Remembering Tom Steele
Tom Steele, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Others and Me
by Lawrence D. Mass
for Charles
[Disclaimer: Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this Remembrance, which should be considered work-in-progress and is not intended for publication or authorized for referencing, was correct at the time of posting, and while it is designed to provide accurate information in regard to the subject matter covered, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any other inconsistencies herein and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.]
Part 1
“We don’t receive wisdom. We must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us…”
— -Marcel Proust
It was the best and worst of times. At the start of the new decade of the 1980’s, Gay Liberation was refulgent, but on the cusp of the great global pandemic that would become known as AIDS. It was the heyday of Interview Magazine, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. At the pinnacle of arts-and-letters celebrity were Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag, whose every utterance and appearance, private and public, would be grist for mills of gossip and emulation.
Becoming a writer, I was to learn inadvertently via my apprenticeship with Tom Steele and others, is not a knowledge base or set of skills you acquire from university courses, books, seminars, salons, retreats or parroting literary icons. Literary osmosis would of course play its role. As would ambition and access. But as I was getting to know it, writing was an imperative that at first invited and then mandated a commitment more personal, interior, lonely and dangerous, with the ante always being upped. From its inception, I always felt like my life was at stake in my writing. Was it really so? Was it supposed to be? Did it have to be? Would it always be?
Though it dangled the carrot of uncovering the mysteries of the self — that proverbial thousand mile journey begun with single steps— it felt like I was flirting with something more daunting, something scarier and secretive, like witchcraft or criminality, the costs of which could turn out to be as baleful as liberating. Would this path prove divine or damning, and, in what became a tacit refrain of what felt like my tumbril roll forward, could it really cost me my life?
Apart from the hubbub around her, Sontag the writer seemed something of a cipher. A High Priestess of our worlds of culture, to us younger gay writers and activists she could seem more involved in maintaining her status than fully deserving of her pedestalization as an icon of literary greatness. Beyond her signature intellectual curiosity and the gay friendliness of her circles of influence, she wasn’t Shakespeare, Hannah Arendt or Harold Bloom. Showcasing regard for the intellectual and aesthetic the way she became sanctified for doing was unquestionably laudable and worthy. And her essays did strike chords. But was there more to understand about her attainment of such outsized status? Who was this person who spent so much of herself scrutinizing and interpreting the lives and sensibilities of others while keeping her own at bay?
Her breakout “Notes on Camp” and later, Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and its Metaphors, and a New Yorker essay, “The Way We Live Now,” were zeitgeist pieces that seemed to speak directly about her and to “us.“ But how well were they delivering on their promise of telling us new and profound truth about her subjects, cancer and AIDS, while revealing more deeply personal truth about herself and her own interiority?
In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag noted the ways metaphorization has stigmatized cancer, as she herself experienced it. In AIDS and its Metaphors, she observed that AIDS had become like cancer historically — a taboo diagnosis rife for metaphorization with military and Biblical terms such as “war” and “plague.” For those of us in the trenches of early AIDS, including our friends in community, these observations, while valid, could seem obvious and rendered frivolous by our collective experience of what Larry Kramer would lead us all in appreciating as indeed both a war and a plague.
Meanwhile, in a piece I wrote at that time, “Cancer Signs” (Christopher Street, September-October, 1981), I praised Sontag and her book for farsightedness in warning us of the inverse relationship between understanding (knowing with scientific certainty) the cause of an illness versus not knowing the cause with certainty and overreaching to explain it (characterologically, psychologically, sociologically, multi-factorially).
Indeed, her vision foretold of the AIDS denialism crisis and catastrophe to come in South Africa in the early 2000’s when nearly a third of a million died preventable deaths from AIDS because of the AIDS denialism of South Africa’s prime minister Thabo Mbeki, which grew out of the multi-factorialist and conspiracist theories of causation that took root in the early period of AIDS in our communities here in America. It’s a threat which looms as strongly as ever today under the AIDS-denialist watch of Trump-appointed US Secretary of Heatlh and Human Services, RFK Jr.
“The notion that a disease can be explained only by a variety of causes is precisely characteristic of thinking about diseases whose cause is not understood. And it is diseases thought to be multi-determined (that is, mysterious) that have the widest possibilities as metaphors for what is felt to be socially and morally wrong.”
— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Larry Kramer’s powers of vision and leadership notwithstanding, I concluded my commentary with a warning that we gay people and persons with AIDS (as they would later become known) would have to arm ourselves for intellectual confrontation. “We must be prepared, with ammunition like Illness as Metaphor, to fight on several fronts what Nixon called “The War on Cancer.”
Past such intellectualizing, what was the hubbub surrounding Sontag really all about? Centrally, there were her essays. In 1980, when my own life of writing began in earnest, she had just published Under the Sign of Saturn, with pieces on culturally influential but marginal figures the intelligentsia was curious to know more about and which enticed readers with their promise of shedding light on her own life’s journey as a writer and intellectual. The collection opens with a candidly personal and effusive tribute to the the multi-genre writer Paul Goodman, and moves on from there to an acrobatically impressive effort to deconstruct the life and work of surrealist theater icon and influencer Antonin Artaud. Centrally, her appreciation of Weimar intellectual Walter Benjamin drops anchor in the Europe of Hitler and Nazism. From there to semiotician Roland Barthes and Nobel Laureate and memoirist Elias Canetti, another Jewish intellectual displaced by the catastrophe of World War 2. In the mix are more questionably successful pieces on the Wagnerianly besotted films of Hans Jurgen Syberberg and the great, Nazi-tainted photographer and documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
The esteemed cineaste Robert Bresson was for me a likewise obscure figure of the era I would learn about primarily via Sontag. Her appreciation of this period icon of her 60’s and 70’s Parisian experience and intellectual orientation, as expressed in her essay, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” would later reverberate in my relationship with Bresson’s psychobiographer and filmographer, Tony Pipolo.
A number of these essays by Sontag had been published in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and other venues. Many became touchstones of her forays into international cultural and political discourses. She endlessly and confidently wrote and spoke about other writers and artists we were thereby and likewise enticed to learn more about — e.g., Constantine Cavafy, Milan Kundera, Simone Weil and Joseph Brodsky, to whom Under The Sign of Saturn is dedicated. And yes, she could write well, often beautifully, always seductively and always with her signature, often breathtaking, high-wire act erudition. Sometimes you wondered what she was saying, but, yes, you were always drawn in. Adding to her allure as a writer was her personal charisma, an amalgam of mystique and statuesque beauty that aged well.
Sontag had taken her title, Under The Sign of Saturn, from an autobiographical text by Walter Benjamin which began, “I was born under the sign of Saturn– the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”
Meanwhile, my sense that too much about Sontag remained inscrutable is an impression that was to endure and sometimes fester via my interactions in community and friendships with some of those more in her orbit — e.g., Richard Howard and Jaime Manrique.
Celebrities of Sontag’s heights were almost never openly gay in those early post-Stonewall era years, despite being under increasing gay movement pressure to “come out of the closet,” our rallying cry. Those like Sontag who were known in community to be living gay lives, activists felt, owed our struggling movement a commitment of public self-revelation against the status-quo tyranny of invisibility and disenfranchisement which newer levels of knowledge and candor about gender, sex, and “sexual orientation” (the phraseology of which was now changing to “sexual preference”), boosted by civil rights activism, seemed finally to afford. An emerging generation of gay people, we were like newborn foals, struggling to gain footing and looking to our mothers to help us.
In Sontag’s case, such was her evasion of direct discussion of feminism and homosexuality and for that matter her Jewishness, and of these elements in her own life — of what became increasingly demeaned as identity politics — that it could seem the proverbial elephant in the living room of her persona and writing. For someone so intent on deconstructing the work of other intellectuals and artists, her failure to more persuasively do so— less disingenuously — for herself could seem less than literary and more like cognitive dissonance.
Such was the intensity and embracement of discontent on this front among gay activists that it gave rise to a new term, “outing” –-the movement to bring public figures, past and present, deceased and living, out of the closet. It was a movement that became famous and infamous for pressuring “closet cases” to openly, publicly identify themselves as gay (the catchall term for same sex preference in wider use in the period prior to later, more variable and complex designations of LGBTQIA+), and who or whatever else they were — feminist, Jewish, Islamist, Marxist — or, alternatively, to “out” them regardless of their own privacy preferences.
It was always recognized that people were entitled to complexity of identification with minorities, beliefs and behaviors, that privacy isn’t the same as secrecy, as Michael Shernoff put it, and that invasion of privacy could have serious personal consequences and could otherwise be ethically questionable. The dividing line for movement activists had to do more with whether a public figure’s being in the closet was perpetrating discernible damage to the greater gay liberation movement, with its premiere cause of gaining visibility, historical accountability and universal civil rights.
This was easy in the case of elected officials who were known to be gay but in the closet and thereby hypocritically abetting and often enough directly endorsing anti-gay legislation and homophobic public opinion, from what seemed easily discernible as their own self-hatred, self-interest and career protection and promotion. (1)
Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch was a good example of this, though not an infallible one. That his being in the closet rendered him a “murderer” of gay men in its presumptive consequence of neglecting AIDS, Koch’s fiercest critic, Larry Kramer, could seem to be more involved in scapegoating for his own purposes of political rallying than outing for the greater good. Like Sontag, Koch was clearly on our side in some important and decisive political viewpoints and initiatives. But yes and like Sontag, Koch was a closet case. While Sontag for the most part always deftly managed to evade such direct confrontation about her sexuality, Koch was less fortunate.
In the individual cases of celebrities (e.g., Liberace), where the basis for legal liability could be demonstrable damage to one’s career and income, but extending to leading arts figures like Sontag more widely known to be gay and gay-friendly and whose careers could be more subtly impacted, decisions about outing could seem more fraught.
On the front of complexity and for someone as formidably intellectual as Sontag, there were other factors to consider. She had been married and had a son. She was, in other words, bisexual. As definitions and acronyms have increasingly spiraled out of control, to such an extent that no two individuals are any longer using the same terms of self and cohort identification, how reasonable was it to judge her reticence about declaiming minority identity with greater explicitness and passion? Did she really need to declare herself “gay,” “lesbian” or “LGBT” or “LGBTQI+” or use the newer mixes of pronouns that weren’t yet afoot? If she declared herself “bisexual,” was that really as illegitimate (as a smokescreen) as earlier activists believed it to be?
What should she have done — become a street protestor? asked my close friend and mentor Jaime Manrique, one of whose books she blurbed and who became a PEN spokesperson when she was that organization’s President. Is that idea really so ridiculous, I wondered. Is the idea of her joining street protestors for civil rights and health care — like ACT UP demonstrators— really so risible? And was her studiously not allying herself with that level of activism thereby indirectly shaming of those “little people” (as Edmund White once referred to critics of his Genet) who were putting themselves on the line for all of us? Naively, my impression was that if she weren’t going to participate in that level of activism herself, did she not at least have a greater responsibility to do and say more in support of those who were doing that work and taking those chances, to express respect and even gratitude for such?
What exactly did we want or expect? I think what we wanted Susan Sontag to do for the still overwhelmingly powerless, invisible, unrepresented, mortally endangered and rights-less gay community here and around the world (even as we naively counted ourselves as oh-so influential in the arts and elsewhere) is to do what she later did regarding the global authoritarian menace of communism.
At a peak moment of her fame and influence as a world-class intellectual, she took center stage to proclaim boldly and clearly that “communism is fascism.” What we gay activists wanted was for her to make a comparably simple, clear, boldly public statement about gay oppression. Of course, there would be immediate caveats. Trying to conceptualize and value the challenges such an action would have meant for her, would she thereby be obligated to say and do something equivalent regarding women, Palestinians, people of color, native Americans and other minorities?
Whatever legitimate quandaries she may have felt herself to be dealing with intellectually, instead of finding a way to do what she did so memorably with communism — to find a spot in time and place to speak out broadly and succinctly about what was incontrovertibly true of the hoary old communism that permeated the arts, intelligentsia and education of our college years and sensibilities, and begging for a figure of her stature to do so — she pivoted.
Her choices around staying in the closet, apart from innuendos, struck observers like myself as a combination of cowardly and disappointing. It seemed almost impossible not to conclude that what people like Susan were doing was carefully hedging their bets in favor of their careers. We could see it. It smelled of hypocrisy and self-serving, and we resented it.
Eventually, having made earlier reference to the “vehement sexuality” of gay men, and with her perfect timing, Sontag made a single statement from on high, describing Larry Kramer as “one of our most valuable trouble makers.” That was as close and as good as we were going to get as a major public statement from her. But was that acknowledgment a heartfelt indictment of homophobia and AIDS neglect, or a strategic concession to an activism she perceived as coming ever-closer to outing her?
Though openly gay themselves, Richard Howard and Jaime Manrique were like many gay luminaries, all the way up to and including Sarah Schulman and Larry Kramer, who were willing to collude with Sontag’s decision not to come out as lesbian — she lived most of her later life with her partner, photographer Annie Liebowitz — until very late in the game, when it was much safer to do so, when the pressures on her as an intellectual and writer ostensibly committed to honesty and integrity beyond all other values became unbearable.
