty-six years, I came to see the reserves of strength and the hidden fears, the public achievements and private griefs, of a life that contained much richness, but also more hurt than anyone should have had to endure, and more courage than I, for one, can fully fathom.

I won’t dwell on Mark’s family story, since he has portrayed it in such painstaking detail in his own writing. When we became lovers, he was still marveling that he had achieved escape velocity from the toxic atmosphere of his parents’ disintegrating marriage, his mother’s mental breakdown, and the isolation of queer adolescence in the shadow of Carmel, California—that oceanfront village of understated good taste, built on reserves of wealth whose culture was omnipresent, and/but utterly alien to the experience of a plumber’s son who’d grown up in peripheral working-class and semi-rural areas, far from the picture-postcard rich folks’ homes. A tiny handful of friends and communion with nature were precious, but he needed to get away—to more worldliness, more gayness, more life.

San Francisco! That was the gravitational center to which he was irresistibly drawn. There, starting as a student journalist at San Francisco State, and then more explicitly when he became cultural editor of The Advocate, he created his first career. His unwavering focus: an ongoing in-depth exploration of his own tribe and its burgeoning, fomenting culture. He had the good fortune, for a brief moment in the mid-seventies, to acquire an abundance of experience and insight in tandem with the expansion of the Lesbian-Gay community. Almost immediately, he realized that his life’s work was to document that culture—and, mostly invisibly, working from behind the keyboard, he also helped shape it as well.

Throughout his writing, there is a connecting thread. His underlying subject is queer consciousness, as manifested in any number of forms: the specific trajectories of individual queer lives; the evolution of queer politics and movements and grassroots activism; the self-empowerment of groups marginalized by the LGBT mainstream; and the realms of archetype and spirit, especially in their queerer configurations. This was his terrain, which he crisscrossed assiduously for the duration of his life.

Mark’s interest in the experience of marginalized folk was by not, as they say, strictly academic. From an early age, he felt the pull of the psychosexual realm in its darker aspect, which later coalesced in his attraction to the world of radical sexuality and its ritual corollaries—gateways, in his view, to shamanic and transcendent experience. In fact, Mark’s taste for leather and sacred kink was developing exponentially at the time of our first encounter, as the above-quoted vignette makes clear, though I knew nothing about it at the time.

*   *   *

I WAS THE ONE who went after him, not the other way round, and at first he received my courting with considerable reluctance. He was just out of a relationship that had left him feeling wary, and he wasn’t looking to partner again any time soon. I persisted, though, because I was deeply attracted: to his intelligence, to his wit, to his sophistication, to his depth, to his unabashed gay identity, to his career success, to his circle of connections, and, not least, to his good looks—a sturdy blondish handsomeness that he attributed to his mother’s Nebraska pioneer forebears. 

Our first real “date” involved a trip to North Beach, in that baby-blue Volkswagen beetle, named Toots. We were going to the San Francisco Art Institute, to attend a birthday tribute to James Broughton, already Mark’s cherished mentor and close personal friend. It was a chilly night in early November, slippery with leaves wet from rain. We waited outside the modern theater, on the cement deck behind the original Italianate building, until a Cinematheque staffer came along to unlock the doors. I remember Mark introducing me, James’s embrace, the opening of magic vistas, the window-mobile (James’s word) of film and poetry and collaboration and intimate delight. The friendships that I forged with James and his beloved Joel Singer, with Will Roscoe and Bradley Rose and with many other faeries and kindred folk, were gifts that came to me through Mark, and I’m grateful for the pleasures and projects that I shared with them—the many dead, and the relatively few who remain.

I think Mark would want me to tell you that I seduced him after serving onion pie as the main course of his first dinner at my table—he referred to it often enough, so I figure I should mention it. I know he would want me to tell you about how we were approached by a handsome uniformed and booted park policeman on the slopes of Land’s End, just as we were starting to have sex—he told the story dramatically himself, on the stage at my 60th birthday party, replete with salacious details. We were fined, as I recall, $50 each, and no, the officer did not join in.

Most of our private time we spent in his studio apartment overlooking the lower eastern corner of Buena Vista Park. He lived high up in an art-deco building; one took a tiny, slow elevator to the seventh floor. Very exotic, this seemed to me, from the vantage point of the funky semi-communal flats that I had lived in—indeed, it still brings pleasure to recollect.

The apartment had a somewhat irregular layout, corresponding to the angles of the streets below. The main window offered the bijou vista into the treetops, while to the left, at a more-than-90-degree angle to the parkside view, a shallow bay extended over a sheer cliff of stucco down to Waller Street, here just a flight of steps, seemingly half a mile below. Beyond, a panorama over the whole southeast quadrant of the city opened out, in dramatic contrast to the green of the park diagonally opposite. When he first invited me over, he had just acquired a new couch, a very big and grown-up purchase. I was somewhat overawed, and thoroughly excited about this new relationship with a very grown-up and handsome young man. I was 30, he was 29.

Along with buying the new couch, Mark had replaced a second-hand bed with a good mattress on a platform that he had constructed in the window alcove (butch points for carpentry skills). From the bed, sitting up, one saw the trees; to the left was the window high above Waller Street. Happy nights I spent there, in that boat-like bay—the lights of the city over our shoulders, preferably shrouded in fog, and at the bow—or was it the stern?—the darkness of the forest, sometimes with moonlight slanting over, often with clouds rolling in. Whatever our other schedule constraints, we always tried to spend Sunday nights together there, so that we could drift off listening to Music from the Hearts of Space. It was a live radio show back then, three hours on KPFA starting at 11, and we’d maybe make love and then always fall into a kind of trance, until eventually one of us would groggily turn off the radio, awakened by a BBC voice cutting short whatever leitmotif might have been weaving in and out of our shared sacramental dreamtime from the show.

Aside from the windows, the apartment offered another visual that drew my attention on a regular basis. In the tiny vestibule outside the bathroom there were two pieces of framed art, both ink on paper. One was a drawing of a chorus line of fishnet-stockinged Playboy bunnies (that is to say, rabbits); but it was the other one that held my eye. This was a depiction of a sleazy sex scene set in a graffiti-covered, cracked-tile bathroom, signed “Rex”. Rendered in countless pinpoint black dots, this fastidiously-made masturbatory fantasy-image intrigued me—a reflecting glass, perhaps, of my own sexual ambivalence, in which I saw myself as embarrassingly juvenile (that is to say, squeamish and limited) and at the same time fetishistic in an offbeat sort of way, too, um, petty to warrant mention—or at least, that’s how I’ve often construed it, though the narrative hasn’t been particularly helpful.

 We were probably a few months into our relationship before we started talking in depth about our different sexual realities. It had been clear from the outset that our tastes weren’t particularly compatible, but we were caring lovers, and had found ways to enjoy each other physically as well as in other respects. Also, being sensible people, we weren’t attempting monogamy, since it was obvious that neither of us could completely meet the other’s needs.

One evening, Mark opened up the topic of his kinky tastes, telling me of a date he had arranged for a subsequent night. He was awkward and diffident; I sensed that he was fearing judgment, but my response was unequivocally affirming. I intuitively knew that this was an essential part of his journey, and I encouraged him without reservation. Our trust deepened, as Mark came to realize that I had no desire to limit his exploring, but on the contrary, wanted to support his unique path of individuation, wherever it might lead.

*   *   *

SADLY, BY THEN a shadow was already spreading over that path, although we couldn’t foresee how dark our sky would eventually turn. Indeed, Mark’s magic moment was already starting to end, even before it could be said to have truly begun. There may have been a near-perfect season, perhaps the summer he went to Crete, but soon enough there was the Briggs amendment, and then there were the assassinations, and the trial, and the riots—and although gay San Francisco continued to party, it was clear that the course of liberation wasn’t going to be as smooth as we might have wished. Mark was more determined than ever to foster queer consciousness and self-empowerment, and in many ways his most powerful days were still ahead of him, but his hour of sunshine had passed. Observing current events, and as always looking for corollaries in his own psyche, he unflinchingly named and “called out,” as we would say nowadays, the power of homophobia, external and internal, and its capacity for destroying lives.

And then, AIDS happened. It’s graven on my memory, that late afternoon in the spring of 1981, May or June I think, when I came to his apartment after his workday, and he told me about seeing a fellow-worker from The Advocate in the hospital, covered with KS lesions. “They’re calling it the gay cancer,” he said. As per the familiar trope, a metaphorical chill came over the room, despite the golden sunlight slanting in over dusty Buena Vista Park. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew in our bones that it couldn’t be good.

We could mostly ignore it at first. We went to a faerie gathering together over Labor Day of 1981, the third of the “national gatherings,” this one held in national forest at an altitude of some 7000 feet, an hour outside of Pecos, New Mexico; perhaps not surprisingly, it was cold and rainy the entire week we were there. James and Joel slept in their Volkswagen camper-bus at 5000 feet, and came up for a couple of daytimes, but James couldn’t tolerate the altitude, and then somehow they got word that James’s teenage son Orion had suffered serious head injuries in a motorcycle accident. Storm clouds. Rain. Reagan. GRID. Soggy heart circles, soggy tent, dubious food, and a sweatlodge which made me realize that sweatlodges are definitely not my thing. Oh, and a bunch of people who decided to call themselves the Revolting Hagettes.

That fall, wanting to reinvent myself as someone I wasn’t really equipped to be, I left my hippie flat and rented a loft space on the edge of SOMA, at 12th and Bryant. It wasn’t a happy choice, as it turned out, and although Mark did his best to support me, my depression was hard for both of us. Still, we continued doing things together—like starting a ’zine, I guess you’d call it, named Vortex, with a long-and-narrow format on newsprint, which we cooked up with Bradley Rose and Will Roscoe. With Will and Brad, James and Joel, and various other brilliantly insightful free spirits, a shared interest in words and design and meaning brought heartfelt connection that extended far beyond any specific project, often till death did us part.

After my year of living without car or coziness in a big empty loft, leaning unreasonably hard on Mark, I eagerly agreed when my dear friend and ex-lover Mica Kindman suggested that he and I co-create a faerie household in San Francisco. Within a few weeks of my move into the house that became Touchstone, Mark and I broke up. In the context of the epidemic and Reaganism and Mark’s deteriorating work situation, and my own embarkation on a new chapter after a year of serious depression, our breakup was gentle and matter-of-fact. Nothing much changed, in fact, except that we stopped sleeping together.

Already at the time of our meeting, Mark was beginning to feel scapegoated at The Advocate. The paper’s publisher and owner, a petty tyrant who recognized a good target when he saw one, took advantage of Mark’s carefully hidden vulnerability, insisting on calling him “arts editor” instead of Mark’s preferred “cultural editor,” and generally denigrating the second section, which of course included the infamous pink pages (where people found each other before the internet came along). Once again, as in his growing-up years, he was experiencing unanticipated slings and arrows, a pattern that sadly recurred all too often in his life.

*   *   *

THERE WAS REAL satisfaction for Mark in the relationship he developed with Barry Cundiff, a sweet, unassuming man with a passion for intense body sensation and kink. Their sexual connection met some powerful needs that Mark had become attuned to, and their participation in the rites of the faerie offshoot group Black Leather Wings was a profound experience for both of them. But the shadow of death was becoming omnipresent, and nothing was untouched. I can’t remember when Barry first got sick, but his health was already a concern, even before the next bomb hit.

As if the death all around us wasn’t enough, in 1985 the Advocate publisher announced that he was moving the paper to Los Angeles. With deep reluctance, Mark decided to keep the job, and to leave his beloved Bay Area home. The first year that he lived in L. A. he was desperately lonely, and I tried to call him every Saturday morning, from a corner phone booth where I could make free untraceable long-distance calls, using a code stolen by a bike-messenger friend from a corporate law office. With the sense of doom all around us, we got a bit of dark pleasure from knowing that those calls were paid for by some evil lawyers’ dime. 

As always, his antidote to suffering was work. In addition to his interviews and articles for The Advocate, he published his first book, Gay Spirit, in 1987. In it, he compiled a selection of writings focused on the psychic and spiritual aspects of queer experience. Consider this, from the introduction:

In a time of so much dying, the creation of consciousness born out of love is a miraculous act. [...] Where even hope has been betrayed as disposable commodity, there stands a vision of the future as magnificent and shimmering as the silver sword plunged into stone. The sword is known by many names. For some people the name is gay, and it has released them from a long-buried past. [...] This is parable, of course, but told in the manner best known to such storytelling: out of a compelling need. It is for this same reason that this book exists.

Here, as in many other places, Mark makes clear his overarching theme: that we queer folk have some special calling to bring to the world, something that the world needs, which we ourselves need to discover. That quest, that poking-around for whatever its essence might be, never stopped beckoning him, despite all the pain along the way.

Over time, he began to make his peace with Los Angeles. His meeting with Malcolm Boyd was certainly a turning-point for him, as it was for Malcolm as well. Once again, Mark was the pursued. At first he was thoroughly ambivalent about the attentions of this well-known Anglican priest, thirty years his senior, who was a substantial public figure: Mr. Gay Episcopal U. S. A., columnist, bestselling author, former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and before that, personal assistant to Mary Pickford, a classic reclusive aging silent-screen star.

For Mark, who found religion in the tidepools of the Monterey Peninsula and whose dearest intimates included multiply-pierced sex shamans, the idea of partnering with a mainstream Christian clergyman was a big stretch—but Malcolm persisted, and Mark accepted Malcolm’s suit, and together they bought a little house in Silverlake, where they made a happy home together until Malcolm’s death some thirty years later.

Not that their partnership was always easy. In the early years, Mark sometimes complained to me that Malcolm was like a spoiled child, and that he (Mark) felt like the housekeeper—but they softened into one another, and their reciprocal love and commitment were never in doubt. Mark did, indeed, do almost all the cooking and housework, but I think he came to accept it as just one of the costs of continuing to live, almost enjoyable in comparison with a disastrous new HIV cocktail or finding a voodoo paquette on the doorstep along with the daily newspaper.

Those were hard years, when his own deteriorating health dovetailed with vicious harassment, against a background of ongoing death and dying. That story is too distasteful to dwell on, but in essence, a couple of troubled people started projecting an imagined “betrayal of the faeries” onto Mark, presumably because he’d achieved a modicum of public success. The petty private humiliations and insulting public abuse they inflicted on him made his life miserable for something like a decade. Once again, as at so many other junctures of his life, Mark experienced underserved hostility, the product of others’ unexamined shadow. 

Did he bring this on himself? I don’t buy the finger-pointing implication, but we both agreed that certain pathologies seek out certain kinds of “screens” onto which to smear their unresolved shit/script—and as self-doubters, folks like Mark and I are subliminally recognized by people in the grip of these pathologies, and are targeted because we will eat the suffering they inflict instead of responding in kind. In this respect, both he and I were socialized “female” in the simplistic (but useful) binary paradigm, where female-socialized people internalize trouble and male-socialized people externalize it, looking for outside things/folks/events to blame. 

Internalization cost Mark a lot, especially in combination with HIV/AIDS. He paid dearly, in terms of both health and career. It became impossible for him to continue the trajectory he might otherwise have followed: that of a vigorous middle-aged writer bolstering his literary efforts with increasingly visible speaking engagements and an expanding public audience. He did his best, and his writing continued to rip open readers’ hearts with its honesty and courage; but his health, his nerves, his stamina were all precarious, and much of his energy was dedicated to Malcolm, who needed a good deal of backstage support. 

In effect, Mark became a kind of personal assistant to an aging celebrity. Not that Mark was jealous, since he never wanted the spotlight for himself; but supporting a husband sought by the spotlight was surely at times not easy for my old friend hovering in the wings. He fulfilled his duties as an Important Episcopal Spouse with remarkable grace, and I think he rather enjoyed cavorting with bishops and their wives; but I know there was a part of him that looked forward to communing with his own gods, naked at the ocean’s edge, or in a sacred grove with needles in his chest.

There was no space for that, though, in his burdened life. Consider the combination: behind-the-scenes caregiving duties; severe health challenges related to HIV and medication side-effects; long-term erratic harassment and subsequent PTSD; loss of editorial support; inability to continue full-time work and decision to go on disability with all of its financial constraints; ongoing responsibility for a certifiably crazy mother; more (thankfully, fewer) deaths of friends and acquaintances, even with a new generation of drugs; and, as the ubiquitous dark-grey background, an unimaginable burden of accumulated grief and loss. Small wonder that he felt moments of bitterness—the marvel of it is, not only did he (always) continue to write, but beyond that, he went and got himself a master’s degree in psychology and a therapist’s license, to help troubled queer youth and to add to his already extensive shamanic toolbag.

This would have been something like his third, maybe fourth, career. Did I mention photography? As a journalist at a low-budget weekly tabloid, he was expected to photograph the subjects of his interviews himself, and thanks to his studies in film and darkroom technique, he was already a good photographer when he took the Advocate job. His skills grew more sophisticated with the years, and his photo portfolio with accompanying texts, Fellow Travelers, is a masterpiece which is luckily available in digital form, as well as in a numbered edition of original prints.

*   *   *

WRITING, EDITING, PHOTOGRAPHY, clinical psychology, and then, in 2010, a new book project. Originally conceived in conjunction with Don Kilhefner, a Jungian psychologist who had started the L. A. Gay Community Services Center and co-organized the first “Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies” in 1979, the book was intended to fill a gap in the literature about and by the faerie tribe. Both initial plan and final product included essays, poetry, and reminiscences by a wide diversity of fae folk, ultimately brought to life through Mark’s persistence and skill.

Once again with this project, as with so many others, a painful episode intervened. For reasons he never publicly explained, Dr. Kilhefner withdrew from co-editorship and took an adversarial stance towards Mark and the book’s completion. In frustration and feeling that the work was too important to be abandoned, Mark pursued the project as editor in collaboration with Bo Young of White Crane Books, who ultimately published it under the title The Fire in Moonlight. It was a triumph, but a shadowed one, with personal hostility from a previously supportive colleague leaving him shaky and hurt.

In our private conversations, he called The Fire in Moonlight our love-child. I had no part in its conception, but maybe I was a foster-parent. Almost weekly, by phone and by email, I witnessed his initial enthusiasm, his distress at Don’s volte-face, and his resolve to see it completed. He sought my feedback, welcomed my essay about queers and global collapse, and asked me to organize the resource directory that Bo felt belonged in such a book—a perfect assignment for me at that moment, as I began a quest after my twenty-year leave of absence from the faeries, seeking queer intentional community. Mark supported me in that quest, just as I tried to support him in birthing his book—perhaps that’s why he called it our love-child, I’m not sure, but it feels sweet to think of it that way.

The publication of The Fire in Moonlight wasn’t the only bright spot in those later years with Malcolm. Their renewal of vows and legal marriage, celebrated with all the pomp that the Episcopal Church could lay on, was another; and there were occasional honors for each of them, and time with cherished friends, old and new, that offered respite from the exhaustion of living. Martinis were another solace, a reasonable source of comfort in an often adversarial world. 

As Malcolm approached his ninetieth birthday, interest in his life-story increased. Documentary filmmakers approached him about being the subject of a biographical feature, to which he agreed, and in short order Mark had become a central figure in the team that was creating the film. The plan was to follow Malcolm on a tour of places where he had worked in the South, but when the time came, he was too frail to make the trip. Consequently it was Mark who went with the filmmakers to interview the seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds who during the Freedom Summer of 1963 had hosted the charismatic, radical, recently-ordained white minister who was traveling round the region as a liaison to Dr. King, providing much-needed psychological and practical support. Mark spoke feelingly about the emotional welcome he’d received, as Malcolm’s husband, in the homes of these elderly veterans of the civil rights movement, who remembered Malcolm with gratitude and something approaching reverence.

*   *   *

DESPITE ONGOING CHALLENGES, things were mostly stable until Malcolm’s health finally broke down as he turned ninety. A brutal year followed, with hospitalizations and confusion and re-infections and all the rest of it, until he died in February of 2015. Mark was taxed to the limit, and although the death was in some ways a relief, it was also a devastating emotional loss for him—greater than I had imagined it would be. He was hit by a tsunami of grief. This was made additionally complicated by the fact that he was now an Important Episcopal Widow. There was something like a state funeral, and all kinds of responsibility—archives to be contacted, letters to be answered, who knows what-all that needed to be done. He was, I expect, very alone with his sorrow. But he devised a plan for moving forward with his life, realistic and firm.

Once upon a time, Mark and I had speculated about whether we might have another chapter together, under the same roof—but over time, it had become clear that our lives weren’t going to twine that way. I was looking for rural queer intentional community, and he needed financial security and reliable health care. He made a calculation: sell the house in Silverlake, buy a condo in Palm Springs, invest the difference (along with the small inheritance from Malcolm; there wasn’t much), and live off the interest. His life would need to be very modest, but there would be enough, and his health needs would be adequately covered.

He outlined the plan to me during his one visit to Groundswell, the community that I helped co-found in Mendocino County north of San Francisco. It was a sweet and poignant couple of days and nights that we shared then, his frailty obvious but his spirit strong, his support for the Groundswell experiment abundant. Soon after his visit, he sold the L. A. house and disposed of all the effects, everything except for the small amount of furniture and housewares, and large quantity of books, with which he would furnish the condo.

As I understand it, during the move he fell and injured himself, quite badly. For the first few months in Palm Springs he evidently saw no one except for the couple of close friends who had urged and facilitated his move, and doctors and surgeons. He didn’t tell me at the time; I suppose he was too embarrassed, and I didn’t call as often as I might have done.

And then, a miracle happened. On his doctor’s advice, he switched to a new combination of HIV meds, and for the first time in fifteen years or twenty years, he felt good. The constant plague of diarrhea was gone. he had begun to meet people, and life without Malcolm was beginning to feel normal.  

The return of well-being was miracle enough, but then, through the Black Leather Wings family/tribe, he was introduced to a highly intelligent, sensible, big-hearted and highly skilled kink practitioner, also recently moved to Palm Springs, who was ready to meet Mark more than halfway, as he hadn’t been met in at least a decade, maybe two. 

They hit it off. It was evidently good—very, very good. My last phone call with Mark took place as he was preparing for their second date.

I called because I had something important to tell him. For the second year in a row, Black Leather Wings was holding its annual summer gathering at Groundswell. Ever since I’d renewed my engagement with Bay Area queer life in March 2011, when I dramatically bonded with much of Mark’s kink family, I knew that I’d be welcome at BLW events, if I ever chose to participate. Up till the summer of 2016, I’d never felt called, but then, in celebration of Mark’s re-emergence into the light, and with his tribe gathered at the retreat center I’d helped found, it seemed important for me to do something for/with him in his physical absence, and I accepted the invitation to be a rare guest in their central rite, the hook pull. 

