For John Scott

I.

He and I are sitting in the bank of a café, just talkling. We're in the patio part, through the rear door and into an open-air garden that strikes me as slightly prehistoric in its aspect. And yet it is unmistakably a city garden: whatever will stay green in damp air, won't go pale, or worse, for lack of sun. Hardy things that survive. The café is a popular place. More of a bakery, really, with booths in the front and picnic tables in the back. It's nice in the patio, when the weather's warm enough. When it's not, they have smudge pots.

"AIDS is an occupational hazard." This is what he's saying. That's not the only thing he says, but it's how I sort that day out from all the other memories—of him, of other people—it's the caption on the moment: the time we had the AIDS-as-occupational-hazard conversation. It's a watershed, a word I can't say without remembering the time I drove five hours to have lunch with a friend in the Mendocino forest. After eating, we hiked the steep fire road to the razorback ridge, and I filled my backpack with pine cones the size of footballs. My fingers were muddy with pine sap; the odor of resin formed an aureole around my head. My friend raised an eyebrow at the dark, sticky stains of pine tar on my jeans. "You know you're never going to be able to get those out," she said. "That's in there for good." I looked up then and saw the sign nailed to a tree: "You Are Entering A Watershed Area."

He's been making porn movies for a while now, on account of his dick, which is famous. This is the longest period of employment in his life. Not the sort of thing you'd ordinarily put on a resume, but he's not the sort of person who ordinarily needs a resume. He's not even the sort of person who ordinarily needs a job.

"Any kind of employment you can name involves risk," he says. "A secretary working in an office could catch her hair in the roller of her electric typewriter and get hurt."

I don't mind so much that he holds this opinion privately, but he's just given an interview to a reporter for the local Sunday magazine saying essentially the same thing: some earnest young pup with a seventy-five-dollar haircut and a set of Calphalon cookware at home who pitched a piece on "AIDS in the Sex Industry." She could hardly contain her delight at finding someone eager to admit he didn't use condoms while making pornos and didn't care if anyone else did. One person willing to go on the record and you can officially declare a trend. And he's so eager for attention he doesn't even know when he's been played.

Anyway, it's easy for him to say that, since he isn't the one getting fucked, at least not on film. In real life, getting fucked is what he likes better than anything. I know this from experience. But on film, a dick that big has only one function: it goes in. No one's going to pay to watch some guy fuck another guy whose dick is bigger than his. Don't ask me why; it's the peculiar economy of fag porn.

When I watch his movies, I don't find them all that erotic. My interest is really more clinical: How is the guy on the bottom getting all that in there? I asked him about that once, about the guys who could turn their assholes into caverns and make his dick disappear, as if without effort. Had they spent hours getting ready with dildos? Were they, as they usually appeared to be, operating on a fistful of Valium?

"Well...," he drawled, embarrassed, the way he was whenever the conversation turned to sex specifically—his sex life—as opposed to sex thematically. "They have one talent," he said finally, prudishly, "and I have another."

The interesting thing was that I knew that was exactly how he thought of it—having a big dick, I mean—not as something that had simply grown there, a genetic accident, but as a talent, a skill, something for which praise was warranted. That, of course, was a belief he shared with thousands, maybe millions, and his own movies were infomercials for the proposition that dick-hunger defines fags, in part because fags want to be defined by it. But don't take my word for it. The principle can be viewed in action, even today—at sex clubs, in the park: The scrawny, pock-marked, balding, or hunch-backed guy with a big dick is transformed, via the removal of a layer of obscuring fabric, into the belle of the ball. It's a Cinderella story of sorts, if Cinderella were an otherwise out-of-the-running homo with decidedly hidden charms. Very democratizing, in fact—the only time body beauty doesn't count for much: Haul out a penis of note and the men circle, mouths agape, like so many lantern fish in the miles-deep ocean where sunlight does not penetrate.

Walking down the path with him one day to the beach at Land's End, I watched a bicyclist ram a guard rail and tumble to the ground because he'd seen The Unit—as we jokingly called it—flopping around in loose cotton painter's pants. The man got up, brushing the gravel from his scraped knees and shaking his head in wonderment: he'd received a vision, a glimpse of the holiest of homosexual miracles.

