Mirrors of Narcissus Read online

  “He was in prison?”

  “Yes. In fact, he wrote most of his books in prison. The rules of the prison forbade any form of creative writing, so he had to write his works on paper bags which he tore into page-sized sheets. Several times these works were discovered by prison officials and destroyed. But enough survived—and was published on the outside—to make his name well known among the reading public. Finally, thanks to the efforts of some of France’s leading literary figures—who rated his work quite highly—the government gave him a pardon.”

  “What did he go to prison for?”

  “Well, theft. Before he went to prison, though, he spent much of his youth in and out of homes for juvenile delinquents. As an orphan he never knew who his real parents were. He was raised in foster homes, but didn’t seem to be able to live the straight life. He grew up in the streets, learning to fight and steal in order to survive. As a young boy, he spent a lot of time in a succession of reform schools, and from them he just sort of graduated into adult prisons.”

  “And he wrote about all this?”

  “Yes. But not in straightforward prose. His novels are a mixture of dreams, fantasies, sexual longings, as well as hard reality. He describes some of his criminal activities in Confessions of a Thief. But it’s in his writing about his homosexuality that he reaches his greatest heights. He’d always been gay, but the special atmosphere of prison, which fosters ritualized homosexual relationships, appealed to his needs. His first book, Our Lady of the Flowers, gives wonderfully poetic, almost mystical descriptions of his sexual activities and fantasies. You can easily imagine how confinement in prison had enriched and deepened his fantasy life. It was his one method of escape from the grim realities around him.”

  “But he’s out of prison now, right?”

  “Yes. Maybe that’s the reason why he seems to have fallen silent. But though he has become a free man, Genet always seems to wear the aura of an outlaw, someone who lives outside all normal bounds. That is his special appeal. His being homosexual, and suffering society’s ostracism for it, only gave more impetus to the distrust and contempt he feels toward straight society. And by ‘straight,’ I mean straight in the jargon of both homosexuals and criminals.”

  “Which book of his do you recommend?”

  “They’re all good—Our Lady of the Flowers, Confessions of a Thief, Miracle of the Rose, Querelle of Brest—but I like Funeral Rites best.”

  I saw several students scribble these titles in their notebooks.

  “Who were those other writers you mentioned?” asked a girl.

  “Well, another interesting character is William S. Burroughs, who, though he never went to prison, was fascinated by the underworld. Perhaps as a result of his fascination, he began experimenting with drugs, almost willingly becoming a heroin addict in the process. Remember, as a young man, he lived in a time when drugs were almost exclusively linked with the shady underworld and jazz musicians. His experience as an addict gave him the materials for a series of books which form a searing indictment of American society. The world of Burroughs is the world of horror comics and bizarre science fiction—of paranoia, government conspiracies and erotic perversion. His style is a surrealistic blend of the most advanced literary experiments with popular genre fiction such as science fiction, hard-boiled detective novels, westerns, pornography. The result is a grotesque mirror world of our own society. His satire is keen and biting, though some of his descriptive passages are pure poetry. At one point, he was involved with literary experiments which he called cut-up. By actually cutting up a page of his writing and piecing it back together in random patterns designed to give insights into a deeper reality, he was trying to produce the equivalent of cubism in literature. But he failed, and those are his least readable works. I still think the homoerotic parts of his books are some of the most erotic writing I’ve ever read. He presents a tough, masculine homosexuality which I hadn’t come across until I’d read Junky, Naked Lunch, and other works by him.”

  I felt a shiver go through me. He was echoing exactly my own feelings about the “good parts” in Burroughs’s books. How many of the others here had read those passages? By now, our number had dwindled until only five of us remained. His eyes had lingered on mine a number of times during his talk, and though he spoke to all of us, I felt that his words were directed at me alone. It was like listening to a private lesson arranged for my benefit. Yet the other four students seemed just as fascinated as I.

  Golden’s student assistant had long ago put away the slide projector and tape recorder used for the lecture, and had left. But the professor himself seemed in no mood to halt his flow of talk. “Another interesting homosexual was the Japanese author Yukio Mishima.”

  “Isn’t he the guy who committed hara-kiri? I didn’t know he was gay.”

  “He wrote two books which deal with homosexuality: Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors. Though I find Mishima’s prose rather too baroque and ornate for my taste, the straightforward way he deals with homosexual themes was rather refreshing when I first read him. He was more into the sadomasochistic aspects of sex, obsessed with pain, mutilation, and death.”

  “Ugh.”

  Golden grinned. He seemed to take a boyish delight in seeing the students’ shocked faces. Though they pretended to be mature and open-minded about his matter-of-fact acceptance of homosexuality, I knew most of them probably felt as I did, that we were flirting dangerously with the dark specters of our own demons.

