Connection of the Sticks

(or, The Grand Tapestry of Homos)

The great poet Frank O’Hara was a beautiful man who was struck and killed by a dune buggy at Fire Island in 1956.

In 1980, the philosopher Roland Barthes tragically died a month after he was hit by a van. It is believed he was writing a novel at the time of his death. He wanted to write his own À la recherche du temps perdu.

Marcel Proust is written about so much, mythologised so endlessly, and admired so shamelessly that it’s kinda hard to take him seriously. Sometimes, though without a shred of intentional disrespect, I laugh at him.

Down the hill from Proust’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery lies the dancer and librettist Boris Kochno. He was a muse for many composers and Szymanowski wrote a novel and several poems for and about him.

Karol Szymanowski is possibly the most prominent of Polish composers since Chopin. He was a passionate admirer of Polish folk music, particularly that of the Górale highlanders. Poland today remembers him fondly, if selectively.

In 1958, Henryk L. was hired by the Polish Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to lure visiting academic Foucault into his arms and thus have him expelled from the country. Henryk is now 67, ashamed and remorseful, and lives in Wrocław with his daughter and her family.

After his stint in the Uniwersytet Warszawski, Michel Foucault presumably fucked many more students all around the globe. Foucault’s biographers suspect that he, teaching and fucking in San Francisco in the late 70’s and early 80’s, acquired AIDS in a BDSM club.

The social history of AIDS is littered with alleged ‘Patient Zero’ cases. There’s the African man who died of a mysterious disease in the 50’s. There’s the St Louis rent-boy whose death baffled doctors in the late 60’s. A poor fellow named Gaëtan Dugas was fingered by the American Journal of Medicine as the root of all the HIV cases in New York City. There’s also Arvid Noe, the Norwegian sailor turned truck driver (what promiscuous professions!) who infected a number of fellow sailors, port prostitutes, highway hookers and his wife and consequently, his daughter.

Far, far in the remote north of Norway, between mountains at the shores of the deep dark and cold fjords, in a town named Skjolden, the young philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein lived and worked, safe from the harmful influences of Bertrand Russell.

A New Zealander I met in Kathmandu many years ago claimed to have met Wittgenstein during the war. Lighting a joint wrapped in a fresh nettle leaf, the New Zealander put his arm around me and pointed to the sun and said something that he thought to be profound and I thought to be the chorus from a Little Richard song. As he got friendlier, one half of me wanted to say “see you later grandpa” and go back to my hotel room while the other half was thinking “but think of the stories!”

Little Richard toured Australia in 1957 and after the Soviets announced the successful launch of Sputnik, he quit showbiz, dumped his jewellery into Sydney Harbour and returned to the eternally outspread arms of Jesus, sweet Jesus.

North of Sydney Harbour, near the beach of Manly, is Fairy Bower, a famous right-hand point break first surfed by Snowy McAlister in the 1930’s. McAlister’s pioneering spirit is remembered annually with the Snowy McAlister Longboard Competition.

In 1970, Yukio Mishima, author of The Sound of Waves, lead a paramilitary group which stormed the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces and demanded some very passionate things (some reasonable, others not), which were instantly giggled at and ultimately ignored.

The Sacred Band of Thebes was an elite, virtually invincible army that was finally defeated in 338 BCE at Chaeronea.

During the US Civil War, Walt Whitman served as a military nurse, attending to basic medical needs and accompanying soldiers to the thresholds of their deaths.

Several years ago, a good friend named Reeve accompanied me on a work trip to Washington DC. Just before the Pennsylvania border, on the New Jersey Turnpike, there’s a sad little rest-stop named after Walt Whitman. We stopped to stretch our legs and we ate at a hamburger place and Reeve went off to the toilet, or as they call it in America, a rest-room. (A rest-room in a rest-stop.)
      Reeve returned a couple of seconds later and asked me to get my camera from the car and come to the toilet and photograph him making sex-love with some other fellow he had just met. I hesitated for a moment and finally met the two of them kissing in a dirty cubicle with the door wide open.
      Oh how they heaved and moaned and grappled and grunted! How athletic was their activity! I shot a roll of film in a few minutes and looked away when they, you know...