In the end: Arguing with his analogy about the secretary is pointless. When I say that occupational hazards aren't usually deadly, he counters by saying that thousands of people die each year in work-related accidents. Doesn't matter. Neither one of us has the facts, which is to say the truth. The truth, ultimately, is minor. It's just that this is the thing we're talking about, in the back of a café, sipping lattes. He doesn't have HIV yet, or at least he hasn't tested antibody-positive yet. About a year later he's living in another state, and I get a letter saying that he'd started noticing spots the color of grape juice that could only be lesions, so he got tested and now he's officially positive and has decided to tell everyone.

I read his letter, standing at the desk in the post office that is about two blocks from the apartment of another friend who is, at that exact moment, dying: home from the hospital at his insistence, but no one believes it'll be for long. On my way to his house, I decide to stop for my mail. My shift hasn't started yet; I need a few more moments to perform internal alchemy. The letter pisses me off, then I feel numb. But numb isn't the right word, either. I feel like the child with the helium balloon who has been warned to keep a tight hold on the string. A moment's distraction and the string slips away. I feel the way it feels to watch the balloon float out of sight and to understand that the moment before letting go can't be retrieved, that all that's left are recriminations on the ground.

For a while after the lesions started appearing, he kept talking about making more porn films. And why not: He still looked good—slim and blonde, with a body that could have belonged to someone you might actually meet; a dirty auburn wash across his chest; a few stray hairs, thicker than the rest, on his shoulders; tufts of it, darker still, in his ass crack.

When he worked out, he managed to achieve a kind of lanky, adolescent muscularity in about a week and a half: another gift of his genetics. During his non-gym periods, his limbs took on a rounder look, boyish with baby fat. He didn't look like a gymnast or a swimmer, those perpetual archetypes, the assembly-line porn boys of the nineties who seem press-formed out of fiberglass, like surfboards with cocks. He had grown up beating off to the diametrically different images of another generation—the skinny, pimply boys of twenty years before—which may explain why, in his first appearance in a glossy stroke mag, he dyed his hair orange, shaved it into a Mohawk, and practiced sneering like Billy Idol, costuming himself to look exactly like what he was: a white punk from the back woods of Oregon whose beliefs about America were just as frightening as they seemed. Sad, venerable Oscar was right: Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth.

He had some of the first lesions frozen off. One of the perks of private insurance is that you can walk into the dermatologist's office and ask for such a thing and they give it to you and figure out a way to bill your insurer without disclosing the incriminating details. He never even saw the bill—he had people for that.

But his polite, enthusiastic inquiries to porn producers and erstwhile backers went dead-end. Everyone knew he had "it" now; infected porn stars were expected to lie or to disappear. Many of us can name the ones who did one or the other—or both. Later come the revelations: the Brit with the uncut dick, granite jaw, and louche, unsmiling James Dean façade "comes out" positive. Illusions shatter: Maybe he wasn't such a stone Top after all. The boys he was balling on film, meanwhile, have their own reactions.

Unaccustomed to being refused, he was at first affronted by the resistance to his comeback in a porn film that starred nothing but men with HIV. "People need to see this," he said to the man, a former funder, who labeled the idea "morbid." So he entered a new phase, the closest he ever came to aligning himself with a political principle. He had a tattoo inked onto his right deltoid—HIV+—thick and red, like graffiti, as if drawn on crudely with magic marker. He let the lesions stay and arranged his clothing to make them more visible. It was a version of fetish sex, like the pictures his favorite photographers displayed in their South of Market garrets: the beautiful man with one withered arm; the young bodybuilder with vacant, milky-blind eyes. He was there, too, in the exhibit, showing off a body that had been roughly kissed over and over by a lover who enjoyed leaving marks. Only his dick was spared.

The last time I saw him was during the Folsom Street Fair on a sunny Sunday when most people were, according to protocol, as naked as possible. He was dressed in black leather: vest, chaps with nothing beneath them but a too-small jock strap, motorcycle boots, an aviator's cap. And he was emaciated, sallow, his ass saggy from AZT, the skin on his face shiny where it stretched across the skull: The high cheeks and Neanderthal brow that had once helped him look sexy, vaguely European, had betrayed him by showing, underneath it all, that they were just bones. He looked like the queer angel of death.

 

II.