For maybe three hours, I moved through time and space with sturdy needles through the skin above my heart, the attached cords available for linking by carabiners to wires suspended from trees, to the cords of another person or persons, or to be used in other ways, as impulse might suggest. I did my best to investigate the pain, to make friends with it, and though I experienced no transcendent breakthroughs, it felt momentous nevertheless.

“I’m so proud of you!” said Mark when I called him to tell him about it, as I knew he would. Then, the last words he spoke to me: “I’m sorry I can’t talk more now, but I have a date in an hour, and I need to douche.”

Their second date happened, and Mark died a few days before their scheduled third. So, the existential question: was this a terrible time to die, or, on the contrary, a perfect one? Imagine: you’re finally on an upswing, after seemingly endless exhaustion and recurrent despair. Obviously, if you could be guaranteed twenty years on a plateau like that, you’d say yes to the offer—but life’s not like that, as Mark knew very well. So I like to think of it as good timing, as far as his own trajectory was concerned. The hole he left in his survivors’ hearts is big, but my first impulse was to wish him bon voyage, and that’s the vision I still hold. I see him joyous and free, gradually merging into the universal flow, leaving abundant blessings available for anyone open to receiving them. 

*   *   *

HIS WORK, OF COURSE, is his legacy. I have been re-reading his books, and am struck anew by the unflinching honesty of his exploration, the depth with which he probes inherited trauma, dubious truisms, and emergent insights. It saddens me that his writing has largely fallen out of view; my hope is that it will be “rediscovered” by a new generation of readers, who will recognize the ongoing value of his words:

The point is, gay men like myself have much tending of our psychic houses to do. One hundred years after the invention of the term homosexuality in the modern west, and a quarter century past rebelling against its stupefying effects, we’re either dazed from sorting out fact from too much fiction or are lost in the woods with no moral compass. Some live in denial, a kind of willful deep sleep induced by sex, drugs, or lack of reflection, while others have abdicated caring altogether, riding along on the wrong bus.

As deeply feeling men who have been robbed of feelings, we have no choice now but to know ourselves completely. Where is our joy? Our rage? Where are the stories and myths that will lead us back to where our true self lies? Asking these questions is the better act of survival.

One critique that can be made of Mark’s work is that it disproportionately privileges the gay male experience, and doesn’t fully recognize the value of situating it within the larger, more diverse reality that some of us now call “queer.” Mark would say that, as an essayist writing out of his own experience, he didn’t want to stray too far from his home ground, and he didn’t, in fact, have much contact with the “big-tent queerdom” that’s been emerging in recent years, which saddens me, because I think he would have been excited to witness it.

Mark has also been criticized for an essentialist view, as if he were entirely dismissive of the lines of thought which see homosexuality as a social construct. In fact, he readily acknowledged the value of that schema, but he refused to accept it as the whole story. He saw nothing simplistically or mono-dimensionally. This was one of his strengths as a thinker; and, unlike many thinkers, he was at home both with theory and with the insights of the heart. “I finally saw that my homosexuality possessed its own immutable truth, an inner reality existing beyond any outside reason. […] I persist in my belief that queer eros holds multiple purpose in our lives—pedagogic, religious, creative, even altruistic—beyond the near-meaningless context it’s been assigned.”

So, how to sum up this one queer life? That it was hard, I know; also multi-faceted, presumably in more ways than I’m aware of. I’m sure there were many moments of joy, but despite all his public self-disclosure, he was a very private person, and doubtless there were significant realms of his psyche that I never heard anything about. On the other hand, he was consistently vulnerable with me, indeed often raw, and I tried to offer succor as I could. 

I wonder how many others saw as much of his vulnerability as I did. I ask this question not as a competitive counting game of who knew what, but as a portal into some of his archetypes: loneliness, autonomy, authority, the shaman’s path.

This last is what I want to leave you with; it’s the piece that matters most to me. In this era when consciousness is debased at every turn, his commitment to truth-telling seems not unlike a shamanic calling, a mediation between realms of experience. Mark led a profoundly examined life. The best tribute any of us can pay him is to do the same.

Who and To What End

Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness

William Stewart

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BACK IN 2010, my old friend Mark Thompson invited me to write a piece for an anthology about the radical faeries that he was starting to compile along with a sometime collaborator, in hopes of filling a gap in the literature about a phenomenon which he considered to be as signficant as anything he’d witnessed during his thirty-five year career of observing and documenting gay culture in America. That impetus resulted in the book that eventually came out under Mark’s sole editorship, titled The Fire in Moonlight: A Radical Faerie Reader, and I was honored to have my essay included in it.

Mark initially asked me to write about Harry Hay, who as much as anyone had galvanized the modern radical faerie movement into being in the late 1970s, after decades of theorizing and activism. But despite the importance of Harry’s legacy, I realized that I didn’t want it to be my primary topic, and instead decided to pursue a conceptual thrust of my own, using Harry’s work only as a starting-point for my more personal message. I called the resulting essay “Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness,” and I still think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever written, though in retrospect I see significant weak spots in it that I hope to remedy here. 

Broadly speaking, my piece addresses the question of whether there’s a special role for queer people in the context of systemic global collapse. Surely, the rationale for such an examination is at least as great as it was when I first wrote: our horrific planetary trajectory has only gathered speed since then, and as for why the situation deserves to be viewed through a queer lens, all I can say is, it’s of vital concern to me personally, since my involvement with queer culture is second only to my existential dread about environmental and societal catastrophe in terms of issues that claim pride of place in my list of energetic priorities.

In considering how to rework my material, I’ve pin-pointed two areas of concern that seem particularly problematic. The first of these relates to the topic of gender, which has been intertwined with questions of radical faerie identity since the term first surfaced, and indeed since long before that. In the original version of this piece, I introduced my subject by referring to “the people Harry Hay variously called third-gender folk, non-assimilationist gays, two-spirits, and Radical Faeries.” This was a bit of artful dodging on my part, devised in order to sidestep a problem that I didn’t want to deal with at the time, and therefore need to revisit now. If I’m to use an editorial “we” to express a viewpoint that I think should be widely shared, I need to be clear in my own mind about who I’m talking to, and on behalf of—in other words, like the queer of Khartoum in the limerick who had a lesbian up to his room, I want to shed light, if not literally argue all night, about who has the right “to do what, and with which, and to whom.”

When I first encountered the radical faerie swirl that was emerging in San Francisco in the late 1970’s, there were many unknowns, but one thing, at least, was clear: whatever else we may or may not have been, we were a subset of the category “gay men.” We were conditioned by a profoundly binary world-view, in which humans were either male or female; and while we were determined to investigate what kind of men we were, and while certainly there were moments when we saw the whole construct as simplistic, we nevertheless unquestioningly accepted the notion that ours was a quest by, for, and about men. We eagerly looked to the women’s movement for inspiration, the discourse of radical feminism provoked and inspired us, and lesbian separatists got us to thinking about how we, too, might want to form our own autonomous communities—but always, the “we” of our conversation was a bunch of theoretically progressive-minded and spiritually-oriented gay men, who were, not coincidentally, almost exclusively white, largely middle-class, and typically shaped by an educational system which, however much we may have rebelled against it, nevertheless validated a broadly shared world-view. In ways that were genuinely powerful, but also more narrowly self-referential than we realized, when we sat in circle and looked around the room, we saw…ourselves. 

In the early 1980’s, I was part of a faerie-identified group that started meeting with the dream of establishing a residential community in rural northern California, and ended up taking collective ownership of the Wolf Creek Sanctuary—a property in southern Oregon that had been in use for gatherings and informal tenancy for over a decade through the generosity of its owner, who was eager to have the land legally entrusted to community hands in perpetuity. We named ourselves Nomenus, amused by the trope of “no men us” as an imagined answer to the question “who are you?” —but in truth, the assumption was always that Wolf Creek would be owned and governed by self-identifying faerie men, as delineated in our non-profit articles of incorporation. 

As it happened, I began pulling away from radical faerie culture soon after the acquisition of the Wolf Creek property, troubled by the dysfunction that I saw there, wanting to honor my commitment to provide emotional support to people with AIDS through the Shanti Project, and generally feeling drawn to other priorities. As a result, I missed the turmoil of succeeding years, when more and more people not falling in the category of “gay male” learned of the faerie phenomenon and declared that they, too, were radical faeries and were entitled to be part of the burgeoning tribe. Some long-standing community members were resistant, but the newcomers pointed out that no less an authority than Harry Hay himself had insisted that the essence of “our” identity lay in the kinds of social roles we were called to fulfill, and not in a narrow biological determinism per se. Having felt powerfully drawn to the faerie ethos, these women—a mere handful at first, but in larger numbers as the years went by—became an increasingly widespread presence in the rad-fae culture, in many ways bringing new life to pools that had suffered severe attrition from the predations of AIDS, homophobia, and all the other insidious forces at work during the Reagan-Bush era. 

Consequently when I reconnected with the radical faeries in 2009 after a twenty-odd-year leave of absence, I found a community that looked very different from the one I’d left behind. Male-identified, female-identified, transsexual, non-binary, trans-gender, cis-gender, gender-non-conforming, and in-betweens of all kinds were represented in faerie circles—not in equal proportion, to be sure, and not without a certain amount of bias and tension, but the admixture was evident. Here was proof that, in principle at least, neither sexual identity nor sexual preference was determinative of whether you were or were not a radical faerie.

This demographic shift reflected a turn of events that I wouldn’t have predicted. When we “non-conforming,” “counter-culture” gay men started coming together for collective consciousness-raising in the late 1970s, we never imagined becoming role models for anyone else: on the contrary, we (or at least I) visualized the road ahead as being one of emulation, whereby we would do our best to follow in the footsteps of our lesbian-feminist sisters, whose critiques of the dominant culture were so much more cogent than our own tentative explorations. Why would anyone want to tag along with us, a bunch of faggots just beginning to figure things out, easily distracted by silliness and desire, when other liberation movements offered such high seriousness of purpose?—at least, that was the thrust of my wondering, before my path diverged from that of the faeries and led me towards other interests and priorities. It never occurred to me that what I’d seen as our frivolity, our propensity to care more about fabulous outfits than political correctness, might hold active appeal for folks wearied by years of humorless leftist discourse. But such, in fact, was the case: many of the newcomers I met after returning to the tribe affirmed it, and I saw for myself how playfulness and high intention could, in fact, be complementary and not automatically antithetical as I had previously tended to assume. 

Most of these newcomers were women, and it was a joy to find myself in community with them. For my entire life, the most durable and nurturing relationships I’ve experienced have been with women, and the presence of women in faerie circles seemed self-evidently appropriate the moment I encountered it. But then, the possibility that had drawn me to the radical faeries in the first place had been that of finding with other gay men the kind of intimacy that I already knew with my female friends: the impulse was toward expansion, not exclusion. I saw, and still see, the value of separatist space for certain kinds of consciousness work; but the idea of a community defined by maleness had never appealed to me, and when I reconnected with the tribe of the new millennium, I unhesitatingly joined with the “inclusionists” in being ready to welcome everyone who felt called to participate, regardless of genital equipment or predilection. 

This impulse also led me to adopt without reservation the designation “queer.” Queerness, in my perspective, is a way of viewing and moving through the world: it entails the rejection of heteronormativity (also the parallel phenomenon, homonormativity), and instead embraces a multidimensional paradigm that doesn’t privilege any one set of “lifestyle choices” (ugh) over another. In other words, it’s not about what you’ve got or what you do with it; it’s about how you live, what you believe in, and how much you’re willing to commit in order to bring it one step closer to reality.  

With regard to this perspective, it seems to me that Harry Hay wanted it both ways: yes, I believe he claims, our identity as a specific subset of the general population derives from our cultural roles, and not from what we do in bed and who we do it with—but “we,” nevertheless, are biological males who are attracted to and partner with other biological males, if not exclusively then at least in the overwhelming majority of cases. To put it simplistically, we’re a bunch of gay men who are distinctive not because we’re gay men but because we’re shamans, healers, etc., except that we’re shamans and healers because we’re gay men. Now, I certainly do Harry a disservice with this cartoon portrayal of his views; but I still think that there’s a certain amount of “unclear on the concept” involved, which I’d like to bring into a bit more focus if I can.

In my opinion, the most helpful lens for viewing this conundrum is the concept of statistical correlation. I want to suggest that there’s a frequent overlap between non-standard (minority) gender identity and/or sexual preference, on the one hand, and typical social function, on the other. Not a one-to-one correspondence, and not a statistically meaningless coincidence either—instead, a characteristic falling-together of psycho-social and psycho-sexual tendencies, which can loosely be clustered under the rubric of “queer.”

I like this conceptual framework of big-tent queerdom, partly because it feels comfortable to me, but more importantly, because of the inclusive energy that it fosters. I have no interest in converting people to homosexuality per se, even if the notion were not as preposterous as it is disrespectful; but I emphatically do want to advocate for queerness as I’m construing it, and indeed—to circle back to my larger theme—to make the case that our planetary destiny depends on making the world a more queer-spirited place.

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UP TO THIS POINT, I’ve been trying to identify who, in my opinion, might be called upon to steward humanity through the dark days ahead. Now, for a moment, I want to consider the character of the change that I believe is necessary. Much of my 2010 piece, which follows this introductory section, focuses on this issue; but before I finish here, I want to pivot from the subject of culturally-determined gender to “gender” in the realm of the archetypal, and to introduce into the discourse a concept that I’ll call the deep feminine. It’s a charged term, because it’s based on the premise that there’s a spiritual dimension to reality, and that psychic energies are an active factor in shaping the lives of individuals, communities, and our evolutionary destiny as a whole. 

I feel a strong imperative here to assert the felt truth of this premise, in anticipation of a rationalist critique which would claim that there is no material evidence for it. On the contrary, I would argue, the history of the last ten thousand years provides overwhelming evidence that we neglect the life of the spirit at our peril. Far from being mutually contradictory, the two stories—the social and the archetypal—are in fact equally valid: the lived experience of gender prejudice has been hugely damaging in countless individual lives, and at the same time the disappearance of the deep feminine from the collective psyche has caused an incalculable amount of harm on the planetary level, and is arguably at the root of why we, as a species, have gotten it so wrong for the last dozen or so millennia.

Evidence suggests that in paleolithic times, humans generally lived more or less in equilibrium with their environments, with largely stable population numbers and with natural resources exploited slowly enough for ecological self-regulation to redress any imbalances. That all changed, of course, with the discovery of agriculture, when for the first time, the possibility of surplus was revealed. 

With the advent of surplus, cultures ceased to reverence the principles symbolized by the Great Mother. Motivated by greed and the lust for power, small male elites took control of the production, accumulation, and distribution of resources of all kinds, following a curve of exponential growth that now threatens the very existence of life on earth.

This, in my view, is ultimately a consequence of the displacement of the deep feminine from our collective psyche. And even in contexts where one would like to imagine that a greater degree of awareness would prevail, such as in radical queer communities, its absence makes itself felt. All too often, we joke about, parody, or pay empty lip-service to the notion of putting the archetypal feminine at the center of our community life, while continuing to demonstrate through our choices and behavior the narcissism, wastefulness, and disregard for anything not in our immediate self-interest that characterize the larger society as a whole. For me, the task before us is not primarily about things like goddess rituals, though such practices can be useful consciousness-building tools in the right spirit; the real invitation that I see, which is also an imperative, is to make space for the demise of the masculinist paradigm, which must give way (read: come crashing down) in order for something more viable to emerge. 

I’m using the term “masculinist paradigm” on account of its potential shock value, since only something that truly shakes us can suggest the extremity of the peril we face, and the immensity of the task ahead. The construct of patriarchy, while certainly an essential tool of analysis, doesn’t fully get to the heart of the matter: patriarchy is a primary manifestation of masculinism, but the phenomenon is greater than that. The term toxic masculinity, similarly, pokes at the edges of the problem—but what I need to say here is that we’re dealing with a force that is in the process of destroying the world. Call it what you will, we must break its spell: only through the overthrow of the all-pervasive masculinist paradigm, and through the restoration of the deep feminine at the heart of our collective spiritual life, do we stand a chance. 

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AT THE BEGINNING of this new introduction to my 2010 essay, I stated that there were two topics that I would need to address before I’d be willing to submit a revised version to a contemporary readership. The first of these has been relatively easy to discuss, because even when I wrote my original draft, I knew that my call for emotional and spiritual availability in the face of incipient collapse needed to go out to as broad a spectrum of queer people as possible, even if I didn’t delve into what the latter might mean. It’s been important for me to probe this question, and to explicitly state why I believe that restoration of the archetypal deep feminine must be at the heart of our work—but none of this is unfamiliar territory for me, and for the most part I’ve simply articulated understandings and intuitions that were already part of my awareness, long before I began to write this piece.

I wish I could say the same about the other big subject that I need to discuss here, but like all white people, I’ve been profoundly unconscious about systemic racism and its ubiquitous impact on our society. It’s only since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement that I’ve begun to seriously examine my own complicity in this system, which so pervades all aspects of our lives that it’s invisible to those like myself who benefit from it—it’s the water in which I swim, and no more than the fish can I see it as something other than reality itself, at least not without an intensive re-education program, which I’m determined to undertake but also know can only be partial and incomplete. 

At least, when a bunch of us gay men started gathering as radical faeries in the late ’70s, it was the result of a conscious choice that our group was to be all-male and wouldn’t include women. By contrast, we had no equivalent awareness of how we were excluding people of color; we were just getting together with others of our kind, and our kind “just happened” to be white.

As a matter of fact, there was a tiny handful of non-white participants in the early faerie circles I was involved with, and I can only imagine (no, I can’t imagine; that’s part of the problem, that I should presume that I could) what their experience must have been like, in such an overwhelmingly eurocentric environment. I, for one, never gave it much thought—a classic example of the obliviousness that’s enabled racism to flourish in society and in the individual human heart.

Of course, as good progressives, we were in principle aligned with the movements of Black and other minority communities to liberate themselves from systemic oppression. We believed in solidarity, and gained insight from reading, for example, statements from groups like the Black Panthers, whose incisive critiques of police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, blanket covert surveillance, and all the rest of it were eye-opening to say the least. But we were reading about those realities, not experiencing them. I, for one, remained comfortable in my oblivious “liberal” racism, never noticing how white privilege upheld and undergirded every aspect of my supposedly principled life.

As I look toward the future, and make the claim that queer people have a unique calling in the face of collapse, I see an absolute imperative to put dismantling white supremacy at the heart of our agenda, along with challenging pervasive masculinism, confronting gender categorization, and making space for the deep feminine as the ground and spiritual substance of all being. Standing at the intersection of multiple kinds of oppression, queer people of color can speak to the reciprocally-amplifying impacts of colonization, expropriation, sexual violence, environmental abuse, and the egregious dehumanization that accompanies resource-extractive capitalism as no one else can. I firmly believe that as a white person in the twenty-first century, my obligation is to make this point as forcefully as I can, and then to get out of the way and listen.

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FOR A MOMENT, as I pondered how to update my 2010 essay for a new audience, I considered the possibility of a total rewrite, and of trying to weave my insights about gender and race into the fabric of the whole. Upon further thought, however, I decided not to go that route, and rather to write a substantial new introduction and to leave my original text essentially unchanged. What follows, then, is that earlier version, modified only by a few editorial tweaks and by a rewritten first sentence. 

Why change the first sentence? Because that was where I’d used the slippery language about “the people Harry Hay variously called third-gender folk, non-assimilationist gays, two-spirits, and radical faeries”—and since one of my primary goals in this upgrade was to tease apart some of the confusion around gender, group membership, and radical faerie identity, I couldn’t let it stand. So here, with one critical substitution in that opening line, is my original essay, “Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness”:

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AT THE CORE of Harry Hay’s vision was the belief that we (see above) have a calling and responsibility to be of service in the communities that we are part of, in keeping with our experience and inclinations. Among our typical traits, in his view, are the skills of artists, healers, tricksters, shamans, ritual-makers, and intermediaries between the worlds. The offering of these skills for the benefit of society as a whole, he maintained, is central to our purpose, our reason for being here.

Harry’s claim that social function rather than sexual preference should be seen as the defining characteristic of our kind is as radical now as when he first conceived of it in the dark days of McCarthyism. Bruised by the collapse of the original Mattachine and deeply troubled by the direction of postwar society, he had immersed himself in anthropological studies, and had moved to the Southwest in order to connect more deeply with the indigenous cultures there. Out of these investigations, cross-pollinating with his intuition and Marxist education, there emerged his pivotal insight that we queer folk have an essential role to play in maintaining and enhancing the common good.

Based on his research, Harry believed that this was implicitly accepted in traditional societies across the world, as manifest in the frequent existence of classes of individuals with special status and obligations as ritualists, medicine persons, and the like. If this is the anthropological norm, then Western culture’s stigmatization of nonstandard gender identities is actually an aberration, of a piece with all the other ways in which our society has deviated from healthy, sustainable practices in order to pursue exploitation on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, in this analysis the persecution of homosexuals and other people of “deviant” tendencies is intimately linked with the rapacious capitalism and spiritual fragmentation of modern life. In its greed to plunder the earth and its peoples, our expansionist global society has dangerously upset the balance of things, and has ostracized the very folk most attuned to what’s actually happening—the shamans, the visionaries, and the walkers-between-worlds, who are disproportionately often also the queers.

Harry died in 2002, with many hopes and many fears for the future of our tribe. Now, as we go deeper into the twenty-first century, I believe that we have an obligation to take this line of thinking to an entirely new level, in this era when resource depletion, climate change, and environmental degradation loom ever larger on the horizon. The sacred stewardship identified by Harry as our archetypal vocation, which the dominant culture desperately needs but pathologically rejects, will be tested and tempered in ways we can scarcely imagine as the planet faces collapse on an unprecedented scale. 

For we are confronted by nothing less. Perhaps, if these imminent crises were independent of each other, the high-tech quick-fix approach might be adequate to address them individually—but even though the prevailing paradigm insists on seeing such phenomena in isolation, ignoring their overarching context, in fact they’re all manifestations of the same self-amplifying system of beliefs and behaviors that threatens the very foundations of planetary life. It’s no accident that climate change is spiralling out of control just as fossil-fuel scarcities approach a tipping point, or that languages, species, and entire ecosystems are disappearing at similarly accelerating rates. These and an endless list of other meltdowns—environmental, economic, social, spiritual—are all ultimately the result of human ingenuity run amok, acting on the disastrous misapprehension that the world’s natural resources can be exploited without negative consequences and essentially without end.

It’s not hard to see how this error arose. Until recently, all the evidence suggested that it was true. Beginning with the development of agriculture some ten millennia ago, we as a species have been manipulating our environment with ever-increasing effectiveness, enabling a trajectory of exponential growth. It’s only in this unique historical moment, when for the first time we are able to view the entire human experiment as a single episode in the context of planetary time, that the inherent unsustainability of the growth model has become apparent. From this perspective “civilization” is an anomaly of breathtaking proportions: never before has one species so completely dominated the planet, capitalizing on the evolutionary edge of its large brain size and taking advantage of an unusual interval of climate stability to drastically increase its numbers and power through plant and animal husbandry, resource extraction, and social control.

