strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jun 27 03: my homosexual agenda: a review
The last 36 hours have been unusually queer ‘round these parts. Not weird, mind you: just very gay. Wednesday night, for instance, Paul and I went to see “Take Me Out,” the Tony-winning play about baseball and gay men and straight men and truth-telling. It’s warm, it’s brainy, it’s very funny, and a good time was had by all. In the interest of full disclosure, I am obliged to admit that the shower scenes weren’t entirely a bad thing either.
And then yesterday, because it was the first sunny day of summer (!), I went to the beach. What’s the point of being a footloose freelance guy if you can’t drop everything for a day and catch some rays? It took some doing, though: I started the day at swim practice, and from there dashed down to Penn Station to catch the 9:04 train out to Sayville, Long Island, and from there jumped into the $3 van that took you to the ferry dock, and from there took the 11:30 boat to the Pines, on Fire Island. For those of you unfamiliar with Fire Island Pines, it’s sort of like Chelsea with sand: a tiny, tony beach town with expensive vacation homes and lots and lots of homos. And then I paid exorbitant sums for groceries at the little store—it galled me, but I still hadn’t eaten anything—and then I walked out onto the beach and felt all cares melt away for a few hours. The Pines was weirdly deserted. Maybe it was because the sunny days had come upon us so suddenly that nobody had been prepared to get out there; maybe it was because this weekend is Pride and so people weren’t planning to use their rentals. But that was fine. I walked east until the sprawl of million-dollar bungalows gave way to the mile or two of dunes that separate us from them. The haze in the air made the line between sea and sky indistinct. Blue melted into blue melted into blue. The waves were cold: delicious and refreshing for about 90 seconds, and then suddenly oh my god I’m freezing and you were scrambling for dry land. I had a book, but didn’t read; I had paper, but didn’t write. Birds rose up behind the dune fence and hovered and dropped back into the grass. It was heaven. And then I caught the 4 o’clock ferry home. I spent more time in transit than on the beach, but it was still so, so worth it.
Once back in the city, I went to a party thrown by Bob’s fiancée Whitney and discovered that while I’d been away from civilization the Supreme Court had invalidated the Texas sodomy law. And, by extension, everybody else’s as well. I don’t expect to be in Texas any time soon—but it’s a huge relief not to be a criminal anymore. God knows you don’t want to deal with the Texas judicial system if you can help it.
In other news: shortly after the Texas decision was announced, Strom Thurmond keeled over dead. Coincidence? I wonder.