The worst thing that ever happened to him, if you want my opinion, was winning The Biggest Dick in San Francisco contest. The next step, naturally, was for it to be filmed in action, so he made a few videos in which he can be seen having desultory sex—him and his penis, impressive even at three-quarters mast. There are other people in the films—once even a woman, during that brief period when someone decided that having gay men fuck women brought some sort of bi-kinky, hetero-fetish quality to videos. But the other characters are barely more than props; even he becomes superfluous. If his dick could have appeared without him, everyone might have been just as happy.

The problem is, he's lousy at dialogue—even in real life, his voice is tense and unnatural and he has a way of self-consciously snickering, as if intending to be droll. Being filmed, of course, only makes things worse. The obligate comments that porn Tops spew like verbal tics, "Take that dick!" or "You like that big dick, huh?" and so on—always that dick, the disembodied one, never my dick—come out sounding like cruel parody, but the film continues to spin because he's not yet bankrolled at a high enough level to allow a lot of retakes. Predictably, he has trouble staying hard when he's the one in the saddle; it's an unnatural position for him, and his greater interest in the dick of the person he's fucking is obvious. That aside, the films have a certain, "shot-in-my-basement" appeal, as porn flicks go. He always grins after he comes.

In any case, his few videos in release, and the few others "in the can" (purportedly his best work) are enough to insure that he will be called a "porn star" when he's referred to in print after that—and for the rest of his life—especially by white journalist fags by whom it is considered a boon to be on a first-name basis with porn stars. He is a minor celebrity—even a major one in some cosmographies. I know a man, for instance, who is prouder to have tricked once with Donnie Russo than he is to have had an audience with the Pope.

He gives interviews to many local and several national queer magazines in which he's asked questions about literature and gay rights and censorship and government funding for AIDS, because, honestly, who among us could be expected to say, directly into the figurative spotlight of media attention, "What the fuck makes you think I have anything worth saying about that?"

He does jack-off shows at a dive in the Tenderloin, the highlight of which comes when he bends over and puts the head of his own dick into his mouth. The crowd seems to love that, though I don't know why: The act excludes them completely. Besides, it's nothing you haven't seen done by Chinese acrobats.

He invites me to his show a couple of times, and I walk in without paying, full of I'm-with-the-band feeling. When I tell him, later, that I find the whole scene a little sleazy—the audience, mostly older men with an unmistakable suburban furtiveness, masturbating beneath coats and newspapers; the anxious cruising in the back aisle of the theater; the ritualistic, frenzied worship of slim hips, blonde hair, and big dick—he tells me my problem is that I'm full of guilt about sex. "There's no such thing as sleazy," he says. "It's just sex. If you think sex is sleazy, then the theater is sleazy. But if you think sex is natural and human, then that's what the theater is."

"Would you actually have sex with most of those guys in the audience?" I ask.

"I probably have," he giggles.

I have to hand him that: He is the Mother Theresa of sex, the most equal-opportunity dick around. He's the whore you always fantasize about meeting, if you're the sort of person who fantasizes about such things—the one who isn't really in it for the money. Sure, there are men he's more attracted to than others; he has endless passionate, disappointing crushes, all of them on boys who are so fucked up—either by drugs or living on the street or by working in the same "industry" as he does, and somehow not able to rise above the sadness of it, the way he says he can—that none of his affairs turns out well. More than anything, he wants to be wanted. And, with his dick as bait, he gets wanted a fair amount. I don't really need to spell out the limitations of the process.

The first time I met him was on a public bus in Waikiki. The year was 1982. I was on vacation with a boyfriend I no longer have and we were making our way to a dance club that no longer exists. We planned to finish the evening off at the local baths—The Steamworks, also called The Lewers Sewers, in honor of the street where it was located. Perhaps I should make a point of saying that there was a time when accompanying your lover to the baths was not shocking.

When my boyfriend and I began to chat with him on the bus, we learned that he was already on his way to the baths—admission was halved for early arrivals, and his famous frugality was piqued. Who knows how the topic of our mutual destination arose, but cruising was his best kind of talk—anything vaguely salubrious and suggestive, the double entendre. That's when the self-conscious snicker came in handy. But talking about sex was more natural for gay men then; you were expected to know something about it, to have played the game a little. They say that ballet is gay men's baseball, but really sex is.

