Bitter from the sweet

Lisa and I were sitting on the floor futon in our living room in Syracuse in 1995 with our nightly Molson Goldens and a tape from Blockbuster. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s a musical about a troupe of Australian draq queens driving a camper van through the outback. Suitable hijinks ensued.

The music started; the film does a cold open with one of the queens miming a ballad in a night club.

Hey lady, you lady, cursing at your life
You’re a discontented mother, and a regimented wife

“Christ, that song,” said Lisa, pulling on her Vantage menthol. Lisa was a lipstick lesbian who looked like a modern and buxom version of silent picture star Louise Brooks.

“What’s wrong with the song,” I asked, thinking it was pretty and sorrowful. Lisa complained that it was “anti-feminist,” and a “reactionary anthem” from the 70s deliberately written to “put women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.”

The song is Never Been to Me, by Charlene. I learned that I was not allowed to like the song, or even feel indifferent about it, because it was obviously a psyop from the misogy-raper-5000 MEN who controlled all women, including recording stars. You know the drill.

Well, I’ve always liked the song. As the years go by I like it more, and it feels personally meaningful to me in a way I didn’t predict. It’s a song about a woman who spent her youth and beauty living the high life of promiscuity, drinking, cheap liaisons, drug-fueled glamour-the Hollywood life. A bit older, she sings to a younger woman about how she lost out on having a husband, bearing children, and creating a loving home and legacy.

Please lady, please lady-don’t just walk away
Cuz I have this need to tell you why I’m all alone today

[Musical aside-if you find the song musically pretty, a lot of that is owed to the fact that the refrain is based on the chord structure of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It’s one of the most popular harmonic progressions-overused, even-and the majority of people find it emotionally compelling.]

I’m not a woman, but I am a gay man. For young gay men, the glamorous and oversexualized life at the peak of our youth and beauty is like what young women in that set experience. That’s the thing about being a male homosexual. We’re men, with men’s proclivities, but many of the experiences of young “fast” women are like the experiences we have. When you’re young and pretty and cheap, like I was, there’s a never ending line of older men, jet-setting men, predatory men, waiting to give you a thrill.

In a smaller way, I’ve also been to Georgia and California, and anywhere I could run. I did, in fact, take the hand of a preacher man and make love in the sun. And like Charlene, I spent my life exploring the subtle whoring (not so subtle, really) that costs too much to be free.

As a young man I adopted the attitude of every party boy gay. I “loved” being gay. I loved to go out and turn the heads of men who would be making wolf whistles if it were a Looney Tunes cartoon and I was an animated Ava Gardner strolling past. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Who wants to live, as Aunt Ida from Female Trouble would say, the “sick and boring life” of the heterosexual? Stupid breeders. Squares. They’re just jealous that we’re hotter and having more fun.

This is what I told myself in the middle of the AIDS crisis; it’s what we all told ourselves. It’s what I told myself despite having been drugged multiple times and raped at least once (the thing about being drugged is you don’t remember certain days, so who knows). It’s what I told myself after getting throttled and bashed around by an inner-city prostitute (a male) who I didn’t even know was a hustler until the surprise bill came due and I didn’t pay.

I’m not 25 anymore; I’m 50. And that was never any kind of life, looking back. It wasn’t any kind of life when I was performing it, and I knew it, deep down. The shame, the anxiety (what did I do or say last night during my blackout drunk?), the worry that I’d contract a disease. But mainly, the shame. The unavoidable knowledge that I was a cheap slut doing cheap things that would never bring me love, or any happiness that lasted longer than the delusions of grandeur that come with a great cocaine high.

This is not the life of every young gay man, but it’s not the life of only 20 percent of them, either. It’s a lot more common than the gays will usually admit to.

As I was driving home today the song came into my head and it occurred to me how much I’d like to stop that young man and ask him to listen to me the way Charlene pleaded with that lady not to just walk off. This is what I would tell him.