Gay volleyball tonight—the first of the season. It was fun, though a bit swampy.

I'm now reading the later diaries of Rorem, 1986-1999. He's in his sixties and seventies. His writing is more prosaic. There's more recollection and less reflection. He's become more stridently political, which I don't like—I liked the Rorem who proclaimed how he cared not at all for politics. He's also lost his endearing self-doubt. There's much discussion of physical ailments. In short, he's become a cranky old man. In some ways he reminds me of Diamond in some of the taped interviews I have of him. But I'm enjoying this volume even more than the others. I actually enjoy reading about the details of his life, the daily events AND the ailments. As reading, it's quite interesting. But as for Rorem the person, the older man, he's less likeable (though perhaps I've caught him at a bad time—the mid-80s). His life seems far more settled. Where is the vulnerability, the admiration of others?

Well, I read the diaries out of order, going from the Paris and New York Diaries directly to the later diaries. Where once he wrote of encounters with Les Six (lunches with Poulenc and Milhaud), now he writes of television shows, Reagan policies, and pets. The AIDS epidemic has politicized him, I think, which one can hardly find fault with.

It's funny to look back on the time period from a perspective just slightly removed in time. I don’t like the tone of the 80s, on either side of the political spectrum. AIDS politicized the gay population, for better and for worse. In some way it was the impetus which has advanced gays socially, even politically. But it also became the face of gay culture. I don't mean to suggest that we should marginalize the still grave AIDS epidemic, or that we should be glad that the disease has spread to other populations, but I'm glad it is no longer synonymous with gay culture.

More striking than anything, really, when comparing the early diaries and the later diaries is just how crass modern life seems to have become, striking even in the life of a great artist like Rorem. Television intrudes, and pop culture. Perhaps it's more a factor of what was NOT included in the earlier diaries rather than what is in the later ones.

Before I leave the early diaries behind, a few last notes. Rorem writes a little paragraph about some drag queens, remarking that the dream of one of them is to be fucked by the unknown soldier. Funny.

He notes in June of 1959 that he missed part of the rehearsal with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic of the world premier of his Third Symphony because he had an interview for his unemployment insurance renewal. He speaks fondly of his weekly check of $45.

He writes a couple of engaging pages on the bathhouse experience. I must come back to this sometime. It's rich stuff.

About diary writing: "Anecdotes are a diary's heart's blood. Yet their annotation requires more skill and patience than philosophic musings." He’s so right.

On sexual intercourse: "Think of it, obsessing the heart, dominating logic, teasing nights, wasting whole days! Isn't it really—well—rather silly, or at least senseless: two clumsy positions rubbing like washboards with ugly grunts and an ultimate thump that rhymes with nothing, except maybe 'Go away'—when two minutes earlier, for some wild reason, it was almost 'I love you'? For that we walk the streets fifty-two weeks a year!"