In any case, by the end of the eighties we had begun to worry that we couldn't talk about anything else; and, in the nineties, we learned to pretend, publicly at least, that our interest in sex had fallen somewhere between our enthusiasm, say, for flavored vinegars and for black torch singers of the fifties. In other words, we had put sex into mature perspective, hadn't let it overtake our lives. That is what is often said, although the history-minded may note that such rhetoric emerged alongside a renascence of sex clubs, cottaging, kink chic, and enthusiastic tricking on the gym-boy circuit, so conclusions must be drawn advisedly.

My boyfriend and I spent several hours steeping ourselves in the atmosphere of the disco—the tourists dogged with the task of enjoying themselves, the rum drinks decorated with paper umbrellas and precarious beneath the weight of immense rafts of fruit—and then we walked down the strip to the alley where the baths was located. I found him there, in the movie room, watching porno in the midst of a group of men who were watching him. He'd thrown his towel aside and was languidly jerking off—just enough friction to achieve, as it were, Maximum Tumescence in Repose. Later, as everyone knows, he got paid for doing this; at the time, it was just a way to create a scene. Still, he wasn't like most of the men, attractive for one reason or another, who go to public places to put themselves on exhibition. Their displays of dick, body, or prowess are based in hostility; the disdainful rebuff is part of the studied Schadenfreude of the act. His exhibitionism was innocent; anyone who looked might also have touched.

And yet perhaps the act was not entirely without recognition of the commodity exchanges in effect at such establishments as The Steamworks. No, it would be naive to imagine that it was. But surely there was a time in his life before a marketplace consciousness had taken root, when he experienced the ordinary desire to be loved and touched, but didn't yet understand the means he had at his disposal, if not to achieve his desires, then at least to prove the maxim: "You can never get enough of what you don't really want."

One of the most difficult lessons we learn, of course, is that others are attracted to us for their reasons, not for our reasons. Perhaps he wished other men would seek him out for motives beyond the obvious, though he also, pragmatically, realized the power of advertising. He was, for example, photographed hundreds of times. He never refused an invitation to sit, no matter how unknown, how amateur the photographer. Each photograph was like a kiss, and each kiss was like a promise to remember. And yet imagine the ambivalence: Was he ever unaware of the expectations of the men who invited him into their studios, into their homes, to stand before the camera, that insatiate eye? If none of them actually specified the word "nude" when they asked to take his picture, it was only because to do so was unnecessary.

But, as I say, there was a time before that. When he was fifteen, he seduced a bicyclist who had stopped, during a cross-country road trip, to spend the night at his parents' rural farm. The cyclist was twenty-three, and he fled in horror the next morning after learning the true age of the boy—eager, guileless—who had climbed into his bed long after dark. Later, because all roads lead eventually to San Francisco, or once did, they ran into each other again, and he asked the bicyclist the question that had plagued him for years: "Did you leave without saying good-bye the next morning because you found me unattractive?"

But of course that was not it at all. Fear of arrest for child molestation was what had sent his guest into the predawn piney woods—for what man sleeps with teenage boys without fearing reprisal?—and it is possible to conjecture that the humiliation and disappointment of that adolescent rejection, for so it must have seemed, were what later caused him to champion the unpopular cause of boy-lovers, although an equally plausible explanation is that he did it simply to be annoying.

Flash forward nearly ten years. We're at his brand-new house in a midwestern state. Say it's located in the lush valleys of Ohio; it isn't, but let's say that. Anyway, the middle of nowhere. Farm country: silos; the sound of tractors in the thick air; the constant buzzing of bees, grasshoppers, other small, flying things. People like to say how quiet it is in the country, but this place is deafening. The insect sounds are a cacophony, especially at dusk; the air is frantic with things that hover and dart. In the bare, vindictive heat of summer afternoons, I sit on the porch, dripping sweat onto the keys of my typewriter. The reflection of sunlight off hundreds of insect wings nags at the corners of my eyes; it's unnerving, as if comets were constantly falling just out of sight.

I stay with him for a month, sleeping in a half-finished loft constructed on the side of the house where the blackberry brambles have all but taken over. There's a door in the room that leads nowhere; you open it onto a drop of fifteen feet. He hasn't gotten the stairway built yet. That's one of the projects we might do together, might not do.

Every morning when I wake up, I lie in bed and murder hornets. They come in through the cracks in the walls, through the constantly open doors, and agitate themselves against the window glass above the bed. I hate them irrationally, joyfully. I cut off their heads with the smallest blade of my Swiss Army knife, then arrange the severed heads in a line with the miniature pair of tweezers concealed in the knife's handle. Once I'm sure the bodies are dead, I brush them onto a sheet of paper and toss them out the door that goes no place. The heads stay in a row on the sill. It feels very samurai, very Predator.