It’s an open question whether this pattern of human development would have been sustainable without the additional factor of fossil fuels. But once humankind discovered the secret of concentrated energy, the genie was out of the bottle. Expansion on a previously unimaginable scale became possible, and naturally, as a species determined to maximize control over everything around us, we took advantage of the opportunities available. 

This one-time unrepeatable raid on the strongbox of petrochemicals has fueled a binge of mind-boggling proportions. Burning up eons of stored sunlight, we have exhausted most of the readily accessible sources of these substances within just a couple of centuries, enabling us to briefly, grossly, exceed our planet’s carrying capacity, with unheeded environmental consequences accruing all the while. Even those aspects of petroleum-driven growth which may seem the most benign—I am thinking of things like modern agriculture and medicine, which have made possible massive global population growth and, for some, a better quality of life—can now be seen as deeply problematic, because they have increased the burden of global unsustainability.

Immersed as we are in this era of overextended carbon-leveraged growth, our natural inclination is to experience it as “normal,” and a significant effort of consciousness is required to discern just how far removed from any previous reality our current situation is. But in truth, we are in dangerously uncharted territory. And this is precisely where we queer folk come in—for who better than we, with our outsider status and our multi-focal vision, to see beyond the insidious trance that holds society transfixed? While the “well-adjusted” sleepwalk through a world of material glut and anomie, we walkers-on-the-edge are already ahead of the curve in our ability to comprehend the spiritual bankruptcy and potentially catastrophic consequences of the Western way of life. 

I don’t mean to suggest that this take on our global predicament is uniquely ours. Many provocative thinkers unconcerned with sexual identity have argued that we’re heading for collapse, and their conclusions are no less valid just because a queer perspective isn’t part of their analyses. But even though it’s not necessary to look through Harry’s “gay window” in order to see the peril we face, I believe that we queer folk have an important insight to bring to the table. As mediators between the multiple dimensions of reality, we have a predisposition to see the essential spiritual character of the coming global crisis. Our window reveals how it’s the psyche of the modern world that is fundamentally out of balance; all the other imbalances are tied to this disease of the soul, and nothing short of a revolution of consciousness will be enough to turn the tide. 

Like addicts generally, our culture is hugely invested in denial. We grasp at the delusion that solar panels and clean coal and carbon-trading protocols will allow us to continue on our current path with only minimal sacrifice, as if the whole superstructure of modern life were not built on the myth that we can always spend our way out of trouble. Like mediaeval sinners buying indulgences, we imagine that we can trade up to an ever-grander fantasy while ignoring our ever-larger debt—fiscal, environmental, psychological, and spiritual. Hooked on the rush made possible by fossil fuels, we insist that we can maintain increasing population and resource extraction without courting disaster; and we eagerly devour the media blandishments proffered endlessly for our consumption by commercial and political power-holders who pander to those beliefs out of venal self-interest, since that’s where their short-term profits lie.

I do not claim for us queer visionaries a messianic calling to turn the world from the error of its ways. We may have some insight into what’s happening, but even in conjunction with our many allies in awareness, I believe that we are powerless to stop it. The momentum of uncontrolled growth and its destructive impact is simply too great to be reversed, no matter how many of us in the vigilant minority put our shoulders to the wheel. 

No, only collapse will break the cycle. We could, perhaps, use our trickster ways to marginally hasten it along—but destructive energy most often backfires, and in any case, the process will follow its own trajectory, so intervention would serve no meaningful end. Just as the addict must hit some sort of bottom before recovery can begin, so the requisite shift in consciousness will become possible only when global expansionism falls apart under the weight of its own overreach. 

It’s unproductive to speculate about how, exactly, the coming crisis will play out. The points of vulnerability are virtually endless, and chaos in any one of them could trigger a domino effect among the others. We can only hope that the process will begin sooner rather than later, since the longer current patterns prevail, the more brutal the ultimate debacle will be. Even a high bottom will create enormous suffering for our own and our kindred species, while a few more centuries of heedless consumption could condemn all life on earth.

This is why I put my faith in collapse. The sooner the growth model crumbles, the greater our chance of salvaging some measure of human culture, some fragments of viable ecosystems, some potential of spirit from the wreckage. In breakdown lies our last, best hope of redemption.

And then, my fellow faerie shamans-in-waiting, the world will need us as never before. In those dark days, if I read the omens right, a mighty and solemn task will be ours, provided that we can accept it. In short, I believe that our calling as queer spirit folk will be to midwife the death of the world.

For who knows better than we how to face the dark? Throughout history we have embraced the shadow, challenged denial, flirted with death. We dance close to the fire; many of us have gotten our wings burned, and not a few have gone up in smoke. Unlike the bulk of humanity, stupefied by falsity and averse to any psychic travail, our queer tribe knows how to meet the demons—our own, and also those of the dominant culture, which cannot see that it is about to be consumed by the unacknowledged shadow within. And thus are we tempered: because, while the collective psyche of modern society will have no bulwark against disintegration when its material scaffold crumbles, we have the tools to hold the sacred circle, even as everything around us falls apart. 

We have done it before. We kept the flame alive during the plague years, when our own gay world was turned upside down and shaken to the core. And perhaps our experience with AIDS was just a foretaste of the work that lies ahead. Perhaps what we did for our own immediate kin—tending them, bearing ritual witness, calling on the ancestors to ease their passage onward —is what we will be summoned to do for the planet itself in its hour of mortal need.

Our strength lies in our heart-energy. The essential truth we know is this: in a world of endangered resources, the one inexhaustible resource is love. With mineral and bio-wealth exploited and abused to the point of near-terminal depletion, with oceans dying and a suffocating shroud of toxins enveloping the globe, where else to turn but deep inside, to the pure well of our hearts? Compassion, insight, imagination—these are assets which are not depleted by use, and should be squandered lavishly, because they’re actually self-renewing. We’re creators of magic and ritual, and we don’t need tinsel and Christmas lights to do it; the key ingredient is spirit, and we have it in abundance. Sacred keening, ceremonial rites and intercessions with the gods, trance and tenderness, heart circles and wild play and daredevil laughter in the dark night of catastrophe: these are some of the skills we’ve assembled that will allow us to undertake the shaman’s journey on behalf of our imperiled Mother Earth. 

So gaze into the fire with me now, let it take us far into the future, a thousand years hence. See a time when all our current social and technological infrastructure is gone, when the biosphere has been convulsed by loss and countless humans and other species have died in the fight for what remains. Find some little resilient band of queers, determined despite everything to bring an element of grace to a desecrated world. And what are they doing? Holding a dying child perhaps, or telling tales of songbirds gone extinct; stretching the soup a little further, invoking rain for the growing season, ritually carrying nature’s grief, welling up with heartache joy that love and play and magic still live on. 

Yes, windfarms must be built, wetlands restored, patterns of living reinvented. None of these efforts are wasted. What better way to spend a lifetime, in the shadow of incipient doom? Regardless of the outcome, it makes karmic sense for us to do what we can, here and now, to minimize the damage we have done.

But material remediation alone will never turn the tide. Like the addict, we as a species need to recognize the extremity of our sickness, and surrender our ego-driven will to the deeper wisdom of animals and plants, of stones and seas and stars. Of course we resist this reckoning, because we instinctively know how painful it will be. But face it we must, since cataclysm will confront us with the results of our hubris, and the suffering will be great. 

 And in anticipation of that moment, to my fellow beings I say this: we, your queer-spirit servitors and intermediaries, will hold you in your anguish. We will not flinch from our responsibility to witness the planet’s despair. Indeed, in the coming epoch of collapse you will see us emerge into the fullness of our being, in strength and humility and heart. This, I believe, is the sacred task awaiting us queer-spirit folk: to steward the end of the world, and to hold space for its rebirth.

The Button

William Stewart

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ON THE LAPEL of her winter coat, my mother used to wear a button that said “grub first, then art.” Or at least, that’s how I remember it; a bit of research suggests that the text was probably “grub first, then ethics.” The quote is from Bertolt Brecht, and his message, as I now understand it, is that survival must be secured before morality can be considered. But that’s not the sense I got from the words on her lapel, whatever they may have been. I took “grub” to stand for material needs, as distinct from anything abstract, metaphysical, or aesthetic; and, with more angst than discernment, I interpreted the opposing category as referring to those aspects of reality that mattered most to me, the ethereal and fantastic, which were, in my susceptible projection, unacceptable by the standards implied by the button. 

I was, in those days, an unhappy and disoriented adolescent, by preference spending most of my time in solitude, adrift in moodiness and confusion. From that place of lonely self-absorption,  I experienced the words on my mother’s button as a daily reproach. I had thoroughly internalized the emerging family ethos that activism—“grub”—was all that mattered, yet here I was, a solitary teenager who recoiled from engagement with civic concerns. In truth, I could hardly tear myself away from my fantasy-realms for lunch, let alone for the sit-ins and protest marches that figured prominently in my parents’ lives.

As a result, on some visceral level, I knew that my priorities were just plain wrong. If grub (or rather, the provision of grub, and voting rights, and all the rest of it) should always come first, with creativity and imagination kept on hold until justice rolls down like a mighty stream, then my preference for living in worlds of my own devising must surely damn me to moral failure, even though I had no will to make it otherwise.

This belief was animated by a revolution of sorts that had recently taken place in my family. In the fall of 1966, responding to a request from Brown University higher-ups, my father had reluctantly agreed to leave his perch in Brown’s genteel math department in order to spend a semester teaching at Tougaloo, a historically black college in Mississippi with which Brown had established a sister-school relationship not long before, in solidarity with the growing civil rights movement. Within weeks of his arrival at Tougaloo, he was a changed man: his letters home burned with outrage at the conditions that he saw, and sang the praises of the righteous African-Americans he was meeting who were determined to bring about change.

My mother had always been something of a radical, but prior to my father’s sojourn in Mississippi, her activist instincts had been kept in check by a grudging acquiescence to the conventions of the day that assigned her the role of wife and mother. This was augmented by a certain deference to my father’s temperamental conservatism, which she challenged but also respected, especially during the early years of their marriage when the heavy hand of Eisenhower-era conformity still held sway. But when my father came back from the south, glowing with previously unimaginable passion, the two of them plunged into action with a vengeance, and civil rights became the order of the day. I remember saying once at dinner, both hesitantly and explosively as I imagine it now: “Can’t we talk about something other than politics?” After a moment of stunned silence, I’m sure that one or other of them gently asked what topic I’d prefer, since they were loving parents who were, as I now realize, at a painful loss as to how to deal with their highly intelligent but socially awkward, emotionally volatile, and undeniably eccentric only child. I don’t recall what happened next, but the incident sticks in my mind, a telling snapshot of the kitchen table during those tumultuous years.

The occasional outburst notwithstanding, my usual mode of participation in our three-way family dynamic involved a kind of sullen, passive resistance. My psyche was largely immobilized by an invisible tug-of-war: on the one hand, I was pulled towards fantasy as if by gravity itself, but at the same time I constantly heard the voice of the parent within, condemning me as bad. Lodged deep in my subconscious was a relentless parental authority figure, quite unlike my well-meaning, clueless real-world parents who would never have dreamt of expressing disapproval towards the changeling in their midst. No, the parent that oppressed me was the one that dwelled inside my head.

I certainly never heard harsh judgments from my parents’ lips, though of course they tried to steer me in what they hoped were healthy ways. If anything, I was an overindulged child, at least in terms of what was spoken: the main directive I remember from my mother was, “you can do whatever you like, so long as it makes you happy.” The trouble was, nothing seemed to work. I had enthusiasm, but underneath my excitability was a melancholy that felt untouchable and pervasive. Paradoxically, my parents’ permissiveness reinforced my defeatism, instead of mitigating it: if I could do whatever I wanted, and yet even with all that freedom still couldn’t find anything that would shake me out of my depression, then surely I was culpable, since I couldn’t please my parents despite being given carte blanche to follow my heart’s desire. And so, in a self-perpetuating pattern, I kept looking at the same old books and artifacts, kept drawing the same imaginary subjects over and over again, prevented by guilt and shame from attempting anything different that might upset the no-win status quo, the stalemate dominating my household and my soul.

And then there was that button. Grub first. How could I fail to imagine covert judgment, when that was the message my mother put forth to the world? How could I feel safe in her all-enveloping love, while in her public person she so harshly condemned the self-indulgence and inertia I knew I was guilty of?

The core of the conundrum, I now believe, was that without either of us being aware of it, she was using me as a vehicle for dealing with internal conflicts that she couldn’t resolve on her own. Profoundly self-critical, she could never live up to her own high standards: “Be like your father, not like me,” she used to say—that is, don’t get caught up in emotional drama as I have been. I think she hoped that maybe, if she could just give me enough of her own under-utilized essence, I could achieve the fulfillment that had eluded her. Maybe, in other words, she could redeem her sense of failure by living vicariously through me. 

This pattern was exacerbated by her ambivalence about her marriage. Despite her injunction that I take my father as a role model, the very steadiness that she esteemed in him and urged me to emulate was also deeply frustrating for her, junkie for big emotion that she was. On top of that, his two semester-long sojourns in Mississippi, while on the one hand feeding her passion for the good cause, also left her feeling abandoned and alone, with no one to turn to for reassurance but me.

As a result, while her intention was undoubtedly to be supportive, I mostly experienced her as invasive and needy. Her hunger for me to be free of demons, running up against my actual inner turmoil, led me to feel like I was being pulled into a web of enmeshment that I had to avoid as best I could. Her need triggered my resistance, my resistance triggered her feelings of hurt and exclusion, and so on, in a self-amplifying feedback loop.

To some extent, I think, this dynamic was present even in my earliest years, but it intensified dramatically when I hit puberty. Once I discovered masturbation, there was one big thing that I felt I needed to keep secret from her, along with all the little things that contributed to my general sense of otherness and inadequacy. A turf war ensued between us, the disputed territory being my psychic space.

Evenings were particularly hard: my father would go to bed soon after dinner when he was at home, while my mother stayed up late, fretting about the state of the world, the state of the family, and—especially when a couple of drinks were involved—the state of her aching heart. She would sit at the kitchen table after clearing up, smoking and writing whatever public official had aroused her ire that day, until at some point, wanting validation and respite from her loneliness, she would call upstairs to me, asking for “just a minute” before bedtime. Summoned against my will from the comforting nest of my imagination, I would come down resentfully, subconsciously trying to gauge the right amount to withhold in order to stake my bounds without getting buried in an avalanche of need. These exchanges would follow a predictable course, eventually circling round towards my mother’s tearful plea that at least we not go to bed angry with each other. (“Don’t go to bed angry, just go to bed!” was my unspoken response.) As quickly as possible after our mandatory reciprocal assurances of undying love, I would escape to my room, making sure that my bladder was empty so I wouldn’t risk encountering her again when she came upstairs. Even then, I wasn’t always safe; one memorable night, after I thought she was asleep, I heard a plaintive voice outside my door, entreating “please don’t masturbate!” Small wonder that I turned to my private worlds of fantasy, trying to wall her out.

The sense of having my boundaries violated, while amorphous, was pervasive. Twist and turn though I might, the internalized parent was always there, telling me that I was shirking the responsibilities imposed on me by circumstance, to make amends for unearned privilege through service to a higher good.

This sense of unfulfilled obligation operated in a couple of different ways, which reinforced one another seamlessly. On an intellectual level, I felt guilty about my class and economic privilege: this was thrown into stark relief by my parents’ commitments, especially to various dirt-poor black Mississippians whose struggles, conveyed through letters and photographs, put my own to shame. Compounding this, more insidiously, I felt burdened by my mother’s adoration—presented as boundless generosity, asking nothing in return, but subliminally imposing a feeling of indebtedness that I knew I could never repay. “With all of your advantages,” ran the whisper in my head, “what is wrong with you, that you sit there doodling, that you can’t stir yourself to be of use in the world? Surely you, of all people—white, male, a child of wealth, with unstinting parental support—ought to be able to give selflessly to others. If those heroic black people can do it, if women overcoming gender oppression can do it, if your parents can do it, why can’t you?”

Such was the refrain that held me in its grip, and my response was, metaphorically speaking, to squeeze myself ever more tightly, to take up as little space as possible. If I couldn’t do positive good, then at least I could minimize the harm created by my parasitic existence, made possible by the sacrifice of others. This self-imprisonment, running up against my temperamental inclination towards flamboyance and grandiosity, served mainly to neutralize whatever aliveness might otherwise have been available to me. 

With the sense of impasse growing, we eventually agreed that I would be sent away to boarding school. I was desperate to escape the claustrophobia at home, and my parents shared my hope that a new environment might reset my modes of navigating (and not navigating) the world around me. Even my myopic mother knew that something needed to shift, and my father, while instinctively recoiling from the melodrama swirling around him, did his best to be supportive of us both (“Be kind to your poor mother,” he used to say to me, and then, turning to her: “be kind to your poor son”).

Boarding school was a welcome change in some respects, but there, too, I felt like an awkward outsider, beset with irreconcilable impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to live big, theatrically, like the queen I subconsciously yearned to become; but on the other, I felt that the only half-acceptable choice was to box myself up, since I already took up more space than I was entitled to, and needed to renounce any more. It was as if I had been given a prize for a race I had not competed in, which I could not return but also could not legitimately keep, because I was too weak-willed to attempt a penalty run to retroactively earn it.

Somehow, slowly, I began to free myself from this double-bind, but it wasn't easy. Immersed as I was in the paradigm of struggle against oppression as defined by material circumstances, for many years I just assumed that my confusion and inertia could only be the result of personal failure, the self-indulgent neuroses of a spoiled rich kid who didn’t have anything better to worry about. It never occurred to me that I might be dealing with a kind of oppression myself, no less real for being self-enforced and internal rather than inflicted upon me from an outside source.

I remember hearing on the radio an interview with the first woman to appointed to a cabinet post in Morocco (as minister of health, I think, or maybe culture), who had reached her position despite having been raised in a brutally patriarchal harem where she had been virtually imprisoned without access to education or the outside world. When asked how she had broken free from such a restrictive environment, she replied that, having been blessed with an intrepid spirit, she had never been daunted by external obstacles, and that in her opinion, the most destructive oppression is the kind that people impose on themselves, which she had never been subject to. Her answer felt like a tremendous gift: maybe my difficulty in liberating myself from unproductive habits of thought wasn’t a failure of will, but a condition deserving acknowledgment and compassion.

Another breakthrough came after my mother died, when I happened upon the notes she’d written while I was being seen by a child psychologist, around the age of six or seven. I had mostly forgotten about those sessions, but my discovery brought them vividly back to me. Most importantly, her jottings gave me tangible evidence that I wasn’t making things up: that my tendencies towards melancholy, isolation, and paralysis weren’t merely the whims of an over-pampered imagination, but were deeply embedded traits, handicaps if you will, that had been with me from an early age. Presumably in preparation for a discussion: “All I need is someone to help me do the right thing by this only child. He’s bright and imaginative, but anxious and insecure, talks incessantly, performs below expectations in school. Does he need more of my attention, or should I try to push him away?” And, scribbled more quickly, as though listening to the doctor: “Often tired and listless, lacks energy. Uncoordinated, poor sense of body awareness. Marked fear of physical activity, compensates by playing old man or cripple. Attaches himself to adults instead of other children, especially out of doors. Not happy in his role as a child. Friends no longer want to play with him, because he wants them to share his fantasies and won’t join their boyish games. Spends hours in long, coherent creation of an imaginary world, leaning towards the feminine. May be homosexual.”

These messages in a bottle were oddly reassuring. They showed me that I didn’t just have the vapors, but instead had internalized some stubborn behavior patterns early on, in symbiosis with my mother’s worry about me and our relationship. I realized that often she had been dealing with her own unresolved issues while intending to be supportive of me—perhaps an inevitable pitfall of parenthood, but none the less toxic for that. I didn’t need to blame her, but at the same time, I didn’t need to see my life-path as a trail of failure either. It was simply what it was, and my goal was to make sense of it.

Seeing one’s woundedness doesn’t automatically heal it, but recognition is an essential prerequisite for moving beyond its constraints. For years, I’ve been trying to disentangle the knotted skein that enmeshed my younger self, noting where it still trips me up and gently, patiently, trying to tease the fibers free. I work to accept that my imagination and whimsical creativity are gifts to the world, no less than the provision of healthy food or the furthering of social justice. I honor my generosity while also recognizing that it has a shadow side—because I see how sometimes I, like my mother, aim to give without imposing obligation but end up subverting the empowerment I want to support. I look for ways to foster worthy causes while respecting my own aptitudes and limitations, instead of condemning myself for not doing it the way my mother did. Self-liberation is always a work in progress; messages are everywhere, waiting to be recognized. When it comes to the one conveyed by my mother’s button, I want to honor its big-spirited impulse, without being constricted by its underside.

Emptiness and Grace

William Stewart

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WAS THE SENSE of scarcity there all along? I can’t say for sure, though I know that I was an insecure and lonely child. Dependent on my mother’s overprotective love, with a socially awkward father and no siblings to butt up against, I spent much of my time in solitary fantasy. I was fascinated by the elderly, and preferred the company of adults to that of other children, spouting voluble monologues to the grown-ups whenever I wasn’t lost in moody withdrawal. I largely avoided playing with my classmates, shunned anything rough-and-tumble, and was sufficiently uncoordinated that my worried parents sent me to various doctors to see if there was something diagnosibly wrong.

In hindsight I feel sure that body-shame was embedded in my psyche from a very early age. I was a chubby child, teased for my weight and ungainliness, and from my parents I absorbed a visceral certainty that the body was basically a regrettable encumbrance, whose primary function was to cart around a brain.

The one physical activity that I eagerly embraced was sex-play. I started playing doctor with a couple of other boys from my neighborhood when I was eight or nine years old, and soon thereafter formed a “club” that met in a windowless bicycle shed in our back yard. There, with flashlights shining on our little erections, I knew that I was where I wanted to be.

Puberty hit fast and hard, and by the time I was twelve pimples were erupting across my face, chest and back. But soon I found a way to escape the unpleasant aspects of physicality, while also experiencing previously unimaginable pleasure, after a classmate told me the secret of masturbation (“you rub it”). Here was a place I could go to escape my feelings of scarcity and isolation, my body-shame and awkwardness as an incarnate being—paradoxically, by engaging an aspect of my physical self with an intensity that I’d never experienced in any other realm before. This koan, of how masturbation enabled me to both connect with and dissociate from my embodied self, is central to this narrative, and is with me still.