  “Well, he experienced his first orgasm while looking at a reproduction of Guido Reni’s painting of St. Sebastian, showing the young martyr’s death scene where he’s bound half-naked to a tree and shot full of arrows. In a sense, that picture became the motif of Mishima’s whole life: eroticism became bound up in a violent and beautiful death. Maybe because he was such a romantic, he never really outgrew his boyish dreams. He idealized manliness to an almost parodistic degree, and took up bodybuilding because he was ashamed of his weak, intellectual’s body. By the time he was in his thirties, he was so proud of his muscles that he posed for a series of nude and semi-nude photographs. In his forties he became an extreme Japanese nationalist, but I think what excited him about the Japanese past was its tough, samurai idealism, a manly, stoic philosophy which honors endurance of pain and discomfort. I don’t think he was deeply into the political aspects of Emperor worship. Be that as it may, he started a private paramilitary group, the Society of Shields, dedicated to the glory of the Emperor. He designed its uniforms himself, and was successful in recruiting a group of young men, mostly right-wing college students, to wear them. All of this was his preparation for the climax of his life—his own glorious death. And it had to be both violent and beautiful if it was to be the work of art he wanted it to be.”

  “When was this?” asked a boy.

  “In 1970, coincidentally, the same year E. M. Forster died. What a world of difference between two writers, though. The only thing linking them is their homosexuality and their dedication to literature.”

  “How did Mishima die?” asked another boy impatiently.

  Golden smiled. “He attempted to stage a coup d’etat at a Japanese Self-Defense Force base with a group of his followers. His idea was to incite the Self-Defense Forces into action on behalf of the Emperor. He probably knew it was doomed to failure. But it gave him the excuse he needed; he took responsibility for his failure in the age-old Japanese way—he committed ritual suicide, disemboweling himself with a short sword. Immediately after, one of his followers, said by some to be his lover, chopped off his head with a longer sword. Mishima had always said that he didn’t want to grow old—he wanted to die while still in the prime of his manhood, while he still had a beautiful body. He was forty-five years old when he staged his suicide. That morning, he had turned in to his publisher the last pages of the novel many consider his masterpiece. I think his suicide was, in the end, the culmination of his belief that death is the ultimate orgasm. With that dramatic clim
ax, he’d turned his own life into his greatest novel. The moment of his death witnessed the apotheosis of his political, literary, and sexual philosophies.”

  We were all silent for a time after this; then a bookish-looking boy said:

  “My literature classes are never this fun. Why don’t they teach us about writers like this in school, instead of making us read boring classics?”

  “There’s nothing boring about the classics. And anyway, quite a few of them were written by gay men. Didn’t your teachers ever make you read Moby-Dick?”

  “Of course. It’s probably the greatest American novel. But are you saying Herman Melville was gay?”

  “Oh yes. I recommend you read a book of his called Pierre. You’ll find it quite revealing.”

  At this point the boy standing to my right made his first contribution. “It gives a whole other aspect to a writer’s work, to know he’s gay. I mean, none of the teachers in high school, or in college for that matter, really gets into that aspect of it. But it seems to me that a writer’s sexual orientation would have a tremendous lot to do with how he perceives the world.”

  “Exactly,” smiled Golden, obviously pleased. “When I was young, such things were hushed up. In the case of heterosexual writers and poets, there was no problem telling about their passionate love affairs with women, even with other men’s wives. In fact, it somehow added spice to their legends. But in the case of gay writers, whose romances were just as passionate, love affairs were hushed up or re-labeled. Perhaps he had ‘a very close friendship,’ or ‘a lifelong devotion to a friend.’ Or he was ‘a confirmed bachelor not known to have had any passionate attachments.’ In fact, these loves were often secret out of necessity, due to society’s attitudes at the time. However, later scholars often continued the deception, covering up what they felt was a shameful secret which would only besmirch their subject’s honor. It’s only recently that scholars feel free to tell about a gay writer’s sexual life. Take Walt Whitman, for instance.”

  “What? The Good Gray Poet?”

  “None other. In many of his poems he’s quite open about his love for men and the beauty of their bodies. And the physical nature of this love is not left in doubt.” He raised his head slightly as he recited:

  “But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares

  “Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island

  “Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you

  “With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss

  “For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.”

  He looked around at all of us, and his eyes met mine, and briefly held. I felt my heart beat faster. I had made no contribution to the discussion, though I felt on the verge of doing so several times. I was a little afraid that he would discover I wasn’t registered in his class, not even auditing it. Or perhaps I had the irrational fear that he would recognize my voice from the time I’d called him anonymously from the phone booth outside the library. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t want to reveal how fascinated I was by all this talk about gay writers.

  He was still talking about Whitman. “Maybe he was able to ‘get away with it’ for such a long time because his love seemed to reach out beyond men and embrace everything: women, children, animals, the sky, the sea, the rolling plains, the mountains, the stars. I guess people thought his love of the male body was just a part of that vast cosmic love. He lived in a time which was more naive—perhaps more pure. For example, he would kiss his men friends on the mouth in greeting. This was thought to be a sign of his affectionate nature, his warm-lovingness—that he made no distinctions between men and women. Arm in arm with his comrades and all that. But in fact, his primary sexual orientation was gay. Though he was born in Brooklyn, he built up an image of himself as a ‘roughhewn son of the frontier,’ and wore workmen’s clothes, didn’t shave, and was bluff and hearty in manner. He loved working class men above all. He would cruise them on the streetcar, downtown, or by the docks. Strictly speaking, he was not gay in the sense we mean today, but if you read some of his poems, you can see that he accepted his homosexuality and was proud of it in an open, honest way. His collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, is his masterpiece, and he often said his favorite part of that work was the section called ‘Calamus.’ This was where some of his most sexual poems were gathered. The calamus—or flag iris, as it is sometimes called—was his favorite flower. Look.”

