The Beauty of Men Never Dies: An Autobiographical Novel

Driving through the Stars

126 Driving through the Stars The poet John Wieners wrote, “The beauty of men never dies. It drives a blue car through the stars.” If I thought dying was like rushing to meet a handsome lover, a lover who truly loves you as you do him, who will hold you in his arms and bring you to orgasm in the most thrilling manner, I’d be willing to die without a qualm. I think I will start thinking of death in that way. Start thinking of God as the handsome lover waiting for me out there in the stars. I think homosexuals love in a way women can but often don’t. We perhaps respond sexually to other men, and only sexually, when we are younger. But if you are at all enterprising and have any kind of sense, by the time you’re in your early twenties you’ve done that enough. And nature, in its clumsy way, swings someone into view who is really no handsomer or more special than many others, but you find a little bell rings. And if you’re lucky, the bell rings for both of you. And if it doesn’t ring for him, it does one day because you love him. Which brings us to domesticity. The idea that the domestic life of Mom, Dad, and the kids spells happiness is very recent historically. It wasn’t until Queen Victoria’s time that this was considered a desirable goal. Before her time, happiness was probably spelled out as fame, power, riches, sex with beautiful people. Happiness at home never came up. Then Victoria wed and bred and set a royal example of domestic bliss for everyone to follow, which now even homosexual men and women wish to copy. I recently saw daguerreotypes of some of Victoria’s 127 Driving through the Stars children. They were all gussied up, standing in what looked like the gardens of Windsor Castle on an overcast day. What days aren’t overcast in England? Only the ones when it’s raining. The royal little girls were decorated with plumes, tight gloves, stiff-hooped and ruffled skirts, albeit only down to their knees. Their brother was in kilts and an awkward Scottish hat that I’m sure he hated wearing. He would not look at the camera and seemed quite downcast. Their looks certainly didn’t suggest that home life with Vicky and Al was much of a ball. But somehow, the idea has permeated all of Western society to the point that any deviation from it is looked upon as unfortunate or sinful. How is it that the bourgeois can only conceive of “boring” as a legitimate goal? Which is only to say that perhaps as you lie under someone’s loving body and you fall, fall, fall through your orgasm and call out to him/her, “Hold me, hold me very tight,” you are getting your glimpse of heaven. And that is what it will be like when the end comes: falling, falling, falling through the stars into the arms of the one you loved most of all in your whole life in the entire world in the entire universe. And perhaps for some it will be for the first time. How wonderful. It’s an idea worth considering. ...