During adolescence, my need for refuge grew in response to my mother’s neediness. Her understandable concern for my psychic health was compounded by the emotional impoverishment of her own life, and she routinely invaded my private space in her search for reassurance. Furthermore, perhaps in resonance with the pressure of her anxiety, I had conjured up an “internalized parent” in my head who was far more judgmental than either of my indulgent real-world parents ever dreamed of being. As a result, the only place I could go to escape my mother’s worry, on the one hand, and my own self-censorship, on the other, was into solitary sexual arousal, where sensory pleasure was so intoxicating that it trumped my fretful mind.

Boarding school brought me much-needed distance from my mother’s invasiveness, but other sources of angst surfaced soon enough. After a summer sleepover when I was fifteen—my first experience of actually sharing a bed and bodily intimacy with another, as distinct from show-and-tell sex play—I developed an obsession with a classmate named Burr, which was to persist for many years. Henceforth my burgeoning sexuality would be tightly entwined with emotional fixation, as other aspects of reality became subsumed in the black hole of need that I experienced at my core.

Burr’s breezy dismissal of my adoration and sexual hunger, coming soon after our initial electrifying connection, reinforced my sense of being innately undesirable, and I became morbid and maudlin with unfulfilled longing. Eventually I transferred my dependency to other objects of desire, but the dream of romantic fusion remained the same, as I yearned for someone, anyone, who could fill the emptiness inside. Not surprisingly, my fumbling attempts to find affection and sex never offered any but the most unsatisfactory results, presumably because my need was so all-consuming as to scare potential partners from a mile away. My only solace lay in solosex—but even though I turned constantly to this precious and tightly-guarded secret pleasure, it provided only transitory respite from my underlying sense that life would be an endless hollow purgatory unless I could find
a lover who would somehow make me right.

I spent the first half of my twenties in a fog of melancholy and marijuana smoke, groping feebly for ways of coping with my sorry state. After hearing some of Alan Watts’ brilliant and insightful lectures on the radio, I decided that I was a “spiritual seeker,” imagining that my loneliness and despair would somehow be transmuted into wisdom with this new identity. I told myself that I would practice non-attachment, and bummed around Europe for the better part of a year, lusting after beautiful unattainable men and feeling like a Joni Mitchell song (“so this is how I hide the hurt, as the road leads cursed and charmed…”). Finally I decided to go to art school, on the premise that being a calligrapher would fit well with my self-image as a vaguely monastic artist-scholar in the classical Chinese mode. By day I honed my lettering and graphics skills, by night I retreated into a lavish lair of masturbatory escape.

Much as I tried to embrace this solitary path, I knew that I hungered for something more. One day, browsing in a leftie bookstore, I stumbled across a few back issues of RFD, a magazine created by and catering to counter-culture queers, and realized that I might actually have spirit-kin, somewhere out there in the larger world. I decided to move to San Francisco, in order to immerse myself in the gay community fermenting there. Leaning on a tenuous thread of long-distance friendship, I secured a place to live, and arrived in June of 1979, when I was 28.

This was just a couple of months before the first “Spiritual Conference of Radical Faeries,” organized by Harry Hay and his associates, and announced in flyers that my housemates brought into our shared home. All three of them went to the Arizona desert to attend, and even though I chose to stay behind and have my long hair cut short in hopes of feeling more sexy, I was soon immersed in the faerie culture that was springing up in San Francisco. I savored the sense of community, and felt as though I’d found my tribe at last.

Still, sexual intimacy continued to elude me. A new and troubling awareness had arisen alongside my generic body-shame and insecurity about looks, making connection seem more problematic than ever. As I learned more about what my peers were seeking, a powerful sense of stigma surfaced in my psyche, because I didn’t want to do what everyone else seemed eager for. In a culture where anal sex was the ultimate desideratum, with fellatio as a kind of second-best alternative, I realized that I was deeply resistant to the idea of penetration, and really only wanted to masturbate with other men. I developed a deep-seated fear that, if and when reciprocal attraction actually showed up, I would have to reveal this shameful truth so as not to get caught up in something I didn’t want, and would experience humiliation as a result. 

Naturally, this anxiety reinforced the old familiar patterns, though I continued to seek out intimacy all the same. Eventually, despite my inhibitions, I managed to forge a couple of reasonably satisfying relationships that lasted for a few weeks or months apiece—but more importantly, from the perspective of my overall trajectory, I discovered anonymous sex.

I came to it late, in comparison with many of my generation who created the gay counterculture of the 70’s: it wasn’t until I turned thirty that I began exploring the possibilities in earnest. So I entered this arena, too, shadowed by scarcity consciousness, because everybody else had already had more than I would ever get, or so I believed in the dark corners of my psyche, where I was sure that
I was hopelessly undesirable. 

Of course my squeamishness about hot and sweaty physicality was operative here as well, but parks and sex clubs offered a freedom of movement that incipient relationship didn’t. In the cruisy venues that I frequented, I could adopt a pose of aloofness, and mostly watch from the sidelines. After all, how better to anticipate rejection and avoid unwanted interaction than to feign indifference? Such places always offered an escape route, so that if the man I desired wasn’t available—or wanted to do what I didn’t—I could quit the scene and maintain my sense of control. In effect, my forays became voyeuristic masturbation sessions, where instead of looking at photographs, I could watch living, breathing pornography. No need to risk disappointment—I’d hide my insecurity under a cloak of nonchalance, watch the pretty boys until they hooked up with others, hopefully get my orgasm at some good moment, and tell myself I wasn’t craving more. 

As it happened, my first ventures into the world of casual sex coincided with the appearance of HIV in our midst. My experience during the early years of the epidemic was paradoxical: whereas many found their reality completely up-ended, for me it was in some ways more of the same, in that what had previously felt scarce now felt simply scarcer. Of course I was dismayed by the stories of gruesome deaths, and the mix of homophobic vitriol and willful blindness that they provoked in the larger world; but since the evidence indicated that HIV was transmitted through bodily fluids, and since I was turned off by sucking and fucking, my own habits were largely unaffected. Indeed, ironically enough, I owe my survival to those very biases that felt—and still feel—shamefully jejune in a community that prides itself on sexual adventurousness. For me, being “good” entailed no sacrifice of pleasure; the penalty lay in feeling deficient as a gay man, on account of my narrow range of tastes.

My tastes may have been narrow, but I certainly indulged them deeply. Still, even as I spent untold hours in tranced-out cruising, I continued to dream about relationship, convinced that only a significant other could ultimately fill the aching void within. The real shift away from that fixation didn’t take place until circumstance intervened, through what in retrospect feels like the agency of grace. It wasn’t a move away from sexual compulsivity, but at least I was able to liberate myself from the visceral belief that romantic love was the key to happiness. How I came to be freed from that illusion is one of the archetypal stories of my life.

It revolves around two primary relationships that I had in my thirties and early forties, the first with John and the second with Steve. John, when I met him, seemed like my dream come true, and I fell for him hard, though our time together was anything but smooth. All my neediness came out when we started seeing each other: I always wanted more, he knew it, and began to pull away as a result, even as we were getting closer. My possessiveness scared him, and when we broke up, after two years of addictively emotional tug-of-war, I experienced the most devastating grief of my life. We said that we’d stay friends, but every time I’d call him, hoping for a little contact, I got the message that he wanted less, not more. I’d beg for a half a loaf, and he’d grudgingly offer a quarter; I’d wait for what I considered a sufficiently long interval, and ask for just a quarter this time, only to discover that I’d have to settle for crumbs. 

Finally, in desperation, I surrendered: it was the one and only time in my life when I’ve truly bottomed out, as the twelve-steppers say, and come to a place of saying to the universe, I cannot do this any more. No matter how painful the alternative may be, it cannot be worse than the pain I’m in now. I put myself in your hands, do with me what you will. And what came to me was a vow: I will never initiate contact with this person again. If he contacts me, that’s a different story; but if he doesn’t, I’m prepared to go to my grave without attempting further connection, because I know that
I cannot will it into being. It’s out of my control; I put it on the altar, and turn it over to the cosmos, whatever that may mean.

My grief remained, my emptiness remained, but I’d done what I needed to do in order to reclaim my life. And then, when the backwash from this turbulent journey had hardly begun to settle, I got involved with Steve. This new relationship seemed to offer everything I’d yearned for with John but hadn’t gotten. It felt comfortable and effortless, there was none of the drama that characterized so much of my time with John. We settled into an easy coupledom, and for the first time in my life, I moved in with a lover, and made a home with him. Perhaps the sense of scarcity at the center of my being would finally meet abundance, and be stilled.

I’d been with Steve for a year or two when John resurfaced in my life. By this time, friends were dying all around, and memorial services were commonplace. At one of them, I looked across the room and realized John was there too. I gulped, and tried to remember to breathe, especially when, after the service was over, he approached and asked if we could talk. I hadn’t vowed to avoid contact if he initiated it, so I listened with pounding heart as he recounted his news. He’d gotten an AIDS diagnosis a month before, he’d broken off his relationship with Robert (someone we’d both known through faerie circles, and paradoxically, even more prone to possessiveness and jealousy than I), he’d gotten together with Brian (another mutual friend from faeriedom, whom I’d always liked and trusted) and with Brian’s support, he’d realized that he had unfinished business with me. “I want to bury the hatchet,” were his words.

Whereupon began a fragile and tentative process of reconciliation, which gradually gathered momentum as we reestablished trust. Or rather, as we built a trust that had never existed between us when we were lovers, because I’d been too needy, and he’d defended himself against me in response. But during the interim, I’d renounced the impulse to possess, and so was simply available for whatever happened, without expectation of outcome. Luckily, he had a few years of reasonably good health, so that by the time he got really sick, we’d developed a deeper intimacy than we’d ever had before, even though we were both with other partners, and there was no breath of sexual energy in our friendship. Of course I was saddened when he died, but I was also grateful that I’d ultimately found grace in the most pivotal relationship of my adult life.

But this was only half of what led to my recovery from love addiction. During the years of John’s decline, I’d felt my relationship with Steve growing increasingly hollow. As the joy of new connection wore off, I watched his temperamental preference for certainty over adventure come to the fore. My seemingly happy marriage was turning into a simulacrum of success: no fights, but likewise no exploration, just the anodyne comfort of the known. And so, over time, I came to see
that I needed to get out.

It took me a couple of years to initiate the breakup, because I knew that it would cause a lot of hurt to Steve, but there was no question in my mind that it was what I needed to do. Making this decision completed an arc that began with my infatuation with Burr, back in boarding school, and reached its climax in my renunciation of John. Having found with Steve some version of what I’d always wanted with John, then having been rewarded for my renunciation by John’s unsought return, and finally having viscerally realized that I’d rather be single than in a lackluster partnership, I was finally free of the belief that I needed relationship to make me whole.

But this story has a paradoxical corollary. Even as I embraced my single status, eager for a future without the scaffold of coupledom, I pursued my secret life as a solo sex junkie as obsessively as ever. Throughout my years of partnering, whether with Steve, with John, or in the handful of other relationships I’d attempted along the way, I’d never abandoned it, and had kept it hidden from everyone except my therapist and a couple of trusted friends. I did attempt a stint at Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, but soon realized that I wasn’t ready to change my ways, so it made no sense to continue.

It was a well-controlled addiction; my assessment was that it neutralized maybe ten or fifteen percent of the energy that I’d otherwise have available for other things, but aside from that, it didn’t seem to have a lot of a negative impact. I’d pursued my calligraphy career until the frustrations outweighed the rewards, whereupon I’d embarked on a master’s program in linguistics. When I was still with John, I’d become a volunteer with the Shanti Project, offering emotional support to people with AIDS and their loved ones. I’d also done a bit of faerie organizing, though I’d disengaged from that reality when I’d gotten involved with Steve—in part because of the drugs and drama, in part because he wasn’t interested and I was attempting a bourgeois marriage. But I still did artwork, maintained numerous friendships, and generally had a more or less reasonable life.

Indeed, a big part of my habit’s seductiveness lay in its constraints: it offered both escape and control. Whereas in my teens and twenties my malaise had seemed to permeate everything, by the time I turned forty I was doing a very good job of compartmentalizing. Even as I liberated large tracts of my psyche from inadequacy and dependence, I was sweeping my remaining messy unresolved stuff into the quadrant of sex addiction, where the toxins in my psyche were effectively compressed.

The conundrum of this situation was never clearer than at gatherings. I had reconnected with a subset of my queer-spirit tribe as I was leaving Steve, having been steered towards a group called the Billies who were reputed to be more grounded than the faeries and thus seemed like a good fit. And indeed it felt like a wonderful homecoming, when in heart circle I announced that I’d broken up with my partner of six years and had come to the gathering in order to reclaim the thread of my authentic life. But I felt disinclined to engage with sexuality there—in part because I still had a goodly amount of insecurity about my appearance, but more significantly, because I’d fetishized dissociation, and also because I felt that if anyone really knew what I liked, they’d see it as repressed, twisted, defective, and/or laughable. Thus, unlike my many brothers for whom gatherings were spaces of erotic possibility, I experienced them as rare extended periods when, through some combination of resignation and preference, I put sex-obsession on the shelf, and focused on heart connection instead.

Though I still savored opportunities for anonymous public cruising, these became dramatically rarer when I moved back to what had been my childhood summer home on Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-late ’90s, a few years after I broke up with Steve. Once setted there, I became a virtuous citizen, served on the board of the local environmental advocacy organization, worked with the oral history project, made art, gardened, and maintained a chronic masturbation habit on the side. I continued to travel cross-country once or twice a year to attend Billy gatherings, but for a long time I was uncertain as to whether I would ever again make my home in community with others of my queer-spirit tribe, as I had done during my early years in San Francisco.

Finally, late in 2008, I came to the realization that if I was ever going to pursue that dream, I needed to begin the quest, because otherwise inertia would win. I renewed my ties with the larger faerie tribe soon thereafter, at the winter gathering at Breitenbush, and in doing so initiated a chapter in my life which continues to this day. It’s full of rewarding new friendships, including several with men twenty, thirty and even forty years younger than I am, which I treasure despite the heartache that they sometimes entail. There’s been a certain amount of relapse into patterns of love-addiction, as well as lots of swooning over youth and beauty, but overall I feel like I’m right on track with my life—and I know that I still have work to do around my quirky sexuality, as it’s evolved over sixty-odd years.

Which brings me back to the paradox that I’ve already mentioned, of how my particular flavor allows me both to inhabit my physicality and to escape it at the same time. Much of its power derives from the fact that when I focus exclusively on genital sensation, I can ignore body-image, loneliness, and the complexity of real connection. Embarrassed and shamed at an early age for being a moony, maladjusted kid, I became fixated on self-constraint: put it all in the lock-box, and savor the intensity. In a kinesthetic corollary, I’ve eroticized a preference for keeping my clothes on during arousal and orgasm, and also for holding my piss at the same time. The pressure of an erection in snug jeans with a full bladder is now a primary source of pleasure, as is postponement of ejaculation for as long as possible. 

No doubt my fondness for remaining clothed for sex—both public and solitary—relates to a desire for invisibility. I’m happy enough for my arousal to be seen, but my body is something I’d rather keep hidden, even from myself. Let me fantasize about the beautiful young, let me watch from behind a screen, let me look at ever more porn, but keep the risk of exposure at bay. I’ll act cool, squirt semen down the leg of my jeans when no one is looking, and walk away as if nothing had happened.

The pattern began when I was a lonely adolescent, and felt like my penis was my only friend. Over the decades it’s hardened into scar tissue, both sustaining and constricting the movement of my life. It’s my secret room, where nothing can reach me. Sometimes I feel like the dragon in the children’s tale, sitting on my hoard of treasure: it’s mine, I gloat, all mine, and I don’t want to share it with anybody.

All the sickness that I’ve absorbed from the larger culture is concentrated here. The consumerism and exploitation that I condemn with every ounce of my intelligence and heart have free rein in this sterile room, where I rip through vast swaths of glossy virtual anatomy, always wanting more. 

Racism, elitism, looksism: all by-products of rapacious exploitation, and as someone committed to dismantling empire, I strive to purge them from my psyche. Yet in my secret bunker, I swoon for Hitler Youth—not for Nazi paraphernalia, which does nothing for me, but for the arrogance of the runway model, whose attitude mirrors the disdain I feel for my own corporeal self. This is how internalized homophobia still has its claws in me: deep in my subconscious, I can’t believe that anyone would want to be with me in this dumpy, hairy, doughy body for which I never could imagine feeling love.

In truth, at this stage of my life, part of me believes that it’s not appropriate for me to be sexual with other people—on account of my age, but even more, on account of my being too enmeshed in my familiar ways. In some ways it seems like the universe has offered me a bargain: relinquish any expectation or hope of sexual intimacy, and in return, have rewarding friendships and a vivid erotic relationship with myself. I know it’s self-limiting and defeatist, but to some degree, I’m invested in this schema nevertheless.

And so I vanish into neverland, where I can lose my sense of physical encumbrance in a miasma of engorged genitals. Here, I’m as haughty as the objects of my fixation. I examine and discard them, one after another; there’s always the chance of a better specimen in the next frame. It’s materialism gone so far as to become its opposite: I’ve so tightly boxed and fetishized my lust that I lose connection with the only material that really matters—our all-embracing mother earth, and this imperfect incarnation, in which I am part of her. 

So, here’s my koan: how do I honor who I am, while also recognizing how my habits have and haven’t served me? What, if anything, do I want to change, and what do I want to keep? My self-centered, tightly-torqued, dissociated eroticism has been a precious ally over the years, and yet at the same time, I know it’s a delusion, to think that I can escape the confines of my animal embodiment. And for all my messed-up shadow stuff, that’s where I really want to be—in the blessed ache of being alive in this ever-dying, ever-a’borning world of transient matter and eternal spirit. My journey with sexuality is a key part of that quest, and I pray for the willingness to embrace it fully.

New England Gothic

William Stewart

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AS I PACK up what are, metaphysically speaking, the last remains of my distant relative-in-law Gerald Chittenden, in anticipation of sending them off to the prestigious New England boarding school where he taught, I find myself reflecting on the long shadow that he cast, and on the circumstances by which his papers came into my hands.

For me, the story begins with Mr. Chittenden’s wife. She and my maternal grandmother were second cousins, and had a warm friendship that extended beyond the ties of familial regard. When my grandmother was widowed and left with an only child—my mother—on the eve of the depression, the Chittendens began inviting the pair to come for extended visits to their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, initiating a connection that my mother honored, albeit with some ambivalence, throughout her lifetime, which I now want to memorialize as well.

The Chittendens had two daughters: Bertie, born in 1922, and Julie, two years younger. Birth order sometimes pushes an older sibling to take the lead, but in this case the pattern was reversed, since Bertie was developmentally disabled. Her cerebral palsy, which impacted her cognitive capacity as well as her balance and coordination, was caused by brain injury at birth. The damage was likely related to the polio that her mother had contracted some years before, which had left her partially crippled and which undoubtedly colored her subliminal feelings about Bertie’s condition and needs.

Because of all this, from an early age Julie was expected to be her sister’s keeper. This situation, I believe, shaped the family dynamic in incalculable ways, and triggered a sense of burden and shame that was all the more corrosive for being unacknowledged. For the Chittendens were, if nothing else, determinedly “old school,” and in their world, such things simply were not talked about.

“Old school”—it’s a curious phrase, not exactly a class descriptor, yet it encapsulates the Chittenden family heritage more succinctly than any other term that I can think of. It certainly fits with Gerald Chittenden’s professional life, since for the bulk of it he taught English at St. Paul’s, one of New England’s most exclusive prep schools, which especially in his day could be viewed as the very embodiment of the type. Back then, the school was all-male, thoroughly Episcopalian, and drew its student body almost entirely from the eastern elite—and Gerald Chittenden was right at home in that milieu. He began working there in 1912, and stayed until retirement in 1948, becoming the epitome of the witty, condescending, punctilious schoolmaster along the way. 

I have no reason to doubt that he was a good teacher, or that he and his wife were appreciated at St. Paul’s over the years. Going through his papers, I have found abundant tributes expressing gratitude for his skill in the classroom, and equally, for the nurturance of the family’s afternoon teas, where Mrs. Chittenden offered a welcome counterbalance to the School’s overwhelmingly masculine atmosphere.

Gerald Chittenden was not only an educator; he was a man of letters par excellence. He authored a handful of novels, as well as many essays and short stories that appeared in a variety of periodicals. He loved to guide readers in what he considered edifying directions, and his dream for retirement was to have a little bookshop on Martha’s Vineyard, where he could arbitrate and moralize to his heart’s content. By the time my young life intersected with his, this had come to pass: the Borrowdale Bookshop, located in a remodeled woodshed adjoining the family home on a back street in the village of Edgartown, soon acquired a reputation that far exceeded its geographical confines, known widely for the firm opinions of its proprietor and the gracious hospitality of his wife.

Brought into the presence of these august personages, I was always on best behavior, following my mother’s lead in calling them Uncle Gerry and Aunt Peg. They were relations of a sort, but also archetypes in my young mind, embodying a world both intriguing and remote. My mother, I know, felt real affection for Aunt Peg, and I appreciated her grandmotherly kindness towards me as well; but Uncle Gerry was the éminence grise, the patriarch of Borrowdale, patronizing to my mother and inscrutable to me.

Those were the names I used then, but as I try to put their story into written form, I find that I think of them as Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden—a reversal of the usual pattern, where those whom we once knew as Mr. and Mrs. Such-and-such, mere cardboard cutouts in our childish lives, acquire first names and develop three-dimensional personalities as we grow into adulthood. But they were so anachronistic even in their lifetimes, and the epilogue to their story turned out to be so grim, that it’s hard for me to remember that they were flesh-and-blood people, and not characters in some New England Gothic cautionary tale. There was so much that was never fully recognized: class privilege, gender bias, self-righteousness, and the question of how such attitudes might impact two daughters, one retarded and the other notably maladjusted even then, growing up in a mid-century America that they were given no tools to cope with.

So, how to find a balance—to respect what was admirable, yet also do justice to its shadow side? I’ll pick up the thread with some of my earliest memories, and then proceed from there.

*   *   *

LET US BEGIN with afternoon tea, that most Chittendonian of rituals. In my mind’s eye I see old Mr. Chittenden in his low and enveloping chair, holding forth on some subject or other, family and guests dutifully attending or attempting repartee, according to inclination and circumstance. There was good humor, to be sure, but it was based on assumptions that could be egregious: when my mother introduced her fiancé, then a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in mathematics, Uncle Gerry jovially commented (as she told me many years later), “ah, a rude mechanical, then!” No doubt this riff on Shakespeare was intended as a joke, but it reveals the assumption of superiority that pervaded the household and its master.

