THE VISITOR
by Lawrence D. Mass
What follows is a reading from Song of Myself: A Novel, by Arnie Kantrowitz, for the Rainbow Book Fair at the LGBTQ+ Center in New York City, 5/10/15. Preceding the reading, here, is an introduction by me.
In 1935, pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld watched in horror and overwhelming sorrow a Parisian cinema newsreel showing the Nazi book burnings in Berlin that were signal demarcaters of the Holocaust to follow. The books they were burning were from the priceless archives of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science Hirschfeld had so painstakingly founded and shepherded. It was the first and only such institute anywhere in the world.
We are now at this same turning point of a new wave of intoxicated authoritarian extremism, beginning with the banning of books and rapidly escalating to goons, stooges and thugs taking the law into their own hands on every front of society and culture.
It’s not just gay literature that’s at stake. It’s writers like Magaret Atwood, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. Two high ranking literary figures — one gay, one straight — who I won’t name because of the sensitivity of their circumstances, have learned that their NEH and NEA grants to complete their scholarly books with leading publishers have been terminated.
Remember outing? I’m from the old school of outing and outers. I believed in dragging closet cases who were otherwise famous out of their closets of complacency and double dealing — living gay lives without paying any price of involvement for their benefitting from our struggles. But it’s one thing to drag a Liberace out of the closet, risking a downsizing of his huge income from his largely straight, conservative fans. It was quite another, however, to out Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, condemning them to certain incarceration and death. We’re not quite at that point yet, but we’re headed there. If you wind up on one of their secret lists, you could be shipped off to a prison gulag without any possibility of redress.
As with the Nazis and most other authoritarian inspired and dominated cultural revolutions (as most revolutions tend to become), it’s getting worse by the hour. It took Hitler 60 days to establish an absolute police state dictatorship. Donald Trump is well on his way to doing so in comparably record time.
Meanwhile, the anti-science defiance that is often a hallmark of dictatorships makes what’s happening with book burnings look like a picnic. Murder is being plotted and facilitated on a much vaster scale than anything conceived of in the early period of AIDS.
I use the term murder advisedly. That’s what Larry Kramer and ACT UP accused Reagan and the Republicans of doing in their neglect of AIDS. Well, all that is on the cusp of roaring back on a scale that’s difficult to imagine. AIDS denialism is perhaps the premiere example of our time of science denialism. In the early 2000’s it resulted in the preventable deaths of a third of a million people in South Africa.
Even though Trump had earlier given lip-service support to combined global efforts to end AIDS, his chosen health czar RFK JR is an AIDS and science denialist. It will be all the more appropriate to accuse the perpetrators of the next wave of AIDS deaths of murder and mass murder because it will now be willful. In the early period of AIDS we didn’t know what the cause of the epidemic was or have effective treatment. Now we have both. So, to put it simply, if you deny a person with AIDS treatment that’s proven effective, you are committing not manslaughter but murder, and probably murder in the first degree.
What did Larry Kramer think about Donald Trump? “Get that monster out of the White House!” he railed, demanding that Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Jimmy Carter unite in taking unprecedented action to stop Trump.
If you want to know what it’s like to be back in the closet, to live through times of fascism and oppression, consider Arnie’s novel, Song of Myself, about a gay boy in heartland America growing up amidst the staggering ignorance and mean-spiritedness of the Joseph McCarthy dark ages that Gay Liberation grew out of. The ringleader of those dark ages, let’s not forget, was Roy Cohn, the self-hating gay power behind the bully pulpit of McCarthy and subsequently that of Donald Trump.
Lawrence D. Mass, 5/10/25
New York City
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Song of Myself: A Novel by Arnie Kantrowitz is the fictional, historical saga of Daniel Dell Blake, from his coming of age in small-town America through World War 2, the early gay liberation movement and AIDS. The passage I’m going to read is called “The Visitor.”
Surviving his brutally oppressive, homophobic upbringing by becoming increasingly part of an alternative family of like-minded friends, Dell discovers, via a gift to him from his lesbian schoolteacher of Leaves of Grass, the poetry of Walt Whitman. In the following passage from an early chapter, Dell, who aspires himself to be a poet in the vein of Whitman, tells of his mystical encounter, via reverie, with America’s and the world’s great gay poet of democracy, self-realization and sexual liberation.
It begins with Dell’s early attempt to write a poem inspired by Whitman:
I Am a Tree by Daniel Dell Blake
I am a tree.
I come from the earth.
I reach toward the sky.
I am old, old, old.
I do not know what it means to die.
My wooden limbs bear trays of fruit.
I am food.
I shake my leaves in agreement with the wind.
I am music.
Blossoms and colored leaves bedeck me.
I am beauty.
Birds and squirrels and caterpillars abide in me.
I am home.
I generate seeds.
I am the future.
I stand long and long, imperturbe,
waiting for your pleasure.
Burn me: I am fuel.
Carve me: I am art.
Cut me into planks:
I will be your coffin.
Embrace me.
Put your arms about me.
Stop for a while and stand with me.
I am your lover.
I reach toward the earth.
I turn from the sky.
I am old, old, old.
I do not know what it means to die.
For the first few days the sand was clean and beautiful, except perhaps for some seaweed that had washed ashore. But one day hundreds or maybe thousands of alewives, small silver fish a little larger than sardines, lined the beach, cast up out of their element to die. Some still thrashed, desperately trying to breathe. I managed to toss a few back into the water, but there were far too many to save and I grew depressed. For several days the sand was littered with their rotting bodies, picked at by birds and insects, and I kept away from the beach.
