#mark merlis

Do you remember? Loitering outside the disco, finally making yourself go in. You paid your three bucks to an improbably muscular man who looked at you with incurious disdain, got in return a little ticket good for one drink, then turned a corner and beheld: HUNDREDS OF US, under the flashing lights. Sometimes it can seem as though all the repression was almost worth it, because it made possible that explosive discovery: hundreds of us, in the disco, free, and you had turned a corner and were one of them.

But that's what people were here for, the only reason we were on the planet at all: so that a star that flared and died a billion years before we were born would not pass away unobserved.

Talk on my dash about the erasure of classical homoeroticism reminded me of the gay retelling of Philoctetes where Philoctetes is afflicted with an HIV metaphor and Troy survives because no Deus Ex Machina Heracles shows up, so he elopes with ex-stripper Pyrrhus.

30 Days of Literary Pride 2024 - June 15

[M]ost of civilization consists of lies about the dead.

Here was the truth: because Joel did not believe in Paradise, an eternal life, he was left believing in New Mexico. To be there with the Santa Fe boy, swimming, lounging, cruising forever. Just dwelling with him, as so many people have dreamt of a timeless dwelling with the altogether less attractive and unsmiling deity they have conjured up. Joel at least had incontrovertible evidence that the Santa Fe boy existed. Or that he had existed once. More than anyone could say about Jesus. For an eternity they would wash his Mustang, each of them wearing his little lo-rise trunks, then take a dip in the pool to cool off, pop a couple of brews and lie in the sun. They wouldn't touch. But he would look over at Joel from his chaise longue, raise his hips and adjust his wet trunks, lie back. Still looking at Joel, that sad impenetrable smile dawning on his face. Joel would smile back. They would not touch. For ever, Joel would live in that moment that was so much more intense than mere touching, that instant when you knew you were going to touch. Through aeons he would be with Him in Santa Fe and would be about to touch Him. Santa Fe. Holy faith.

They were lawless. Of course they obeyed most rules: they never jumped a turnstile or ran a red light or spat on the sidewalk; they seldom shoplifted and then only as a lark, never anything of value; they showed up for jury duty. But they were lawless in the manner of heroes. They sailed west without a chart, beneath night skies with unnamed constellations. They plummeted off the edge or found safe harbors that they claimed for all of us. They did it for everyone who had come before them. The Eronauts lived out their freedom for all the generations that had been caged, so that every impulse was a holy obligation. They did it for everyone who came after. And, a league ahead of the pathfinders, Philoctetes.