My mother used to say that he was the most pompous person she had ever known—not that she was a particularly lenient judge of character, but even for her, this was unusually harsh. She often recalled his grand pronouncements, for instance at the Sunday family picnic suppers (always at Chappaquiddick East Beach, always with black bean soup), where he would moisten a finger and hold it to the air, then solemnly announce the direction of the wind—and invariably get it wrong.

Nor could she find much to appreciate in Julie, who was already ill-at-ease in the world, even when they were girls together. Looking back on those days, my mother remembered a child prone to strange obsessions alternating with lethargy and stubbornness, a pattern that would only grow stronger as she reached chronological if not emotional adulthood. To some extent, I think her inability to navigate consensus reality was just a part of who she was; but surely some of the blame should be assigned to that martinet father of hers, who burdened her with expectations she could never live up to, frustrating her at every turn.

From adolescence onward, she emulated him as much as possible, but alas, the deck was stacked against her. For one thing, she had been born female; she tried to compensate as best she could, developing a persona not so much mannish as ungendered, but it never quite measured up in her father’s Kiplingesque world, where women were a tiresome distraction from the real business of life. And somewhere deep in her bones, along with unconscious resentment, there developed an uneasy sense that it was true—that she was, indeed, irredeemably tainted, damned from the outset by reason of her sex.

Then, too, there was the bookshop: there was never any question but that she’d take the helm eventually, when her turn came. Never mind that she had no aptitude for it, that maybe, in an alternate world, she might have found something she’d have actually liked to do; she never had any choice in the matter, Daddy had worked it all out, and the mandate was no less absolute for being unspoken.

Most damaging of all, though—so everyone agreed, who talked it over in whispered tones, years after the harm had been done—most damaging of all was the injunction laid upon her, from an unconscionably early age, that she must never marry, but devote her life to the care of her sister. Not that she would have married in any case, but still, it’s a cruel thing to burden a child with, and while she honored it as best she could, it was at the expense of a life of her own. It makes me sad: how different everything might have been if she had been able to grope her way to some rough-and-tumble lesbian tribe, some tight nest of late-1940’s bulldykes, where she could have found a place among kindred spirits—not an easy life, to be sure, but at least she wouldn’t have half-choked on bilious latter-day Victorian proprieties, then lived out her days in the wretched vomitus of that ill-digested meal.

*   *   *

OF COURSE, JULIE’S downward spiral lay far ahead in those days of cucumber sandwiches and literary discourse, but her awkwardness was striking even then. She echoed her father’s inflections eagerly, but she was hopeless with the niceties that mattered so much in the Chittenden home, being more comfortable on a sailboat than in a drawing-room. In fact it was her sister Bertie who inherited their mother’s grace, and it was only sad that the family conversation had to be so elevated, because if it had been more down-to-earth, Bertie would have been better able to hold her own.

As it was, she mostly sat on the sidelines, waiting for a question to be addressed to her, when she would brighten up and respond appropriately. Her composure was hard-won, but after many years of specialized schooling in the best institutions available, she had developed considerable poise in addition to her basic good nature, and was altogether a more sympathetic person than Julie, whose enthusiasms and crackpot ideas could be distinctly unnerving.

I have a memory of being taken for a drive, sandwiched between the two sisters in Julie’s ancient automobile. This was a pre-war relic with no back seat, just a two-person passenger compartment and then an enormous trunk. I remember straddling the yard-long gearshift that rose up from the floor between my knees; I must have been very young indeed, because we stayed with the Chittendens only a couple of times in my childhood before my parents found a summer place of their own. I don’t recall the destination of the trip, but I’m going to speculate that we were headed to Lambert’s Cove.

Because Julie had a friend there, whose name was Ellen. This was important: a relationship that wasn’t mediated by her parents. Having retreated to the Vineyard after college, lacking the psychic means to create an autonomous life for herself and saddled with the expectation that she would always look after her sister, Julie was largely in thrall to the demands of pedigree, but here, at least, was one connection that she’d forged on her own. 

And Ellen was a free spirit. Although she, too, lived beneath the familial roof, she was far more independent-minded than Julie was, and more self-accepting as well. While not exactly lesbian-identified, she nevertheless wore her dykey manner more comfortably than Julie did, and even in the Eisenhower years of oppressive gender conformity, delighted in following her own distinctive muse. 

Nor did her domestic life bear much resemblance to the forced atmosphere of the Chittenden home. Ellen’s mother, Mary Stokes, was a warm and lively person whose cheerful good humor belied her history, which included a decade of forced immobility in her teens and early twenties due to scarlet fever, as well as a marriage that ended with her alcoholic husband’s suicide. When her older daughter Ellen moved back to Martha’s Vineyard after a few years of post-college jobs on the mainland, the two of them—one turning thirty, the other turning seventy—formed a happy if unconventional dyad, connected by shared creativity, imagination, and an ever-ready delight in the absurd. 

They lived in an old farmhouse on a freshwater pond, less than half a mile from the beach at Lambert’s Cove, on the Island’s north shore. This place was so remote from Edgartown, in the elder Chittendens’ narrow view, that one practically had to strap on extra gas tanks to get there,  never mind that it was barely fifteen miles away. Obviously the distance was as much psychic as physical, and for both Julie and Bertie, the Stokes house became a precious retreat where they could let down their guard as they never could at home.

I know this from both sides, because within a few years I was a regular at that house myself. When my parents had told the Chittendens that they’d like to find a summer rental in some rural part of the Vineyard away from Edgartown, Julie replied that her friend Ellen had a camp for rent, and was seeking tenants for the following year. A visit was arranged, my parents liked what they saw, and that’s why I’m here today—because after they had rented for a couple of summers, the Stewarts and the Stokeses developed a friendship beyond their connection through the Chittendens, and Ellen let it be known that she would be willing to sell. She was looking for buyers that she’d want to have as neighbors across the pond, and evidently my parents qualified, since the transaction was completed in the year that I turned seven. By then I was already bonded with Ellen, and also with her mother, who ultimately became what I can only call a spirit-grandmother to me.

*   *   *

OBVIOUSLY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to know, but I can’t help wondering how Julie’s life would have unfolded if Ellen hadn’t died just two years later, at the age of thirty-five. Her death from multiple sclerosis was a grievous blow to her mother, of course, but equally to Julie, who lost her strongest link to any reality outside the family circle. It was also the first death that registered in my childish consciousness, and I felt her absence keenly. 

I identified a lot with Ellen, and in some mysterious sense, I felt like I’d come to take her place in her mother’s life. Whether or not Mary experienced our relationship similarly I can’t say, but if nothing else, I expect she enjoyed having a youngster across the pond who would paddle over a few times a week to share ideas and laughs. Certainly our intimacy grew as I went through my high school and college years, and she entrusted many private thoughts to me, not least about the Chittendens and how their story had evolved.

Mary was thoughtful and compassionate, but there was nothing saccharine about her, and her insight could be tart when provoked by hypocrisy or pretension. She saw no excuse for how the Chittendens had raised their daughters: she used to say that Bertie would have been better off in a bricklayer’s family (back when there was a viable working class, and such an idea would have made sense), where she would have made her way as just another neighborhood kid, albeit a little slow, instead of being both over-protected and under-engaged as she was in her own home. She also felt that Julie had been hoodwinked into internalizing her parents’ guilt, and she lamented that Ellen’s death had cut short the one escape route that might have been available to her. 

There was never much sympathy between Mary Stokes and Gerald Chittenden. She considered him puffed-up and tiresome, and would occasionally summarize one of his conversational set-pieces as “how I won the war in Texas.” It’s true that he had been the commander of a pilots’ training base outside of Austin in World War One, and presumably his contribution was unexceptionable, but I can well believe that his exposition of it may have been somewhat overblown.

Indeed, over the years I became acquainted with a number of people on the Vineyard who had none too high a regard for the “sage of Borrowdale.” One tough old dame whom I saw for the last time when she was in her late nineties, who’d worked with him on the board of the local historical society and later tried to help Julie with the bookshop, roused herself from the fog of age in response to my diplomatic question and declared firmly, “Old Mr. Chittenden? He was a so-and-so!” This from someone who had herself been a rock-ribbed conservative all her life, too—but there was something in his manner that could rub people the wrong way, especially strong-minded people, and especially women.

Naturally, evidence of Gerald Chittenden’s gender prejudice is absent from the materials relating to his life at St. Paul’s School, an environment created by and for boys and men. Nor is there much recognition of the class privilege underlying the ethos he purveyed, since the people he had dealings with were all products of the same elite, and social superiority was simply a given. But as I review his story, I see how his assumptions—common enough in his place and time, but exemplified almost to the point of parody in him—could cause deep if invisible harm.

On the other hand, that same conservatism led him to principled stands against what he saw as wrong, often in defiance of public opinion. No socialist, he nevertheless inveighed against capitalist greed, and during the red scares of the late forties and early fifties he set up an “Anti-McCarthy Table” at his bookshop, in protest against the era’s pervasive climate of fear. As president of the Island’s Historical Society, he oversaw preservation of the historic Fresnel lens that had been in the Gay Head Lighthouse for almost a century, when the Coast Guard was preparing to scrap it in the course of converting the light to electricity—I found his personal correspondence with Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. on the subject, and of course it was cordial, almost chummy, being from one patrician to another. Manner aside, his preservationist instincts sometimes seem downright prescient: in a letter to the editor of the Vineyard Gazette, dated 1934, he suggests that the Island should strive for sustainability with respect to locally produced food.

His conservatism, in other words, cut both ways: it was both dismissive and conscientious. When I consider his views, they seem so unlike my own that our opposing perspectives occasionally converge at opposite ends of the spectrum, closing the circle so to speak. Paradoxically,  for all his snobbery, intransigence, and righteousness, he sometimes stumbled upon wisdom. At their best, his attitudes inspired Julie to think outside the box; unfortunately, more often than not, they also confined her within it.

*   *   *

MR. CHITTENDEN DIED in 1962, his wife in the following year. For the next decade or so, Julie kept the bookshop limping along, always with reverence for “what Daddy and Mummy would do,” even if she didn’t do it. She enjoyed being around books, but had no inclination or patience for running a business—her mother had handled that department, dutiful helpmeet that she was, and Julie had never bothered to learn. Indeed, she had a deep aversion to paperwork of any sort, and people who had been coming in for years found their orders neglected or their charge accounts incorrectly billed. Gradually they drifted away, frustrated by Julie’s incompetence: many of them had become regulars on account of the personalities of its founders (the grand oracle up front, the factotum-hostess in the rear, or some combination of the two), and Julie had neither the incisiveness of the one nor the charm and reliability of the other to keep them coming back. 

There was another reason for the loss of clientele: most of the Island’s younger residents and visitors, who hadn’t known the senior Chittendens, were unaware of the shop’s existence. There was no advertising, the location was hard to find, and an increasingly reclusive Julie failed to maintain her parents’ network of connection, so there was nothing to bring new people in. Those few that stumbled across it found a sorry sight: a dark little cave of a place, the shelves understocked and disorganized, the books largely out of date and warping from the damp, the owner either absent altogether or belatedly emerging from the house, barefoot and in tattered khakis held up by a piece of rope, summoned by the bell. Even without the advent of a new bookstore on Vineyard Haven’s Main Street in the mid-seventies, Borrowdale would have been done for, a casualty of Julie’s unerring penchant for self-sabotage.

At first, I saw this downward slide only once or twice a summer, when I accompanied my mother on her dreaded duty calls. She went out of genuine affection for Bertie, but she found Julie hard to take, and their relationship was always strained. I, on the other hand, felt considerable kinship with my idiosyncratic cousin, and was fascinated by the Victorian furnishings and musty aura that filled the house and shop. As a maladjusted queer teenager without friends of my own age, I felt at home in Julie’s decaying world, and she, in turn, responded to my fecund imagination without judgment or restraint.

I started finding ways to get to Edgartown on my own, hitch-hiking or riding my bicycle and relying on Julie’s kindness to get me back to Lambert’s Cove—because, for all her faults, Julie was boundlessly generous to those she cared for, and would think nothing of putting my bike into the back of the old Jeep that she’d inherited from Ellen and making the hour-long round trip to drive me home. We would sit in the cluttered parlor, or at the dining table covered with unopened bills and overflowing ashtrays, and I would spin fantasies for hours, as we consumed endless quantities of Hu-Kwa tea and cigarettes. 

Ah yes, cigarettes. A prodigious smoker herself, Julie knew better than to encourage me in the habit, but once I made it clear that I was hooked, tobacco became something of a shared vice, as we conspiratorially delighted in being bad together. I shudder now, remembering the ubiquitous ashes and reeking atmosphere, but at the time, it represented freedom.

And here I must give her credit—not so much for letting me smoke, but rather, for accepting me so unreservedly. At home, at school, I was always conscious of being watched—with concern for my well-being, to be sure, but also with anxiety about my social awkwardness, my incipient homosexuality, my eccentricity. But with Julie, I felt free—not only from potentially critical observation, but more importantly, from the self-judgment that I had internalized, which was far harsher than anything I experienced from my worried but loving parents. And so, while Borrowdale was in many ways an unhealthy environment for an impressionable adolescent, I found a kind of support there too, and I’m grateful.

Somewhere along the way I began officially working at the bookshop, though this was always a bit of a canard, since we were both adept procrastinators. But I enjoyed arranging books and practicing my calligraphy in the ledger, and I saw to it that the bills got paid, which was more than Julie by herself could do. I started imagining myself as an old family retainer, especially after I’d gotten my driver’s license and Julie loaned me the Jeep for the summer (having bought herself a Land Rover, the first of several decisions that eventually reduced her to penury)—and over time, without any conscious decision, I came to see my future as linked to Borrowdale’s.

Meanwhile, thanks to Julie’s one consistently honored familial obligation, Bertie’s routine changed little. Every winter she went off to the school she’d attended as a girl, and then in late spring she’d return to Edgartown, eager to once again be in, or on, the salt water. She was a strong swimmer, and especially loved to go out on her sailfish (basically, a sailing surfboard), which was beached at a nearby coastal pond at the end of a quiet lane. Julie would drop her off after lunch, leaving her alone—there were always familiar folks around to keep an eye on her and offer help if needed—and she would stay till late afternoon, walking the mile or so back home with the sail furled up on her shoulder, pleased with her independence. To be sure, I could tell that the chaos around the house sometimes troubled her, but at home she kept busy as her mother and her teachers had instructed, writing letters to relatives and school chums, walking down Main Street to the post office with the dog (always a Scottie, by family tradition), and going to church on Sundays, mostly by herself now that her parents were dead and Julie had stopped going. 

The cost of Bertie’s schooling—and indeed, of all the household’s expenses, since the bookshop barely paid for itself—was covered by a trust which had been set up by Mrs. Chittenden for her daughters’ benefit. The trustees were two: Julie, and the family man of business, a long-ago St. Paul’s student and tea-time regular whom I shall call Mr. J. DeVere Bronson, a name with an aura similar to that of his actual one. Although Mr. Bronson was justifiably skeptical about Julie’s financial competence, the trust agreement gave her a decision-making authority that she exercised to calamitous effect. While recognizing the need to keep some of the portfolio intact so that Bertie could keep going back to school, she was ready to reach deep into capital in pursuit of her own conceits.

*   *   *

HER MOST SPECTACULAR expenditure came a couple of years after I started at the shop, when to fulfill a lifelong dream she commissioned construction of a classic wooden sailboat, a 22-foot gaff-rigged sloop. She moved to Maine for the winter, leaving the house and shop to incompetent and opportunistic friends, and returned triumphantly at Avior’s helm the following June. Alas, while acquisition of this treasure had been a great adventure, routine maintenance was not, and within a few years the boat was high and dry in Borrowdale’s backyard, awaiting the care that her skipper could never quite manage to provide her. There she sat, slowly rotting, a sad metaphor for Julie herself.

Of the people who entered Julie’s life around this time, none was more problematic than a young man that she got to know because he was the son of her long-suffering housecleaner. A sometime merchant seaman with a fondness for the bottle, he soon took up residence at Borrowdale, nominally paying rent but mostly just making himself at home. By now Julie was in significantly reduced circumstances as a result of her extravagance, and when her boarder suggested that they start a taxi operation, using Julie’s Volkswagen (the Land Rover having joined the boat in the backyard), she readily went along with the idea. Undeterred by the discovery that taxis must be licensed, they simply changed direction a bit, and that was how the Ace Errand Service was born. A few ancient former bookshop patrons were glad enough to get prescriptions fetched, and occasionally (illegally) to be chauffeured to doctors or hair appointments too, but the business was hardly a success, especially since Julie (like Mr. Toad) had smash-up after smash-up, until eventually her driver’s license was revoked. Luckily the accidents were all low-speed, and caused no bodily harm, but when at last she found herself without license or co-proprietor, she discovered that most of her remaining assets had disappeared as well.  

My relationship with this deteriorating scene was erratic: I knew that my involvement was unwise, but at the same time, I fantasized about reclaiming it. After graduating from college, I came back to the family summer house in Lambert’s Cove and commuted to Edgartown in the rusty jeep, trying to keep the bookshop limping through one more summer, while Julie and her Svengali ran errands around town. Ignoring my mother’s understandable uneasiness, I was determined to spend the winter on the Vineyard: I would stay in the little house until the danger of frozen pipes outweighed the pleasures of being a pot-smoking hermit by the pond, whereupon I would move to Borrowdale. With Julie’s taxi-partner off at sea, upon arrival I began imposing my vision of Chittendonian style right away, pushing the piles of junk to the far end of the dining table, beyond the light of the candles I insisted on, and serving beef bourguignon or sole amandine instead of the TV dinners that had become the household’s standard fare. Afternoon tea was once again in china cups, at least until Julie knocked over the tea table and they went crashing to the floor. I even pulled off a shabby-elegant Victorian Christmas, inviting my reluctant parents and clearing out a guest room that had been given over to random detritus a decade or so before. My goal was to be some mix of major-domo and heir apparent, and—fearful of risk and growth as I then was—I told myself that I could make a life of it.

True, Julie’s fondness for rum-and-water had reached disturbing proportions, but I tried to ignore it, and for the most part, I was able to. My precarious self-deception lasted until mid-winter, when one evening, looking to summon her for dinner, I found her asleep on the toilet after eating a pound of tootsie rolls. With that, my scaffolding of denial collapsed, and I knew that I had to get out.

With the arrival of spring, I moved back to Lambert’s Cove and went to work at a local inn, effectively severing relations with Borrowdale. I was blessed with a timeless season of closeness with Mary Stokes, radiant on the cusp of ninety, but that transcendent moment came to an end when her surviving daughter came to fetch her away for the winter, as the days drew down towards solstice-tide. I closed up the little house on Seth’s Pond and went looking for a real job in Boston, notifying Julie of my decision as a fait accompli. A few months later, I got word that Mary had died peacefully in her sleep, and with that milestone my first Vineyard chapter came to an end. 

*   *   *

THUS IT WAS that I missed the most melodramatic phase of the Chittenden saga, during what I think of as the rabbit years. But I followed the plot from a distance, because my mother continued to arrange for visits with Bertie, and would relay her growing apprehensiveness to me. Sometimes she would cut out and send me newspaper clippings about Julie’s escapades, and would glean further information from occasional anxious phone calls with other distant relatives when the situation took a particularly outlandish turn.

The chapter began, ironically enough, with a book: specifically, with Watership Down, a novel in which the protagonists—shrewd, heroic, and wise—are rabbits. As was typical of Julie when she got fired up about something, she went full steam ahead without constraint, and the consequences were predictably messy. She decided that rabbits were the hope of the world, or some such thing, and of course it would be inconceivable to confine them. On August 17, 1976, under the headline “Rabbits Warrant Drastic Action,” the Vineyard Gazette reported that there were sixty-three of them in the house, uncaged, as revealed at a hearing of the Board of Health. The Board’s agent described the dwelling as “filthy, with garbage all over,” and in a surreal touch, said that while Julie had promised to build one cage per night (a laughable thought, given her incompetence with tools), “he questioned whether this rate would be sufficiently rapid to keep up with the growing population.”

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Despite the Board’s order that she get rid of the creatures, a couple of years later they (or their descendants) still had the run of the place, according to the next piece in my file. Here it was reported that, in addition to animal feces and a large electric heater with a badly frayed cord, the authorities discovered that the house had neither working toilets nor hot water. To this concern, Julie protested that she couldn’t afford to repair the systems in question, and claimed that she was being unfairly singled out since there were other people in town who lived without such amenities (perhaps true, but presumably they would at least have had outhouses). 

This time, the observations in question were made by the police. They had entered the house with a warrant for her arrest, issued for her repeated failure to appear in court on motor vehicle charges dating back several years. Giving no thought to the impression it might make, she proceeded to write a letter to the Selectmen, complaining about her treatment at the hand of the law. With a flourish that her father might have applauded if the context had not been so grotesque, she stated that when she went to get dressed in order to accompany the officers to the station, “they did not stay put as they should have done, but instead slithered around the house, poking their noses into everything, evidently to satisfy their vagrant and jaundiced curiosity.” Then, magnificently: “Surely the town owes me protection against such lawless and irresponsible invasions.” 

*   *   *

BECAUSE I HAD absented myself from the scene, I was blessedly uninvolved with the process by which Julie and Bertie were finally extracted from the Edgartown house and installed in a new home in the backwoods of working-class Oak Bluffs. But what I saw before and after makes me confident that there was no exaggeration in the gruesome descriptions I later heard, of truckloads of rotting furniture going to the dump, gallons of disinfectant being used to wash down walls and floors, and a couple of selfless cousins (out of twenty or more, most of whom had washed their hands of the entire mess) desperately strategizing how to sell the house and find enough money so that one of them, a kindly soul who’d opted for carpentry instead of suburban self-aggrandizement, could build a basic cabin for the two weird sisters on the plot of scruffy land they’d bought for the purpose. 

In the end, Julie made her peace with the plan, though at one point she’d wanted to move to a remote corner of Chilmark instead. At that juncture, when Cousin Nina had pointed out that the location would be impractical without a driver’s license, she responded in all seriousness, “oh, that won’t be a problem—I shall have a donkey.” But eventually, she accepted the lifeboat constructed for her benefit, and came to find merit in the design of the new house, with its sitting and eating areas focused on a wood stove, and its two modest bedrooms flanking the central core, one at each end.

Of course, the building’s shipshape practicality was soon flooded with overflowing ashtrays, foul dog blankets, mounds of books and papers, and other miscellaneous junk, but no matter—at least they had a roof over their heads, which was no small thing under the circumstances. True, they were now, ironically enough, dependent on taxis for transportation, but this didn’t trouble Julie too much, virtual hermit that she had become. Nutrition, however, suffered: with trips to the market now complicated, costly, and rare, the fresh meat and vegetables she felt duty-bound to purchase mostly ended up rotting because of her failure to cook them, and even the sorry staples—junk bread, cheap jelly, and not much else—were often in short supply. 