I turned for companionship to my old friend Walt Whitman and began to read from the “Sea Drift” section of Leaves of Grass because it seemed like the most appropriate one for that place. The opening poem concerns a young boy who hears two birds singing on the beach, and when one of them disappears, the boy hears the remaining bird sing a mournful, solitary song, which gives him a glimpse of his own future:
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake . . .
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was . . .
He asks the sea, whom he calls “the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
” to give him a word of explanation:
Whereto answering, the sea . . .
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death . . .
I thought of all the dead fish when I read that, and it made me even sadder than I was already. I couldn’t listen to the sound of the surf without hearing that word. I combed through the poem again, finding it more difficult than most, and eventually I found a note of hope for the boy, and of course for myself:
My own songs awaked from that hour . . .
I understood that the boy learned from his experience with the birds and the sea that he would become a poet, but he knew that being a poet meant feeling the pain of life as well as the beauty. There was always a price to pay for understanding, I realized, and since I knew that I would always try to understand whatever I saw, I had to be willing to pay that price.
I walked a long way up the beach by myself, following the white line of the foam so I didn’t have to worry about losing my way, and I lost myself in reveries of what my life would be like when I could leave home and be the master of my own fate. I would move to New York and live with Chester and become a famous poet and give parties of my own. My guests would be the brightest, most creative people in the world and would definitely not include Ariel Dumont. I could laugh now to think of how different my life turned out from what I imagined that summer day.
One evening, after lingering on the porch to watch the wide sky above the ocean fill with stars, and uselessly trying to imagine the vastness of space and time until the effort made me dizzy, I went upstairs to my room. I lay for a long while somewhere between waking and sleep, maybe in a dream, maybe not. I thought I heard the sound of air rushing past my ears, as if I were flying through space, but that made no
sense. I felt as if the earth had dropped away beneath me, as if I were floating gently and aimlessly upward. The sensation was so real that I opened my eyes. And what I saw was myself, lying in the bed below me. I seemed to be floating somewhere near the ceiling in a body that looked like my own, except it was not made of flesh. It was almost transparent, gauzy-looking and luminous; to an onlooker I might have looked like a ghost. Terrified, I wondered if I had died and my soul had left my body.
Along with the fear there came motion, as if I had jumped back. When I was startled by the movement, my direction changed. I looked at the open window and found myself drawn toward it. Then I felt even more terror and I stopped, unwilling to leave the room where my body lay, for fear that if I were separated from it, I might never reenter it. Lines from the poem I had been reading flashed into my mind:
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot . . .
Again, I felt myself drawn toward the open window. I looked through it, and suddenly I was outside the house. Trying to get back in, I looked into the windows. Behind one of them lay Chester, sleeping soundly in his bed. I tried to call to him, but I had no voice. Then I raised my vision toward the glittering sky and I began to rise. Afraid I would lose myself among all those stars, I looked quickly toward the long strip of pale sand bordering the ominously dark water. And suddenly I was on the beach.
I managed to “sit down” on the sand merely by thinking of sitting. I wasn’t tired, but I was disoriented, and I wanted time to think. The dark waves rolled slowly up to the shore in cadence, the foam bubbling and hissing at the ocean’s edge. I was afraid to think of the water for very long or to look in that direction, because to be drawn into the darkness might mean never to return. Beneath the sound of the surf, I could hear a low thumping, as if some distant bass drum were being solemnly struck. I thought the drum sound was especially strange, and couldn’t imagine what might be causing it. It seemed to come from the very air: thump . . . thump . . . thump.
Then, from the corner of my eye I saw a tall, solitary figure, strolling calmly up the beach. He was clearly in no hurry. Occasionally he stopped to examine something at the water’s edge, and now and then he stopped to look up at the stars. As he drew closer I could see that he wore a round-brimmed hat and a long white beard, and I recognized him at once. He looked just like the frontispiece in Leaves of Grass. It wasn’t until he was almost upon me that he noticed me at all, but as soon as he saw me he was at my side. I never saw him take the final steps in my direction. He sat down next to me in the sand and with his glowing gray eyes looked straight into mine. Then he put a weightless arm around my shoulder. More words from his poem sprang into my mind:
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter . . . and lines from another of his poems as well: Kiss me my father, Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love . . .
I leaned my face close to his until our lips seemed to touch, but we passed through each other like two mists. There was no sensation except an inward feeling of great joy. Then the wraith before me slowly began to fade from sight. I couldn’t bear to watch. Looking down, I saw that my own image was fading as well.
I awoke in my bed, looking up at the ceiling with a clear memory of what had happened. It was unlike any dream I had ever had. Excited, I ran to Chester’s room and tried to wake him, so I could tell him what had happened and ask what it meant. But his bourbon had made it impossible to rouse him past semiconsciousness, and all I could get from him was a dull groan. I went back to my room, where I kept going over and over the details in my mind. The only thing that made no sense at all was the thumping sound of drums that I had heard in the background. Had it been the sound of my own heartbeat? It took me an hour to fall asleep. The next afternoon, when I calmly described my experience to Chester, I could tell by the way he humored me that he didn’t believe a word of it.
That afternoon I wanted to write again. I sat down on the veranda in front of a fresh tablet of paper. It was a gray day and Chester sat there too, reading Marcel Proust. He looked dashing in his white flannels with a sweater knotted around his shoulders, and I couldn’t have loved him more. But I had another love to commemorate. I wrote:
The Visitor
Striding up the darkened beach,
Out of time and out of place,
Hearing seawhispers of death,
I greet my other self with a kiss.
Older than time.
His footsteps are inside me.
I have never been happier. One kiss offered,
My father, my teacher, my love,
Your arm around my shoulder
only once.
Then we fade into memory’s mist,
Everywhere, nowhere,
now and then,
Together beyond words,
Beyond this life.