It was another version of what Barry Diller just did with his new tell-all bio, Who Knew, in which the media mogul finally, if still half-heartedly, acknowledges being gay. Like many before them, the time had finally come, as they calculated it, to set the record straight. Those who knew Sontag in friendship, like Jaime, say she was deeply personally conflicted over there being so much rancor and pressure on her from gay activists. But posthumously, even her most recent biographer Ben Moser (Sontag: Her Life and Work) acknowledges — more so than her previous biographer Carl Rollyson (Understanding Susan Sontag), both of whom I spoke with — that her remaining in the closet did significant damage to her legacy. (There is also Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber and Sempre Susan, A Memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived for a period with Sontag and her husband Philip Rieff.)
Meanwhile, it wasn’t any of her defenders so much as an early casual observation by Tom Steele that would commence the upending of my “contempt prior to investigation” (as people in recovery call it) attitude towards Susan Sontag.
Tom and I were having a pre-op (opera) dinner at Café Des Artistes, close to Lincoln Center, where Tom recalled once seeing Sontag at a nearby table, jotting what must have been very tiny print note fragments on the inside cover of a match book. Though it registered then that that was something only a real writer would do, it did not deter me from my disaffection from her at that time.
It’s a moment that reverberated over a decade later, following a phone call from Larry Kramer telling me something right out of the most preposterous science fiction — that people with AIDS were getting up off their hospital deathbeds and being discharged thanks to the new antiviral medications Larry had always believed possible and had championed against the grains of possibility, bureaucracy and complacency. After babbling incoherently in response, I later sat down and scrawled a tiny-print note on a paper scrap about the size of a matchbook cover. I later read it to Larry.a In indictment of my own disbelief and failures of courage up to that point, and more personally than anything else I had ever written, it said: “I was wrong about everything.”
While leading gay movement figures like Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman and Vito Russo believed this issue of the closet to be forefront politically and outing to be a credible and legitimate strategy in select cases of overtly anti-gay politicians and others, they were more loathe to do so in the case of someone as otherwise influential in their own cultural circles as Sontag.
In Sontag’s case, as with Liz Smith, Leonard Bernstein and others who got easy-passes from most of us on not being more forthrightly out, sympathy for their discernible efforts on our behalf proved surpassing. Liz Smith became a leading publicist for AIDS initiatives, shepherding and promoting Liz Taylor and AMFAR at every turn. And she led the charge against viciously bigoted theater and culture menace John Simon that finally got him the boot.
Bernstein, after appearing as a guest conductor for the first big AIDS fundraiser, GMHC’s circus event in Madison Square Garden in 1983, earnestly and bravely laid out his personal story in his opera, A Quiet Place. Was Bernstein’s opera any more substantial a statement of pro-gay identity and affirmation than Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now”? Irrationally, perhaps, it seemed so to many of us.
Another figure in these discussions was Lily Tomlin. Like Sontag, Tomlin lived with a lesbian life partner (Jane Wagner). But such was the inviolability of Tomlin’s close friendship with Vito that he, and we for the most part with him, seldom wavered in tolerant support and taciturnity.
The question of respecting privacy would remain intellectually vexatious and challenging. Would I have felt similarly about closeted Jews during the rise of Nazism in Europe? Should they have universally put their lives and careers on the line to come out as Jewish? Of course not. Notwithstanding Hannah Arendt’s observation that Jews in Nazi Germany were notably silent in protest of what was happening to them in the early years of Nazism’s escalation, under Nazism Jews who were outed as Jews, and their immediate relatives and friends, were at grave risk of being incarcerated and murdered. In the gay liberation period that was the heyday of Susan Sontag, however, the risks of coming out had diminished considerably, even if coming out did still involve risk. Sontag was like her contemporary, Elton John, in being still closeted when he no longer needed to be. The Diller book seems a postscript to this era of the peekaboo closet.
In the writing of this remembrance, another timely postscript presented itself. Tom Lehrer, the brilliant social satirist and songster, passed away at 97 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. Here’s what I posted on Facebook, in an exchange with opera archivist, connoisseur, maven, gadfly and Parterre Box star John Yohalem:
“I met Tom [Lehrer] in the mid-70’s in Boston and Cambridge, in the years of my medical training there. At the time, I’d little idea who he was reputationally. That’s how much of an opera queen I was. As a person, he seemed indeed witty, notably good-natured and bawdy. And he was one of us — that is, gay. The analogy to Sondheim is telling not only of both of them in the same time spans and realms of musical theater, but of their times, in which even people of their ilk of seriousness about social issues and justice couldn’t or wouldn’t and in any case didn’t come out of the closet. The political left that gained such voice in the Viet Nam era and on the UC Berkeley that was my alma mater was notably indifferent to gayness, neither including us nor even acknowledging our existence. The Wikipedia entry on Tom Lehrer says nothng about his being gay, and says only of his personal life that Lehrer never married and had no children. “Whether or not Tom Lehrer is gay is unknown,” states AI. “He has kept his personal life private, and there’s no public information about his sexuality. While some have speculated about it due to his single status, it’s also possible he’s asexual or simply never wanted to marry,” For the record, and if you don’t otherwise know, Tom Lehrer was gay. This is the nonexistence of heritage and legacy we gay people are headed right back to in the current era of reactionary backlash. It took Steve Sondheim forever to finally come out. Apparently, Tom Lehrer never did.”
I sent an abbreviated version of this posting in reply to Lehrer’s obituary in the New York Times. The obit had made no reference to his personal life. On first thought, Lehrer might seem like Pee Wee Herman, someone whose work would have rendered him endangered by open disclosure. In Herman’s case, it could have set off alarms about his proximity to the kids who constituted his biggest following. In Lehrer’s case, edgy, extremely irreverent numbers like The Vatican Rag and The Masochism Tango might have increased his chances of indictment on lewdness and morals charges when antigay laws and tactics still threatened.
Beyond immediate legal threats, each of these creative artists and intellectuals — Pee Wee Herman, Tom Lehrer and Steven Sondheim, among many others, struck what must have seemed to them and indeed were delicate balances of what they perceived to be public versus private, personal versus political, what was or should remain inscrutable for their creative work to have its fullest meaning and impact, what was of the here and now versus what should be appreciated as timeless and universal. These are age-old imponderables of art in relation to its creation and creators and the real world they inhabited that can never have absolute certainty of resolution. About what major historical figure, however, have we ever concluded that we need know nothing more about them than what’s in their works, that whoever and whatever and however they really were in their real lives is of no real interest or significance? In each of these examples — Lehrer, Sondheim, Herman and Sontag, we now know more specifically and in greater detail about their LGBTQ lives. It’s an accountability, like that of Barry Diller, that’s better late than never.
History is filled with Savonarolas and lesser moralists who urged the burning, desecration or alteration of creativity that was “profane” or otherwise politically incorrect. But it’s also filled with artists like Botticelli who colluded in such directives. It’s the reality that’s otherwise known as “it takes two to tango.” Beyond compassion for the personal and legal and socio-political endangerments of artists and their work and our own collusion of apologism for the decisions they made in favor of their careers (e.g., composer Richard Strauss’s capitulations to Nazism), and beyond situations of extreme personal endangerment such as those that existed during the Inquisition, under Nazism or during the McCarthy period, is there any enlightened figure today who would affirm the practices of censorship and secrecy, as they kept recurring historically?
Apart from circumstances of mortal endangerment (e.g., Galileo facing the Inquisition), is there any reason to think that history will be kinder to those creative folks who bowed to various forms and levels of censorship — their own in deference to society’s — for what seemed the best interests of their own creativity and careers? In many cases, it’s a calculation that has paid off handsomely, whatever the cost to reputation. One could fare a lot worse than ending up as Richard Strauss has, still ranked among the most famous, popular and successful composers who ever lived, and forgiven for his sins of career and collusion by most everyone, including me. And one could fare a lot worse than Tom Lehrer, Stephen Sondheim and Susan Sontag, whatever the caveats.
Over time, my experience with writers and writing would help me see that even the most shamelessly self-protective and self-promoting of them, the ones who could seem consumed by fame and celebrity, by career, at the expense of a more credible loyalty to their calling of telling truth, including a number of those I got to know personally, were in their own way and on their own terms also and indeed authentic. While my presumptions about them are worthy of recounting as part of my own narrative and cultural history, they were fallible as enduring judgments and indictments.
My appreciation of Susan Sontag as one of these people was painstaking, And it was Tom Steele who became, at a crucial moment of my own evolution, my guide and accomplice in fostering such discernment in the realms of writers and writing, and in myself.
An earlier friendship dating back to my years of medical training in Boston in the 1970’s with Robert L. Caserio, a literary academic with an interest in Victorian literature, yielded insight about writers and writing that struck deep on hearing it. Bob was the author of a study, Plot, Story and The Novel, between the lines of which there could seem to be a mission to validate the moral rectitude of some of these writers, especially Dickens, at the expense of others such as George Eliot
Bob was a person of intellect, principle, character and hirsute attractiveness (like David Bergman) who became the first openly gay person in his state to adopt a child, an adorable little boy, Cesar, from El Salvador. Eventually, Bob settled into his life at Penn State where his areas of specialization are listed as 19th Century British Literature, Modernist Studies and Theory and Cultural Studies. We grew apart in the wake of his secretly conspiring (as I perceived it) to help Larry Kramer create the character of Mickey Marcus in The Normal Heart that was based on me, but also, coincidentally, in the wake of a casual, unselfconscious statement he made about “the Jewish mind.”
Was it somehow merely contextual, describing how others were thinking, or was it an inadvertently overt, personal reaction in moral defense of Dickens’s characterization of Fagin, often cited as an antisemitic caricature, in Oliver Twist”? Unfair perhaps to pluck that phrase and moment out of the blue-gray of senior memory, but, well, there it was and has since sat, notwithstanding that so many of our mutual good friends were Jewish.
During our trip to Lake Chapala in Mexico, our Jewish-British-American host, a friend of years in a Trump-reactive process of expatriating himself (he doesn’t use the term expat) to Mexico, who was raised both Catholic and Jewish and who is very sensitive to bias in any form, said something casual about “the English mind.” There is no such thing, I shot back. There’s no more reality to such a stereotype than there is to that of “the American male,” which I had admonished my nephew for purveying.
My friend’s defense was eloquent. We do use ethnic stereotypes — Italians are demonstrative, the British are reticent. Ok, but to speak of “the” Italian, British, Jewish, Muslim or Christian “mind” seems more pointed, especially to those like myself who may be more primed in sensitivity to ethnic slurs and worse, than good-natured humor about Jewish mothers or Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or Italian or Hispanic temperment. Though it can seem a fine point, it also seems one worth making.
Another factor in the collapse of my friendship with Bob may have been the pressure I might have been putting on it to be more yielding in those heydays of our (my) being so sexually active. Bob was already serious and mature about life, family and relationships, of which his bold adoption of a child seemed emblematic and genuine. It’s brainy Bob, not incidentally, who thought Faggots “sweet” in its psychoanalytically subterranean, childlike belief in the essential goodness of straight grownups. Such could be the impact of his intelligence that I still titter to myself when I recall his putdown of the endless “house talk” (properties, prices, purchases, landscaping, renovations, antiques, property lines, ordinances) of people in the Hamptons, where his boyfriend had a place in Water Mill and dabbled in real estate.
My friendship with Bob would reverberate years later when I was approached by another scholar of Victorian literature, Daniel (Danny) Bar David, an Israeli-American living in New York who had been severely fag-bashed, leaving him with permanent and eventually fatal brain damage. He had read my Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite and wanted to enlighten me around his own great hero of Victorian literature, George Eliot. He was at pains to importune on behalf of her and her last novel, Daniel Deronda, with its compassion for Jewish people and warnings of the great “hep hep” battle cries of malignant antisemitism emanating from the riots in German cities in 1819 and already sweeping Europe. Daniel had Holocaust survivor relatives living in Israel where his body was sent. When Arnie and I traveled there in the aftermath of Danny’s passing, per Jewish tradition and at the request of Danny’s surviving partner Terry, we put stones on his grave.
Dating back even earlier, during my first trips to Europe in the late 1960’s, was my first literary friendship in New York — with Larry Kramer, who I’d earlier met in London and who knew Bob from their background as Yalies and via their friendship with Richard Howard, who was believed by many to be the power behind Sontag’s throne.
Ahead of a visit from Richard, Bob found himself fretting. Why? It was like preparing for a visit from the Pope, he said. Was Richard, who I was getting to know more informally, really such a formidable and intimidating figure? Yes, Bob and Larry agreed separately, and as was quickly verified by my own experience, culminating in some very bad feeling triangulating (to use a word I first learned from Richard Howard) between Richard towards Arnie Kantrowitz (my life partner and a pioneering champion of more decisively outing Walt Whitman) and boomeranging back to me around this very issue of the closet.
As Bob appreciated him, Richard Howard was that great “man of letters,” an homage more commonly bestowed to leading writers of the past. As Larry put it, Richard was simply a priceless literary resource. Ask Richard any question about any writer or book, he observed, and [Richard] would instantly have four references for you. ‘That’s Richard Howard.” That Richard had major reservations about Larry and his work, to put it politely, wasn’t a reality Larry ever seemed very aware of.
