I only ask because everything associated with summer is gone. I remember a summer four years ago in Vancouver, by a pool, with friends; we were at a theatre conference together. These were people I had known for many years — mostly women — we bought food and shared it. I don’t do this often — that is attend a party — I’m mainly alone in groups with strangers. (I don’t know why, because I like parties — but then I don’t, because meeting new people is perilous, being trapped with a bore even more so— I know, awful of me to say— and worse yet is being ‘Sky Gilbert,’ that is, meeting someone who won’t tell me their name, so awed are they by talking with ‘a star.’ I’m not bragging, it’s just a reality and crazy and wrong. I won’t speak to such a person if they don’t identify themselves. And then there is the awful memory of my first gay parties — because in my imagination it was there I would meet men. What frigid condescension and high-school cliquishness! I was immediately excluded, and hurt — no wounded. I only seem to enjoy parties when I am the centre of them, which is sad, I know.) Anyway, here is Lewis Carrol on the end of summer days: “Dreaming as the days go by, / Dreaming as the summers die: / Ever drifting down the stream— / Lingering in the golden gleam— / Life, what is it but a dream?” I’m talking about touching, cavorting, swimming (naked?), being less than six feet away from each other, sharing food, kisses, drink, drugs, and who cares what else? I don’t see the new normal ever disappearing as this paranoia about human contact is not only related to our increasingly digital lives, but to increasing paranoia about disease. I do not see the world getting less infections, but more so. (Not in reality, in fantasy. But, fantasy is all that matters.) Who knows whether we will be living in a more or less ‘infectious’ time, nevertheless living and breathing will be perceived as essentially dangerous, and other people perceived as potential agents of harm. We are biologically wired to fear difference, so it’s a hop skip and a jump to this particular brand of madness. We can talk about anti-racism forever but if we are pretending to embrace the ‘other’ but simultaneously viewing every stranger as a potential carrier of the plague, our pious social justice platitudes will have no effect. The 50s notion of the ‘family’ — has also made a return. One is safe in it’s ‘bosom,’ while God knows what kind of abuse, at worst — or emotional manipulation, at best — is going on there. But it’s all misery. We are ordered to love our families though they are often more strange to us than those with whom we are not yet acquainted. The bond of ‘blood’ is insidious and the very source of hatred. But all this valorization of the family heralds our upcoming winter; it’s best to scurry home every night, and not look about. We’ll turn on the lights and start the fire in our little safe cave — a bulwark against the dangers of touching, drinking, carousing, singing, and dancing. I echo Nashe’s sentiments from “Summer’s Last Will and Testament”: “Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.” Summer is gone, we must try and forget it ever happened. But I’ll always remember that party by the pool where we laughed quite cruelly, viciously even, at others, we laughed at Brendan Healy and his gang of beautiful boys who swam nightly and didn’t seem to want to talk to us, we laughed at anyone who was not there and was our perceived enemy, and we also knew of course that we were wittier and more profound than anyone, for nothing seems quite as charming as that which happens on a summer night. Last night ‘beauty’ visited the baths. I was in my room minding my own business, and I saw him approach. Was he a stripper who had gotten lost somehow? What was he doing there? And why was he looking at me? He entered and I was all over him; doing things he very much wanted to have done to him — if I was to believe the noises he was making. I won’t go on — but it was heaven and then after getting into a few of odd positions and situations, he was very nicely and apologetically gone. I went to shower a few minutes later, but I could not take one, because he was about to get into into it with someone else. And this is the image that will stay with me — the future smile from this summer night: because whoever he was climbing into the shower with was not, obviously, protesting. Why would they? It was a minute epiphany: this is what it means to be young and gay and beautiful (for I never was) and to know that if you are in a sexual environment (and even sometimes not) you have absolute license to invade anyone’s personal space, to start kissing anyone, because quite simply everyone not only wants you, but can’t get enough. So partly it’s never having been that young man and never having had that experience, but it’s also knowing that’s the way things should be — for everyone — at some time or other. And if not, that’s somebody’s fault. What a crime to tell you my dirty stories in the middle of a COVID Summer of suffering! But remember, it’s not really summer, if you’re not gathering freely (shall we call it) if you’re not getting into some sort of mischief, even if it’s just badmouthing somebody with a drink in your hand under the stars. It will all be a dream, some day, a remembrance, so I wanted to say goodbye. It’s not easy. Lewis Carroll again: ‘Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.” We shall not be awake but we shall know that summer exists always in our minds eye — not just to help us cope — but so that we might enter it through a private door, when are sitting home, snug and cozy, content with the morally approved loneliness of society’s chosen eternal winter.