The house is a shrine to eighties porn. Upstairs, the walls are covered with framed photographs of Jon King, Jim Bentley, Al Parker; there's a sculpture made of dildos. Downstairs is an art gallery: oil paintings, photographs, and original drawings by Etienne, Tom of Finland, Philip Core, Marc Chester, a dozen others. The porn-viewing area is built into another loft, with plenty of room to spread out on thick pillows. The video player itself juts into space on a shelf across from the alcove in the loft; you have to lean out over the gap in order to change the tape. Jars and bottles of every imaginable kind of lube fill the shelves, fitted in among the collapsing, disorderly rows of videos—baby oil, Vaseline, KY, Jergen's, and, of course, the expensive name-brand lubricants that don't pretend to be made for anything else. A white terrycloth rag, the kind you can buy in bags of eighty at CostCo for seven bucks, is stuffed under one of the pillows; I pull the rag out; it's stiff with dried cum. In fact, the whole loft smells like cum. And sweat. And him.

I've never gotten completely used to his body odor, which is strong and, now, chemical. I know it's part of what he considers being "natural," but I often wish he'd take a bath, brush his teeth, use a little deodorant. All this is evidence of what he calls my "repression" about sex. I argue that anyone taking six different synthetic drugs manufactured by multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies can't lay claim to nature, but I'm still the only one using the soap.

While I'm visiting his house, we go on a road trip to the nearest big city, where I have a friend. He and I spend the night at my friend's house, on a blow-up mattress on the living room floor. He's a light sleeper and, early in the morning, he's awakened by the sound of my friend throwing the locks on the door and going out. A few minutes later, the sound of the locks again and our host returns, back with the newspapers and coffee from the shop on the corner: enough time for him to arrange his body so that the sheet falls to one side and his cock is exposed, pendant against his thigh. One of the things that's impressive about it is that it's not much smaller when it's soft. Through his lashes, he watches for a reaction. Later he confides to me his disappointment: The guy didn't even look twice.

I'm at his place barely two days when he comes out to the porch where I'm writing. Completely naked, he calls me to the far corner of the deck, where I must stand if I want to see the distant feature he is describing to me: a column of smoke from a far fire rising straight up like an exclamation point against the dull blue haze. I have to lean over to see and he leans with me. His dick rubs against my skin where my leg is bare in my shorts. I haven't yet started going around naked twenty-four hours a day, the way he does, even when he's working in the yard. He gets into his pickup naked, arranges a ratty towel against the sun-fissured vinyl, and drives to the end of the road where he reaches out the window to check the box for mail.

We're both sweaty, which makes our skin slick in some places and sticky in others: In any case, you're acutely aware of the zones of contact, of having another person's sweat on you. I wasn't sure we'd have sex on this trip, though we always had before. Maybe he wouldn't want to; maybe I wouldn't want to. When he squats down, a perfect pliè, his dick as vertical and as exclamatory as that column of smoke, and puts his mouth over the cloth covering my dick, soaking it—then I want to.

As he blows me, he closes his eyes and suckles, making contented animal murmurs; he doesn't touch his own dick at all. I've watched him do this before—my dick, other men's dicks. The attention, the intensity of his focus, is flattering. You want to stay hard just so you can go on watching him. He's better than a porn movie. When I bend over to say, against his ear, "If you don't watch it, you're going to get a mouthful of cum in about five seconds," he grabs my hips in his hands and shoves his face onto my dick so that, when I do come, my glob of warm semen slides down his throat.

We go inside and sprawl on the daybed for a while, letting the sweat evaporate. I play distractedly with his cock, just enough to keep it hard; I bite his nipples and kiss him, thinking of the bleeding gums, for which he's just seen the dentist, thinking of his spit and my cum mixed together, thinking of thrush, and I draw his tongue into my mouth. With my free hand, I pull one of his legs across my chest, exposing his asshole, and I tease the opening with the tip of one finger. When I'm ready again, I hawk up a gob of spit and rub the slime against the crack of his ass. Now I can slip the entire finger into his hole, which is twitching, then two.

