Before they burn

From the saved articles:

Richard Rodriguez' Late Victorians from Harpers:

The age-old description of homosexuality is of a sin against nature. Moralistic society has always judged emotion literally, The homosexual was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it. In attempting to drape the architecture of Sodom with art, homosexuals have lived for thousands of years against the expectations of nature. Barren as Shakers, and interestingly, as concerned with the small effect, homosexuals have made a covenant against nature. Homosexuals survival lay in artifice, in plumage, in lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, irony.

and

I am preoccupied by the fussing of a man sitting in the pew directly In front of me- in his seventies. frail. his iodine-colored hair combed forward and pasted upon his forehead. Fingers of porcelain clutch the pearly beads of what must have been his mother's rosary. He is not the sort of man any gay man would have chosen to become m the 1970s. He is probably not what he himself expected to become. Something of the old dear about him wizened butterfly, powdered old pouf. Certainly he is what I fear becoming. And then he rises, this old monkey, with the most beatific dignity, in answer to the microphone, and he strides to the sanctuary to take his place in the company of the blessed

So this is it- this, what looks like a Christmas party in an insurance office and not as in Renaissance paintings. and not as we had always thought, not some flower-strewn, some sequined curtain call of grease-painted heroes gesturing to the stalls. A lady with a plastic candy cane pinned to her lapel. A Castro clone with a red bandanna exploding from his hip pocket. A perfume-counter lady with an Hermés scarf mantled upon her left shoulder. A black man in a checkered sports coat. The pinkhaired punkess with a jewel in her nose. Here, too, is the gay couple in middle age, wearing interchangeable plaid shirts and corduroy pants. Blood and shit and Mr. Happy Face. These know the weight of bodies.

Bill died.

. . . Passed on to heaven.

. . . Turning over in his bed one night and then gone. 

These learned to love what is corruptible, while I , barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift m tailbone on the cold hard pew.

and

In the 1970s like a lot of men and women in this city, I joined a gym. My club, I’ve even caught myself calling It.

In the gay city of the 1970s. bodybuilding became an architectural preoccupation of the upper middle class. Bodybuilding is a parody of labor. a useless accumulation of the laborer’s bulk and strength. No useful task is accomplished. And yet there is something businesslike about the habitués, and the gym is filled with the punch-clock logic of the workplace. Machines clank and hum. Needles on gauges toll spent calories.

The gym ls at once a closet of privacy and an exhibition gallery. All four walls are mirrored.

I study my body in the mirror. Physical revelation -nakedness- is no longer possible, cannot be desired, for the body Is shrouded in meat and wears itself.

The intent is some merciless press of body against a standard perfect mold. Bodies are “cut" or “pumped" or "buffed” as on an assembly line in Turin. A body becomes so many extrovert parts. Delts, pecs, lats.

I harness myself In a Nautilus cage.

Lats become wings. For the gym Is nothing if not the occasion for transcendence. From
homosexual to autosexual. . .

I lift weights over my head, baring my teeth like an animal with the strain.

...to nonsexual. The effect of the overdeveloped body Is the miniaturization of the sexual organs of no function beyond wit. Behold the ape become Blakean angel, revolving in an empyrean of mirrors.

O

The nineteenth century mirror over the fireplace in my bedroom was purchased by a decorator from the estate of a man who died last year of AIDS. It Is a top-heavy piece, confusing styles. Two ebony-painted columns support a frieze of painted glass above the mirror. The frieze depicts three bourgeois Graces and a couple of free-range cherubs. The lake of the mirror has formed a cataract and at its edges it is beginning to corrode. Thus the mirror that now draws upon my room owns some bright curse, maybe some memory not mine. As I regard this mirror, I imagine St. Augustine’s meditation sIowly hardening Into syllogism, passing down through centuries to confound us: Evil is the absence of good.

We have become accustomed to figures disappearing from our landscape. Does this not Iead us to interrogate the landscape?

With reason do we invest mirrors With the superstition of memory, for they, though glass, though Iiquid captured in a bay, are so often less fragile than we are. They- bright ovals or rectangles or rounds-bump down unscathed, unspilled through centuries, whereas we . . .