Randall Mann

This may sound queer, but in 1985 I held the delicate hands of Dan White: I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk was made monument—no, myth—by the years since he was shot. I remember when Harvey was shot: twenty, and I knew I was queer. Those were the years, Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk— elected on the same day as Dan White. I often wonder about Supervisor White, who fatally shot Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, who was one of us, a Castro queer. May 21, 1979: a jury hands down the sentence, seven years— in truth, five years— for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White, for the blood on his hands; when he confessed that he had shot the mayor and the queer, a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk? Why cry over spilled milk, some wondered, semi-privately, for years— it meant “one less queer.” The jurors turned to White. If just the mayor had been shot, Dan might have had trouble on his hands— but the twelve who held his life in their hands maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk; maybe, the second murder offered him a shot at serving only a few years. In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White. And he was made presentable by a queer.

The soul descends once more in bitter love… —Richard Wilbur The eyes open to the cries of police. Skirting sleep, the soul industrial as laundry— realities like bad checks, burning like new sex. Dinner is the better half of someone’s lunch. Someone’s playing a guessing game: Psychosis or Handsfree. Local fame. Praying to a calf, or debt ceiling, keeps us grounded. You can take the kid out the food court, but child support won’t upgrade from buy to buy— outbid, I am my financial aide. Astounded, we wake and take. Let every boy Tolstoy with disease have a chance. Liabilities, let’s dance. We’re clean— or rather, not unclean— doxycycline our balance sheet. Our spirits, neat.

for David Trinidad I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video, its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled, on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard- won a little corner of sex was then, no internet, no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can. In an elaborate bid to convince myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual video that I can’t recall, and a box that made my heart stop: Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap: I spent all my allowance.) I can measure this adventure in increments of shame: tape loop, checkout, the run-walk to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out. And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . . Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine, that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein. Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give. And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara, or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints in jail, IV drugs, and conversion. Leo and Lance had the chance to work together twice on film— Leo & Lance and Blonds Do It Best— and more than once on the corner. Where have all the hustlers gone, anyway? They died weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first, in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications. On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.” That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s, his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India— IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . . As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache of scanned porn. Leo & Lance: it begins in synth, Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo, shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim, letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow. God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill, gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet, before they go back to the lodge and do what they do better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet— like children in the street.

A giant bird- of-paradise has climbed the bar: in this paradise there are no flowers, no flowers at all. When Happy Hour becomes Last Call— Adam in drag our royalty— we buy her gin for eternity (an unseen deejay scores the years with pulsing music of the spheres). Now the queen has gone, gone again in search of love, in search of sin. It’s closing time. You were not at fault. I drain my glass and lick the salt.

Roy Halston Frowick, 1932–1990 He kept his middle name, the pick of   the lot, he thought, and mispronounced himself:Hall-stun. At Bergdorf’s he acquired an accent and referred to himself   in the third person, every bird he flayed wrapped in Ultrasuede. He lit a True with a True, smeared his hirsute muse with sequins. There were air- kisses, Capote’s new-cut face at Studio 54, that Baccarat flute of ejaculate. Never too late, he ordered in meat and potatoes, and a trick. He called it “dial-a-steak, dial-a-dick.” He appeared on The Love Boat, Halstonettes in tow, maybe the high, maybe the low, watermark. When his pupils betrayed him at work, on came the shades. And a well-cut blazer, paranoia. He had signed away the rights to his name, for options. When he tried to reclaim them from the conglomerate, he excused himself to the toilet, just a sec — white dust on a black turtleneck. His block started to look a lot like sickness. Even his beloved orchids, the sickness. Just like that, the eighties were gone. New York, New York, the eighties were no one.

Like eelgrass through a glass- bottom boat on the Silver River, I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision, a tattooed flame crackling underneath the lewd, uncool khaki of an amused park worker. I was the sometimes boy on a leash, my sliver of assent in 1984 — as if it were my decision. The I-75 signage, more than metaphor. As if I had the right to vote. The slumber parties then were hidden wood; the tea so sweet, the saccharin pink and artificial, like intelligence. The science sponsored in part by chance. I made my acting debut with the red dilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts, in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead, straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor. A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold- ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool ... The pool shark lurked, but not to fear. The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold, like the comfort of a diplomatic war.

the relationship between blackbird and fencepost, between the cow and its egret, the field and wildflowers overrunning the field— so little depends upon their trust. Here, in God we trust to keep our cash and thoughts in line— in the sky, an unexplained white line could be the first of many omens. But this is no country for omens, the line as chalky as the moon, bleak and useless as the moon now rising like a breath of cold air . . . There is gullibility in the air.

Gainesville, Florida An empire of moss, dead yellow, and carapace: that was the season of gnats, amyl nitrate, and goddamn rain; of the gator in the fake lake rolling his silverish eyes; of vice; of Erotica, give it up and let

There's a certain sadness to this body of water adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds, handful of ducks, the water color manmade. A still life. And still life's a cold exercise in looking back, back to Florida, craning my neck like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin. As for the scrub oaks, the hot wind in the leaves was language, Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic— an obsession: I wanted to live in it. (One professor in exile did, covered himself in the stuff as a joke— then spent a week removing mites.) That's enough. The fields of rushes lay filled with water, and I said farewell, my high ship an old, red Volvo DL, gone to another coast, another peninsula, one without sleep or amphibious music. Tonight, in flight from San Francisco— because everything is truer at a remove— I watch the man I love watch the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento, lit city of legislation and flat land. I think of Florida, how flat. I think of forgetting Florida. And then the landscape grows black.

The palms are psalms. The nail salons, manicured lawns. This is some phase. The park has been razed. I miss the hip, hours at a clip, their dopey glazed Dolores haze (sorry). I worry about basic stuff: my graying scruff, Ambien addiction. Eviction ... — But there’s another story: this site was once a cemetery. In 1888, the late were stirred, disinterred, carted somewhere calm, a nothing place called Colma. By then the dead prohibited in city light. They thought this was all right: the dead have nothing to lose; the dead were Jews. Hills of Eternity, Home of Peace: the dead were put in their place.