I return my cupped hand to my mouth for more spit, smelling asshole, then jam three slippery fingers inside him as far as I can get them. He's humping my leg now; his dick has been non-stop hard for an hour and his balls have got to be hurting. I shove him onto his back and kneel over him, my face above his crotch, my dick pointed at his mouth. But he doesn't get my dick: I hunch forward instead and lower my ass onto his face—say "Eat!"—and he launches the thick, pointed tip of his wet tongue into my asshole. He's almost always running a slight fever these days; I can feel the heat of his lips and tongue on the sensitive skin—that, and the prickle of chin stubble, shocking, but not unpleasant.

After a while I lean off him, make him get on his knees. I reach around to his mouth and harvest a wad of his own mucus and spit to rub on my cock. I feel around for his hole and, in one motion, shove my cock in. He lets out a noise like gagging, like sighing. I know I'm not going to be able to fuck him for long, and when I'm close I turn him over. He holds his own legs in the air, scooting his ass against my cock with every thrust, staring me straight in the eye the whole time, soundless now except for the rasp of his breathing, which chronic sinus infections render heavy and labored.

"Maybe you don't want this load," I say, and he gurgles out what sounds like Pl - ee - ee -se. "You want to touch your dick?" I ask then, slowing down, glad that concentrating on words is delaying my cum. "Unh, unh, unh, yeah," he says, starting to fist the head of his dick before I've said he could. So I knock his hand away.

Too soon, I can feel the cum starting to move around behind my belly button. I try to hold it back, but it uncoils, gathering force, reaching the tip of my dick only at the last second, and then into his asshole.

We lie like that, limbs entangled, until he says he wants to do some gardening before the light goes. He gets up, sweaty, slimy, his feet bare, everything bare, and walks through the open door of the room where we've just had sex and into the yard directly beyond, moving from one space to another as easily as stepping across a threshold. I begin to hear the rhythmic kachunk, sigh sound that dirt makes as it is dug out of the ground and then slung away on the edge of a spade.

I think to myself: Yes, there is a difference. Nothing we did put me at risk, not really, and let's be pragmatic: It's too late for him to benefit from safe sex anyway. So it's not the same, what we did and what he does. What he did.

Anyway, he wanted it.

So it's a gray area. You make these sorts of statements to yourself as if sliding a bookmark between the pages of the novel you've been reading, setting it aside for the night with a certain reproachful firmness: I know there's more to say, but that's all for now. You make these statements, though the counterpoint of your own experience tells you that there are no gray areas at all in life. Wherever you are, you're standing somewhere.

 

III.

When he died, was I the only one who wondered whether a cast had been made of his most celebrated feature? I do not raise the question frivolously. Another porn star—one of his contemporaries, in fact—resorted to litigation when he discovered that the company he had engaged to market statuettes and dildos modeled on his own famous attribute had, in an excess of capitalist zeal, added an extra inch to its product. No doubt the beleaguered litigant considered the original more than sufficient for the masses or, perhaps like all of us, he just wanted to be loved for his own true self. Penises, certainly, are a matter of pride to those who possess them—more, of course, to some than to others.

Consider the case of another acquaintance of mine, whose equipment is no less substantial for his not being a professional. What I mean is that you would not have seen him on video. He is prevented by his well-paid government job—as much as by his Polish peasant ancestry, which has rendered him unfashionably thick around the middle—from going into film work. He is, nonetheless, extremely popular with the boys he meets on his lunch hours, which he spends in downtown department-store lavatories or in the hallways of construction projects, which his employment obliges him to visit. What his ordinary face and lumpenprole body cannot get for him, a glimpse of his hard dick through polyester blend can, and, though he does not tell the lover with whom he lives about these daily dalliances, he does feel that they provide a balance in their relationship, one unfortunate feature of which is that familiarity and time have rendered the lover immune to the feature that most enchants the lunchtime crowd. Like the porn actor defrauded by callous marketeers, he wants to be appreciated for what he believes is best about himself, and he finds no lack of others who will do so, even if his lover no longer can. It is for this same reason that he keeps his pubes shaved smooth, concerned that an over-bushy pubic patch (another hereditary flaw) will conceal crucial inches.