The move was particularly hard on Bertie, since she was now deprived of the daily walks around Edgartown where casual social interaction had provided a reassuring routine. Julie’s idea of compensation—to read aloud from books that Bertie couldn’t really follow—was surely a trial for her, but there was still the dog to walk, as well as the needs of whatever other creatures they were sheltering that year to take care of, and gradually an unsteady equilibrium emerged. Most importantly, she still had school to look forward to, where she had friends and a structured daily schedule, and could swim in an indoor pool to her heart’s content.

One other stable point of reference in her calendar came every spring, when my parents would host her for a week’s stay at their winter home in Providence. These visits were the consequence of my mother’s loyalty and compassion: she had resolutely kept her distance from the drama surrounding the Edgartown house, but she still wanted to give Bertie the experience of a calm and reasonable household, if only once a year. Of course this meant negotiating transportation and schedules with Julie, but she dutifully made it happen, most often right after Bertie’s term at school. She did her best to create a welcoming environment for her childhood chum, and saved up her worries about the sisters’ domestic chaos until she could confide them to me.

By this time I had settled in San Francisco, and was pursuing a life quite unrelated to my Vineyard past. The Chittendens were far from my mind except when my mother needed to unburden herself, so I was taken aback when, out of the blue, a card from Julie arrived in the mail. It was an amazing thing, that card—not only because I’d heard nothing from her since I’d fled from Borrowdale a decade earlier, but even more remarkably, because I knew it had been years before that since she’d last initiated communication with anyone. Looking back on it, I’m struck by how starved for friendship she must have been, to have made that overture; but I was too intent on building a different reality, and couldn’t—or at any rate, didn’t—respond.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, BACK ON the Vineyard, the two mismatched sisters shuffled along, getting older and stranger all the time. Trying to do the right thing, once or twice a week Julie would hire a taxi to chauffeur Bertie into town for a hot lunch at the local diner, accompanying her from time to time in order to pay the bill. I still encounter people who shake their heads ruefully, remembering the pair of them coming in—the crazy one and the retarded one, dislocated, disheveled, and oddly, poignantly, brave.

I tremble to think how this story might have ended, were it not for a chance encounter in that diner, which happened one day when Julie and Bertie had settled in for lunch. Linda Martello (to give her a name congruent with the one she actually bore) was a youngish woman who was working part-time at the grill, when Julie overheard her mentioning to a fellow-employee that she was looking for house cleaning jobs to make ends meet. Julie, drawn to Linda’s kindly manner and knowing that their rustic cabin was about to collapse beneath the weight of its accumulated debris, asked Linda whether she would be willing to come help them out, although they would only be able to afford a couple of hours a week. Linda agreed, and took it as a challenge when, after their departure, her employer said that she wouldn’t be able to stand it, since it was widely known that they lived in disgusting squalor. “But isn’t that the point of being a house-cleaner?” she asked me rhetorically years later. “That you clean their house? And here were these two old sisters with no one looking after them, so of course I was going to help.”

Even for someone as accepting as Linda, though, the level of filth was a challenge. For the first few months, she said, she did little except throw away rotten food and other trash, taking it off to the dump by the carload. Her endurance was remarkable, but even more remarkable was that she was permitted to keep coming back. She had just the right mix of qualities—sympathy, earthy good humor, a non-judgmental attitude—to slip past Julie’s defenses and be allowed in, whereas the one or two others who’d previously offered had merely provoked hostility and distrust. Like the feral creature she had become, Julie was always ready to bite an unfamiliar hand, but somehow this newcomer made her feel safe, and she responded gratefully. Seeing how desperate they actually were, Linda started spending more and more time with “the girls,” overlooking the financial sacrifice and effectively adopting them out of the goodness of her heart. She quickly formed a tight-knit bond with Bertie, and before long was setting up craft-type activities and taking her to the beach, in addition to cooking and cleaning for the both of them.  

This new relationship was a piece of remarkable good fortune for the sisters, especially since by this time almost none of the old ties were left. My mother died in 1991, and while my father dutifully notified Julie and kept up her regular Christmas present (Hu-Kwa tea, smoky aftertaste of a vanished world), all other connection between the families faded away. Even as I felt the need to spend more time at the house on Seth’s Pond—my father being disinclined to visit without my mother, and happy for me as the only child to take over in his stead—I still couldn’t quite bring myself to see my wayward cousins, though I knew I had unfinished karmic business on the Island, of which the Chittenden thread was part. After all, my life’s ambition in childhood had been to become an eccentric old man on Martha’s Vineyard, and sooner or later, I would need to find out what that was all about.

It took me a couple of years before I was ready to leave San Francisco, but in due course I settled into the family cottage, intent on exploring the mythic Vineyard of my memory. Inevitably, my path led me back to the Chittendens. It was because of the Chittendens that my mother first came to the Island, and because of them that my parents found this little house where I write these words today. It was thanks to the Chittenden connection that I got close to Ellen and then to Mary Stokes, my spirit-guardian who still occasionally visits me in dreams. And it was from this archetypal matrix that I became a steward of personal history, committed to acknowledging the past and ritually closing the circle.

Even so, being in touch with Julie was the last thing I wanted to do. But my sense of obligation was strong, both to renew my mother’s family loyalty, and also to make amends for having run away—since for all her craziness, Julie had always supported me, and I had abandoned her. I dreaded the thought of having her back in my life, but I felt like a shirker avoiding it, and finally I picked up the phone.

*   *   *

IT WAS EXCRUCIATING. It was as though I had never been away. There’s nothing to forgive, she said, good heavens no—that old upper-class New England accent, all snorts and brays and whinnying British vowels—and when will you come for tea? I got directions, drove through the depressing subdivision, identified the ancient cart track, and eventually found the house, hidden at the end of an unmarked turn-off that I missed when I first passed it, so little did it resemble the driveway of a human habitation. 

My first impression was that she had become the de-sexed salt-water equivalent of a mountain man. Living alone in Bertie’s absence, far from the proprieties of a long-ago Edgartown, she seemed to have gone native somehow, like a formerly captive animal gone to earth. The mess was as total as ever (this was before Linda’s influence took hold), and her appearance—all uncombed tufts and Audenesque wrinkles—was thoroughly uncouth, but to a markedly greater degree than before, she seemed accepting, or at least, reconciled to her fate.

Remarkably, she had given up smoking. I heard the emphysema the minute I walked in, well before she mentioned it, but cigarettes had been such a part of her for all those years that I could hardly believe the unequivocal evidence I saw, telling me that she’d quit. And alcohol? No sign of the rum bottle that had been so prominent a feature of those years I’d worked in the bookshop, and my gut told me that she’d probably stopped drinking too.

She was also suffering from malnutrition. That much was clear from her scarecrow frame, and from the woeful state of the kitchen, out of which she nevertheless managed to produce two cups of tea and two slices of Wonder bread, smeared with margarine. Watching, standing by, attempting to make conversation, it was all I could do not to take over her clumsy preparations or run away screaming, but I held myself back, and eventually we had our tea. 

Taking my leave as soon as I decently could, I headed for my car, and noticed two or three dead Volkswagen buses in the underbrush. They had served, I later learned, as storage spaces during the move, filled up with old books which inevitably mildewed into spongy dankness from exposure to the humid coastal air. I rather think that Julie herself may have spent a few months in one of those microbuses, while the house was being built and Bertie was off at school—but I may be wrong, since I wasn’t around at the time, and I’m a little uncertain about how things unfolded. However I do know that a lot of books saw a lot of weather out there, because it was I who had to deal with them in the end.

During our first winter of renewed contact, I visited Julie every few weeks, when my conscience wouldn’t let me postpone it any longer. I usually found her huddled by the woodstove, wearing filthy pajamas and her father’s overcoat; and while many of her tropes were familiar, she seemed no longer so deeply in thrall to—that is to say, in rebellion against—the conventions of a bygone age. The demon-images I remembered from Borrowdale, collected by ancestors in exotic lands in the days of colonial empires, still looked down from walls and shelves through decades’ worth of grime and dust, but their scowls seemed less fearsome now, and the ghosts of her parents held a little less sway.

Even so, her life was clearly pretty thin: sometimes I would take a tub of stew to warm up and eat with her, just to make sure she got fed. But I was relieved to learn about Linda, though she couldn’t have been coming for very long at that point, since her presence hadn’t made much of an impact as yet.

But over time that changed, as Julie’s trust grew and as Linda’s kindness led her to take on more and more. For at least one season, she and her common-law husband actually had Bertie come live with them, so that Linda could provide nurturance full-time. Bertie was thrilled that with Linda’s help she could once again get to the beach, which she hadn’t been able to do for years, and was equally happy just to tag along for errands or to work on crafts projects by herself when Linda went off on cleaning jobs. Nor were Julie’s needs neglected: it was the rare day that Linda didn’t drop by with Bertie in tow, attending to domestic chores along with animal grooming, house-fluffing, and socializing.

As part of their deepening closeness, at some point Linda introduced the sisters to her partner Russ, a builder and would-be entrepreneur with whom she’d been living for several years. Though he struck many, including me, as distinctly shady, Julie took a liking to him because he played chess, with a fair-to-middling aptitude comparable to her own. Whatever his less attractive characteristics may have been, he was courteous towards Julie and Bertie, and they warmed to him not only as their caregiver’s spouse, but also as a friendly visitor who could fix the occasional leaky faucet or rotting window-sill.

*   *   *

GIVEN HOW THINGS had evolved, Julie was naturally shaken when she learned that Linda and Russ were about to lose their rental home after their landlord defaulted on his mortgage. With affordable rentals almost unavailable on the Vineyard, it seemed likely that they would have to leave the Island, and Julie, in turn, was faced with the end of the support system that she and Bertie had grown accustomed to.

The first notion to emerge out of this crisis was that Julie would subdivide her property and give half of it to Linda and Russ to build on, in exchange for which the sisters would get care for life. It soon became clear, though, that subdivision was impossible, on account of the conservation restriction that Julie had put on the land at the time of purchase. So they moved to the next idea, which was that Russ would build a second dwelling on the undivided parcel, where he and Linda would live.

With this amorphous concept agreed to, but with none of the planning actually underway, the parties came up with a supposedly stop-gap arrangement to serve until the new structure could be built. Linda would sleep on the living-room couch, while Russ would get a corner of the woodshed, curtained off for token privacy. Soon, on top of Julie’s residual mess, there came a flood of plastic tubs and milk crates, haphazardly filled with clothing, felting squares, gadgets, squeaky-toys, toiletries, and the tools of Russ’s construction trade. To Bertie’s delight, a couple of high-spirited cats also quickly made themselves at home, joining the incontinent old Chittenden Scottie and a few miscellaneous birds and hamsters as part of the improbable household. 

Russ may have been polite to his hosts, but he was thoroughly unreliable. He would dream up far-fetched schemes in order to make a quick buck, and then, when they backfired or failed to materialize due to impracticality and absence of follow-through, would lash out at whoever he imagined was hindering him. He was also an erratic builder: he was full of grandiose ideas, but didn’t have the competence or consistency to bring them off, and he lacked the organizational skills to run a successful business. 

To be fair, throughout the time that he was involved with the Chittendens, he was dealing with chronic back pain, which undoubtedly made a bad situation worse. He had already undergone major surgery, with indifferent success, and was relying on large quantities of pain-killers just to get through the day. (Rumor had it that he was also dealing drugs on the side, though I have no idea whether this was true.) In any case, whatever natural tendencies towards anger and resentment he may originally have had, they could hardly have been diminished by constant pain and heavy medication.

Russ’s moodiness notwithstanding, the house was now a hive of cheerful activity, quite unlike the desolate burrow of previous years. I found it odd to see Julie, raised in patrician snobbery and thoroughly disdainful of popular culture, now surrounded by the trappings of blue-collar America—the wide-screen television always on in the background, the “feminine touches” incongruously grafted onto the unfinished surfaces. But I wasn’t about to pass judgment, since the people who introduced these things also gave me reason to hope that I wouldn’t end up with sole responsibility for the Chittenden ménage in the absence of anyone else. True, I was the only relative living on the Island, and almost the only one who hadn’t abandoned the sisters to their fate; but with the bonds of the foursome growing deeper all the time, and with Linda and Russ anticipating a home of their own in exchange for the care that Linda seemed genuinely happy to provide, I was grateful that a workable arrangement seemed to be in place.

There was still no written contract, however, and the need for one became more pressing when Bertie broke her hip. Henceforward school would be out of the question, because she could no longer walk without assistance, and would require full-time help. Linda was up for the task, but since she would have to forego all other income sources, it became clear even to these feckless folk, who recoiled from officialdom in any form, that legal agreements were needed.

I can’t say whether the plan to transfer ownership of the undivided property to Linda and Russ was already part of the conversation before Bertie broke her hip, nor do I know who came up with the idea in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t have been out of character for Russ to insinuate the thought into Julie’s mind in hopes of finding a way out of his credit woes, but Julie could equally well have made the offer unprompted, given her generous impulses and her desire to secure the future for Bertie and herself. In any case, regardless of who suggested the arrangement and when, it wouldn’t in itself be enough; Linda would also need a regular stipend, which would require the consent of the investment adviser Mr. Bronson, and of Cousin Nina as well. 

The reason for this was that the trust set up for the sisters’ benefit was no longer under Julie’s control. After the wooden boat fiasco and the meltdown at Borrowdale, she had been persuaded to resign her position as trustee so that Mr. Bronson could appoint Nina in her place. Though understandably less than thrilled to assume the position, Nina had agreed because, having overseen the sale of the Edgartown house and the purchase of the land in Oak Bluffs, she knew how utterly incompetent Julie was, and also recognized that there was no one else who would be willing and able to take on the job. Once she was on board, Mr. Bronson had been able to stabilize the portfolio while also providing for the sisters’ basic needs. Now, however, Julie would have to approach the trustees about a salary for Linda, entailing an additional monthly expense.

I was away from the Vineyard while these arrangements were being negotiated, so I don’t know the details, but when I returned, everything was settled. There was a formal life-care agreement, and title to the property had been turned over to Russ and Linda, with a life estate for the sisters until the death of whichever one outlived the other. For a moment, it almost seemed like things were stable.

Once the documents were signed, Russ was eager to move ahead with the construction project. Since he hadn’t done his research, he was predictably aggrieved when he discovered that the relevant zoning codes only permitted one residence per lot—but, not to be stymied, he came up with an alternative plan, proposing a large “addition” joined to the existing house by a passageway. This new structure was to be the core of the hybrid dwelling, containing shared common space as well as private quarters for him and Linda, while the original cottage would become the sisters’ bedroom wing.

Eventually, after a couple of false starts, the plan was approved. Russ’s first move was to cut a hole in the wall and cover it with plastic, in anticipation of connecting the old area with the new. Next, he brought in heavy equipment and dug a huge pit for the basement of the new wing, piling up the excavated dirt in a small mountain to one side. And then, work ceased. There things stood, untouched, for a couple of years at least.

The stated reason for the delay—though probably not the only one—was Russ’s health. He experienced a sudden deterioration in his back, and then, on top of that, a heart attack: not a terribly severe one, but still, enough to keep him off the job. To suggest that financial mismanagement may have been a factor is not to deny the reality of his medical troubles, even if, as evidence suggested, his behavior would have been problematic regardless of the circumstances. Construction didn’t resume until a grown son of Linda’s appeared on the scene, at loose ends after being released from jail for some minor offense, and made himself available to help. I don’t know whether he got paid for his efforts, nor do I recall where he slept—in a tent? in the woodshed with Russ?—but he went to work on the new house under Russ’s direction, and gradually it started to take shape.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, JULIE HAD grown increasingly frail, and her breathing had deteriorated badly. I clearly remember her low-key, almost apologetic tone when she told me about her diagnosis: “it seems that I have cancer.” I couldn’t feel particularly sad, but at the same time, I was disarmed and impressed by her matter-of-fact acknowledgment of incipient mortality. 

It was then that she asked me to be her executor. I agreed, on the condition that I be given access to whatever information I might need in order to understand the situation in its totality. This granted, I started to piece together a picture of how things stood, and discovered an alarming fact: Bertie had no legal guardian. Obviously the parents, and then Julie, had been de facto guardians, but none of them had ever seen fit to get this formalized—I suppose because they felt that it would be beneath their dignity to draw the state’s attention to such a private matter, or perhaps they just never thought of it, taking it for granted that one of them would always be around. 

I told Julie that in light of her diagnosis I believed it was essential to remedy this, and she concurred, asking me to take it on because, as a Vineyard resident, I would be well positioned to keep an eye on things—and also because, as Linda often reminded me, “you were always her favorite.” Not wanting to shoulder this responsibility alone, I suggested that Nina should become co-guardian, so that I would have a partner with authority in the financial realm. Julie saw my point, and soon thereafter, Nina came to the Vineyard so that she and I could meet, and so that the three of us could discuss things face-to-face.

Conscientious and sensible as well as familiar with the overall picture, Nina immediately struck me as someone who would make an ideal ally for dealing with the Chittenden muddle. Though her reserve and concern for transparency rubbed Linda and Russ the wrong way, I was grateful when she agreed to join me in applying for Bertie’s guardianship, not least because the very fastidiousness that annoyed the householders would allow me to focus on the human dimension, while she, from a distance, could play the “bad cop,” imposing rules which could be plausibly attributed to Mr. Bronson. Meanwhile I would make sure that Bertie and Linda were content, which would include humoring Russ.

I knew that I would be dealing with personality issues, but I didn’t anticipate the complications that Mr. Bronson’s involvement would bring. If Nina was concerned about the pressures of the situation, Mr. Bronson was choleric about them. When I wrote him to introduce myself, and to say that in the process of applying for guardianship I foresaw new expenses which would have to be covered by the trust, he replied in a long, tendentious letter that he’d kept the Chittenden portfolio afloat against all odds for forty years, thank you very much, and wasn’t about to accede to what he considered unreasonable demands.

Julie died within a year of her diagnosis, before the guardianship issue could be resolved. To our attorney’s dismay, the judge assigned to hear our case didn’t approve it outright, but instead ordered an investigation into Bertie’s mental state, which both delayed the process and substantially increased our costs. As we expected, our request was ultimately granted, but not before we were hit with the investigator’s fees—$300 an hour, plus hefty travel expenses from the mainland—as if we, and not the authorities, stood to benefit from Bertie being kept out of the state care system. Naturally our lawyer, while outraged at a maneuver that he suspected was a political payoff, submitted an extra bill as well, which also had to be forwarded to the trust for payment.

Meanwhile, Nina and I had met with Linda and Russ to get a clearer picture of Bertie’s expenses. Linda made a strong case that the $500 monthly allowance stipulated in the life-care agreement had become inadequate for Bertie’s needs, and Nina and I were persuaded that it needed to be increased. She was clearly struggling financially, even as she remained lavish with her time and love.

Unfortunately, while Linda’s caregiving was beyond reproach, the same could not be said of her record-keeping. (Indeed, the disdain that she and Russ evinced towards such matters was part of why Julie had felt comfortable with them in the first place.) When Nina asked for a tally of expenditures, Russ angrily charged us with disrespect, and it took all our diplomacy to calm him down. Meanwhile, after a search, a defensive Linda finally located a plastic bag containing some crumpled-up receipts and other random scraps of paper, which she handed over with uncharacteristic bad grace. I would have foregone the entire exercise in order to keep the peace, but for Nina, who had to deal with Mr. Bronson, a viable paper trail would have been a powerful piece of evidence, and its absence was unhelpful to say the least.

Mr. Bronson could hardly refuse to cover the costs of the guardianship petition, but his convictions—both about the management of the trust, and about Linda and Russ personally—led him to vehemently deny our request. From his perch in the Hudson Valley, whither he had retired from his investment business in Boston, he wrote: 

“After many years of overdrafts, I am determined not to return to paying out more than the trust takes in. I am quite sure that the generosity we have shown is beyond what any ordinary Boston trustee would ever have considered. We are already handing over more than is called for by the terms of our agreement, and I do not intend to make further concessions which would require us to pay out principal. As you know, I am deeply suspicious of Cacciotti”—he could never bring himself to use Russ’s first name—“and his influence over his wife, if that’s what she is. They see the trust as a cash cow to be milked for their benefit. They have the house and land, they have the income from the trust, and now they want the capital too. We do not need to do it, and we should not do it. Who knows, anything could happen—Bertie might require expensive hospitalization, the Cacciottis might go off to the South Seas!” 

Aside from its uncanny echoes of old Mr. Chittenden’s bluff hauteur, this letter was aggravating because of its refusal to recognize what seemed obvious to Nina and me, namely that appeasing Linda and Russ was now the only alternative. I wrote back, pointing out that nursing home care—to which we would have to resort if the relationship with Linda disintegrated—would be not only hugely disruptive for Bertie, but far more costly than the status quo as well. For her part, Nina cobbled together a list of expenses, using the few available receipts combined with a lot of guesswork, and eventually Mr. Bronson gave way, writing to Nina: “I firmly disapprove of the continuing blackmail of the trust by these predatory people, but I suppose they have got you over a barrel. I cannot in good conscience accede to your request, but I am too old to argue about it. Therefore, I will not make objection if in your capacity as co-trustee, you put in the order, so that I have nothing to do with it. This is the only way that I am willing to go along.”

*   *   *

NOW, HAD MR. BRONSON’S principles been the only complicating factor in the equation, things might have settled down, but there was Russ to be dealt with as well. A more archetypal contrast would be hard to imagine: on the one hand, the fastidious old blue-blooded banker, class prejudice dripping from every pore; and on the other, the bullying, bungling working-class scammer, digging himself into an ever-deepening hole through his own incompetence. Reconciling these two extremes seemed like an impossible assignment, but I felt that I needed to do my best, since Bertie’s well-being hung in the balance.

The new wing had at last been roughed in, and Russ and Linda were living amid the sawhorses and paint cans, when one day I went over to check up on Bertie and to look for some papers that would help me finish up Julie’s back taxes (she had failed to file for the last few years, and as her executor I needed to clean up the mess). Linda made tea for me and Bertie—Russ would never take part in such a feminine activity—but when we were done he appeared and announced that they had decided to sell the Vineyard property and move to New Hampshire. His back, he said, required surgery and follow-up therapy that he couldn’t get here, and with the proceeds of the Vineyard house, they would be able to buy something significantly better in a less expensive real estate market, with a swimming pool which would be great for him and for Bertie too. 

Stunned, I tried to make sense of this latest bombshell: what about the construction project, what about Bertie’s life estate, what about all the agreements so laboriously worked out that would now have to be revisited? No problem, said Russ, I’ve got it all figured out. He dragged me to his computer and started showing me photos of all the glorious properties he’d been looking at, talking as if it were already a done deal. 

