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Felipe got kind of serious, almost gloomy. He said, “You know what, Joe? Not many people would admit it, let alone most gay men, including myself. But deep down inside I feel the need to share myself with someone. Sometimes I think I’m better off alone. I mean, think about how much time we waste wandering the streets looking for someone who has your name stamped on their forehead.

I still loved him as one of my best friends, but my life was okay the way it was, without him.

.. but at that one moment, when Donna Summer was playing on the stereo and everyone was dancing and singing along, there was a feeling of success. Of victory. We had all come out of our own separate nightmares to a place where just being ourselves was okay, not dangerous. That was a strange new feeling, reason alone to celebrate.

He told me if I wanted a man I’d have to “clone out.” “Castro Clones” were the gays who wore jeans, Lacoste shirts, and hung out primarily in the Castro District. Their uniform style was a revolt from the fashion of San Francisco’s hippy days, which was still predominant.

We arrived in San Francisco about 11:00 p.m. the night of July 3, 1979. After stopping by our new apartment, Ali took me to a bar a few blocks up Folsom Street called the Stud.

I wasn’t me anymore. I was a thousand different feelings rushing through my body into the guy in front, the guy behind, the whole pulsing crowded toilet. Someone else took my hand and placed it on his hard dick. I started feeling it up and down, rolling it in my hand. I laughed to myself and thought, This is what was missing from the dance floor at the Parade.

I was coming down from the T and the joint helped take the edge off. It brought me back to reality. Only the reality was that I was getting bored and wanted a change of scene.

The dance floor was jammed with shoulder-to-shoulder men. Someone stuck a bottle of poppers under my nose. I inhaled the pungent fumes and felt the exhilarating rush temporarily overwhelm me. Someone was always handing me a drink. We danced and danced. Between being with my friends, being so high, and being surrounded by so many sexy men, I felt like this was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever experienced.

“I mean, I think I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m gay. I’ve accepted it and all that. I just don’t want to be on either side of hurt anymore. I don’t want to be in love. I don’t want anyone to be in love with me. I just want friends.”

All of a sudden I felt like I was face-to-face with God in my own backyard. I felt tiny.

The hum of the fan finally lulled me back into a deep sleep. The last thing I heard was a freighter ship blowing its loud, low horn as it floated by the wharf across the street from us and slid down the Mississippi.

I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t help thinking about Ali picking up James. It kind of made me mad. It was just like Ali to go back into that bar and get him, especially since Ali knew I was interested in James. I felt like it was Ali’s idea of some kind of competition or lesson, like he was showing me how easy it was to pick someone up if you really wanted to. All you had to do was ask.

I mean most people around here wouldn’t get it, but most people around here are stupid anyway.”

we’d talked about almost everything the two of us could think of. Everything except sex. I mean, we had talked a lot about sex in general, but not specifics, like our own sex lives. Late in the afternoon in eastern Indiana, a tension started building between us until our not talking about sex became louder than if we had been talking about it.

The movies told me there was a better life out there somewhere. I wasn’t alone.

I wanted Dad to call me into his room and have me shut the door the way he did with my sisters. I wanted him to do to me what he did with them. I don’t think I would have minded it as much as they did.

In his wedding picture I always thought Dad looked like a cross between Elvis and Rock Hudson. Mom looked like Lauren Bacall. Now he looked like fat Elvis minus the sideburns. I stared, mesmerized at his body. He slept in his underwear and was big and hairy. I was terrified of him catching me, but deep down inside part of me hoped that he would.

..falling in love, you decide, is falling home. it’s clumsy and awkward, utterly wonderful. you’re so vulnerable in the freefall. there’s so much unlearning. it’s letting go of what you knew and how you used to. surrender to her gravity, to the darkness of her unknown. land there, home.

I learn that if pain is noise in the body, the absence of pain is breathtaking silence.

Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

Then there’s the less obvious . . . the part no one writes about. How grief is horny. How I bend myself over the bedhead and feel your fingers in my arse. Real and imagined, grief is pining for your touch. Grief is being wet for a ghost. Grief is not sadness. It is a kaleidoscope of desires. Like white light refracted through skin.

Grief is what if. Grief is endless cycles of why, and I wish I didn’t. Grief is the guilt of the living, of my living. Grief is the sobbing into my birthday cake, because I’m older than you, now. Grief is the building of a world without you in it.

Grief is wanting flesh, yearning for a voice.

is it wrong to be turned on by someone who is dead? I fuck the ghost of you and learn that grief is not sadness. Grief is the body cut open, flows of blood and joy and salt and ache and words and memory and memories never made. Grief is undoing.

I found myself drawn to you. Amid the chanting and the cries, I saw that your body was full of opposites. Anguish and confidence. Betrayal and unity. Horror and joy. You carried yourself like you were crumbling alive.

HER DEATH IS like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That my motherhood was a trick of light.

I contemplate this for a moment, thinking about people as echoes, and how the memory of a person rings louder in rooms they’ve slept and loved in.

‘POETRY IS SOMETIMES a no’

I think of my before, a whole other life, a dead thing.

we are burning in love.