Though I didn’t really quite know it, these were my first role models for writing. In the craft of writing, Bob observed, restraint and measure are important. If you have something to say, don’t just vomit it up and throw it out there (as I — and for that matter Larry Kramer — were wont to do). Let it gestate, mature, ripen, find the right time and milieu and measure to come out.
Certainly what he was saying was incontrovertible literary wisdom, especially for some whose fame and careers — whose livelihoods — depended on such calculation. From my own vantage point of opera, and specifically Wagner, I recalled that it took him 26 years from inception to completion to create the Ring cycle, and that he would end up tinkering with his early opera Tannhäuser for the rest of his life.
Though I too would characteristically tinker with my writing after it was published, my situation felt different not only because I wasn’t of the stature of such great writers and artists but because, in a decision that I saw as the cause of my nervous breakdown in 1984, I never depended on the public for income, career advancement, fame or even reception. I’ve always earned my living as a physician and have always felt more freedom of self-expression than many writers whose literary careers were more determined by the exigencies achieving acclaim, rank and income. Of course, even the very greatest artists and writers were financially challenged, always pursuing commissions and fees, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner legendarily so. But that was not my experience, at least not in any measure I consciously perceived.
Meanwhile, my own instincts were telling me something quite different from what Bob seemed to be advising about writing, at least for myself. As I increasingly felt it, what I needed to do as a writer more than anything else, what I needed to make top priority for myself as a writer, was, well, writing. Do it. Do it whether it’s commissioned or not, whether anyone wants it or not, whether there seems a place for it or not, whether it’s pretty or not (the lesson we all learned from Larry Kramer), whether it’s ripe enough or not, whether it has shape or not, whether it fits neatly into niches or not, whether it or you will be loved or liked or appreciated or respected for it or not, whether it’s too long, too long-winded or too self-indulgent or not (another Larry Kramer lesson), whether you’re being too defiant and need to look more at that than tattle on who and whatever you’re blaming everything on or not (no further allusion to Larry Kramer seems necessary), whether you’re being an asshole or not (again no comment), whether it’s needlessly repetitious or not, whether it’s too angry or not (no comment), whether there are too many lists or not and the lists too long and repetitious or not, whether it will yield career payoff or not. To me, it seemed just that simple. It’s a perception, deeply, personally intuited, that animated my greatest mentor in writing, Larry Kramer, and that has never wavered for me. And it’s a perception — to trust your own instincts in this profoundly personal, however also social, political, communal and spiritual imperative and endeavor of writing — that’s central to the deepest appreciations of Susan Sontag of other writers, intellectuals and artists.
Writing — this imperative of my own creativity — was my priority, getting out what I most deeply felt and needed to say, observe, express, render, explore, revisit, report, repeat or declaim. To post or publish, no matter how questionably, as opposed to the hoarding, honing and crafting in secret or not so secret calculation all writers, including me and by whatever measures, must inevitably, situationally, and at least some times yield to. Though ferocity of commitment may have felt surpassingly true for me and my writing, I grew to appreciate that many or even most writers — Ned Rorem being a good example, Ed White, Jaime Manrique and Larry Kramer being others, and, yes, Susan Sontag — and artists have made complex amalgams of such decisions, in varying relation to and reflection of career ambition, strategy and success.
In that early post gay-liberation, on-the-cusp-of-AIDS period (1980), Tom Steele from Toledo, Ohio was working closely with Charles (Chuck) Ortleb from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to establish what would become our pioneering and leading NYC-based gay publications, the New York Native newspaper and Christopher Street Magazine. The Native is where I published the first press reports on the epidemic that later became known as AIDS and other pieces on medicine, health and culture. Alongside these were feature articles I did for Christopher Street, a more literary hub for essays, interviews and reviews. Crackling with youthful talent, energies and ambition, the environment Chuck and Tom created with editor Patrick Merla in a ramschackle Tribeca office with two key gifted and devoted staff members, artistic director Bruce Eves and his partner, production coordinator John Hammond, was electric. It was the Gotham hub, the home, we writers of Gay Liberation had been clicking our heels in dreams of finding.
Ungainly and unpracticed, I began my not-by-the-rules writing “career “ (the amount of money I’ve been paid for my writing over the years was never more than pittances), in close partnership with Tom. Tom was my chum, pal, consort, accomplice and mentor. But he was never my lover. Both of us were way too busy with others on that front to be waylaid by what was doubtless some degree of mutual attraction.
At that time, having just moved to New York from Boston, I was having an “affairette,” as Larry Kramer described relationships that were more than one night stands but less than full blown love affairs, with Michael Lutin. (I regarded it as a love affair.) Mikey, as I called him, was soon to write an astrology column, “Planetarium,” for Vanity Fair. I think we met at the baths and had mutual friends, Larry among them.
Michael was a gay Jewish Buddhist astrologer and self-taught psychologist, sociologist and amateur politico. He was a pioneering figure of what might be called astrological psychotherapy who could command international clients and audiences from Australia to Las Vegas with his priestly compassion and stand-up comic wit and wisdom. In a tribute to him on Facebook, The Astrological Society of Connecticut — the state that cradled the early lives of both Michael and Larry— described him as “one of the greatest astrologers in the world.”
From his 5th Avenue studio office, steps from Larry Kramer’s Washington Square apartment across the street, he saw his clients, some of them former flower children. The author of a number of enterprising hand-books combining astrology with pop psychology and culture (e.g., Santa Claus Meets Godzilla, Made in Heaven: The Astrology of Relationships, Sunshines: The Astrology of Being Happy), he ministered to the wounded souls of believers and non-believers alike.
At the time we met, in 1980, Mikey was publishing a book, Saturn Signs: A new astrological approach to transforming your fears and anxieties into success, It has an Introduction by Harvey Sakovsky, a mutual friend of both Larrys (Kramer and myself). Harvey was a Freudian psychiatrist who, like Freud, “explored” cocaine, who got hair transplants that made it look like he had an unplayed game of dots on his forehead, and who became an early casualty of AIDS.
Though my failure to take astrology itself seriously — to treat it as having scientific legitimacy — eventually became a wedge between us, I always believed in Mikey, in his spirituality, in his ability to heal. As did the Larry Kramer of turquoise amulets. Our affair soon made way for my life partnership of 40 years with Arnie Kantrowitz, with whom I fell deeply and permanently in love. Though it always felt good to run into Mikey and get his annual birthday greeting, it had been a while since I’d heard from or about him. Then I learned that he had passed away at 74 in November of 2024. RIP Michael Lutin, wandering Jewish star, gay Buddha, mod love guru, “the sixties man who updated,” animal lover and parent to stray dogs and cats, shepherd and protector of lost and wandering souls.
At the time of those early forays of gay media, Tom Steele was “boyfriends” (the term he used) with Rick Sigglekow, who soon turned the tables on Tom by going straight and getting married. But not before launching a tentative but groundbreaking gay cable tv series, one episode of which in 1981 featured me and became the first tv show to discuss “the new gay epidemic.”
In those days of my escalating drinking, of oppressive and pervasive cultural homophobia and no civil rights, and of my own personal and overweening social anxiety, I was terrified of doing anything so public and suffered incapacitating stage fright. I sat there petrified. At the end of the interview I remember saying something like, Well, this has been a real growth experience. The co-host for this event was a woman named Silvana Moscato, who we all quickly lost contact with, as we did likewise with Rick.
Ava Gardner. In my mind, that’s who Tom Steele was, an alter ego I would assign him decades later, when we were no longer in contact. Not that he was a great beauty. He was far from that. Actually, young Tom bore a striking resemblance to the actor Jack Black, whose comic gifts he somehow inherited. Years later, and a lot less flatteringly, he was looking more like Andrew Llyod Weber. But Tom was androgynous and sensual, like Ava in Night of the Iguana or Simone Signoret. He was Maxine Faulk, still sultry and alluring — oh, and boozy — in early middle age, radiating mature, world-wise, gentle and generous wisdom and compassion. He must have been a good lover.
He always had boyfriends. In my years with Tom, before a more global falling out in the wake of Chuck Ortleb’s increasingly paranoid guidance of AIDS coverage, there was handsome Brendan Lemon, a cultural writer and gadfly, and another writer who could wield a sharp but eloquent tongue, Raymond Luczak.
And [Pele], who snapped his fingers next to my eyes once when he caught me drifting away from him in attention. Beyond my actually having clinical ADD, always cruising in party or group environments (and everywhere else) and otherwise easily distracted when conversation didn’t seem riveting or the other person dazzling, it was a moment I would recall years later at a recovery meeting, when someone comparably non-riveting or dazzling was wearing a t-shirt that said, “Be present.”
But to mention recovery is perhaps to get ahead of ourselves.
Raymond, a gifted writer with a speech impediment, could vie with Tom and the best of us in being scathing without being hateful. Meanwhile, neither Tom nor I said anything — reflexively, shamefully colluding in the outrageousness of such politically incorrect, off-color humor — when Brendan called out a leading opera singer we all loved, a person of color, for lapsing into imagined alter-ego — “street nigger” (as he put it) — vernacular.
As I strained to appreciate it, then and subsequently, this was in the vein of our calling people, including each other, “faggots,” the way black people call each other “nigger.” It was a version of what Larry Kramer did in his blitzkrieg satire of gay life Faggots and in much of his subsequent political invective — repeatedly denouncing “us” (with whom he was always mindful of including himself, however cheekily) for being “sissies” and “faggots.” And it’s what Dick Gregory did in his autobiography, Nigger.
But it was also a version of what John Simon did — assume he somehow had the right to use an ethnic or other minority slur because it was inner-circle humor we privately indulged with one another (“haute fagoon,” as my close friend Jim Saslow sometimes describes gay snootiness in art verbiage) and that was reflective of our own status of minority vulnerability. Such looseness of language seemed enabled by an entitlement and natural comeraderie based on our bondedness as minorities, even when we weren’t ourselves members of the specific minority we were gibing.
Though Simon’s persona could seem between the lines to be that of entitled white and class snobbery, he was actually of Hungarian and Eastern European immigrant descent. (In America, what caucasian person — or for that matter what person of any background— isn’t ultimately of “immigrant” descent? Talk about absurdity and the Achilles heels of the far right — the accusations of their being ignorant, intolerant and reactive.) At some level, and also in the vein of far-righters thinking of and promoting themselves as discriminated against, Simon doubtless had his own personal, convoluted basis of thinking of himself as a minority person and outsider — as one of us. It’s a position he tried to argue for, in spots eloquently but mostly unsuccessfully, in an interview he did with Ned Rorem for the New York Native (“The Real John Simon,” issue 115) in the wake of the premiere of The Normal Heart in 1985.
“The gay community,” which was often demeaned as such by the left for being mainstream, assimilationist, exclusionary and passively racist and sexist, in fact shared a deep-seated sense of kinship with blacks, women and other minorities, even if it wasn’t always forefront in proclamation, because of our shared and ongoing history of human and minority discrimination and oppression. Even when not on the front lines of world struggles against class and minority oppression to the extent needed, most of us sensed this kinship in the depths of awareness, of self in relation to others, as captured in the wisdom of a German Lutheran pastor during World War 2.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller
Memorably, boozy irreverence protruded into our repartee ahead of a revival of Dialogues of the Carmelites, starring Met favorite Regine Crespin, who I’d loved and followed since seeing her American debut in Chicago in 1962, and leading divas of color — opera goddess Jesseye Norman and the gifted singing-actress Maria Ewing (who I hadn’t realized was of African-American descent and married to director Peter Hall). Prodded by Brendan, Tom, on demand and in the vein of his sometimes wildly funny, Oh, Mary-irreverent cabaret act persona (about which more anon), and doubtless already somewhat soused, did an imitation of “Mother Superior” singing to her young novice, in parodic, insouciant Poulenc-ian sing song: [What are you say-ing you nig-ger bitch].
Had they — and me with them for not bolting out — lost our marbles!? As often with Tom, we were in stitches — and not coincidentally well into our cups — over the ridiculousness and grossness of such vernacularity. Notwithstanding an unflappability that perhaps too often seemed to just barely avert crash landing, he was Joan Rivers on steroids.
But was he also in such a moment, at least in this instance, like fashion icon John Galliano? Galliano, not unlike Tom in charm and presence, was not otherwise known to be so overtly sardonic and comic, at least not intentionally so in public. Also unlike John Galliano, none of us were advanced alcoholics. Or were we?
Virtually the entire infamously drunken antisemitic rant by Galliano in a London pub, captured in the film High and Low, was merciless in tacit indictment. But it was also an excellent film that showed how and why John Galliano had achieved such heights of fame and endearment. Whenever he was in your presence, you couldn’t take your eyes or ears off him and were inclined to forgive him for anything and everything. Personal charm and grace of the kind so coveted in circles of high fashion has rarely seemed so abundant and seductive as in the persona and charisma of John Galliano.
