Jameson Fitzpatrick

Yes, I was jealous when you threw the glass. I wanted the shattering against the wood-paneled floor for myself, to be the sudden diaspora of its pieces across the apartment — and last night when we fought, I wanted you to hit me so badly I begged. And the other day walking past Renewal-on-the-Bowery, when one of the men smoking unsteadily outside called me a faggot, I thought: Good. People get what they deserve. Then I wished I were more like Jesus — capable of loving all people and all things always, capable of nothing but love. I waste half my wishes this way, wishing to be virtuous. The rest, well, I don’t have to tell you, do I?

In the old place, there was no place that did not see me. Wherever I went mothers whispered about me like a Greek chorus: I heard that boy...    I heard that. I was just a boy. But it was true, what they said, that I liked other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s, though he was four years older and they were very much in love. I made him break up with her in a Chili’s parking lot while I waited inside. I was fourteen. How embarrassing to have been fourteen, to have eaten at that Chili’s, often. That summer I had no taste for anything but him. Faintly of chlorine. When he left for college I had no one. Sarah’s friends stared me down at school. I found it was better, if I could not be no one, to be someone. Small, but particular. Specified, which was an apprenticeship for special. Cold, another word for cool.

Last night, I went to a gay bar with a man I love a little. After dinner, we had a drink. We sat in the far-back of the big backyard and he asked, What will we do when this place closes? I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, I said, though the crowd was slow for a Saturday, and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go? He walked me the half-block home and kissed me goodnight on my stoop— properly: not too quick, close enough our stomachs pressed together in a second sort of kiss. I live next to a bar that's not a gay bar —we just call those bars, I guess— and because it is popular and because I live on a busy street, there are always people who aren't queer people on the sidewalk on weekend nights. Just people, I guess. They were there last night. As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching and of myself wondering whether or not they were just. But I didn't let myself feel scared, I kissed him exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience, because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear— an act of resistance. I left the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside, to sleep, early and drunk and happy. While I slept, a man went to a gay club with two guns and killed forty-nine people. Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed recently by the sight of two men kissing. What a strange power to be cursed with: for the proof of men's desire to move men to violence. What's a single kiss? I've had kisses no one has ever known about, so many kisses without consequence— but there is a place you can't outrun, whoever you are. There will be a time when. It might be a bullet, suddenly. The sound of it. Many. One man, two guns, fifty dead— Two men kissing. Last night I can't get away from, imagining it, them, the people there to dance and laugh and drink, who didn't believe they'd die, who couldn't have. How else can you have a good time? How else can you live? There must have been two men kissing for the first time last night, and for the last, and two women, too, and two people who were neither. Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country which is a racist country, which is gun country. Today I'm thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations in the rifles of the National Guard, and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple. The protester in the photo was gay, you know, he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS, which I am also thinking about today because (the government's response to) AIDS was a hate crime. Now we have a president who names us, the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us, some of us getting killed. We must love one another whether or not we die. Love can't block a bullet but neither can it be shot down, and love is, for the most part, what makes us— in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul. We will be everywhere, always; there's nowhere else for us, or you, to go. Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you. Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

Opposite him at this table again and through the windows the city glittering, surreal as a scale model, the city in miniature — only it moves in a real way, because it is real. One of the windows is open, some construction down on the street drones like a distant vacuum. It’s warm for January. Still, his apartment has that dreamlike quality of feeling like home though I know it’s not. Not mine anymore — but how many people get to visit the past without hurting anything? To come back and drink the same coffee from the same never-quite-clean cup?

and it was political. I made coffee and the coffee was political. I took a shower and the water was. I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses and later, on the train, that was political, when I studied every handsome man in the car. Who I thought was handsome was political. I went to work at the university and everything was very obviously political, the department and the institution. All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political, where I threw them when I was through. I was blond and it was political. So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.” I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was. That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America was political, and it was political when America killed another person, who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation. I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political. My mother read to me almost every night and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political. That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something. Someone called me faggot and it was political. I called myself a faggot and it was political. How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was was political. I thought I could become a writer and it was political that I could imagine it. I thought I was not a political poet and still my imagination was political. It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

Up — or out? — here: a problem of preposition, my uneasy relation with the world. Whether I’m above it or apart. On the other side of the latched glass door, a man loves me. Worries. Calls my name. • Where — for art — thou- sands of windows go dark in slow succession. On Essex and Ludlow and Orchard. A thousand times goodnight. • A boy throwing stones at a window. Right window, wrong boy. • Love goes toward love — And the place death, down there waving its white kerchief —