I left, shaking my head and quaking in my boots. A series of tense exchanges ensued, with letters going back and forth, largely at cross-purposes to one another. From Russ: “I didn’t want this, it was put on my plate. I’m tuffenuff [sic] and I suck up pain 24/7, but I need hi-tech hospitals and I’m not willing to get on the boat every day for my treatments. There is a uniform answer to make everyone happy. Real estate is 3x cheaper in New Hampshire and we won’t have mortgage payments. We will give Bertie 1/3 ownership, a generous compensation compared to her being paid off here soon. We’re keeping our promise to Julie 110%. Once she gets a physical visit I know she’ll be okay with it. Having a pool will make her feel better—become more mobile—it will become very high on her list of favorite things.”

I wrote a carefully-worded reply, recognizing the first-rate care provided to Bertie by Linda and the bonds of affection between them, as well as the legitimate challenges posed by Russ’s health problems, but also pointing out that in addition to the legal complications, the impact on Bertie would need to be considered. In response, Russ opted for bluster: “Your idea about not changing things for Bertie is just plain wrong. Previous to us the girls were living in total squalor and 75% of the Island knows this. Now she is in the new house with heat, clean clothes, three squares, and 57" hi-definition TV with surround sound. In New Hampshire she’ll get everything she has now, plus a pool. The legal papers don’t have to be complicated or expensive, a one-page addendum will do. Your perspective on everything related to this deal is out of focus and unrealistic. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.” 

Unpleasant though this was, I kept visiting in order to maintain friendly relations, and as time went on, I noticed Bertie becoming increasingly comfortable with the prospect of the move. Of course this could be construed as the result of undue influence, but what mattered to me were Bertie’s actual feelings, not what triggered them, and it was clear that her attitude towards the idea was now a positive one. Also, there was another factor leading me to look more favorably on the plan: they now wanted to settle in the area where Bertie had grown up, near St. Paul’s, which was home to many of Linda’s relatives whom Bertie had met and liked. More than once, Linda had driven the two of them up to stay with her married daughter for extended visits and special events, where Bertie had been much fussed over, and I could see how the social life of a sprawling, easy-going family could be of real benefit to her.

Some time earlier, with Nina’s approval, I had hired a lawyer specializing in guardianships to help us with the complexities of our situation. Now, as the person on the ground, I informed Nina and our attorney of my inclination to go along with what Russ and Linda were in any case determined to do, provided that we could secure Bertie’s legal interests. Luckily, Mr. Bronson wouldn’t have to be brought in on this decision, since the life care agreement wouldn’t be affected, and Bertie’s life estate in the property—the only other financial entanglement—was under the control of the guardianship, not the trust. Still, we were daunted by the prospect of transferring the guardianship, health insurance, and other location-based covenants from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, until we realized that we could change Bertie’s address so that henceforth she would officially live with me. While legally dubious, this strategy would allow us to bypass the change-of-state issues, and we figured we could probably get away with it because the odds of being challenged were slim.

*   *   *

SOMEWHERE IN THE midst of all this, Russ let it drop that he had declared bankruptcy and that the Vineyard property was being foreclosed on. So familiar by now was Russ’s mismanagement that this latest fiasco hardly even registered: I was already feeling swamped by the weight of the Chittenden patrimony. Not surprisingly—indeed, appropriately, but still vexatiously—Linda had asked me to take charge of all the old papers, books, broken-down furniture, and bric-a-brac that Julie had brought with her from the Edgartown house. Soon, I found myself on hands and knees in a dank and spider-filled crawl-space, into which several dozen cartons of decaying books had been piled up in disarray, presumably transferred from those rusting Volkswagen buses now lost in the scruffy woods. Day after day, I lugged them through the basement, up the ill-constructed stairs, around the outside of the house, and into Julie’s old bedroom, which became my staging area.

There, abstractedly working through the dust and mold, I pondered the convolutions of fate that had led me to this moment. I wanted to be respectful of these leavings of the dead, but at the same time, I felt the need for vigilance, lest I be claimed by them. Even if there were some of these books that I might be glad to have, some of the small percentage that weren’t so blackened and toxic that they could only be sent to the dump—where would I put them, living in a tiny cottage that was already overflowing with keepsakes of the past? Had I returned to Martha’s Vineyard only to commune with ghosts, my own life no less hollow than my cousin Julie’s—or so it felt just then, within that musty room—and would I, too, suffocate in the sloughed-off drift of years?

Such a meditation on the vanity of human endeavor! So many once-fine leather bindings, rotted and turning to powder in my hands; so many elegant ancestral signatures and high-flown inscriptions, testimony to libraries lovingly assembled and passed on through generations; so many authors I’ve never heard of, their collected works in sets of ten, twenty, thirty matching volumes, tossed onto the trash heap if they’re too far gone, or at best, sent to the library book sale where maybe, just maybe, someone will rescue them—but I doubt it: who would want the novels of Charles Reade, sixteen volumes, 1886? From my biographical dictionary, itself a fine example of high-flown literary style: “Not one of the great nineteenth-century English novelists, but of the second order, he is perhaps the best.”

Shaking myself from my melancholy, I went back to the tasks at hand. I hired a man with a pick-up truck to take the ruined books off to the dump, and paid him for two one-ton loads. I sold some of the better ones to a dealer, giving the proceeds to Linda for expenses so that we could avoid pleading with Mr. Bronson yet again. I brought home boxes filled with old manuscripts and letters, diaries and invoices and other miscellaneous papers, and shoved them under my bed for sorting “later.” I gave bookshop ledgers and memorabilia to the historical society, and took Mr. Chittenden’s ancient bookshop chair to be restored. I filled out change-of-address forms, filed taxes, talked with Nina and our lawyer, managed the guardianship checking account, reported finances as required by the court, and prayed that it would all be over soon.

*   *   *

OF COURSE, HAVING forfeited the Vineyard property to the bank, Russ had no resources for his dream house, and the trio ended up in an undistinguished rental instead. But I knew that Bertie would be well cared for, which was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Given the new configuration, I welcomed Nina’s offer to go look in on them, and her subsequent report that Bertie was adjusting well. 

Once they were gone, I never expected to drive down that ill-omened road again, but a few months after my last visit I got a call from the new owner, asking if I wanted to claim a framed print that he’d found behind an unfinished wall. From his description I realized that it was the only thing I had ever really wanted from the Edgartown house, a woodcut portrait of Queen Victoria by the masterful British artist William Nicholson. I had assumed that it was lost, having searched for it during the clean-out without success, so its reappearance felt like a blessing from the universe. It had been given to Julie by Mary Stokes, a couple of years after Ellen died, because she figured that Julie would appreciate it—and now it had come to me.

In the event, Bertie lived for another eight years after Linda and Russ moved her to New Hampshire. I visited her there once, and she seemed happy enough, though Linda told me that she was prone to the occasional panic attack as her breathing capacity diminished. Nina went more often, and saw the trio through yet another move, the cause of which I no longer remember. There were a few more crises over money and accounting, but we were able to navigate them, and compared with previous years, the drama involved was small. Bertie died peacefully in 2010, at the age of eighty-seven, of end-stage pulmonary disease.

Meanwhile, a couple of years after the New Hampshire move, one other tendril from the Chittenden past had unfurled unexpectedly, when I was spending a few days with an old friend in the Hudson Valley. I mentioned Mr. Bronson’s name, since I knew he lived in the area, and was amazed to learn that he and my friend were members of the same church—Episcopalian, naturally—in the quaint little village of Tivoli. A region of ostentatious riverfront palazzos where my friend had found a modest toehold through Bard College connections, this part of Dutchess County had been a favorite getaway destination for nineteenth-century New York aristocrats, and here, Mr. Bronson had returned to the fold.

My friend offered to call him, to see if we could arrange a visit. A couple of days later, we found ourselves on a long carriage drive, sweeping down to what had been a dower house on one of the Astor estates. Mr. Bronson greeted us, and once again I heard that harrumphing upper-class intonation, which I thought had died out along with Pierce-Arrows and dinner-gongs. A mousy wife was introduced, who then scurried off to the kitchen, since we had been invited for lunch and, as Mr. Bronson explained, there was no help that day. We three gents sat in the parlor overlooking the Hudson and drank sherry, as Mr. Bronson regaled us with stories from his schooldays at St. Paul’s, seventy years before. Many of them were about the afternoon teas: “Mrs. Chittenden was a wonderful tea hostess, you know, simply wonderful. She used to serve a kind of, ah, a cookie-like thing, yes, they were cookies with curls of shaved chocolate on top of them, we used to call them nigger-heads. You couldn’t say that nowadays, could you, but that’s what we called them back then, nigger-heads…” Relishing the epithet more than any remembered flavor, he continued blithely, while my friend and I squirmed on our uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. Lunch followed, in the kitchen: a sad little lunch of Campbell’s soup and sandwiches of ham paste spread on thin white bread, followed by canned pears—since, as I’d observed once or twice before when I’d encountered late-stage Old Money, fine taste did not extend to food when no servants were around.

We departed as soon as politeness would permit, controlling our shrieks and groans until we reached the car. Then, on the drive out, my friend told me a story he had heard, about how Mr. Bronson had been interviewed for a documentary about Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had known as a child from visits to the nearby presidential estate at Hyde Park. When questioned about Roosevelt’s concern for the downtrodden during the depression, Mr. Bronson had replied: “Well, you see, when Franklin Roosevelt was at Harvard, he wasn’t admitted into the Porcellian Club, and that’s why he went down the wrong path in life.”

*   *   *

WHICH BRINGS ME back to where I started—that world of privilege and noblesse oblige that the Chittendens had embodied to perfection. Mr. Bronson had done well by his old schoolmaster: he had handled the family’s modest wealth adroitly, despite Julie’s recklessness, and his stewardship had saved Bertie from destitution in her old age. At the same time, he had perpetuated an outlook of prejudice and disdain, an outlook reinforced over multiple generations and responsible for social and psychic hurt on an epochal scale.

Was this the legacy that old Mr. Chittenden would have wished for? Surely it was not his intent to burden his daughter Julie with a set of attitudes and expectations which, running up against her unruly nature, would lead her to a life of self-consuming frustration and despair. And yet, wasn’t this what had resulted? Going through the contents of those boxes I had pushed under my bed, I found letters from the adolescent girl, writing home from boarding school, eager to describe her odd fixations but also prone to overwhelm in her encounters with the world. I found the didactic essays of her moralizing father, by turns jocular and sanctimonious, and imagined her trying to gain his affection in the face of his withering wit, his rejection of anything that might be considered even remotely sentimental. I looked at endless condolence letters, and saw her set adrift by the deaths of her parents who, for all their restrictiveness, had been her unquestioned moorings. I sifted through evidence of her increasingly disordered mental state—notebooks full of incomprehensible jottings, unopened bills and letters dutifully sent by Bertie once a week from school, and other random scraps of paper, still extant only because they’d never been thrown out. Finally, I pondered the whole trajectory of this archetypal tale: the principled, yet repressive and class-bound start; the harsh reality of mental retardation, compounded by silence and shame; the lack of any heartfelt space for wayward otherness, despite apparent tolerance; and the long, slow disintegration, each episode more bizarre than the one before, until nothing was left but brittle fragments, crumbling at my touch.

With this last dispersal, I put the Chittendens to rest. I have sent whatever might be of interest to the archives at St. Paul’s, and have released the remaining odds and ends to purification in the woodstove. I’m grateful for what I was given, through family heritage and through Julie’s better nature: connection to a place of spirit, a harbor in my youthful confusion, unequivocal acceptance. I’m glad that I could be with Julie in her dying, and could help assure good care for Bertie in her final years. By telling their story, I have completed my service. I bless them, and I let them go. 

Moonlight • Water • Silence

A Nocturne from Another Place and Time

William Stewart

2 0 1 0

THE RECEPTION NOW has ended, and, sated with poems and fine company, you take your leave and step into the night. The heat of the day has abated a little at last, and a tiny breeze just faintly stirs the cassia trees as you stroll past stately mansions hidden deep within their high-walled grounds. A bit past full, the bletted moon has already cleared the treetops as she begins her nightly journey across the sky, blanching out the flickering lamp your footman carries hanging from his pole. Soon, your route converges with a shallow canal, whose quiet music echoes the breath of coolness in the air. How fortunate your way should lie beside it! You walk along in silence, savoring the sounds, the sights, the smells, so variously focused and obscured by the magic of the plenilune night.

Soon, through the stillness, you become aware of the murmur of noise from the pleasure quarters, and, turning from your homeward route, you cross a footbridge and gravitate toward the river. Before long you are traversing the vast Sernashi temple complex, its shrines alight with candles and dotted with devotees offering up their prayers for a hundred poignant or petty things—a lameness healed, a daughter married, lust, wealth, revenge. An ancient fortune teller catches your eye as she sits on her tiny stool, her look unfathomably sad from out her ravaged face; you walk on, but something of her languor lingers, brushing your consciousness as you go through the gatehouse and enter the Quarter.

And here you are at the Street of Dreams. The crowd is thick with wealthy merchants, well-born ladies in token disguise, grandees in their litters, loiterers and shady characters, professional beauties, sad-faced Uzu slaves…they are young and old, Altani, Shari, Transmontane, people from all corners of the empire in fact, exotic clothes and wondering faces floating in a sea of fresh and jaded habitués. Heat, again; and no respite from the river, either, on account of the storied pleasure-houses on your left, which, by virtue of their waterside location, command the highest prices from the finest clientele. Only at the ferrymen’s stairs do you see the water; and even there, the milling throng makes a barrier scarcely less solid than the inns before and after, and the vendors’ lamps and cookfires cancel any cooling that the river might otherwise convey. You move through the crowd and, leaving your servant with a few coppers for a tub of beer at a tavern of his choosing, turn in at an elegant doorway whose understated sign, in a mannered running script, whispers to the knowing: House of the Dusky Iris.

Old Mursa bows you in with a respectful greeting. Next a pretty Shedri youth offers you water and a cloth at the dripping fountain, welcome indeed on such a night as this. The room is nearly empty: a pair of friends are deep in conversation by the door, an enormous bureaucrat fans himself morosely in a corner; but it is from the floor above that the gaiety filters down, and it is to the narrow stairs you go, and mount.

Music and voices, shadows and light, punk and musky oils: the feel of the room is vivid with tension and desire. Here an aged nobleman flirts with one of Hazaldur-zei’s handsome high-class charmers, who measures out a condescending smile; there a group of actors laughs, clustered around their big man, whom you recognize as the famous Dosht-i-Ghuri; deep in alcoves, figures recline, animated or lost in reverie, the boys alert to their clients’ every mood; while on the little platform musicians weave a web with reedy shawm, ethereal glass bowls, and plangent seventeen-stringed ghar. Hazaldur-zei’s lieutenant comes up beside you and, after an exchange of niceties, inquires as to your wants; you answer noncommittally, and, after he is gone, stand a moment surveying the busy room. A couple of tall, broad-shouldered ladies of fashion trip across the floor, their dress a lavish travesty of taste; servers move deftly, thimblefuls of khola and iced syrups on their trays; an unlikely threesome climbs the flight to the next story, presumably to retire to a private room; and in the corner an apprentice lad works the hanging fan, flickering the lamp-flames in their filigrees, making a restless dance upon the walls.

The open archways draw you, and you step out onto the wide balcony, where others have come as well to take the fresher air. For a time you stare down at the great river, where boats go to and fro or rock at wharfside moorings, the reflections of their dim lights breaking up again and again in the rippled darkness. Your eye picks up a fisherman in his coracle; he drifts in the stream and after a minute disappears from view, vanishing as if he had never been. You turn away and, seating yourself on the polished bench, request a khola from a server passing by. When he returns with the tiny cup, you sip, savoring the sharp distinctive smell, the bitterness, the intimation of euphoria…what will the night reveal, you wonder.

Presently a new sound attracts your ear: the voice of song. Curious, you wander back inside, and see that the musicians have been joined by a trio of pretty lads with the broad cheekbones of mountain folk, singing a lilting village air. You try to catch the words, but they are in an unfamiliar tongue, Gurdzhehi or one of the Kûi languages by the sound of it; their garb, too, suggests a northern style, though the rough hill-country idiom has been artfully translated into the silks and linens of the Quarter, and their sharduhas fall open to reveal tight gauzy breeches designed to offer up the gifts of delight they so coyly pretend to conceal. Such an act as theirs, performed by city boys, would be jejune and weary; but from these fresh-faced northerners, it seems charmingly authentic, and you observe them happily as they sing, threading their voices together in close harmony. At the end you hiss appreciatively, along with those other patrons who have been attending to their song. Unexpectedly, you catch the glance of the slenderest of the three; he tosses you the sketch of a smile in response, an aside, as it were, for you alone, fluttering your heart.

Now, though, they are moving on: three notes only, and you know it is ‘Oh, Yon Waning Moon’ its sad, familiar melody provoking an atavistic welling-up of tears. They handle it well, their accents giving it an unusual piquancy; they, and you, get through that last, heart-wrenching verse, and then they are back with another northern tune, a courting song most likely, and you watch the willowy fellow’s expressive face, musing.

And then you glimpse Keram i-Ridzhavi-mura, a friend that you encounter only rarely, but are always glad to see. You beckon him to join you on a divan, and you each take a bowl of chilled Oirani wine and a khola. You spend a pleasant interval, exchanging gossip and playful repartee, before your acquaintance begs to take his leave. He rises and moves away, and only then do you notice that the musicians have disappeared, save for a grizzled Shedri fellow, playing a hypnotic rhythm on the water-drums. Suddenly you are aware of the heat, and of your need to urinate. You rise and acknowledge the steward with a nod, then go downstairs and make your way to the chambers; and there, in the inner room, is the slim northerner, preparing to relieve himself.

Giving nothing away, you take your time undoing your chembran, while the singer stands motionless at the piscina. Moving to his side, you steal a glance and sense a heightened intensity; in the vivid absence of speech, the stream that courses through the trough seems preternaturally loud. You reach into your breeches and withdraw your member, heavy in your hand. You feel the pressure rising as it swells, drawn between the two conflicting impulses. Without raising your eyes or turning your head, you watch your fellow’s locus; he, too, appears to be having difficulty, he holds himself gingerly, and is thickening as well. Two or three times he pulls his flesh, then stops for a portentous moment, as if waiting for the flow. His penis arches out, not stiff exactly but visibly engorged. You pick up on his cues, your unspent water now more whet than counter-urge; insistent though the pressure is, it is subsumed in the other, more exciting lure. You stand there, feigning unawareness, with nothing but your semi-erection revealing your arousal. Suddenly, your neighbor’s jutting piece propels a juddering jonquil jet against the backboard, flooding for a moment before stopping as abruptly as it began. This is too much; you rub covertly, so does he, then you stop, as you must, so as not to get too much caught up in the momentum of the wave. Again the fellow releases his flow, much longer, now, until at last he cuts it; then a handful of flounces, a flick of the skin, a flutter of eyelids, and he reassembles himself and saunters into the anteroom, throwing a glance over his shoulder as he leaves.

You pull yourself together and, as the excitement subsides, finally find your own thwarted fluid pouring into the gurgling runnel, the first exquisite sting dissolved after an instant in luxurious relief. After a long, very long, slow-ending minute, you shake and replace your parts in their pouch. You fasten your chembran and adjust the reghba, then return to the entrance area, where a compère has materialized with a questioning look in his eye—but you pass him with a smile, and stride out, tipping old Mursa a couple of huluda as you pass.

Still a little dizzy, you find your servant waiting across the way, and together you set off for home. Leaving the Quarter by a side street, you pass through the alleys of the Mercers’ District, silent and shut tight now, empty of the jostle and fawn that will return in just a few short hours. Your shortcut leads you quickly to the Avenue of the Imperial Succession, its broad stone carriageway and flanking acacia allées stretching toward the Gryphon Gate, hulking vastly in the distance, the Imperial Precinct beyond. A troop of nocturnal langurs runs chitter-shrieking through the trees, their eldritch cries fading as they race away. You pass a few late-farers like yourself, including some very august personage in a sumptuous longa, who stops you with an imperious rap of the fan on the side of his equipage and makes an impertinent remark, which you deflect as best you can. Despite the passing shadows, though, the thoroughfare seems strangely empty in the zenithal moonlight, and it is with some relief that you turn into the Street of Five Waters. A watchman sounds his clapper, making his rounds, lanterns shining brightly from his horns, and soon you are in your ward.  

A dozen or twenty paces, and you are at your threshold. Recognizing your knock, the porter opens the little side-door, and you enter, the footman at your heels. After a few words, you bid them both goodnight; you hear the heavy lock fall into place, and then the crunch of gravel as they head off to their quarters, and to their well-earned rest.

Now the night is yours alone. Skirting the main reception hall, you enter the western garden. You stand a moment, drinking the beauty in. The full, over-full peonies lean moonfaced on their stakes, night-blooming jasmine perfumes the sultry air. The silence is enriched, not hindered, by the drip, drip, drip of water in the old stone pool. Oh, the blessèd stillness! You make your way by the flagstone path to your private pavilion, where your sleeping room is marked by the gentle glow of lamplight filtered through a fine-wove veil. You mount the three wide steps, cross the broad veranda, lift the netting, and go in. 

At the side of the raised chulum, your thoughtful Raukhma has put out a dressing gown, also a jug of lightly fermented melon water. You gratefully remove your necklace and step out of your sweat-damp clothes, then let down your hair and pull on the robe in happy anticipation of the zerda. Next you pour yourself a beaker of the fluid and drink deeply, conscious of the pleasure it will bring. After a minute, having drunk your fill, you dive beneath the hangings. Along the gallery your step is lit by a miniature oil lamp burning in its niche, but as you cross the courtyard to the bathhouse, it is once again the moon that shows the way, scattering her largesse indifferently on everything she sees.

Taking off your garment, you soap yourself at the dragonmouth tap and sluice off the heat of the day, then gladly sink into the waiting pool. The element embraces you, and at first you simply savor its coolness, your mind empty of all thought. Then reverie begins, under the spell of trickling water and flickering light-and-shade. After a time, you stretch yourself out as though to swim, as much as the confines of the pool allow, clasping the lip of azure faience tiles. Finally you float a bit, and consider the possibilities of adventure still to come. Hoisting yourself out of the pool at last, you take a towel from the bench and slowly begin to dry yourself against its clean caress. Enjoying your nakedness, you step out onto the little portico of the zerda, where the midnight air feels almost cool against your still-damp skin. You stand awhile, toweling, and then go back inside, deliciously aware of the heaviness at your loins. You roughly dry and comb your hair, then pull on the robe, blow out the light, and head back to your apartments. 

