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.