Dinners With Larry

I first encountered him as a name: Lawrence R. Schehr, author of Parts of an Andrology and Alcibiades at the Door, the latter a particularly brilliant I title that made me want to run out and buy the book when I saw the Stanford University Press advertisement—where? In GLQ, or maybe PMLA. It was the mid 90s, and finally someone actually in French (in the academic sense) was doing something interesting with queer theory in French (in a slightly different academic sense). I found his books not long afterwards in a now-defunct (of course) gay bookstore on 20th Street in Chelsea. Some time later I met the man himself, at a conference—of course; he was nothing if not a creature of conferences. I suppose that when he was not at conferences he went about something resembling an ordinary existence, but it is hard to imagine. When he was not at a conference, it seemed, he was organizing conferences, or publishing conference proceedings. Or just publishing, I suppose. How many books had he published? I'm not sure even he knew exactly. A lot. At one point I remember him telling me, in that peculiar offhand way of his, that he was about to publish two books; maybe three, he added mysteriously. I didn't ask. I didn't know which question to start with, or how to formulate it.

Anyway, the first time I actually met him was, of course, at a conference. It must have been in 1997 or 1998, at the first "Rhetoric of the Other" conference, in Chapel Hill. I found myself sitting next to him at the banquet. "You're Lawrence Schehr," I exclaimed stupidly, and told him my name. "I know who you are," he replied in a peremptory manner that left me torn between feeling flattered that he knew who I was and offended at his dismissal of my introduction. In any case it cut short my effusions about Alcibiades at the Door. Then the French person on his other side asked, "vous êtes américain?" to which he unhesitatingly responded "non, je viens de New York."

Somehow—this was, I think, Larry's way in general—we went from being complete strangers to complicit old friends with no transition whatever, beyond that awkward moment when I'd tried to introduce myself. At the next few conferences it already felt as though I'd known him forever. In part this was because we were both New Yorkers, both worked on similar topics, had similar cultural references, understood the same Yiddishisms. But it was also, surely, just Larry—he had similar relations, I could see, with all sorts of people who came from very different backgrounds.

Larry was an enigma to me. It took me a long time to realize how enigmatic he actually was, since he always seemed like the proverbial open book, ready and willing to share, and sometimes overshare. I recall once asking him whether he knew a particular French colleague, to which he replied, "oh yes, we slept together a few times," in much the same tone as though he'd said "oh yes, we taught a course together." Another time, at another conference, over another meal, I asked him how he'd liked living in Mobile, Alabama, which he had left not long before for North Carolina, before moving on to Illinois. I couldn't imagine Larry, gay Brooklynite Larry, in Alabama. (I lived in central Virginia at the time.) He shrugged, and said "it was fine; I liked it there." But what did you do there, I asked. "I worked," he said.

The advent of the internet must have been a great boon to Larry. At a certain point I began getting emails from him, seemingly random missives from Larryland. These were generally non-sequiturs, announcements having nothing to do with any previous correspondence, and were often broadcasts about food: what he was going to cook, or had just cooked. A few years ago, when we were both going to spend the summer in Avignon, I began to receive frequent messages about restaurants in the Vaucluse, addressed...