Eventually, and in the course of the documentary on him and all this, Galliano apologizes and gives testimony about his subsequent entry into rehab and recovery. I, for one, was totally convinced of his sincerity. In its wickedly amusing coda, however, the film’s penultimate Galliano fashion show features models in “creatively” Hassidic garb.
Did I just now do with Galliano what I did with Wagner, family members and lovers — and with Tom Steele? — with everybody for much of my life, codependently forgiving and praising them in an unconscious masochistic strategy of belonging with them and thereby fluffing them into valuing and loving me or at least not hurting me?
Meanwhile, God only knows what we ourselves all said — in this same no-holds-barred vein of forbidden humor amongst and against ourselves — about Jews, especially during this period when the ultra-Orthodox were once again pulling out all the stops to prevent passage of our first gay civil rights bill here in New York City. For the next 7 years (for 15 years total), monstrously offensive and combative Brooklyn Judge and city council person Noah Dear would continue to wage an unremitting campaign of homophobic hate and slander against us that was relentlessly successful in preventing New York City from passing the gay civil rights bill that was first conceived and presented by our (Arnie’s, Vito’s and my) closest extended family member Jim Owles.
In our wars with religious extremism, which was bound up with that against psychiatry’s pathologization of us, it was even more difficult then than today to say or do anything that would not be interpreted as antisemitic. Genocidal antisemitism and religious extremism are profoundly serious and enduring realities, as deeply and personally appreciated by me as for any other sentient, conscious, partisan of Judaism, history and minority rights. But it’s hard to imagine two figures more undermining of the ability of those of us who were gay and Jewish to remain unwaveringly loyal to that historical reality and threat than the far right zealot, Supreme Court Justice Noah Dear, and billionaire professor of Business at CUNY, Heshy Friedman, who the Daily Beast characterized as a “one man homophobia machine.”
I imagine some version of this tit for tat between gays and Jews is what felled Emilia Perez star Karla Sofia Gascon. Such were these realities that none of us ever reprimanded our beloved and esteemed extended family member, Allen Roskoff, when, in an over-the-top reaction to the religious bigotry that was foaming at the mouth in courtroom hearings on the New York City Gay Civil Rights bill, he did a parody “Heil Hitler” salute. Roskoff’s priceless courage and persistence in pursuing extremist Dear and Dear’s co-conspirators are among the finest pages in the history of Gay Liberation.
Whatever we did end up saying about Jews couldn’t have been any worse than plenty of other stuff I myself, the consummate Jewish Wagnerite, had said or codependently colluded with. And at worst, in truth, and in the deft comic arts of Tom Steele, it was no worse than unexpurgated Joan Rivers. Alas, I would later realize, it was one thing to flirt with or otherwise feel justified in treading boundaries the way Joan Rivers did and nearly always got away with doing. But it was another to veer into the extreme edginess of Lenny Bruce, Andrew Dice Clay, Dave Chapelle or the whole-hog boundary clobbering of a Roseanne Barr or Eddie Murphy, or the evermore inexcusable toxicity and mean-spiritedness of a John Simon. I don’t think Tom was ever any of those persons.
In retrospect, the unbearably palpable tension, especially for those of privilege (but as well for everybody else)— the wealthy and those like us in their orbit, especially in the environs of the opera— that is showcased in Dialogues of the Carmelites as in no other work (we had seen the production when it was new), may have endowed us with a nervous-Nelly giddiness, fueled by alcohol — our riposte to the Reign of Terror we knew would be returning, like the several back-by-popular-demand revivals of Poulenc’s masterpiece at the Met. Jewish humor, it’s often observed, is about keeping the wolf at bay. The same is true of gay and most other ethnic and minority humor.
Like the convent nuns of Compiegne, we understood that in almost any Reign of Terror, whether from extremism on the right or left, we would be, in the phraseology of fascism’s current and most alarming mouthpiece, Donald Trump, “enemies of the people,” and, like them, specifically targeted as such. It’s at once amusing and tragic, as Tom Steele would have had we sisters of perpetual indulgence appreciate it with gallows humor, to think of ourselves hand-in-hand with nuns on the tumbrils to the guillotine. Unlike the nuns of Compiegne, however, we were unlikely to be posthumously canonized.
Part 2
Many in Tom’s orbit were fabulous, famous and successful. Like Quentin Crisp, who Tom introduced me to. And Lenny Bernstein, who Tom took me to visit at the Dakota to talk to him about “the new gay epidemic.”
Meanwhile, Tom himself was indeed this very talented, budding raconteur, comedian, pianist, songster as well as a skilled editor and writer. Encouraged by Chuck Ortleb (had they been lovers?), Tom put together a cabaret act, Gay Hot Line, that was so good it became thematic in our lives. Right up to Arnie’s last months, he and I would sing together Tom’s mordant, bloodlesss, off-key and typically, edgily politically incorrect refrain of “Cathy Coalition at the Gay Pride Parade”:
“You and me, together as one,
under the male supremacist sun.
And we, we don’t have much fun,
under the male supremacist sun.”
And then there was “Mrs Verdicchio” with her newly out gay son:
“You’re gay, you’re gay. OK, OK!”
In addition to his day job duties with the publications, sometimes grueling and often extending into the wee hours where night becomes day — earmarking Tom’s and Chuck’s signature Cole Porter refrain (they hoped to write a musical in the spirit of Porter)— he eventually penned a gossip/humor/restaurant review/all-over-the-place column under the name of Dee Sushi. The name said it all, as did the column. In this narrative, Brendan Lemon was “Dee’s boyfriend.” “Night and Day” likewise became a column or theater zine. A companion to our new opera magazine, Opera Monthly, it grew to become another groundbreaking publication, TheaterWeek, which ran for nearly a decade.
More than anything else, it was his charm, his personal charisma and glamour, that gave Tom the kind of entrée everyone covets. He was immediately your confidant and friend. Whoever you were, you wanted to spend time with him, wanted him at your parties and events, wanted to go to the opera with him. Instant friends. Instant buddies, instant soul mates.
In this he was a bit like Ingrid Sischy, who, though you’d never previously met her, came on like she had always been your close friend. Unlike Tom, however, she could just as surprisingly seem to became this other, not such good friend, as when she turned down my offer to fashion my big interview with Ned Rorem for Interview. Tom seemed less practiced in cultivated phoniness, notwithstanding his innate skill at navigating the divides between himself and his writers. Though uncannily adept at imitating others in cabaret and stand-up comedy, he was less skilled at not being himself and real everywhere else.
The only person in my circles who ever approached Tom in this trait of personability was Vito Russo. In neither case — of Tom and Vito — do I recall ever having had any real sense of disingenuousness, even when diplomacy became importunate.
Vito would re-emerge in the early period of AIDS not only as the star of his landmark The Celluloid Closet, for which Christopher Street did a cover story in 1981, but as the leading candidate to succeed columnist Arthur Bell (“Bell Tells”) at the Village Voice as New York’s leading gay nightlife and celebrity gadfly. In fact, they had already shared a column, “The Russo Bell/Connection” in the New York Native, based mostly on their daily telephone conversations.
When the time came to name a successor to Bell, however, that assignment went not to Vito but to a drag and downtown club scene figure, Michael Musto. Apparently, Voice editors Karen Durbin and Richard Goldstein wanted more authentic voices from the worlds of drag, club, ethnic and minority life. Theirs were challenging and to a real extent credible editorial decisions. Until you stop to consider what a column by Vito might have offered to Voice readers and the world.
I remember Arnie and I actually calling our friend Richard Goldstein to importune for Vito to get the nod to succeed Arthur Bell when we knew their decision to be in the eleventh hour. Not so unlike me, alas, in their rejecting of what would have been the first feature on AIDS in the mainstream press (by me and commissioned by the Voice, but similarly rejected by Karen and Richard at the eleventh hour), Vito was deemed to be “not a Voice writer” (the quotes are mine) and the award went instead to Musto. Arthur, who was preoccupied with writing his big farewell feature on his going blind from diabetic retinopathy, “Slow Fade To Black,” likewise failed to intervene in any way we ever learned of for his close friend and protégé, Vito.
When Arthur passed away not so long after that, he left a cash bequest for me in his will. Was it because we were really that close and he thought that much of me (we were friends) or was it a gesture of compensation for his awareness of the Voice’s priorities and choices at that time, as our mounting crises begged for coverage.
Having found an editor like Tom Steele who seemed truly to care about me and my writing and who shared my cultural interests and concerns felt like — still feels like — one of my life’s peaks of good fortune. As it became increasingly clear, that figure would not be Karen Durbin, Richard Goldstein or most of the other mainstream writers and editors (including Lawrence K. Altman and Linda Villarosa at the New York Times) who I intersected with and who were also, however slowly and earnestly but inadequately, trying to reckon with gay people and our lives. And the epidemic that would become known as AIDS.
As for the analogies between Tom and other editors, one that may be suitable for comparison is Bob Gottlieb at the New Yorker. That he was an avid collector of ladies purses rendered him, for me, in the same realm of my appreciation of Tom for his incomparable mix of talent, insights, skills, energies, personality and eccentricities.
Having gotten the nod from editor-in-chief Ortleb, who was clearly the boss running the show, and who was likewise clearly a Svengali for Tom in those early years, I was welcomed into the inner sanctum of working with New York Native editor Patrick Merla on my psychiatry, gay health and early AIDS pieces, but as well on psychiatry, sex research, literary and cultural pieces, mostly with Tom for Christopher Street.
“Why is Hollywood Dressing Gays to Kill?” was an early Native feature by me on the legacy and ever-gathering hurricane of anti-gay films that had set the stage for Vito Russo’s landmark study and traveling roadshow, The Celluloid Closet (TCC). At the time I wrote that piece, I scarcely knew Vito. But I was alarmed enough about the out-of-control homophobia of the current cinema that I had to write about it with the same urgency I felt in covering the new, concurrently unfolding epidemic.
This sense of urgency about the cinema was not a distraction from my medical writing, as David France later suggested about my interest in opera in his book, How To Survive a Plague. It was of a piece with it.
What was happening to us medically was happening to us socio-politically, as the accelerating onslaught of virulently homophobic films from Hollywood kept reflecting, indeed showcasing, older psychiatric demonologies of gays as “psychopathic personalities.” I had cut my activist teeth writing about psychiatric homophobia and becoming an activist with cohorts of gay psychiatrists in navigating the aftermath of the landmark declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. I knew whereof I spoke.
Although I cannot sing enough praise for Vito and his epochal The Celluloid Closet, absent from his book was the film that seemed most emblematic of the morass of stigmatizing cinematic images and stereotypes it was otherwise so pioneering, expansive and inclusive in indicting: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Psycho is not listed in the index of TCC or discussed therein.
Vito and I became close friends and extended family. In fact, in the wake of Arnie’s passing and the passing of Jed Mattes, Vito’s close friend and literary agent, to what extent have I inherited the literary executorship of Vito’s estate? That’s currently being evaluated. During that early period of our work, I did ask Vito about Psycho and TCC. As I recall it now, my sense was that he accurately regarded Psycho as the latest on a continuum of such films, from Hitchcock and otherwise from Hollywood.
Vito did otherwise discuss Hitchcock, whose artistry and fame could cloud a more clear-cut appreciation of the director’s serious and persistent homophobia. Psycho was the classic film of what I call “the psychoanalytic 60’s,” on the shores of which the era’s heavily distorted, unscientific, thoroughly biased, dishonest and envenomed thinking about homosexuality had finally run aground. Overtly anti-gay propaganda that was in bed with primitive theories of homosexuality as the origin and cause of Nazism (like bad mothers causing gayness), it set the stage for the still, at that time, bitterly disputed and resented — and not only by the most extreme of the old guard psychiatry diehards, like Edmund Bergler, Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber — declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association (1973–74).
In the current era of re-emergent and accelerating fascism, with its foundational anti-science wilfulness, ignorance, defiance and cruelty, don’t be surprised if and when homosexuality is re-pathologized by the APA. This is a warning that was likewise sounded by medical ethicist Ronald Bayer in his landmark review of the declassification, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis.
Most of my non-medical, non-AIDS cultural pieces were for Christopher Street. And many of these — e.g., interviews with sexologist John Money, psychiatry critic (“anti-psychiatrist”) Thomas Szasz and sex educator Mary Calderone — were charting what I called “the shift in credibility of opinion from the temples of psychiatry to the laboratories of sex research.”
Meanwhile, my writing about opera, and especially Wagner, was a pregnancy that continued to grow. With Tom, I became a founding editor of Opera Monthly.
In the course of our becoming bosom culture vultures, Tom managed, with his maternal and literary instincts, to shepherd me and my writing. No, I wasn’t of the stature of Edmund White or Andrew Holleran, and not deserving of that level of acclaim or showcasing. These were boundaries that the infinitely tactful Tom kept navigating. But, yes, I could begin to stake my claim as a writer.
As a writer, however, I was insecure and all over the place in my interests, subject matter, style(s) and structures (academic, medical and science writing, interviews, essays, reviews, memoirs, screenplays, dramatizations). What tradition of writers and writing did I fit into? Who might I be compared to? If I wasn’t going to be Ed White, Andrew Holleran or even my friend and mentor Larry Kramer, who might I be thought of as literarily akin to?