A casting of The Unit, of course, would have made a unique and befitting death mask and would certainly have gone to the archivists in the end, as did most of the rest of what he left behind—the collection of pornographic art to one foundation, the cartons of correspondence and papers to another. A kind of legitimation at last. During the month I stayed with him, he let me use his computer to finish a project, and I accidentally deleted a folder of outgoing letters. He had hard copies, but my carelessness rendered him sullen and reproachful for days afterwards. He was, at that point, already being shamelessly courted for his collections by more than one concern, and the experience must have been heady. Imagine the sensation as one's ordinary household articles achieve the status of artifacts; he was having people in to make inventories. Perhaps he felt I was being wanton with history.

The scraps and odds and ends, meanwhile, are scattered to a half-dozen lesser archives. San Francisco, I'm told—and one struggles not to be overwhelmed by the irony—got the box of jock straps, greasy Spandex, and strategically torn jeans that were what remained of his sex-performance costumes, a group of items whose cataloging and display will no doubt challenge the skills of whatever librarian is put in charge of them.

The disease gets worse, of course, more of a pain in the ass really: less energy, the weight loss, the worry that any cold that lingers may spell bad news. He takes a house in Southern California for a while in order to facilitate trips across the border for a treatment not then (and not ever) available in the United States. He modifies his modes of travel—the constant, horrific sinus infections make flying a torture. But he has always preferred to drive. During the early years of our friendship, in fact—prior to his becoming a personage and when he was still more or less a San Franciscan—his habit was to breeze back into town after one of his extended trips abroad, buy himself a car, and, if the next destination precluded driving, to sell it on his way to the new adventure. He had a weakness for sporty convertibles and famous-name motorcycles, and I often heard him bemoan the fact, before he came into his majority and controlled his trust fund, that the mingy monthly allowance permitted by the lawyers meant that he could rarely scrape together enough cash to buy new.

In those years, of course, his itineraries took him largely outside the contiguous forty-eight—southern Europe, Mexico, Hawaii, anywhere there was a reasonable expectation of finding brown boys—and plane tickets didn't grow on trees. He nevertheless traveled whenever the mood struck and returned with the inevitable Polaroids: a hustler in San Juan, a carabiniere who picked him up at the Trevi Fountain. The famous mutual attraction of light skin and dark skin (although, for him, it was largely a matter of foreskin, but that's another story); the gay man's reduction of the travel experience to cruising with an accent.

He asked me once whether I thought he was a leech. This was after he had lived in my house for six weeks between trips abroad without once offering to buy supper or pick up the tab for groceries. I was getting sex, after all, though perhaps it is unfair of me to think that he imagined such a quid pro quo. He wasn't famous then; I wasn't yet someone who was occasionally permitted to have sex with a porn star. And yet I can attest, when he became a celebrity—or, I suppose it is more accurate to say, after he was elevated to the ranks of San Francisco's famously indulged eccentrics—that his habit of parsimony did not improve.

During the last years of his life, when people had largely lost interest in watching him have sex, even for the freak-show value, he discovered that they would continue to pay him to talk about it. And so he became a philosopher of sorts—one whose philosophy was to discern what people believed and then to say the opposite. He went, briefly, into journalism, producing first a broadside that directed men interested in anonymous sex to public places where they could find like-minded individuals; the listings were leavened with "true stories" of truckstop sex, "how to" tips for plein air encounters, and from-the-field dispatches warning readers away from danger spots frequented by vice cops or fag bashers.

His timing, as always, was impeccable, since sex in toilets and parks had never been more popular. He tried his hand at a literary magazine after that, which went almost immediately bankrupt. Nonetheless, the magazines generated publicity—the public-sex guide in particular was widely and passionately condemned, both by the usual suspects among conservative politicians and by homosexual men livid over its affront to a positive gay image-and that was enough to make him both controversial and "transgressive" (a term that was, mercifully, popular for only a moment), either of which, in postmodern queer pop culture, is regularly substituted for quality, originality, or meaning.

The foray into magazines, moreover, earned him a new moniker— "publisher"—bestowed on the basis of approximately the same degree of skill and experience that had preceded the label "porn star," and the two terms became welded together, "porn star and publisher," remarkably like actual credentials. He was also occasionally misidentified as an AIDS activist, an odd term for someone who had never voted and whose hero of political philosophy was Ayn Rand.

