After two pot brownies, my friend Alex was in fine form at
the party we were at. Minus the pot
brownies, this was a pretty staid group of people, but once Alex got a little
high, all bets were off. “You’re so
attractive. You make me moist!” he
bellowed at some mortified straight man.
My head spun only to find Alex talking to said straight man and his
girlfriend. Alex was propositioning them
for a threesome but qualified it to the girl by saying it was only to get into
her boyfriend’s pants. I decided the
straight couple needed to be rescued from Alex and went over. “You’ll have to excuse Alex, he’s had a
stroke, and he’s had two brownies.” “The
stroke didn’t take away my sight and I know an attractive man when I see one,” Alex said, taking one more glance at the
straight man as I pulled him away. “Do
you want to sniff my diaper?”
Alex was indeed wearing a diaper, and was just the kind of
man who let everybody know it. It was a
badge of honor for all that he had been through. He’d already been living with HIV since the
early 80’s, since before HIV had a name.
His bowels and bladder didn’t always give him much warning. I remember the day I received a call from our
mutual friend David in September, telling me that Alex had had a stroke and was
in the emergency room at the General.
I got to the hospital and found Alex. The right side of his body was paralyzed,
including his face. His mouth drooped on
the right side and his speech was slurred.
He looked up at me as I knelt to kiss his forehead. “They say I might not ever walk again,” he
said, enunciating as best he could.
“We’ll get through this Alex. You’ll
walk again, I know it, “ I countered. “Damn
right I’ll walk again. There are still
men to fuck.”
Alex didn’t see the inside of his apartment again for four
long months. After being in the emergency
room for a torturous week until they could find him a room, and then two weeks
in that hospital room, he was transferred to a rehabilitation centre. While I watered the plants in Alex’s
apartment and collected his mail, Alex engaged in the arduous task of learning
to use the right side of his body. His
doctors warned that another stroke was not an impossibility. He battled through and was released from the
rehab center just before Christmas. And
that’s when he completely broke down.
Alex was henceforth differently-abled, if you will. He required a brace to walk, to walk ever so
carefully. His right arm was still
immobile. We had dinner together every
Saturday night once he returned home. We
would order pizza and I would read the latest essay I’d written for this blog
to him. He was the one person to hear my
essays before I posted them, and my short essay would launch us into an
examination of our sex lives. Alex never
allowed for bitterness, but I remember the Saturday night that he looked at me
and asked, with tears in his eyes, “Will
a man ever want to be with me again?”
I remembered, long ago, in my mid-twenties, being at the New
York City Pride Parade. I recall only
two moments from that parade, and both of them left a deep impression on the
young gay man that I was. The first
moment was when the float passed by on which there were men who had fought at
Stonewall on that fateful night in ’69,
when our history changed forever. These
men were old, with canes and in wheelchairs.
They had been there, and they were here with us now. As they floated down the street, I realized
I’d just witnessed history. My
history. The whooping from the crowd
told me that everyone around me was sharing the exact same feeling.
The second moment that I recall was when a gay group in
wheelchairs passed by. Young and old, of
every race, their presence hit me. It
became all too clear, all at once, that our society neglects to recognize the
disabled as sexual. And here they were,
claiming their orientation, refusing to be left in the shadows or on the
sidelines. As with the men who had
fought at Stonewell, I knew I was witnessing something that I did not feel much
of within my own belly: I was witnessing
what looked like courage, and I found it beautiful.
After Alex had his stroke, I did some research – on
Xtube. I found an instructional video
for sex workers on how to best cater to the needs of their disabled
clientele. And then I found a video by a
man who suffered from some type of palsy.
He was jacking off and I so wanted to be there with him. His pits, his cock, his absolute engagement
were hot – his palsy did not matter. I
wrote him a message telling him how amazing his vid was and posted a comment on
his profile. I didn’t hear back from
him.
Alex is improving.
He’s walking without a brace, and he’s getting movement back in his
right arm and hand. He’s even venturing
forth to the Eagle again. More than
that, he got picked up recently and took the man back to his place. But he called me to tell me that it didn’t
work. His body did not want to cooperate
with his desire. He was momentarily
bereft. He is not supposed to take
Viagra, but to hell with it – he ordered some online and his doctor is turning
a blind eye for him. Alex is a force to
be reckoned with.
Last night, I hit the streets of the village to go get a
pack of cancer-causing smokes. I began
to think about the ways we are all disabled.
For some of us, it is visible to others.
But for many, it’s invisible.
It’s the disease that’s eating us from the inside. It’s the mental anguish that we mask so as to
appear normal. Among the many casualties
of illness or disability is our sexuality.
Always, we are fighting to reclaim it, from external forces, or
internal.
As I walked down the steps from the tobacco shop, I noticed
a young man in a motorized wheelchair.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. He, like the man in the Xtube video I had
watched, appeared to suffer from a palsy.
He was alone on the street, in this Gay Village, and he looked
bewildered, lost. He did not see me see
him. And he was gorgeous. My instinct was to reach out to him. I wanted to make love to him. I wanted to let him know that if he was in
the Village seeking comfort from the men who walked by, he would find it. I wanted to take his cock in my mouth. I wanted to enter him and fill him with light
so that he shone like a nuclear reactor.
I wanted to believe that my feelings were not born of pity or fear that
by the grace of god, that could be me. I
wanted to apologize to him if these thoughts were in any way construed as
condescending or patronizing. I wanted to
tell him that even though I am so-called able-bodied, that I have struggled since
childhood with an illness that I rarely discuss, an illness that constantly
thwarts my sexuality, an illness that no one can see, but that I experience so
profoundly. I wanted......But instead,
seeing him carry on down the sidewalk, I too continued on my way. But oh how I wanted....
When Alex first got home from rehab, he was sternly warned
against walking too far from home. And
to walk, especially in the beginning, was laborious for Alex. But secretly, one day, Alex walked from his apartment
to the nearest tattoo parlour. The next
Saturday night, he surprised with me his tattoo. On the inside of his left forearm, he’d had
the word “Courage” inscribed in glorious script. I wondered, like the Cowardly Lion from the
Wizard of Oz, if I would ever have the courage to both come back from an
illness, or to even get and stay sick, and still reclaim myself and my
sexuality. In my twenties, I thought
that the perfect man was the one with the six-pack abs. But Alex’s courage to face disability and
still move forward changed that. I think
that having just turned forty, I am maybe, just maybe, growing up.