Actually, I was the kind of writer of multiformity Susan Sontag repeatedly wrote about — Benjamin, Barthes, Cannetti. Though I did want to reach her, gaining access to Susan Sontag wasn’t a simple matter. Notwithstanding my proximity to her via Richard Howard, but mostly via my abiding friendship with Richard’s partner and later husband, the artist David Alexander — who I commissioned to do a memorable, cherished portrait of Arnie and me — such a coming together was never to be. Though I somehow got her phone number (her name and number are still in my directory) and left her a message — presumptuously and naively, I guess, I wanted to alert her to my AIDS and cultural writing — there was no reply.
In those tender years, questions of which niche(s) of writers I fit into weren’t ones I was explicating, neither to others nor to myself, at least not consciously. And as I say, my trajectory as a writer has always been about writing what I feel impelled to write rather than for or about “career.” (“Sex und Career” quipped the handsome, gifted early gay and AIDS filmmaker and casualty Artie Bressan Jr about Rosa von Praunheim). But like a pup trying to sniff his way in direction, I sensed Tom thought of me as one of his stable of writers and pondered that question himself.
One day, Tom looked at me quizzically, as if trying to figure something out. After some moments of contemplation, he half-whispered, as if it were tentative and still a secret he wasn’t fully confident in sharing: “…Walter Benjamin…”
Walter Benjamin!? His was a name I’d come across in my readings of psychiatry and literary and musical culture, and in Sontag’s essays collection. He was associated with both Arendt and Adorno, with philosophy (the Frankfurt school) and literature. He famously wrote about Beaudelaire and Kafka, being a flaneur, about cities, time, architecture and psychology. He wrote books, e.g., Paris as the Capital of the Nineteenth Century and The Arcades Project. He was an important figure in the intellectual ferment of the Weimar era. Unlike me and many in his circles, he was never a Wagnerite.
“For those afflicted with illness as metaphor, for the character born under the sign of Saturn,” Sontag concludes, “the true impulse when one is being looked at is to cast one’s eyes down.”
— Susan Sontag, Under The Sign of Saturn
Surpassingly, my sense of him, and from perusing Sontag’s essay, was of a man temperamentally saturnine, melancholic, depressive, sad, conflictedly Jewish and conflictedly socialist in failed efforts to be both, scattered and elusive in his interests and subject matter, full of contradictions, arcane, obscure, inscrutable, obscurantist, ambivalent, druggy, the epitome of the wandering literary, intellectual, international Jew who Hitler, Goebbels and centuries of deep-seated German and European antisemitism indicted as such and who eventually committed suicide in trying to escape the Nazis rather than becoming a triumph and icon of survival and authority like Arendt or Adorno.
As a self-described “conscious Jew” and unwavering Marxist, Benjamin epitomized everything Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party despised. And he was proud to earn their hatred. Benjamin wrote repeatedly about the metastasization of Nazism and fascism, especially in Germany but elsewhere as well.
— from “Even The Dead Won’t Be Safe: Walter Benjamin’s Final Journey,” the National WWII Museum, 9/30/2020
Like me, Benjamin struggled with his identities as Jewish and socialist, which, like me, he never quite mastered. He tried to be Marxist without ever reading Marx. He flirted with Jewish mysticism and zionism without ever being religious. Not unlike me writing repeatedly and vehemently about what I keep calling “the Nazi takeover of the world” today, and though I was as repelled by communism as by any other form of authoritarianism, Benjamin was calling for an end to a fascist ruling class accountable to no one, specifically in Germany but globally as well. Not naive about the corruption of communism that overtook socialism, he later became an outspoken critic of Stalin and Stalinism.
Meanwhile, as I myself keep calling it out here in Trump’s America, Benjamin felt that the most likely outcome of such a clash in Germany then was some version of civil war. Trump uses the Hitlerian, authoritarian phrase “enemy of the people” to describe anyone critical of him, anyone disloyal, anyone not as figuratively snow white and incandescently orange-haired or Prince Valiantly blond as himself. For Hitler and the Nazis and their wealth caste backers, Walter Benjamin and the communism he initially championed were the realization of their deepest fears and stereotypes.
As the epitome of the intellectual communist Jew, Walter Benjamin would certainly have been on Nazi lists of “enemies of the people.” Just as Benjamin realized correctly that he was pegged as such by Nazi thugs, goons and stooges, their lists and procedures, so I sense myself to figure on such lists in the here and now of the police state dictatorship America has now overtly become.
Still the consummate Jewish Wagnerite in those gay liberation and early AIDS days, I didn’t want to be Walter Benjamin. I wanted to be like the better-known, accepted and more showcased gay writers in Christopher Street — like glamorously erudite Edmund White, who had already become (and remained) a toast of the international literary world, and beloved Andrew Holleran, even as it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t of their ilk in accomplishment and stature, certainly not in their realms as writers mostly of fiction and in Ed’s case what’s now called autofiction. Naively, I imagined that the fact of stars like Ed and Eric (Andrew Holleran was the pen name for Eric Garber) being best known as writers of fiction should somehow have more congenially dovetailed with my being a writer of what I earlier called multiformity but primarily of nonfiction.
Like a Jew in Germany, and in fact not so unlike Walter Benjamin as a writer seeking ground, I felt myself to be sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb wherever I was and whoever I was with. Ultimately and inevitably, I felt myself to be like my unchosen doppelganger Walter Benjamin, a sad sack of a wayfarer, inwardly, desperately seeking berth, seeking to fill an unfillable hole of belonging.
Meanwhile, if the Violet Quill cliques were putting together collections of essays and short stories that seemed to exclude Larry Kramer and me, why were they doing so? I couldn’t understand it then and have pondered it ever since. At the time, political differences didn’t explain it. Rather, it seemed more like garden-variety snobbism. It was difficult not to take such rejection personally.
Larry Kramer, who I had embraced but who I was also critical of, was the principal designated VQ nemesis, its Simon Legree. For those writers, he was the very definition of the angry, resentful, screaming-queen exemplar of not-pretty, not sex-affirming, unhappy (unrequited love) persona and writing the VQ folks all kept their distance from under the tightly controlled auspices of their matron, guru and ringleader Edmund White, often enough with overt hostility (primarily from Ed, Felice Picano and George Stambolian) and notwithstanding Larry’s abiding friendship with Eric and his eventual ascendance in esteem with other of these colleagues, if never with Ed or Felice.
Yes, Sontag had written about Benjamin as a significant, challenging intellectual, and it’s her essay about him that most of us would eventually turn to to have more of a sense of him. But such was my resistance and disaffection from Sontag at that time and subsequently that I pushed this comparison away. I didn’t have the interest or patience to more seriously read Sontag’s commentary on Benjamin at the time and it wasn’t until recently, in the wake of Tom’s passing, that I returned to it. As I did likewise to another resource on Walter Benjamin and his emigre Parisian world, Edmund White’s The Flaneur.
I can’t remember when I’ve devoured a book so quickly. The big questions about Ed that always came up with his books were almost never about their readability or their author’s allure, intelligence, erudition and taste. Those were always givens. But how substantive were they really? Were they banquets or bons bons? To rightly continue with the food analogy, the questions that lingered about Ed’s writing were, increasingly over time, about whether we were eating fast rather than genuinely nourishing food and whether we were doing so compulsively. Ed, in a story not yet told by him or others, was indeed an addict, and with the same compulsivity around sex, alcohol and food that beset so many of us as writers and readers. In reading Ed, were we being junkies, more entertained than enlightened? Persistently, if ever less pressingly, that was the question that kept being asked about Ed and his books. In the end, had Ed maintained his promise of becoming a gay literary elder statesman and eminence, or had he become more of a bar buddy holding forth for fans?
The answer to that, as it may prove as well for Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, may vary over time. That is, eventually, work that was unknown or originally written off will be rediscovered or reconsidered and better appreciated. In Ed’s case, he wrote a number of plays, including one about Timothy McVeigh’s interaction with Gore Vidal that keeps teasing curiosity, however short it keeps falling for revival.
I never asked Tom directly, nor did he ever volunteer, to say more about his thinking about Walter Benjamin in relation to me. Or if he did, I no longer recall him doing so. Meanwhile, literary wisdom tended to emerge from Tom like apples falling from their tree, some more ripe than others. The early 1980’s ushered in a period of fitful revivals of obscure works by Tennessee Williams (Small Craft Warnings, Not About Nightingales). In casual discussion vis a vis the the standard presumption about the alleged decline over time of the talents of the “Glorious Bird” (as Gore Vidal affectionately referred to him in homage to the birds that are motivic in Williams’s plays), Tom observed that Williams was far more prolific than most people knew, leaving countless manuscripts and other writings that have yet to be evaluated. And it was Tom who first made me aware of Williams as a canvas artist who would leave an astonishing collection of gay-themed art from his (Williams’s) home perch in Key West. (2).
As for the hallowed halls of fame of the New York Review of Books, without missing a beat, Tom dissed it good-naturedly as a house of cards consisting of a desk telephone and Barbara Epstein eating potato chips.
The reason Tom’s humor was always so winning, I think, was that it really was not, at heart, ever truly malicious. “Wicked,“ yes. But I don’t recall ever witnessing Tom be hateful, angry or vindictive, nor racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic or otherwise genuinely biased or toxic. Unlike Larry Kramer and, alas, also me, Tom Steele could never suddenly turn into — like Jekyll and Hyde — Donald Trump. As Larry Kramer but especially Donald Trump demonstrates, you don’t have to be actively alcoholic (neither of them was) to be reactive, defensive, nasty and vicious. In Tom Steele was the corollary that being alcoholic doesn’t necessarily render you vicious, nasty, reactive and defensive. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Fast forward to Quentin Crisp, Ned Rorem and Lenny Bernstein.
Tom’s intimate relationship with Quentin was exemplary of his success in husbanding his writers, of his shepherding the generation of gay writers that has become some of culture’s greatest inheritance. And it mirrored his own experience of being brought out and cultivated by Chuck Ortleb. I don’t recall how Quentin and Tom came together. But it was in the autumn of Quentin’s celebrity, of his showing up at parties and events, on talk shows, in cameos, plays and on film.
In 1982, he was Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1992, he was Elizabeth the Great in Sally Potter’s phantasmagorical realization of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In 2009, he was the protagonist, played by John Hurt, who had portrayed Quentin in The Naked Civil Servant, in the film, An Englishman in New York, in which Denis O’Hare plays a composite based on Tom Steele and the executor of Quentin’s archives and estate, Phillip Ward.
Quentin had become legendary for his ability to be spontaneously witty and engaging on any topic in any venue and on the spur of the moment. In the due course of which he and Tom became friendly, eventuating in Tom’s getting Quentin to write for Christopher Street, mostly about movies. One cover bore the callout: “Quentin Crisp on Miss Midler.” What Tom and Quentin seemed to have in common at the deepest level was what might be called British soul (titter) and survival skills to rank with the best.
On occasion, alas, there were problems. One thinks of Quentin as bon-mot wisdom incarnate. Regarding his life experience with homophobia, for example, Quentin could cut to the chase with clarity and grace: “What I realize now was that my sin was not my homosexuality, but my effeminacy.”
In An Englishman in New York, he appears for the last time in America in a Tampa, Florida gay bar doing a Q&A where he reminds the young crowd of outsiders to “Neither look forward where there is doubt, nor backward where there is regret, look inward and ask, not if there is anything outside that you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”
Redolent of Noel Coward’s triumphant run in Las Vegas, in the wake of the stuffy British press becoming bored with him (winningly captured in the documentary Mad About The Boy: The Noel Coward Story), the story of Quentin’s later-life American success is yet another triumphant blip in the never-ending decline and fall of the British empire.
As recreated in “An Englishman in New York,” however, Quentin could also stir the pot, as in his attempts to talk about “the new gay epidemic.” “AIDS is a fad,” he observed. Quentin Crisp Archives custodian Phillip Ward postulates that in the mix of this response was the conspiracist theory atmosphere regarding the “alternative view” origins and nature of AIDS that increasingly preoccupied many of us — could it be government plotted CBW (chemical biological warfare)? — regarding this epidemic primarily affecting social outcasts and undesirables. This was especially true of Chuck Ortleb in the early period of greater uncertainty of cause. It would be a full three years into the epidemic before that cause — HIV as the primary agent — would be incontrovertibly established, even as alternative theories persisted and metastasized to become another deadly plague — AIDS denialism.
Quentin’s health had been problematic for some time and he was adamant about not going to see doctors or to ER’s. In fact, at the time of Tom introducing me to him, Quentin was becoming ever more reclusive in his private life. So far as I could glean, and though Quentin was widely admired, beloved and still sought after, Tom and Phillip were among the very few friends he was in regular touch with.
Suffering from fits of incapacitating exhaustion, Quentin needed medical attention. Doubtless from his years of trying to navigate the homophobia that permeated society and which was ingrained in all institutions, and notably those that were medical, he remained adamant about not seeking medical help. Fortunately, he had Tom and Phillip.