What people no doubt meant, of course, is that, like tens of thousands of gay men, he refused to lie about having an AIDS diagnosis, but that, unlike those tens of thousands of others, he sometimes got his picture into magazines. His aphorisms on community, sex, love, and relationships, in fact, were not infrequently quoted in the press; he was periodically interviewed at length on his iconoclastic views; and he became a spokesperson of sorts for the proposition that post-infection sex could only be better: Safe sex became beside the point, he explained, once one abandoned all worry about catching "it." There was truth in what he said. The nearly hallucinogenic sensation of bare dick in warm asshole is a secret carefully guarded from the sex police. And yet the smugness of his claims was galling: No one likes the implication that that his sexual conduct makes him a safe-sex sissy.

In addition to the interviews, he was sometimes invited to write articles under his own byline on the subjects gay men are believed to find most relevant and compelling—love, AIDS, and tricking, though not necessarily in that order—not because he had anything particularly wise to say about them, but because he was, remember, a porn star and a publisher. (A third credential never appeared in his bio, though it was doubtless how the public, whose tendency to reduce complicated issues to their essence is legendary, most often referred to him: "You know who I mean—he's that guy with AIDS who has the really big dick.")

During those years, in other words, he made himself a name in the small pond, although, since it is the only pond in which many of us ever swim, its dimensions matter less than do its public relations. The Southern California sojourn, meanwhile, had introduced him and Los Angeles to one another, with the predictable result: He was thin, rich, white, and he fucked for money, which is to say he arrived with a great deal of experience in the local industry. The city that propagandizes conformity but practices depravity ate him up with the proverbial spoon.

Fame, of course, is tedious, or so we are lead to believe by the famous; but notoriety can kill you. Some cities—and San Francisco is one of them—make only the latter possible, and yet it was to San Francisco that he returned in the end.

I will admit that the one thing I never understood about him was his ambition—a word whose Latin root refers to the practice of walking among the people in order to court votes. If I had, perhaps I would not have objected that afternoon in the café—that watershed day among the Jurassic ferns and the relentlessly flowering plants—to the suggestion that the possibility of illness was countervailed by the benefits of being filmed having sex. My vision was so narrow. AIDS was not an occupational hazard; AIDS was on the verge of becoming his occupation.

In other words, he wanted it.

Still, I am often accused, passionately, angrily, of failing to appreciate his single most important gift: that he was consistently, in all he said and did, sex-positive. The term, a tautonym, is wary of specifics the way all labels are wary. But he was sex-positive, one gathers, in contrast to the sex-negative people who sermonize against promiscuity, campaign to shut down bathhouses, and wax indignant when exposed to public nudity at parades and street fairs.

Between those extremes, I remain confused where those of us fall who are still dazzled by the complexities of sex; who have trouble distinguishing who is holding the stick of sexual freedom from who is getting beat with it; who, Luddites, cling tenaciously to the belief that what people do with and to one another more or less inevitably implicates a bewildering ethical dimension; who are ambivalent about the practice of making someone famous for a body part.

I am aware that we do not discuss ethics at the dawn of the millennium. We do not discuss morality, either, a topic that reeks of master narratives, the oppression of institutions, and inchoate colonialist leanings. And yet both imply choice, free will, the ability to make manifest that which is quintessential within us. Surely, if it is true that we get the government we deserve, then it must follow that we also get the porn stars we deserve.

What I mean is that I believe two things to be true—first, that nothing happened to him that was not his intention. And, second, that at some point he lost the ability to extricate himself from an interaction, irreversible as nuclear fission, that he originally thought was within his control. We never get enough of what we don't really want; others seek us out for their reasons. Such is the madness we endure.

I have returned many times to the café where he and I talked that afternoon—with other friends, to engage in other conversations—but only once since his death. On that day, I went alone and waited some time for a moment when, unobserved, I could do what I had come to do. Using the smallest blade of my pocket knife, I carved his name into the soft pine wood of the table where we had sat. I did not add my own. The significance of the act was not, as you might imagine, in leaving his name there; I might have carved anything. Rather, it lay in the fact that the wood, once scarred, could never again be unscarred. We do well to commemorate the points of no return in our lives, the watershed moments when, distracted, we let go the string.

I do not think the owners of the café pay much attention to the condition of the picnic tables on their patio—the tables are, after all, exposed to the elements year round. For that reason, I suspect my marks will stay in place for a while, and you may still read them if you go there.

 

©2003 Wendell Ricketts - Contributor's Bio