Dancing in the dark

DUNCAN, ISADORA (1877-1927) A pioneer of modern dance, she adopted an emotionally expressive free form, dancing barefoot and wearing a loose tunic, inspired by the ideal of Hellenic beauty."

-- Hutchinson Dictionary of the Arts

Come away! her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous world! Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows! Learn to be young always! Learn to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world's history! Storm through into your dreams! Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret!

-- Robert Edmond Jones, "The Gloves of Isadora"

I had to have something to work on, you see. I needed a job and an explanation, not for myself -- I was too depressed, much more than I knew -- but for other people when they asked: "What are you doing? What are you working on now?" I've always hated the question, even when I know the answer. "Oh," I'll say, "one thing and another," or, "You know, it's just beginning to take shape, and I don't dare discuss it!" That always works.

In fact, when I began the research for "Isadora," my lover had just died of "AIDS-related complications." (I'll call him the Phantom, because he swore he'd haunt me if I ever wrote about him, and if anyone could do it, he's the one.) I had nothing to do but ward off panic. An editor, one of the only people in publishing I saw socially, as it were, mentioned Isadora Duncan over lunch. I had a lot of different lives at that time. I was driven, dashing, never stopping, always leaving. I had a separate life in London from the one in New York, a third life in Paris, a generic life for traveling, a gay life, a writing life, a life for tea with duchesses and a life in Vermont -- "home," where I grew up, went to college, got married and divorced, wrote my first book, met the Phantom and lost him in 1,170 days.

Probably, I should have told them all -- publishers, editors -- about my health condition, my sero status, before I contracted to write another book. It might even have helped to tell my agent -- ex-agent, that is, because, when I finally got sick and fell apart, it was much more difficult to do. I still feel ashamed. It's the same thing I felt toward old friends when I "came out," a retroactive guilt over secrets I'd kept and things I should have said, but didn't. For comfort, I remind myself that I was born on the cusp of gay liberation -- "Write that down," I say -- too young to have played a part in the glorious days of Stonewall, too old to have grown up except in fear of discovery and exposure as a faggot -- the worst fate an American boy could meet with on this earth.

So, fuck you -- it took a while to adjust. And no sooner had one hurdle been cleared than another rose up to take its place, higher and even more threatening. I'd been frightened of AIDS since 1981, when those first poor fools in the Village began to drop. "Thank God we're not in New York," I said at the time, and I wasn't alone: "We're not in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami" -- wherever. 1983, 1984, April, May of 1985 -- was it only then that I understood, struck dumb with terror in the middle of traffic on Quai Voltaire, after a side trip to the sauna? "Darling," a friend remarked, pointing to a boy we'd had sex with together, "if she doesn't have it, nobody does" -- something like that. And still I ran, had nightmares and ate flesh in the darkest of dark rooms. Death, somebody said, wasn't the worst thing that would happen to me, only the last.

Next Page: Writing a "Life" on borrowed time

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