The AIDS epidemic was reaching new crescendos and my name via my early coverage and involvement was commonly referenced in discussions. A light bulb went off for Tom. What if “the handsome doctor” (as Quentin had apparently described me to Tom) were willing to do a house call? Quentin agreed and the next thing I knew I was in Quentin’s tiny SRO-like domicile with it’s hot plate, dust, piles of invitations and strewn papers. Phillip says that despite the appearance of disorganization, Quentin knew where everything was and could become unsettled if something was displaced.
An over-the-shoulder toss of his signature scarf was all he ever needed to be “on” as the center and life of the party. I ended up making another of these visits, stabilizing him medically, primarily by getting him to agree, albeit reluctantly, to follow-up with an office-based doctor. As I recall, he needed blood pressure medication which he eventually agreed to take, at least now and then.
Neither Tom nor Quentin — nor I, for that matter — ever seemed to have much money to speak of. In the podcast he did with Eric Marcus for Making History, Phillip (who I’d had my own bear-world relationship with) notes that although Quentin spent little money, he was very generous with friends and anyone in need.
Whether that extended to Tom I never pondered nor inquired about, but money did creep into the picture of my relationships both with Tom and Chuck Ortleb.
In the early period of my AIDS and other writing for Chuck and Tom, Chuck confronted me with a direct request for money to help their publications stay afloat. Though a physician, I was working in an outlier, low-paying capacity in an addiction clinic and was financially challenged myself. With his promise to pay me back “very shortly,” I “loaned” him $800. There was no written agreement, just a handshake. Months later, when I inquired about repayment, he seemed irritated. Upset and uncertain how to react, I dropped the subject. Meanwhile, the problems with Chuck were rapidly worsening. His paranoia and conspiracy theories were setting the stage for the birth of a movement that would prove catastrophic for AIDS, medicine and science around the world — AIDS denialism.
AIDS denialism was the premiere exemplar of science denialism of our time, prior to the spectacle of science denialism of the later Trump-MAGA administration in response to COVID, the consequence of which was an even larger number of preventable deaths — upwards of half a million by the estimation of Trump’s own appointed then aggressively relegated COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Debroah Birx. It’s the same science denialism that’s now on track to perpetrate the next genocidal tsunami of preventable deaths from AIDS under the auspices of Trump’s appointed crackpot health czar, RFK Jr., who, as is clear from his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is an AIDS denialist
I’ve written at length and repeatedly about AIDS denialism. Besides becoming the greatest cause of preventable deaths in the history of AIDS — what I’ve called “genocide by sloth” — it was the beginning of the end of my association with Chuck (“he has blood on his hands,” observed Larry Kramer, in judgment of the careening deterioration of reliable AIDS coverage in the Native), and to a real extent as well with those joined at the hip with Chuck, notably Tom.
Recently, I worked intensively with Patrick Merla on the posthumous publication of Song of Myself: A Novel by my late life partner, Arnie Kantrowitz, during which we avoided the subject of AIDS denialism and Chuck Ortleb. Chuck is apparently still with his life partner, Francis. I sense they’ve all remained friends.
Money issues likewise extended to Tom. Though very far from being flush financially, I was better off than most writers and found myself paying for dinners and opera tickets, as I still do, for people with less means. Gatheringly, there was a lot –too much — of this with Tom and it became problematic for me at the level of my wondering if it weren’t a kind of inadvertent, paraconscious bribery or subtle emotional blackmail for getting the attention and support I needed, rarely received, or so it could seem, and felt I deserved for my writing.
As I came to understand it better over time, codependent generosity could feel undermining of my self-esteem. And although it did not ultimately tarnish my best sense of Tom and his gifts and our relationship, or my associations with the Native and Christopher Street, it was serious and intrusive enough that, in league with Chuck’s worsening conspiracist and denialist fanaticism (remember the dolphins and “CFIDS” — “chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome”?), our friendship could not be sustained.
Once done with Tom and Chuck, we were done. I wanted and had no further communications with either of them, even as I often thought in fond remembrance of Tom and experienced an unanticipatedly major attack of grief on learning of his passing. Whether one is still bonded and to what extent with another isn’t determined by judgment, conscience, choice or fiat. It’s a matter of the heart.
Having discrepancies about money with those of unequal means, I eventually learned, goes with the territory of being human and having relationships. It needn’t necessarily be given weight beyond its immediate circumstances. Being generous always came naturally to me and I never had any deep misgivings about it. Nor any abiding regrets, not even when I sniffed betrayal, dishonesty and contempt, being exploited and disrespected because I wasn’t more outspokenly demanding of name recognition, payment, respect or percs, or for being comparatively moneyed and thereby “entitled.” Such instances may have rendered me more circumspect, but have vindictiveness, retaliation and revenge ever really served me? Alternatively, have I ever really regretted being kind, compassionate or generous? Not now, and not in retrospect, but in my drinking days quieting such reactivity could feel more challenging.
What I have discovered about myself that has remained challenging is the character defect and vulnerability — the defense mechanism — of codependence. When people aren’t giving you what you want, need and deserve, instead of redoubling your efforts to please them — “people pleasing” — or resenting them and trying to retaliate, one needs to step back and away and turn the focus onto oneself and find other ways to meet one’s needs and retain one’s self-possession. It’s a process we in codependence recovery call detachment. Sometimes you have to detach with an ax. More often, and wherever possible, detachment with love is the better way to go. Detachment with love is achieved by acceptance, forgiveness and moving on.
The biggest problem with codependence and its principal mechanism of people pleasing is its distortion of reality in misunderstanding what seems the indifference or even contempt of others. The distortion is bilateral, invariably unconscious and based on the need to control, in the guise needing to feel better appreciated for who we really are and for our gestures of good will. But it’s also a distortion of the realties of others who not only have their own needs and priorities that are independent of our relationships with them but who are just as likely beset with their own psychologies of self-devaluation.
It’s like the old Groucho Marx quip that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. Which in turn is a cousin of the recovery concept of “contempt prior to investigation.” That the codependent meets only a compounding of contempt and rebuffment is experienced by the codependent as increasingly frustrating and maddening. In recovery, which includes recovery from codependence, one learns to recognize addiction and compulsivity as the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Which is why the codependent needs to move away from people and entanglements that are consistently unyielding, where expectations are bilaterally misunderstood and unrealistic, and needs remain unmet.
Certainly, I’ve have no regrets about being generous with the fantabulous Tom Steele, to whom I remain deeply indebted for the evolution of my life of writing and activism, and for some of the best times I’ve ever shared with anyone. Nor, for that matter with the gifted, brave and visionary Chuck Ortleb. Whatever our differences, whatever their own trajectories in life and career, they were in their time and certainly for me true heroes. If this is to be read as codependence, you may have a point. If it’s to be read as acceptance, forgiveness and love, that feels more right to me. As for the relationship between codependence and love, as captured by the brilliant Arnie Kantrowitz, so skilled at cutting to the chase with good will and wit, “codependence is just another word for love.”
Which brings us, finally, to the worlds of music and opera, to Ned Rorem and Lenny Bernstein. My experiences with and in the orbit of these notable figures of our musical and cultural lives and times are subjects of my forthcoming Jewish Wagnerism Series Book 3, Wayfaring with Ned Rorem: A Nonfiction Narrative. My commentary about them here will therefore be more limited to my interactions with them in relation to Tom Steele.
Chuck and Tom made my essay, “The New Narcissism and Homosexuality: The Psychiatric Connection,” the cover story of Christopher Street for the very first issue of the new decade of the 1980’s. Inadvertently (?), my name was not on the cover, which resulted in Tom, as editor, decades later, being credited for this piece in some internet and reference feeds. Was there any malice aforethought in this omission? I don’t think so. Although I likewise winced when Tom brought me to meet his friend and colleague, Harper Collins editor Tom Miller, who had put together a collection, The Christopher Street Reader, of our pieces. That it was the first time my work had appeared in a book seemed to take a back seat for me at the time to my awareness that my name was not among the contributors listed on the cover, something neither of the Toms — nor I at the time — commented on.
For all my innuendos about others taking advantage of my codependence, Tom Steele never seemed truly self-seeking or, even as a literary strategist, personally ambitious. Certainly not for his own writing. A glance at the thankless literary career he did end up having, as ghost writer and editor of junk books with salability but for which he was paid little is ample testimony to the literal poverty of the writers life that Tom had more than his own share of.
In retrospect, and though it took decades, it finally dawned on me that instead of trying to take advantage of me or ostensibly putting me down with his comparison of me with Walter Benjamin — and like Larry Kramer in explaining his motivation for his characterization of me as “Mickey Marcus” in The Normal Heart — maybe Tom’s intention and meaning were, albeit in their own ways and on their own terms, as Larry Kramer put it, “to honor” me. The same, I later realized, was doubtless true of Tom Miller. Instead of feeling diminished by my name not being on the cover of the new collection, I grew to realize that I should have felt surpassingly honored to be included at all, and to be thus launched as a book-published writer.
Such was my friendship with Tom Steele that I could accept him calling me “Maeves,” after Maeve, the “ultrano” superstar of James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz, who histrionically lapses into ancient Gaelic as Isolde transmogrifies in a performance to end all performances of the Liebestod. I had made the fatal mistake, as I’m doing again here now, of confiding to Tom that I was earlier dubbed “Maeve” by the Boston Globe music critic and my close friend throughout my Boston medical training years of the 1970’s, the late Dick Dyer. It was a rare level of intimacy that made that OK for me in those days of being much more comfortable in my identification as “the bear doc.” (I wrote a health column for the bear community.)
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German philosopher and writer, translator of Proust and Baudelaire, lived in this building from 1938 to 1940.
But speaking of the surreal, the writers I first met and conversed with –Larry Kramer, Richard Howard, Sandy Friedman, Martin Duberman, Seymour Kleinberg and Vivian Gornick — were talking about literary surrealism and dropping names like Andre Breton and Antonin Artaud. Jean Genet was still a predominant figure in intellectual discourse, as was a newer guru, Michel Foucault. I don’t recall mention by any of these writers of the German emigre in Paris Walter Benjamin who counted himself among the surrealists.
Clearly, this discourse was a significantly French domain that favored the tastes and networks of Richard Howard, Edmund White, Ned Rorem and other leading cultural figures, especially Sontag, but not Larry Kramer, Marty Duberman, Seymour Kleinberg, Vivian Gornick or for that matter Leonard Bernstein (Candide?). Much as they did in Wagner’s day, the French held sway in matters cultural, a reality relentlessly criticized by fiercely antisemitic and French-hating Wagner, who felt that France had been supremely corrupted by Jews, by the likes of Meyerbeer and Offenbach. Though I did know the work of Genet, and was intrigued by Foucault’s idea of becoming gay — of discovering who we are rather than hoping to find some confirming essence of such in history — clearly, there was lot I still needed to know, and wanted to know.
Walter Benjamin was a great admirer of Beaudelaire and Proust, both of whose work he wrote about. With his insight that behind the pursuit of knowledge is guilt, Benjamin deconstructed Beaudelaire as having spent his life pursuing a guilty conscience.
Paris, the “capital of emigration” for more than 30,000 Weimar Germans, including Benjamin, would continue post-war to attract American artists, and intellectuals, notably in our times Ned Rorem and Edmund White. In Paris, and like Ned and Ed a generation later, Benjamin consorted with everyone of renown.
I suppose I should be writing more here about each of these important writers. I’ve written at length elsewhere about Larry and Martin Duberman. Marty was an early and remained a close friend and mentor. Like Larry — none of us were ever lovers —he became a recurrent subject of my book reviews and interviews. Perhaps opportunities will present themselves to write about the others, the way they just did with Michael Lutin. That said, as an elder as well as by disposition as a writer, I’ve learned to seize the moment when I have an observation I’m otherwise likely to lose now to memory attrition. Nice words that dance around darker ones like dementia, in the wake of my having just turned 79, the day after Alcoholics Anonymous turned 90.
So let me now recall Sandy Friedman, a writer of impressive discipline, self-possession and achievement who, like the rest of us, had earned a reputation for being “difficult.” Sandy was the ex-lover of Richard Howard, with whom he shared a propensity for historical fiction. His best known work was one that sparked my interest as a “serious music” person: Conversations with Beethoven, around Beethoven’s relationship with his nephew, with an Introduction by Richard Howard and praised by Edmund White for its “revelatory fossils of the last year of Beethoven’s anguished life.” I no longer recall how I ended up doing a one-on-one with Sandy in his living room about writing and specifically about my writing. But there we were.
Sandy, like the others, was known for mentoring younger writers. It was a tribal responsibility, it seemed, a familial sense of the importance of helping us wend our way. I was looking forward to getting some of my first real feedback as a writer from another serious and esteemed writer. Despite an awareness of Sandy’s reputation (like the others) as critical, I was fortified with that frequent youthful companion of naivete, optimism.
With earnestness, Sandy turned to me and said, upon concluding his assessment with more generic observations, ”And you’re one of the people who has something to say to us.” In its reserve, it seemed the studied companion of Sandy’s inscription in my copy of his acclaimed, groundbreaking “classic gay novel,” Totempole (1961): “To Larry, With a deeper sense of fellow feeling than our shared experience explains, Sandy.”
