The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Jeremy Piven's been doin' too much sushi to show up to work. Plus: Muppet burlesque and Top Chef both make us feel dirty!
Dating Confessions by You "I think we both sort of think we're doing the other one a favor. Sad or funny, either way this does not bode well..."
Of course, intergenerational gay relationships aren't unique to the Faeries. In addition to sustaining the physical and emotional needs of the people who brought you Western literature, architecture, philosophy, democracy, science, math and religion, such unions are now the driving force behind Daddyhunt.com ("Wiser. Stronger. Hotter."), now with 149,000 members worldwide. One of my friends will be 106 next month, and last I checked, he and his boyfriend of twenty years — forty-one years younger — still had an active, monogamous sex life. The only sensible conclusion from all of this is that Rupert Everett and Virginia Woolf and the mainstream gay mob have less wisdom among them than callow Sean in his cluttered bedroom.
"Well, I do have AIDS anxiety."
"No, I'm sorry — I said age anxiety."
"Yes, but I meant AIDS anxiety."
"Oh, good. Talk about that. I wanted to ask about STDs anyway."
"Okay. So AIDS anxiety supplants age anxiety."
"Really?"
"Well, as an HIV-positive man, I'm mostly really well adjusted to it, but I get these flashes. I see older men who have been living with AIDS for a long time, and you see their bellies are distorted, and their skin is bad, and you can tell that they hurt all over. I have these moments of intense fear that I'm going to be an incontinent vegetable someday. And I have an anxiety about transmitting the disease to someone else, so I try to make it very clear that I'm poz."
I look over at Sean. I'm seeing his beautiful body, the open face and the glittering, faceted eyes, and I'm willing away the nasty emotions that have now swarmed between us. I'm still hearing him pronounce the words as an HIV-positive man, and
One of my friends will be 106 next month, and last I checked, he and his boyfriend still had an active, monogamous sex life.
I'm struggling in this shitty moment to balance an interviewer's responsibilities, a friend's concern if not grief, and a sex partner's grievance.
"Actually, I didn't know — that you were poz."
"Oh! I'm sorry. I thought you knew."
"Well it's funny, because I thought we had a conversation about it, and I don't remember exactly what we said but I must have misconstrued something . . . "
"I'm really sorry. I — "
"Don't worry about it."
The interview moves on. I ask my questions and type down answers, but mostly I'm going over what Sean and I did that night (not enough to concern an HIV counselor, but enough to worry me), and trying to piece together how I came up with the fiction of his being HIV-negative. All I can come up with is the beauty of his youth, and all I can think of is what that beauty no longer represents for me.
"Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" Sean is no less young, no less beautiful, but now he's thrown open the door to the room where my picture hangs. It's not the portrait that ages instead of the man, and it's not the caricature that the narcissistic essayist draws to laugh off the inevitable. It's the picture of a twelve-year-old boy growing up in San Francisco who starts to realize he's gay just as men covered with purple lesions start showing up in the news. A thirteen year old who gets a rise out of his classmates with the riddle "What does GAY stand for? Got AIDS yet?" A young man who, after his first sexual experiences, uses every instinct of hypochondria and survivor guilt to convince himself, despite regular test results to the contrary, that he's infected.
In a shitty moment Sean has gone from a vision of lost youth to the embodiment of what terrified me throughout my teens about what the future held. The transformation is as instant as it is complete, and it jolts me into a realization of how thoroughly, in charting my history of fearing time, I have avoided looking at that picture of myself. Because it comes as a shock to me now, that memory, that person, who thought of growing old as a privilege, who didn't think he'd live to be thirty-eight. n°
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Festa's essays appear in Hooksexup, Salon, the Best Sex Writing anthologies for 2005, 2006 and 2008, and other publications. He is the author of OH MY GOD: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever, which is based on Apparition of the Eternal Church, his award-winning and critically acclaimed film about the music of Olivier Messiaen. A violinist, he has toured extensively, given the U.S., Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles premieres of Messiaen's 1933 Fantaisie, and performed with the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and the North Bay Shakespeare Company. He is the official historian of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, and is revising a novel. More info at paulfesta.com.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
