The Russians have become a burden. They write as faithfully as ever, and as voluminously, but they say less and less. At the beginning and ending of each email are paragraphs of giddiness about how delighted they are to receive “letters” from me, and how happy they are to have found me. In middle paragraphs they write that they’re convinced I’m genuine and “different” from others, as if to reassure themselves, and they beg for me to be honest and truthful to them in all matters—for it is the only way love flourishes.

Both have announced their love for me, and have spoken of our lives together, this together with a perfunctory allowance for the possibility that I may think of them as mere boys, that I many not feel quite the same as they do. But in the next sentence there’s more discussion of when we’ll meet, our undying love, etc. In any email there are perhaps two or three sentences upon which I can build any sort of reply. I can’t muster the energy to keep up this correspondence much longer. Sergey writes that I give him “new vivifying strength.” Vivifying? I don’t even use that word. How do Russians know such words?

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Since writing this I’ve heard from another person who was contacted from his gay.com profile by a Russian, an “Ivan.” We’ve been comparing notes on our Russians, and he’s done some research about this Russian scam. He tells me the letters he receives are numbered consecutively, presumably to keep tract of which pre-written, canned letters have been sent and which have not. He he These scam artists are smooth. I told him that I was continuing to write because it was entertaining, but that lately it’s become more burdensome than amusing. I had thought I might continue until these people either tire of my non-committal, frivolous emails or actually get to the point of asking for money. Today that point was reached. Sergey says he went to an agency to see what it would take to get a visa to the U.S. Options were laid out, and costs were enumerated. All told, it’ll take about $420 in U.S. dollars. To save this much himself it will take 4-5 months, after he pays his bills, and assuming he does not help his parents. I’m tempted to reply, asking if I should then plan to see him sometime in June?

But what about the cost of the flight and other travel? Maybe I should offer to make his arrangements for an apartment here in Rochester, once of course he sends me the $1000 in U.S. currency for a security deposit. He mentioned 3 times that he’ll have to take an HIV test before he’s allowed a visa. Is that supposed to elicit empathy or something, or maybe put me at ease that he’s HIV negative? I haven’t answered him yet, but I think I’m going to ask about the cost of the flight, and then act disappointed that it’ll be another year and a half before he’s saved enough money. What a test of our love!

(Actually, I just responded to him. This is what I wrote: “What about the cost of the flight? You haven't considered that. It will surely take a $1000 or more. To save that much will take you a year or two. I'm willing to wait that long. Are you?”) ha ha

Just a quick word about Judge Alito. He will be confirmed, and he’ll take his place with Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts. The court will be more conservative than it is now, deferring to legislative and executive power in nearly all significant cases. This group of justices will marginalize the Supreme Court. That is what they want, though I don’t understand it. But there have been long stretches in the nation’s history in which the courts have been marginal players among the three branches. We’re entering another. It’s not the end of the world. Those seeking redress in the courts will have to sift their focus and their efforts to the legislatures. I don’t think this is necessarily bad. For too long legislatures have been protected by the courts from their own bad legislation, and their own bad animus. When the cover of the courts is taken away, I think public opinion may well be advanced in some cases. I’m thinking about gay rights. It’s on my mind. But the same may be true of other things. I heard today that if Roe v. Wade were abrogated (which I don’t believe it will be), 9 states have laws on the books to outlaw abortion. A considerable majority believes in the right to an abortion. Let those 9 states try to sustain their ban, and let’s see how those states stand up to the pressure of a far more progressive nation than is represented in that ban. For gay rights, maybe it’s time for the public opinion to catch up to where I believe we ought to be in the law. It takes time, and the best thing we can do to advance gay rights is to be open about who we are and to let our neighbors know that we’re queer. Invisibility is our greatest enemy, still today. Ok, enough on the political soapbox. I could write volumes, but I force myself not to write about political matters in this blog.

Saturday I went to Spot Coffee. As I found my way to a table along the window at the front I saw an acquaintance from the gym. Let’s call him Ed. We waved and that was that. I booted up my laptop, opened a book, and began looking through my art glass lamp book while intermittently chatting on gay.com. There I was with a half a dozen gay chat windows open, profiles of nude men, and a busy conversation going on with a chatting man calling himself (I am not making this up), something like HungHugeInRochester. At one point I noticed Ed rise from his chair—I thought, to go to the restroom. But before I know it he’s headed directly toward me, no doubt to exchange a few words. He’s a chatty fellow. I scramble frantically to open a new browser window that will cover my sordid activities, but I can’t manage to do it. My friend has no sense of boundaries or discretion, and he bends over to see what I’m working on at my laptop. The look that came over his face spoke the words, “Oh, I see.” The stammering of my voice said, “Yes, I’m a raging homo. Now leave me the fuck alone you stupid twit.” He he Neither of us addressed the pink elephant staring at us from my laptop, and after a few minutes—truly a few minutes of senseless babbling—we both regained our heads. He lifted his head after examining what I was “working” on, and retained a smirk on his face for the rest of the encounter. I felt like an ass—first for chatting so openly on such a site, and then for being embarrassed for chatting on such a site. I’m certain he had assumed I was perfectly straight—or rather it wasn’t even an issue. Why would he think anything on the issue? We never talked about anything but workouts, houses, and our jobs (actually mostly his job—he liked to talk about himself mostly). As we chatted and pretended that all was fine, he tells me that he’s taking voice lessons through the Eastman community outreach program. He wants to be able to join a music group, a chorale group. And then he tells me he’s taking dance and ballet lessons. And soon I’m thinking I may have a recruit on my hands. Well, not really. He seems pretty straight to me, but goofy straight. He’s goofy. And he speaks out of the side of his mouth, like a Flintstones character might do. It’s . . . unsexy, to say the least. This is the guy who told me of an earlier career in modeling, before the civil engineering. He also writes poetry. I’ve been outed to a straight guy who’s a bigger homo than me.