Instead of taking him seriously and being inspired and honored by such thoughtful and in its own special way, genuinely intimate feedback, I felt taken aback by its ostensible froideur and experienced it in as a kind of putdown. In character, it seemed not unlike the advice I got from the chief nurse in the locked psych ward at St. Vincent’s several years later when I was hospitalized for my major, suicidal, depressive episode: “Lower your expectations.” Is that all there is? I thought there in the living room of Sandy’s handsome West Village apartment. Instead of praise, which it actually and certainly was on reflection, I felt defensive. Such reactive psychology I now realize is from our old frenemy from psychiatry and society, narcissism, what people in recovery call “being the piece of shit at the center of the universe.”
What Sandy did with Beethoven, Richard Howard and the others were doing with a number of other notable figures of music, literature and art — creative historical fiction. On the front of opera and Wagner, in his Untitled Subjects, Richard had created a narrative about Richard and Cosima Wagner, constructed around their imagined conversation during one of George Eliot’s salon dinners. (Though the dinner itself actually happened, what they actually discussed is not known.)
Another of these pieces by Richard Howard featured the imagined reflections of conductor Hermann Levi about Parsifal, the world premiere of which Levi prepared and conducted in residence at Bayreuth, with reflections on the Wagners, Bayreuth and antisemitism, which he felt was more Cosima’s than Richard’s doing. In reality, fiercely antisemitic but abjectly devoted Cosima was taking her cues from her husband, however profoundly antisemitism permeated her upbringing and world at Bayreuth. (Her father, Franz Liszt, was not antisemitic.)
Similarly affecting was Richard Howard’s Wildflowers, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s known single meeting with Walt Whitman. Wonderful stuff my pride would prevent me for decades from more honestly and soberly appreciating in the wake of activism — especially by my beloved Arnie Kantrowitz — to more overtly out Whitman and the ensuing, tacit clashes on that front with Howard going forward.
Meanwhile, I’m inhibited by a misgiving I need to ease up on myself about: that I’ve already written about people and events. Revisiting and repetition can be be pitfalls and vices, of course, but they needn’t be unduly dreaded and evaded as such.
With the publication of Edmund White’s latest book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, however, I now feel like I have a renewed legitimacy in re-revisiting temps perdu, for not being hamstrung by the idea that having once been there, and even at the risk of repetition, some rule of literary decorum should stop you from looking back again at this place, event or individual. Ed, who passed away at 85 on the eve of World Pride 2025, had left us with another gem of literary inheritance — that a writer’s subjects need not be delimited by the arbitrary admonition of once only. “Une fois, Venise,” I was once told about visiting that great city. Nonsense. Unless it’s in the sense of having once visited a place, you can no longer be the flaneur who brought you there. Surpassingly, however, the waters of a river are never the same.
In the middle of the antigay Trump-Putin-Orban-Erdogen onslaughts that threaten at every turn to become full-blown pogroms, the time could not be more ripe now, again, for The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, which finds Ed back in his default mode of defender-in-chief of what others, most notably Larry Kramer, would have deemed sexual license.
One of its chapters is about Stan Redfern. Stan, who remained a lifelong close friend to Ed as well as me, is a subject of Ed’s early novel, A Boy’s Own Story. It’s a relationship Ed has revisited in several of his books. And why not? Literature is filled with people who return home, or try to, only to discover that their perceptions and feelings have changed. With the passages of time, there are always more gems for a writer to mine. The way we were may be the way we were, or believed we were then and on subsequent revisits. But were they really or always such, and will they always be only as we knew them then, or now?
All of which seems a good lead-in to some revisiting of my interactions with Ned Rorem and Leonard Bernstein, as facilitated by Lenny’s boyfriend at that time(1980), Tom Steele, and as otherwise recalled in my Jewish Wagnerism Series books.
How did Tom and Lenny meet? I’m not sure, but it seems probable that the intermediary was Harry Kraut, Lenny’s manager, who resided in Key West, visited by many gay writers seasonally — most notably Tennessee Williams — and which became the seat of various gay literary initiatives. As it turns out, Lenny did spend considerable time there, inspired by the local “conchs.” He composed his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano there (1941) as well as a ballet, “Conch Town.”
In writing, there are always threads. Why did this or that name come to mind? The one I’m grappling with presently is “Benjamin.” “Benjamin” is the very first word of the first book of my Jewish Wagnerism Series, my memoir Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite. That opening chapter, “The Epidemic and the Volcanoes,” tells the story of my affair with Michael Lutin. It begins as follows:
“Benjamin Goodman was a Jewish war baby who was believed by many, especially himself but including me, to be endowed with priestly powers.”
I’ve no idea how or why I chose the pseudonym Benjamin. It was my first memoir and I used some semi-fictional names, a practice (fictionalization) I abandoned in my subsequent writing. What Richard Howard, Sandy Friedman, Larry Kramer, Seymour Kleinberg, Edmund White and most other writers were doing in writing fiction during a time when constraints against sexual explicitness and identification were much worse, did not work for me. The need to write nonfiction was an imperative I could not ignore or relegate.
If the name Benjamin at that time had to do with Walter Benjamin, any such connection was subconscious. Some years later, we named one of our cats Benjamin, probably in honor of Mikey (Lutin), who I believe also had a cat named Benjamin (Other of his pets were named Flo, Flux and Homer.) Unlike Mikey, but perhaps more like Walter Benjamin, our so-named cat turned out to be nervous, as if always stressed by unshakably deep misgivings. He was the classic fraidy cat —” restless, irritable and discontent,” as addicts in recovery describe ourselves.
So why “Benjamin” now, at this juncture of writing about Lenny and Key West? That’s easy. The only thing Key West is better known for than its most famous citizen, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser extent Tennessee Williams, is the Hemingway House’s cats, whose descendants still reside there.
“Synchronicities” was what I originally called the work-in-progress narrative that became my Jewish Wagnerism Series. That concept and title came to me at a time when other terms of this discourse were aswirl in my sensorium and paraconscience: astrology, cosmology, astrological signs, Saturn Signs, Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin.
In writings about his travels (his Arcades is a riff on the glass arcades of Paris), and inspired by his favorite poet and Flaneur conceptualizer Beaudelaire, about whom Benjamin wrote several essays, Benjamin noted that his greatest compass when visiting another city was to let himself wander in discovery. Like gay men who have always consciously and unconsciously adopted this approach to wending our way in a new milieu, Benjamin, Beaudelaire, Edmund White, Ned Rorem, myself and many others, French and non-French, intuited the imperative and benefits of being thus simultaneously lost and found.
That’s what the great American composer and Rorem contemporary Lou Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig did in their travels — their role models being socio-sexual bonobo monkeys — their compasses attuned to gay opportunity. Where was Walter Benjamin’s inner compass leading him?
Edmund White’s The Flaneur brings this world of passages by the likes of Benjamin and other emigre Jews together with those of gay men, and other Parisian communities (e.g., Arabs, blacks and artists of every stripe and background). In perspective, we are all alike in being wayfarers and wanderers of deep-seated, inchoate longing for safe harbor, for home, for desire. Paris and its Marais district — its old and still Jewish and gay quarter — was another of Edmund White’s states of desire.
Of course, getting lost and found is also what we do when we use drugs, as Benjamin did, albeit fitfully rather than progressively (so far as we know). And as I did. I can’t remember whether we smoked weed during the weekend I spent with Lou and Bill in Santa Cruz. They may have. I, newly sober at that time, did not.
Key West was one of the world’s go-to places for gay people. Although by no means free of homophobia, gay people, overlapping with the literary world, and with the town’s unique versions of creole cuisine, honky-tonk vacation rentals and arts festivals, were given harbor there to an extent that made it, along with Gotham, San Francisco, Fire Island and Provincetown, a premiere destination.
These were still the old, dark times, however. Even on Fire Island one could still be arrested for public lewdness, which included cross-dressing. And indeed, following a memorable dinner in Key West for a group of us, including Larry Kramer characteristically fulminating about everyone and everything, and Seymour Kleinberg philosophically taking it all in, drink in hand, on walking back to our lodgings after dinner (were we at the original Clare’s, with its unforgettable New York clam chowder and Clare himself, a straight host extraordinaire to gay people?), we were chased by drunk, antigay, mostly teenage rowdies. It was the closest I’d ever come to being assaulted for being gay. I was there with my lover at that time, “Stash Katkowski,” (my “Polish Siegfried”), the subject of my chapter, “Children in Love,” in my Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite.
“Nurse! Nurse!,” Tom and I shrieked when we began to discern the “Jewish frizz” head of James Levine ascend the podium of the Metropolitan Opera. In our raucous, variably inebriated adventures of savoring and dishing everyone and everything, I had captured, for Tom, the alter ego persona, as I imagined it, of James Levine as a bull dyke ER triage nurse.
Following the opera, we’d see “Jimmy” Levine at Cafe Luxe dining with a small group that nearly always included his boyfriend Philip Creech. Jimmy was another of those celebrities, like Sontag, who was widely known to be gay but who kept his feet still firmly planted in the closet, not only of being gay but also Jewish.
Though Levine’s feelings about being Jewish and a leading Wagnerian conductor, including at Bayreuth, remained unexpressed in the press, a bigger picture of gayness in his life would eventually play out as one of the bigger scandals in the history of the Met. As for Jewish Wagnerism, neither Jimmy, nor his good and loyal friend, the playwright Jonathan Tolins, author of Twilight of the Golds, would ever express themselves publicly regarding any inner turmoil Jimmy, whose father was a cantor, might or might not be experiencing in conducting Wagner at Bayreuth, discussion of which was likewise pertinent to Lenny Bernstein.
Lenny, wildly popular in Germany and Austria, was sought after by Wolfgang Wagner to conduct Tristan at Bayreuth, but had misgivings about doing so, ostensibly around production plans (Lenny had hoped to work with Ingmar Bergman) and scheduling. Though he visited Bayreuth, he never conducted there. Notwithstanding his oft-quoted statement, “I hate Wagner but do so on my knees,” Lenny’s mixed feelings about Wagner and Bayreuth remained reticent.
Creech, black, sweet-voiced and “pretty,” sang many comprimario roles in hundreds of performances. He passed away in 2017 at 67. Hopefully, the story of his relationship with Jimmy did not die with him. Jimmy, meanwhile, does deserve major credit for accomplishments great and varied. He is deservedly regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American music and opera.
The Levine era featured many peaks. Mahagonny, which we saw several times, and the long-awaited, finally and spectacularly completed Lulu, both star vehicles for the peak career blaze that was Teresa Stratas, were so thrilling I thought we were going to have seizures. The same was true of Levine’s fostering of the best, later career work of soprano Renata Scotto, memories of whose Elena in Vespri Siciliani still send shivers up my spine.
These partnerships with supreme artists were a hallmark of Levine’s tenure. That with John Dexter (who is sometimes confused with a headmaster named John Dexter who was prosecuted for sex offenses), whose production of Dialogues of the Carmelites was eagerly anticipated every time it returned as a popular favorite, was another exemplar of the revitalization of opera, and specifically the Metropolitan Opera, that took place under the leadership of James Levine. Whatever the caveats (too little American opera, too few premieres), that opera was once again ascendant and grand in the era of James Levine was unassailable. That the Metropolitan Opera was once again, firmly and for the foreseeable future, one of the world’s greatest ensemble companies, with its peak quality orchestra and chorus, was no longer in doubt anywhere.
I recall a performance of Tannhäuser that captured all this. Apart from Michele de Young (herself not a superstar but an outstanding musician) as Venus, I no longer remember any of the other singers in the cast, but none was a superstar and the production was not new or otherwise memorable, apart from some lovely evening-star blue visuals enfolding Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage. What did emerge with top star quality, however, was the opera itself. Though Levine never became the superstar Toscanini did, in part because of personal inscrutability and timidity in public speaking, the unwaveringly high quality of the performances he prepared and conducted were like those of Toscanini in being less about showcasing great singers, which he was otherwise so skilled at doing and devoted to, than about achieving ensemble greatness.
In the interstices of those opera evenings with their after-dinners, mostly at Cafe Luxe, were moments with the black NYC nightlife cabaret and salon pianist and singer Larry Woodard, described by New York Times after-hours and off-Broadway theater and music custodian Stephen Holden as “an artistic heir of Bobby Short but with classical leanings.” Like Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer (who Dick Dyer had taken me to see in Boston), Larry Woodard was an elegant, suave, musical, upbeat, sometimes mechant role model for the budding NYC nightlife and cabaret artist Tom Steele.
Late night gatherings and parties were everywhere, marking holidays and events. While we were still too young to be more wary of it as habitual and sapping, indulgence in late night fare seemed a characteristic pastime, a mandatory rite of passage and ritual of Gotham experience. Indirectly via my close friendships with music critics Peter G. Davis and Richard Dyer, I had enough acquaintance with Matthew Epstein, who had become a leading opera impresario, not only to go to his annual New Years Eve soirees at the Ansonia, but to bring Tom with me.