  He went to the blackboard and, picking up a piece of chalk, sketched a flower. Its petals were flat and pointed, but a long, cylindrical stamen jutted up from its middle in the unmistakable shape of an erect penis.

  “What does that remind you of?”

  We laughed nervously.

  He smiled at our discomfort briefly before erasing the picture he’d drawn. “I guess you can see why he’d have a special fondness for this flower.”

  He glanced at his watch and began putting his notes away into his briefcase. Then he looked up.

  “Say, if any of you are interested, I’m planning to start an independent study group on gay studies. There are no credits involved, though eventually, I’d like to introduce it into the school’s curriculum. We’ll probably meet at my house and I’ll give a little talk, and afterwards we’ll have a discussion session, over dinner or wine.”

  He looked right at me.

  “Don’t feel intimidated. You don’t have to be gay to attend. Straight people, both men and women, are welcome.”

  He smiled and, snapping his briefcase shut, gave us a little wave before walking away. I felt as if in that brief moment, he had seen deep into my heart, and that the invitation was meant for me alone.

  2

  On the way back to the dorm, I kept wondering why Golden had singled me out for the invitation. When coupled with my experience with the boy in the restroom, it was beginning to seem that there might be something about me which sent out a secret signal to other gays.

  Was I being paranoid? I looked around at the other students walking about on campus, seemingly without any cares in the world. I’d never again seen that boy who’d fondled me in the restroom, though I was still on the lookout for him. The truth was, I was afraid of running into him. After seeing the heedlessness he’d exhibited, I knew there was a good chance he already had some sort of reputation in the school.

  There had been an unmistakable air of desperation about his act, as if he were an incurable addict giving in to a sinful craving. But no matter how desperate he might be, surely he wouldn’t be completely indiscriminate about whom he chose to approach. After all, he was taking the risk of getting beaten up by any boy who wasn’t sympathetic. To be safe, he would have to be certain that the proposed partner was, if not a gay, at least a potential one, or someone who would keep his mouth shut.

  I had fit the bill perfectly. And even though it had been he who had instigated the encounter, I had, after my initial hesitation, actively participated. Even now, I often relived the experience in my mind, centering in on the little details I had missed while it was happening. I embroidered new fantasies upon what had happened. It now seemed much more erotic than it had actually been. Would it ever happen again? If so, where? When?

  It was getting harder to deny that I was secretly hoping for another such encounter. In fact, in the past week or two, I’d begun visiting the men’s rooms throughout the campus, dropping in even when I didn’t feel the need. I had studied the campus map in order to learn where they were all located, and tried to visit each one on the chance that I might meet a similar experience.

  I noticed a lot of gay graffiti in many of the toilet stalls—crude drawings of exaggeratedly enlarged penises, or of two boys embracing in the sixty-nine position. These graffiti were like code words inviting the initiated to complete a vast, complicated but invisible puzzle. They were evidence of lonely, frustrated boys full of pent-up lusts, masturbating for qu
ick thrills as I had done many a time.

  There was one toilet stall in the recreation building which even had an explicit invitation on the wall: Like boys? Meet me here Friday nite at 11:30. Knock 3 times. I wondered what would happen if I “accidentally” passed through one evening just to see if anything actually happened there at that time. But I feared some queer-hating jock who’d read the message might be waiting to ambush someone. It might even be a false message, a bait to lure some poor guy to a beating.

  But the graffiti were secret hints of the extent of the invisible gay population in school. Like an archeologist seeking clues to the existence of a long-lost civilization, I tracked down these tantalizing tidbits, no matter how unlikely the spot. And when I found anything at all, I was reassured by the evidence that there were so many others like me out there.

  When I got back to the dorm, I noticed my door was open. For a wild moment I thought Jonesy had come back, though he was officially expelled from school. He’d just dropped out of our lives, seemingly forever. For me, the discovery that he was a thief had added mysterious depths to his character that I would now never be able to explore. When Professor Golden was talking about the French writer Jean Genet, I’d been thinking about my former roommate.

  There was a new boy standing at Jonesy’s desk putting his books in order. An open suitcase lay on the bed. The bed looked neater than I’d ever seen it; through the open window the afternoon sun shone on it in a refreshingly new way. Somehow I’d always thought of Jonesy’s side of the room as being dark.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He turned around and in the instant our eyes met, I felt as if I’d known him from a long, long time ago, in some far-off land.

  He came toward me a little shyly, extending his hand. Though he seemed a quiet type, his eyes looked straight into mine as he firmly grasped my hand and shook it.

  “My name’s Scott.”