The Russian boys are persistent. Every day they write a voluminous amount of text, ticking off the details of their lives as if accounting to me for their whereabouts these past 25 suspicious years, as if reading from their curriculum vitae in an interview in which they’re clearly not quite qualified for the position. And every day I return their voluminous text with a small paragraph or two of hastily written text addressing their points in summary fashion.

Yesterday Sergey said he bowed out of a birthday celebration for his boss to go to the Internet café, where he waited for over an hour to get an available computer. It took him three hours to write the email, with dictionary in hand, and the fluttering heart of an excited school boy. He tells me of his first and only boyfriend, a lifelong friend who arrived at his home one day when he was in the bath. Sergey answered the door in a towel. They looked at each other awkwardly, and he risked their friendship to speak his heart. They were together for two years before a heart-rending breakup which, if one were to credit all that he said, nearly ended his desire to be with other humans.

He wants me to send a picture, but not a naked one, so that he can frame it and put it in his bedroom in order to see me before he goes to sleep. And I swear that I’ve written nothing to encourage this sort of indulgent lovey dovey fall-off-the-precipice puppy love. Is he playing me? I can’t tell, but I don’t think so. These Russians seem to wear their earnestness and emotions on their sleeves, sweet but utterly humorless. And so dull. But I’m interested to hear about Russian life.

I’ve returned to reading Edmund White’s biography of Genet, and I’m enjoying it greatly. Edmund White is a great writer, and I have this latent desire to contact him in some way, for no good reason. He’s an immensely underappreciated figure in American gay culture. When you learn about White you begin to understand how shallow much of gay culture is. Maybe I've said that already? (I've also returned to the Gide diaries, which are getting interesting as we proceed through the '30s and toward WWII. The poetry of Rimbaud awaits me, and I still have not made it through Pride and Prejudice. And Ann bought me a few books for Christmas which I'm eager to jump into. Never enough time. )

Genet once noted how he differed from Proust and Gide, a difference rooted in the full acceptance of “the antisocial implications of homosexuality.” He says that a homosexual is a “man who by his very nature is out of step with the world, who refuses to enter into the system that organizes the entire world. . . To live with surprises, changes, to accept risks, to be exposed to insult: it’s the opposite of social constraint, of the social comedy. It follows that if the homosexual accepts more or less to play a role in this comedy, like Proust or Gide, he’s cheating, he’s lying: everything he says becomes suspect. . . I reject deception; and if I’ve ever exaggerated and pushed my heroes or their adventures in the direction of what’s frightening or obscene, it’s been an exaggeration in the direction of truth.”

I like that. I think one of the things that motivates me to write so openly about various things is a certain rejection of deception, not that discretion is antithetical to truth. But often it feels truthful and right to me to speak and act openly about things that others think should be kept private. In the same passage Genet claims that for the homosexual “romance is a kind of stupidity or deception—for him only pleasure exists.” I don’t quite see that, or rather, that it may be true of only a segment of the gay population, perhaps of the world of prisoners, criminals and sailors that Genet preferred.

The first portion of the quote above—about the homosexual being one who is out of step with the world—I have come to believe. There was a time when I was younger, more judgmental (yes, even more judgmental than now), and less able to accept different points of view, when I was very critical of such things as gay cinema, gay literature, or gay culture. Why should one’s mere sexual preference color everything else about one’s life, I argued. But it does. As I’ve heard gays say before to straight people, imagine living as a straight person in a gay world, a world in which all the men were coupled with other men, where the norms were inverted. You’d be uncomfortable. You’d want your world back, a world that reflected yourself. Gays live in a minority status, but it’s based on something very fundamental to our identity, something perhaps even more fundamental than race. Gender roles and sexual identity and preference are as fundamental as it gets. Anyway, so yes, I tend to want to watch gay films, and to read gay authors, and I’m unapologetic about it.

Ann and I were just laughing about the movie “Napoleon Dynamite,” and about the lead character whose organizing principles and value system seemed to hang in large part upon the notion of favorites—proclaiming x his favorite comic book superhero spoke volumes in his world about the kind of person he was. It reminded me of my Russian boys. Both of them insisted I tell them my favorite color, as if I have a favorite color. What is your favorite season? What is your favorite kind of music? What types of television do you watch? What is your favorite singer? What is your favorite food. Your favorite drink? It’s these types of questions they fire at me as if their answers held any significance to our compatibility or our future as lover boys in our big gay yankee love nest in the states. Who over the age of 12 has a favorite color? After listing his favorite things Sergey writes, “What about you? Please, answer at the same questions.” How could I not . . . make up a favorite color. Of course I did. My favorite color is now blue.