In the wee hours of the New Year, standing next to us in the kitchen, Neil Schicoff “spontaneously” burst into a rendition of “Nothin Could be Finah than to be in Carolina in the Moh-nin” (reverberations of Ira Siff’s parodies of crossover). I’ve forgotten what Lauren Flanigan, also in the ktichen, sang, or if she sang at all, eclipsed perhaps by the memory of her triumphant “All Stops Out” (as Anne Midgette called it in New York Times) last-minute takeover of the treacherously difficult role of Odabella in Attila for Eve Queler’s concert performance of the opera at Carnegie Hall in 2003. Alas, we never did see Matthew’s neighbor at the Ansonia, the legend herself, the great Met superstar of our time, Teresa Stratas.
Though I was never an aficionado of his music (who was?), Ned Rorem was a major hero for me for his having boldly come out as gay in his diaries, for outing others, and for his capstone confrontation about it all live with his host on the Dick Cavett show. Though many other composers and musicians were known to be gay — Britten, Copland, Bernstein, Thompson, Barber, Menotti, Horowitz (Glenn Plaskin’s 1983 “tell-all” bio was a game changer)— Ned’s coming out was by far the boldest. Finally, we had a champion from what I called, never stopping to appreciate how pejorative and parochial I was being in doing so but also for want of a better term, the worlds of “serious music.” Or so it seemed.
Even if I wasn’t enamored of what I knew of his music, and notwithstanding his fearsome reputation for skewering everyone and everything, for being what I later dubbed an “intellectual brawler extraordinaire,” but especially for pouncing like a cat on any detectable, suspect or overt pretense, and though I wasn’t actually attracted to someone an earlier vernacular might have pegged a gay Lothario, I was attracted to his persona of wit, intellect and courage. I wanted to pick his brains, as we say, on this issue or the closet in the music world and wanted to pay tribute to his heroism. I was determined to meet and interview him, and did so. What became the minor saga of my relationship with Ned Rorem is recounted in my forthcoming nonfiction narrative, Wayfaring With Ned Rorem.
Though I’m pretty sure I’m the one who introduced Tom to Ned, in advance of my big interview with Ned for Christopher Street and Opera Monthly, Lenny Bernstein, Tommy’s boyfriend at the time, had remained in the orbit of his protege, Ned, and vice versa. It was still the early 1980’s and movements were exploding on every front of art, culture and society. Everyone was connected with everyone and everyone was figuratively and often enough literally in bed with everyone. (Spoiler alert: I’ve no idea if anything sexual ever happened between Lenny and Ned. I doubt it. But who knows?)
Between the lines and sheets of all this were some big developments on fronts of health. Tom was reticent about the details of his affair with Lenny, but I had known another of Lenny’s previous boyfriends, musician Tommy Cothran, another early AIDS casualty, in my undergrad years at UC Berkeley and in the SF Bay area. Between the two of them, the stage was set for me to do have a one-on-one meeting with Lenny about “the new gay epidemic,” as more and more were calling it.
Lenny sensed that not only Tommy Cothran, who died years later (1987) from AIDS-related metastatic lymphoma, and others he knew might be affected and vulnerable. Not for a moment in this brief encounter alone with Lenny, however, did I sense his concern to be primarily about his own status of having been possibly infected and infectious. His concern, however his by then whiter-than-white hair, smoker’s coughing chain-smoking and ice-clinking drinking may have diverted one’s attention in this last decade of his life, was immediately and palpably with the greater implications for his communities and for the world. As one senses about him otherwise, he was deeply caring and wanted to help. There was nothing fake or self-promotional about this aspect of Leonard Bernstein. That’s something even Lenny’s snide protege Ned Rorem would and did consistently if sometimes also grudgingly affirm. It was in Lenny’s protoplasm to care and be of service. And he did so forthwith by volunteering to conduct GMHC’s first big fundraiser, the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden in 1983.
Our late nights with the likes of Lenny and Ned peaked with a gobsmackingly bravura performance at Alice Tully Hall in 1981 of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for Two Pianos (Four Hands) with Lenny and Michael Tilson Thomas, followed by a grand party at Lenny’s grand home in the Dakota, at which Lenny spontaneously sang and danced a kind of Charleston, “I ain’t got no shame doin what I likes to do” from Porgy and Bess, as Tommy Steele, Ned Rorem, composer George Perle (grim-faced in the aftermath of Thomas’s spontaneously playing what he called “The Lulu Rag” on Lenny’s piano), who had been crucial to the preparation of the completed Lulu, and I looked on at the dazzling spectacle we had all come to know, love and cherish as Lenny.
Another evening found us at a formal reception for Lenny at the French Embassy, shoulder-to-shoulder with his friend and Dakota neighbor Lauren Bacall.
One of Tommy’s cabaret songs conjures the gassamer pianissimi of Montserrat Caballe in capturing the spell we were under in this late night Gotham of legend and lore. Still possessed, it feels so good — even if it makes me feel high in doing so — to finally say something I never clearly knew or accepted about the heyday Tom and I shared of earnest loose living and becoming: I remain overflowingly grateful for your friendship and I love you, Tom. I always have and always will. Even if that admission renders us and this moment Whitney-Houston maudlin and rife for precisely your gift of cabaret parody, comedy and ecstasy.
Alas, as I was to learn subsequently from Tom Miller and Raymond Luczak, Tom Steele died at his home in Ohio from what was probably cirrhosis of the liver. I never learned whether Tom was diagnosed with or treated for alcoholism, or whether he ever entered recovery. But Raymond, who remained his most sustained and devoted partner, says Tom’s alcoholism was the reason they broke up. “I couldn’t take it any more.” He says Tom remained in denial about his drinking, even as its health consequences mounted.
Tom left no writing of significance that I’m aware of. Though he edited what may have been a small money-maker in 1999 called The Book of Classic Insults, and his name is listed on the cover as editor, no writing in its meager 161 pages, including its single paragraph of Introduction, is credited to him. The dust jacket description reads: “For anyone looking to insult a foe with the acuity and flair of Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker and Mel Brooks, The Book of Classic Insults is the answer.”
Thomas Easton Steele passed away on March 19, 2025. In 2016, The Publishing Triangle gave Tom its Leadership Award for “invaluable contribution to our community and culture.” In her tribute to her brother, posted on Facebook, Tom’s sister, Rustin Levenson, noted that Tom ghost wrote over 20 books of biography and advice. Also on Facebook was a touching Farewell from Tom Miller, who remembered Tom Steele as his “brilliant and beloved friend.” A fellow Callasian, Miller’s final words were touching: “Say hello to La Divina for me, Tommy.”
My admission of my own alcoholism and entry into recovery began in 1984, a year following my hospitalization for my fortunately sole episode of suicidal, major depressive disorder (MDD) at St Vincent’s Hospital, where I came within moments of receiving shock treatment (ECT). There, on the locked psych ward, an old lady, a denizen of Greenwich Village who kept singing refrains of “On the Sidewalks of New York,” would occasionally blurt out recriminations: “You killed my people!”
Nightmares. Like Boris Godunov, I am haunted by furies of guilt, shame, anger, resentment and remorse, but mostly of dread. My husband Attila has awakened me several times from fits of screaming during nightmares. The most recent one was typical. I dreamt I was in an apartment (whose apartment was it?) alone. Or so I thought. In the shadows, someone or something was lurking and I experienced a kind of primal terror. The Scream, by Emil Nolde, was a popular print on the walls of Berkeley student apartments in the Viet Nam era. That’s what it felt like.
This reverberated with an incident in the park some weeks ago that resulted in my being assaulted from behind by a raging drunk I too aggressively confronted with my impulsive demand — screaming at him inches from his bloated, startled face: SHUT THE FUCK UP, ASSHOLE!!! Wielding a beer can and reeking of alcohol, he had been yelling and disturbing everybody in the vicinity. During the assault I screamed, as I’ve screamed during my nightmares at home: Help me! Call the police! Somebody help me! Not so unlike George Michael in his song, only more notably with terror and in extremis than in despair, and with the excuse of my trying so hard to please. Emotionally, the encounter with the drunk was a slip in what AA founder Bill Wilson called “emotional sobriety.”
In his “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud saw dreams as mostly about wishes and their fulfillment. He didn’t have much to say about nightmares. But his colleague Ernest Jones held the more refined interpretation that nightmares represented a clash between a powerful wish and an equally powerful repression.
In the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (“The visual image and the Denkbild: Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin on history and remembrance”), Anat Tzur Mahalel notes that
“Freud’s and Benjamin’s late writings are read in the historical context of European Jewish intellectuals facing the rise of the Nazi regime…The images discussed comparatively are Freud’s last Moorish king and Benjamin’s angel of history. These condensed images are presented as lamenting figures, images of despair and struggle. They serve as examples of the visual image’s ability to represent the unrepresentable and capture hidden mnemic traces at traumatic times.”
From the National WWII Museum on Walter Benjamin’s Final Days:
“Walter Benjamin was one of the early victims of the catastrophe unleashed on the European continent by the Nazi dictatorship. His brother, Georg, perished in Mauthausen two years later. As the war continued, the Hitler regime set a precedent for criminality that shattered comparisons with other dictatorships. As the Nazis moved to not only physically annihilate European Jews, but to expunge them and their culture from history, Benjamin’s warning about a time when “even the dead won’t be safe” captured a reality far more destructive than the most extreme imaginings of bygone eras.”
Thanks to Tom Steele, Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin, I now have a more clairvoyant sense of myself and my journey. I’m no longer the lost flaneur of my own life. I’m found. Whatever the future holds, it has been a life, as we say in recovery, beyond our wildest dreams, even as it harbors the stuff of our worst nightmares.
_____
In recovery, I met Charles, a man of intelligence, substance and attractiveness. Like the rest of us “in the rooms” (as Martin Duberman — speaking of my codependence in relationships — chose to acknowledge recovery, with its core principle of anonymity, in the dedication to his memoir, The Rest of It), Charles grappled with the challenges of habituation, addiction and their collaborator, codependence. It’s Charles, a younger man and gifted writer who was earning his living writing business and financial reports and whose creative writing was thereby shadowed, like mine by my profession of medicine, with whom I first became aware of the contemporary currency of the word “narrative.”
Charles kept using that term to talk about writing— yours, mine, his, whoever’s. Though it has taken years for me to digest it as such, narrative is perhaps the best descriptive of my own writing, the vast bulk of which is nonfiction and which, as one might imagine from the images that would come to mind for anyone, is perforce continuant and open-ended, less bound by the conventions of other literary forms, less obligated to them for identification, placement, categorization, understanding and belonging.
Like all writers but perhaps more so, writers of narratives seem often to be those who eventually reveal ourselves to be on personal journeys we ourselves don’t have roadmaps for in taking them. In this, we are wanderers and wayfarers, never fully appreciating that, like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road or the flaneurs of Edmund White’s Paris, like Charles Beaudelaire, Walter Benjamin and White himself, we are already at home in our journeys themselves. I recall Michiko Kakutani noting of Phillip Roth that he seemed not always to understand that the dichotomy he talked about between writing and “real life” was an illusion. Writing was Roth’s real life.
Though it takes the journey to realize it, it’s the journey, not the destination, as common wisdom has it, that we keep seeking, which is why we still tend to feel alien, homeless and stateless, once “arrived.” In an imagined sequel to The Wizard of Oz, on the basis of the life experience that has been her journey, Dorothy might eventually become a flaneur of Paris, Auntie Mame or Walter Benjamin.
You were always home, always had that power to know yourself, to know where and how to be, Dorothy learns at the end of her earlier life’s journey. It’s the home T.S. Eliot speaks of as being that place we finally come to recognize for the first time at what we presumed to be the end of our journey. Putting it all together, and though this may feel like an ending, it’s also continuant. Narratives perforce have no endings.
It’s sensitive, observant, kind-hearted if also defensive and competitive Charles who, knowing of my interest in opera and Wagner but having little sense of its trajectory of my movement away from those realms he otherwise rightly intuited to be my habitus, who one day offered me his ticket to a NYT speakers event he couldn’t attend called The Wagner Vortex with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. It’s that 2012 Times talk, which I had noted but written off as without current interest for me — that chapter of my life having already been completed, or so I thought, with my memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite — that became the continuant springboard of my narrative sequels, On The Future of Wagnerism and Wayfaring with Ned Rorem. The three works which comprise the trio I call my Jewish Wagnerism Series.
If not for that encounter with Charles and my biting into the madeleine that was his gift to me that day in 2012, this later, defining journey of my life might never have happened as such. Commonly misinterpreted as the year the Mayans predicted to be the apocalyptic end of the world, we now know that 2012 was for the Mayans not Wagner’s more finite “Das Ende,” but the ending of another cycle, beyond which loom…more cycles. The Mayans knew what Wagner knew but resisted accepting, forgiving and loving: that there is no end to it all.
Notes:
(1) “Why I outed Gay Republicans,” by Michael Rogers, Politico, 7/26,2014.
(2) “Tennessee Williams Made Paintings. They Were About Love and Loss Too,” by Michael Adno, the New York Times, 9/21/28
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