A plan has formulated itself in your mind. On the lampshelf sits a vase of tapers. You light one and set it in a holder, then carry it into the anteroom that adjoins your sleeping chamber. The fragrance of cedar bewitches you as you open a drawer and find a pair of nankeen breeches, whose feel you know and love: they will cup you snugly, yet allow the ready movement you desire. You step into them with anticipation, then pause to tie a thong around your genitals before fastening the waistband and the cuffs below the knee. Pleased as always with the fit, you spare a tender thought for sad old Biddeh Loka, wasting away inexorably in pettishness and drink, yet making magic with thread and needle until the bitter end…a blessing on your path, you think to yourself, wherever you may be! Next you choose a kortchi of light buff muslin, cut loose about the shoulders, and tie it at the waist. You slip your feet into a pair of soft babouches, then quickly put your hair up and secure it with a couple of hairpins, and your toilette is done: reckless though it seems to go forth without chembran or reghba, yet for the foray you have conceived, any over-garment would be too much, given the heat of the night. 

Back in your room, you extinguish the taper and make your final preparations. At the edge of the chulum there is a small brass-and-wooden casket, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. You open the top, then lift the inner lid, lined with lead to insulate the cache. There, nestled in precious ice, is the little flagon. You replace the covers and slide the vial snug into your waistband, where the momentary cold shocks your skin with a shiver of delight. Crossing to the veranda, you run your thumb across the khlismava for good luck, and head out into the night.

Passing quickly through the formal courtyards, you come to the rear of the compound, where shrubbery hides the looming boundary wall. Unerringly you find the place where the bushes can be made to part; you hold a heavy branch aside, and half-slide, half-force your way into a narrow space, where moonlight scarcely penetrates. So deep the darkness, the untrained eye might never see the door—but your knowing fingers find the latch, and you step over the threshold and into another world. 

You have entered what was once a garden, now overgrown with weeds and grasses, a decaying mansion looming large beyond. You have been here before. You have come looking for the boy that some say lives here, kept by mad old Lord Druhpanar, who admits no one, possessed, they say, by some evil demon—they shudder and will say no more. Perhaps his nephew, perhaps his catamite, they will not say; some, indeed, deny that he exists, but rumors still persist, and though you have never seen him, you are drawn to look again.

There is a light. Never before have you seen a light. Faint though it is, it pulls you, it insists on your attendance. You will go there. You must see what can be seen.

First, though, you take in your surroundings. Like the postponement of that first inhale of bakhchi, the delay both focuses anticipation and brings a shimmering hyperreality to all that you perceive. The rank vegetation, crowding the long-untended quince and almond trees; the pungent smell of knuckleweed and wild onion, bruised beneath your tread; the flossy cloud illumined by the slowly sinking moon; the great baronial pile, patches of roof tiles missing, vines claiming verandas, silhouette sagging low—everything titillates your senses, begs for your acknowledgement in turn. Cautiously you advance, each step an unsteady venture on the heaved-up paving stones. A sudden subtle noise brings your heart into your throat—but it is only some night creature, scuttling in the underbrush, and deliberately you steady your breathing, regaining your equipoise before continuing on your quest.

Moving towards the villa, you see that the light is coming from a semi-detached wing, no doubt built for some long-ago concubine or other favorite. The ornate ridgepole, more or less intact, is an inky outline that makes the sky look pale; its serpentine form, that once announced the importance of the original inhabitant, now looms like a mammoth headdress over the pavilion, and the overhanging eaves hood the dot of lamplight like a giant beetling brow. A fearsome face, but its single eye is glowing, draws you in.

As you come nearer, your ears pick up the plang of plectrum against strings, the unmistakable music of the ghar. Faint it is, and somewhat melancholy—but thrilling too, for who else could it be, if not the youth you dream of seeing? For this is no fierce old tyrant or timid serving-maid; whoever it is that plays is confident, yet the touch is delicate, and the piece in ancient mode is sweetly modulated, a rare and tricky fingering, a minor threnody. Each step is a trancelike journey now, and desire flushes through you, filling out the loose-taut muslin. Will it be him? What will he be like? The stirring grows unbidden, the sacred gift, the impish godling, the ever-precious friend.

Through the gossamer hangings you descry a cross-legged figure, head bowed over the instrument, back-lit by an oil lamp set upon the floor. Behind the player, bathed in the golden lamplight, glints a waist-high chest, topped by a fine brass bowl. Softly through the gauze the glow diffuses, setting off the silhouetted form. So exquisite the picture, it could almost be a papercut, opaque against the scrim, save for the almost imperceptible gestures that render magic out of wood and strings. You cannot even tell the musician’s gender, though every hope and intuition tells you male…You listen, beguiled by the ornamented phrases as they circle round the underlying scale. They come to rest and then take flight again, like birds no sooner perched than scattering, only to alight anew, back where they began. But now the piece is winding down; it wheels around in a last long-lingering gyre, then settles in the secret glade of silence.

After a pregnant moment, the figure sets the ghar aside, and pauses…then rises with a dancer’s grace, and all at once uncertainty is ended, as the young man steps into the light, which gilds the highbred profile, the telltale boss of throat, the slim adolescent form. He is clothed in a dark chembran, which he now begins to unfasten slowly, as though his thoughts are elsewhere. Time seems to stop…but soon the hooks-and-eyes are all undone, and he reaches down, picks up the ghar, then turns and walks away, through an invisible doorway, his garment billowing out behind as he disappears beyond the pool of light. 

Swooning in the still night air, you look around for something you can lean on. That such a vision should be vouchsafed you, then withdrawn so soon…well, perhaps it is enough, you say to yourself, though underneath you know you yearn for more. By lucky chance, you see a sculpted pard, worn down with time and weather, a darker form against the shadowy dark ground. Walking toward it, your package shifting with every uneven step, you almost stumble into it, mound against the smooth stone flank, pressing in. So good to rest and press, your hands on the broad back of the sculpted creature, waiting.

As you watch and listen, a new sound enters your awareness: somewhere there is water running. The faintest trickle, some tiny channel flowing through the grounds. Familiar but exciting, its music, barely audible, takes you right to your center of gravity; and though the need is still remote, a hint of pressure arises, in resonance with the tinkling of the rill.

Your eyes, fixed on the luminescent screen, await. You hardly dare to hope, but the lamp left burning promises return. Time passes. Then suddenly you are all attention: the boy has re-entered the room, he bears a long-necked ewer, he is naked above his breeches, save for an open flimsy. His lustrous hair is falling on his shoulders, his lips are full and slightly open beneath his long straight nose. His eyes seem deep, unreadable, lit strangely from below: try though you will to read expression there, yet all is mystery. He puts the ewer down beside the basin, then turns and pulls a hidden tabouret from out of a dark corner and sets it near the lamp. He lifts the bowl, its uneven beaten surface showing fickle in the flame, and puts it on the stool. Taking up the ewer next, he turns once more, tilts the slender curving spout, and pours. The delicious sound incites you, drowning the gentler murmur then ceasing with the end of the brief cascade. He returns the ewer to the chest, then sheds his lightweight garment with an impatient twist of the shoulders, letting it fall like froth upon the floor.

And now—oh can it be so good?—he lifts his arms above his head and, intertwining fingers, stretches upward, closing his eyes with the pleasure of the reach. Turning somewhat sideways to your view, he shows his silky flank, the lamplight pooling in the secret underarm where a dusting of darkness reveals the first brush of manhood, the calligrapher’s initial mark on the perfect virgin page. Taut over his ribcage, his nipples are stretched slightly out of round, their tiny tips just visible, erect. Below his slender waist, a swelling distends his pantlets, suggestive of the plenitude within. Dare you dream—could he be thinking about masturbating?  Perhaps you should not hope, but oh, the thought is sweet! Of necessity you push, and raise your hand, smoothing back your hair. Half-consciously you breathe in—ah!—then out, and ready yourself, knowing what must come next.

Reaching into your waistband, you retrieve the secret potion and uncork it. No need to wait for something better: this is perfect, just like this, engrave the scene in memory, you know that you will finish it a hundred times and more. The beauty pulls his stretch to rearward, then audibly exhales as he lets go.

The moment has arrived. You raise the vial to one nostril, blocking the other with index finger pressed against your nose. You pull the bakhchi deep into your lungs; slowly it floods your body, reaching to your fingertips and toes, yet concentrating all on that one crux of being, fluxing, filling, floating, going, gone. With automatic motion you plug the bottle and nestle it back home, then pull back from the carven beast, just to let it be—the rich tumescence, the waiting water, the enchantment of the drug.

And now there comes the gesture you have conjured, have willed in your imaginings but did not think to see. He touches on the sly, as if absent-mindedly, but the sign is unmistakable and thrilling. His hand is gone as quickly as it came, but there you see the evidence: the prominent contour, the lazy downward curve. You make a slight adjustment, and notice a certain moistness in your breeches. You feel yourself engorge still more, the bakhchi works its sorcery, and you drift into a daze. 

Let it be indifferent. Let it not matter one way or the other, what happens or does not happen. A trick of the mind, a sleight of awareness—pa didin, it is done. Just passing the time, you are, just loitering in a deserted garden, just happening to see this youth half-naked and about to bathe, just happening to be half-erect and heavy, just casually needing to urinate—it means nothing, you can take it or leave it, no matter either way. So languid thus, so nonchalant, so unconcerned, you can stay all night if need be, not go, not come, just be, and watch, and wait … 

But now the boy is kneeling at the basin. You watch as he reaches round behind him, sliding a panel open in the chest, torso twisting sideways, head turned to the rear. He removes a couple of cloths, then faces you once more. Head down, he dips a towel in the vessel, wrings it out, and then begins to wash. First his face, then—lifting the weight of hair, and there again the brush of blackness—the nape of the neck, then breast and hollow stomach, then under the arms, then face again, water dripping down.

How quickly it is over! For now he is picking up the other towel, now he is drying his face and chest; and now, his bath complete, he gathers up the linens, then stands with an easy suppleness, and lays them on the chest. He seems to look right at you for a moment, and you freeze—but surely he cannot see you, you think to yourself confusedly, since the light is within the netting, and you are in the dark. 

He stoops and picks up the basin, and suddenly you see what he intends. Beware the risky moment—surely he will glimpse you now! He lifts the gauzy curtain and ducks under so it drapes him, then tosses the water onto the weed-choked ground, where it sloshes once, abruptly, and is gone. He glances up—you catch your breath—and looks around, then all at once he turns back in, and finally you are able to exhale. He sets the bowl upon the chest, then stows the tabouret, leaving only the oil lamp, glimmering on the floor.

Now he leans against the cabinet, narrow buttocks half-resting on its surface, one foot thrust out forward, the other kicked behind. Casually he tucks his thumb deep into his waistband, letting the fingers fall in loose repose, then studies the nails of his other hand, picking at the smallest with his teeth. After a minute, he sends his idle fingers downward, where they grope the heavy bundle at his thigh, adjust it and release. Does he have a secret mirror, placed where you cannot see? There is something in his pose, a certain coy deliberateness…Watch that little fingernail, just beneath his pouch: is it inching upward, twitching the coarse-grained fabric into the tender slit? You wonder if the motion that you think you see is real, or only the vibration of your nerve-ends, all aquiver. You look away an instant, to clear your head and vision—but still you cannot tell; so slight it is, if movement there is at all, that you must feed on the unknowing, all suspense.

Out of the corner of your eye, half unaware, you have noticed a curious thing. A rattan blind, fixed lower than the others, hangs somewhat to the right of your line of vision. Stand so that it hangs between yourself and him, and no eye contact will be possible. A safety screen, cover, deniability. A secret phantom epiphany, unnamable, unprovable, whatever happens with that jalousie between.

Can you move to where you want to be? Leave the security of the pard’s support, and put the slatted blind in your sightlines’ way? Yes, if you dare. There, barely a pace away from the narrow loggia, is a gnarly fruit tree, its trunk nearly horizontal for a bit at waist level. If you can reach it—how silent you will have to be, though!—you will have a prop to lean against, and a perfect view beneath the lowered shade. But what if the lamplight finds you, reveals you to the one you want to watch unseen? It is a risk you have to take. You prepare for the perilous journey, knowing that the dozen steps from out behind the sculpture and to the tree imperil all, yet needing to take the chance. 

Step, then: the friction of the homespun almost unbearably featherlight intense, fretting against your genitals in response to your weighted gait. Just idly strolling in a ruined garden, let it be loose, no need to be stiff, just walk a certain way, yes, you must pass close, right beneath the overhang, that close, that close, to reach the damson tree, the light will graze your garments, it cannot be helped, you are almost there, one more step, take it now, seems you’re safe, backside touching, resting/perching, rest, breathe, be. 

Just as you had hoped: you see the taut stomach and cryptic navel, the smooth chest with its twin rondels, almost near enough to touch…and through the hairline openings between the rattan slats, the vaguest hint of head and shoulders, nothing more. Never will you know if he can see you, nor would he know for sure that you see him. Unable to restrain yourself, you reach for your flask of bakhchi and inhale…waves of it sweep over you, a tide of sweet delight.

It has begun. Affecting an offhand negligence, he cups his package through the linen, hefting, adjusting, fidgeting, unmistakably starting to masturbate. You drink the vision in, and try though you will to maintain your neutral stance, you cannot keep your hand away for long. Urgency is building in your bladder, and you must outmaneuver it, to keep the need at bay.

After a bit the boy begins to milk his fleshy member, pulling through his breeches. You can almost feel the tantalizing pinch as he tugs his skin’s loose bud, the silky sheathing smoothly sliding over the hidden head. He tweaks it down and then lets go, and you imagine the hood retracting just a fraction, exposing the secret tip, its little fish mouth pouting, oozing fluid just like yours.

Enthralled by the tableau vivant unfolding beyond the scrim, you follow every gesture as the numinous being enacts his ritual, all the time provocatively slow. Now he palms his box and presses, flattening and smoothing himself down; now he gently rocks his loose leg back and forth, the unit riding heavy on his thigh. You catch his sidelong glances as he checks the hidden mirror that is surely positioned somewhere out of view. A growing wet spot shows, seeping through his breeches; you feel a sympathetic discharge in response.

Now the youngling shifts his weight, and adds a new dimension to his monodic self-caress. Reaching up, he finds a nipple, first brushing gently, then flicking the puckered nub. Beneath the loose-wove muslin that just skims them, you feel your own pips stiffen in response; you follow his suggestion, echoing his gestures, whether seen or unseen, impossible to say. The little mascots come to life, standing to attention; you give them what they ask for, and they thank you in return. You could almost believe that a tiny drip was forming at each nipple-tip, if you did not know better …

And so the dance continues, suspended out of time, hypnotic and compelling. Only the position of the moon, low above the western hills, tells you that the night is waning and will not last forever. You note the passing hour in some corner of your mind, then once again surrender to the spell. The energy is tuned to a high-pitched tension, like a bowstring straining at the limit of its reach. The invisible filament stretches taut between you, edgy with vibration, and you know that something soon will have to give.

In mystic synchronicity, the youth starts worrying the knot beneath his navel, stomach held tight in. After a minute the tie comes free, and his breeches fall, catching for just an instant on the pendulous protuberance on their precipitate way down. The shocking black of the little patch, the fat and drowsy member, the tight round sac with its sacred eggs almost hidden underneath—the revelation takes your breath away, and you nearly have an accident, hard inside your pantlet leg. You stand a moment completely still, holding back from touching, waiting for the closeness to subside.

Reaching round behind him, he finds the bowl and pulls it forward, then picks it up and pushes it into his eager groin. You almost feel the shock of coldness, metal against skin. He lets his piece half-float, half-sink, into the empty basin, then forces it against the side and shapes it, molding it to fit within the vessel’s hollow curve. He holds it there, mashed sideways, turning downwards, where it stiffens in resistance to the torque, and you cannot help but wonder: does he need to urinate? The question triggers a violent surge of pressure: you feel it moving down the dark canal, so near is the weight of water. So easy it would almost be, to open up the floodgates; yes, but well-nigh impossible too, so near the waiting semen.

The faunlet’s tip is glistening; a rope of slime is drooling down into the waiting bowl. The head is showing red and shiny, expelled from its protective sheath, which gathers at the flaring ridge. The penis hole is rounded for a squirt. The moment cannot be far off now; you read it in the slit lips’ pout.

Like a distended wineskin, your bladder yearns to flood—but the fluid you will soon discharge will be a milky one, heavy with your seed. You grope yourself against your leg, and find the secret opening in the cloth. Reaching in, you find and tug the spongy bloated glans: you bless the hidden orifice, the placket oh-so-sweetly placed, that Biddeh Loka made there. It barely offers passage—indeed, as you pull down, the edging binds you, jamming up against your bulky flange. You throb at the insistent chafe, and feel the precipice near.

Now the creature takes his thing and flogs it, thwacking it on the inside of the bowl. It thumps against the burnished metal, spitting ooze with every heavy thud. You shift your stance so your penis head is pointing firmly down, peeking out the little flap like a lurid purple fruit. No matter if he sees you now—the lascivious scene will climax soon in a transcendent denouement. You set your freighted leg little wider, so the semen will splat unhindered on the ground. 

Yet still you cannot know if it will be semen, so needful is your water to flush out. Maybe they will mix, and pour together…You hold them in equilibrium, holding to your casual stance, as if just dallying, as if any squirt would be just accidental. Just adjusting once too often, feeling the gates about to open, filling out, spilling over…

Swiftly bending, the wanton stripling tosses the brazen vessel on the floor, then aims his penis at it, forcing the erection partway down. He holds it backhand from above, his slender forearm angled in alignment, making it look unnaturally large. A pearl of sullen semi-liquid quivers at the tip, then turns into a gleaming thread as it stretches toward the floor. Milking deeply, he rolls his foreskin over the swollen head, showing the gaping oval to the basin. You see his narrow haunches flex…Suddenly an arc of fluid spurts from his rigid member; it lands with a heavy blat like a far-flung viscous ribbon, falling in the hollow of the bowl. Another splatter follows fast, hard upon the first—but you are nursing your own convulsion, and cannot control the pressure any more. You squirt a long fierce blurt of semen, hard onto the ground; it seems to last forever, as though you are ejaculating urine, but harder, thicker, searing as it jets. And then your penis squirts again, and you swoon in the sweet release…

At last the spasms gradually diminish, though even now there comes another, and just when all seems over, still one more. Trembling, vision spinning, you lean against the crooked tree, and try to catch your breath. Dazedly you touch your glans, now shockingly hyper-sensitive; you smear the residue around, then slip it back inside the little flap. The urine pressure is cruelly sharp; in a minute you will release it. 

Slowly you begin again to take in your surroundings. You hear the trickling watercourse, steady in its libation, and smell the damp night air. The weary moon is sinking down, a few bright stars reclaim the vault of heaven. And in the east, the faintest opalescence, first harbinger of the coming of the dawn.

The youth is standing abstractedly, drawing out the last of his euphoria. You reach inside your breeches—the ordinary way—and extract your sticky, still-tumescent organ. It takes a moment to find the flow, but when it comes, it gushes forth, burning first then almost aching with the long-postponed release. It seems to arc out endlessly, falling far and loud on the hard-packed earth. You think the boy must surely hear, but if he does, he gives no indication. Instead he pulls his breeches up, and tucks his lovely genitals in their nest. Eventually your torrent slows, then changes to erratic bursts, then sputters, then finally ceases. You take your time and flick yourself, then slowly reconfigure, the last few droplets moistening your linen.

You leave your perch reluctantly, and as though in an unsteady boat, begin your journey home. After half a dozen steps, you turn for one last look; and from where you pause, no rattan blind obscures your final view. You see the apparition, still naked above the waist: he bends to get the oil lamp, then straightens up and lifts it close beneath his solemn face. His head is tilted slightly down; he looks out with a foxy gaze from under his raven brows. He drops his eyes, purses his lips, looks up once more with the ghost of a smile, and blows the quick flame out. 

You blindly stare at the dark pavilion, disoriented and uncertain. The sudden change shifts everything: the villa flattens into black, the magic falls away, the sky that was a velvet cloak is now a pellucid paleness. The collapsing ruin seems eerily deserted, and you shiver at the unexpected chill. You fetch a mighty breath, then turn, and swish your way through the dew-soaked weeds and grasses. Coming to the boundary wall, you push aside the underbrush, then grope and find the hidden door, and silently go through.

Emerging on the other side, you see the lines of roofs and walls against the transparent dawn. A twitter of birdsong flickers, and is still. Drained in a sweet exhaustion, you pass through the various courtyards, heading for the welcome of your bed. You mount the steps of your apartments, lift the gauzy veil, and enter. Still in your lightweight underclothes, you sit on the edge of the raised chulum, replace the vial of bakhchi in its chest, then crawl into your curtained sleeping space. The first cock crows. You shift and stir uneasily, then return to your dream’s embrace. 

I Want to Die at Heart Circle

William Stewart

RFD 141, Spring 2010

I want to die in heart circle.

Life arises out of stillness, and when my time comes, I want to be lovingly witnessed as I sink back down into that eternal well of silence that is always at the center of our vessel.

Silence begets listening. At first, sitting in circle, I hear a sequence of different voices, each telling a unique story, distinct and individuated. But then, after a while, the strands begin to weave together, so that while I still hear the distinctness of each thread, I also start to see it all as the ebb and flow of life.

Like everybody else’s, my own individual thread is linear. My lifetime had a beginning, and it will have an end. But the circle is eternal; it revolves in cosmic time, like the seasons and the stars. It braids our finite stories into the universal stillness at its heart.

The circle existed before I was born, and it will continue long after I am gone. What a gift, to surrender my unique and fraying lifeline into the weave! To enter free-fall, knowing that whatever disintegrates is merely ego, and that the circle will accept me as I am, without judgment or problem-solving.

In circle I am part of the tribe. Here I understand: it is not my singular life that matters, but rather, the life of the greater whole. My experience takes on purpose and meaning in the context of the shared reality that’s cyclical and infinitely elastic. In circle, I rediscovered a basic human birthright, which our spiritually bankrupt modern culture denies to the psyches it has colonized: I know myself to be secure in an ever-changing, ever-balanced universe. Before empire, before agriculture, our ancestors knew this essential truth, now shattered by ten millennia of accruing ego and hubris. Heart circle brings me back there, into the collective embrace of the tribe, of soil, of seas, of spirit, where safety and substance inhere.

The circle expands with each heart’s sharing. It invites me to drop into the core of my soul, into the heart of the world. It invites me to die a little bit each time we sit together, so that my narrow and isolating sense of self can break apart and fuse with everything that is. 

With each passing moment, I come closer to my final breath. New life, new stories will be renewing the fabric, even as I fade toward silence. Carry me in, lay me down gently by the fire. Here, at last, I can relinquish my failing body and wounded psyche, knowing that everything recycles, joining the earth, the ancestors, the spirits. Sing me out, oh my beloveds! Twine me into the eternal basket, the vessel of our collective heart, the circle of the cosmos. Lower me into the well of stillness, witness me as I take my leave. I want to die in heart circle.