Two Boys Together, Clinging…
My dear, longtime friend, MIchael Graziano, posted this piece just this morning… Reading this, I am moved by my own memories of tentative, tender exploration and discovery of a feared and welcome Love…and the bringing of that Love into the Light.
World AIDS Day is December 1.
Every day, though, might be
Remembering Those, Gone, with Whom I Discovered and Experienced Love Day…
“We two boys together clinging
One the other never leaving
Elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves
“We Two Boys Together Clinging”
LEAVES OF GRASS, 1860 - Walt Whitman
“This is not a Sleep-away Camp,” said the woman in the pearls and the fine silk scarf, as she welcomed all 200 of us to the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University at the beginning of our summer break between junior and senior year. “This is a Pre-College Educational Experience.”
She lied. It was totally a Sleep-away Camp. And a marvelous one at that.
All of us were there to spend our summer focusing on the performing, creative and studio arts. Morning was dedicated to practice in one’s area of concentration - creative writing, music, theater, visual arts or dance - with afternoon classes in interdisciplinary arts. I was in the Theatre group in the morning and selected Songwriting and Javanese Gamelan to study in the afternoon.
I almost didn’t make it to CCY, which was the abbreviated nickname it was called. 3 months earlier, daydreaming while driving, I rear-ended the car in front of me and totaled the 1972 Dodge Dart that my father allowed me to use to get to my after-school job flipping burgers. He was absolutely furious and decreed that the $700 I’d saved for tuition working at McDonald’s the previous summer would instead be used for car repairs. At the time, my father operated under the belief that his anger could change all the things he didn’t like about me. He was mistaken. The punishments that he expected would lead to changed behavior worked no more effectively on me at age 17 than they did at age 9.
I was saved by the Board of Education which, for the very first time ever, voted to provide scholarships to all 8 of us in our middle-class town who had been accepted into this exclusive program. My father was angry about this, too. But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. There was absolutely nothing he could do about everything else that would happen that summer either.
There was a boy. He had black hair in tight curls, an aspiring novelist from New Canaan. We were at opposite ends of our circle of friends and knew each other slightly. During the last week of CCY, all of us in our friend group walked down the highway to the multiplex to see E.T., the most popular movie in the country that July. The boy and I sat next to each other in the dark. He wept. I did not.
On the penultimate night of camp, I asked him to come to my room in Nicholson dorm, which had been my home for the last 5 weeks. We soon moved out to the balcony right next to the walkway up Foss Hill so we could watch the stars. He revealed his deepest secret: he had always wanted to kiss a boy. We began a heavy make-out session before moving back into my room where I experienced the first - and still to this day best - orgasm I’d ever had with another human being. I reciprocated for him, barely holding back tears. Afterwards, we were sweaty and spent. The summer of 1982 was very hot. We agreed that we hated it and did not spend the night together.
The next day, the final day of the camp, there was a slide show in McConoughy Dining Hall to commemorate our accomplishments. All the campers had just finished dancing on the cafeteria tables in the manner of Coco, Paul, Leroy and Doris in the “Hot Lunch Jam” scene from everyone’s favorite movie - FAME! - which had been released the previous summer.
Shortly after the slideshow begins, a photo appears onscreen of the two of us taken at an outing to a state park a week earlier. We are standing on a float in the lake. I stand behind, about to push him in the water, my arms wrapped around him as if in passionate embrace. We two boys together clinging. There is an audible gasp from the crowd when this slide comes up and I realize that someone had seen us on the balcony the night before as they walked up Foss Hill. Word has spread like wildfire. I feel heat rise in my face, lower my head in shame, and thank the God that I still believed in that this is our last day and I’ll never have to face any of these people again.
Of course we were not the only homosexuals there that summer. I knew of two others. One, a Hispanic ballet dancer from New Haven, the first openly gay person I’d ever met, who was what was called at the time a flaming queen, used to sneak away in the night to go clubbing in New York City. He was the most outrageous, daring and sophisticated person I’d ever met. He was also the first person I ever knew who died from AIDS. His is the only real name I will use in this story because it is important it be remembered: Willie. Willie. Willie.
The other gay was a French horn player from Madison who was caught giving another boy a blow job on his bed. He was the only one of the pair who was publicly identified and asked to leave, making it clear that the active fellatio participant was the more guilty. Meanwhile, during this particular summer, unbeknownst to me or anyone else, there is an invisible virus passing among boys like us who engage in similar but more intimate acts. The virus, eventually named HIV, targets the passive participant in this other act. The boys who get it will be thrown out of much more than CCY in the years to come. Fighting HIV/AIDS and being Gay (at some point it becomes capitalized) were shortly to become the most important things in my life.
Today, all of this reads like ancient history. HIV is a manageable disease and the AIDS crisis is just about over. As a former professional fundraiser for this cause, I am not supposed to say this, but it’s true. At the moment, being Queer (because one is no longer allowed to be simply Gay - using either the lowercase or uppercase “G”) does not even make the current running list of the ten most interesting things about me.
Today, 43 years after the summer that changed my life, the float upon which we were two boys together clinging is deserted. It’s too cold to go swimming in the lake during the fall.
The Center for Creative Youth is no longer in operation. The state cut funding for arts education and that was that. STEM now gets it all. The creative youth are no longer dancing on the cafeteria tables or looking at the stars from the balcony on humid summer nights.
As for the Gays, we did not all die. One boy, which would be me, is alive and well in the East. The other boy, not-me, is alive and well in the West. I remain HIV negative after all these years. Of course many others are HIV positive. Many others, still, did not survive it. These, the Dead (let’s call them that for that is what they are) are mostly forgotten, including, and perhaps even especially, by the Queers.
Remember when we used to say Silence = Death?
I implore you. Right now. If you were lucky enough to have met a boy who passed, perhaps befriended one, maybe even loved one, you must say his name. Out loud. This very minute.
Here I go: Willie, Michael Barto, David Feinberg.
And yet, also right now, this very minute, simultaneously, somehow, somewhere, there is the miracle called Beginning. Summer will begin again after this Fall and this Winter and next Spring. Youth will be creative with or without CCY. Someone will pause before pushing another off a float into a lake. There will be a photo taken at this exact moment that makes one gasp. For the right reason. One of the boys in the photo will not hang his head in shame.
Somehow, somewhere, two boys are together clinging, one the other never leaving, fingers clutching, armed and fearless.
-MG, October 12, 2024
