Lately I have a passion for Sartre. As I’m reading about Genet, I’m learning a bit more about Sartre, as they were friends. Sartre was a genius. He was of course a brilliant intellect and an intellectual. But more than his intellect, he understood people. He formalized his understanding in Being and Nothingness, but he also understood people in a less formal way. He wrote of his study of Genet (his book Saint Genet), “Whatever mistakes I may make, I’m sure that I know him better than he knows me, because I have a passion for understanding men and he a passion for not knowing them. Ever since our first meeting I have no recollection of our having spoken of anything other than him: which suits us both.” Genet said he liked Sartre because he was funny, amusing, and because he understood everything. “And it’s rather pleasant to be with a guy who understands everything while laughing about it and not judging it.” That’s the sort of person I want to have as a friend. He should be very intellectual, but even more important, he should understand people and himself. So often you know bright people, but they have stunning blind spots in their own understanding of others, or about how others perceive them.

Lately I’ve been down on friends. “Who needs them?” I say to myself. Maybe I’m just brooding that friends didn’t come to my party, people that I’d expect to come. But it’s not really that. It’s caught up in a series of reminders I’ve had lately that people have their own agendas and their own insular pursuits, and the rest is all filler. This happens as we get older. People begin to turn inward, I guess. We don’t want distractions from our routines and rituals. We do what we have to do in the world, and then we return home, not to be disturbed. I’m exactly that way. I don’t want distractions. I want to be left alone most of the time.

Today a manager at work was talking about the difficulty of getting people involved in a volunteer organization like the GLBT group at work. Someone from his church calls him, for example, looking for people to help with some activity, and all his mind can do is to race for an excuse to give to the person. I’m the same way, except that I don’t even let the person get as far as talking to me—I’m simply not answering, or Dan is not at home at that time. These days I want to pursue my own things. If I’m not at work or at the gym, I want to do stained glass, or read something from my reading list, or work on a design, or write in my blog. That’s all. Somehow I believe that my activities are more worthy of respect than the lists of others—at least I’m trying to be creative, making things, thinking, learning, etc.—but of course it’s all just a load of shit. We all are.

Back to Sartre. Sartre seems not to have fully understood homosexuality. He was fascinated by it, but I’m not sure he got it right. He wrote, “A person is not born homosexual or normal. He becomes one or the other, according to the accidents of his history and to his own reaction to those accidents. I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malfunction nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.” I’m not saying Sartre’s wrong, exactly, but I believe there are many factors that might lead someone to gay sexuality. There is no single explanation. And though it is cliché by now, certainly it is more fluid than previously thought. But to his credit, he was very interested in it, and non-judgmental. And what more can you ask of a person. I always like to trot out my favorite examples for how situations can influence or skew sexuality—prisoners who, when faced with no other outlets for their sexuality, turn to homosexuality, and priests who subvert their sexual drives and find it released in other, less acceptable ways—pedophilia. Of course some may challenge the causation in these examples—only the prisoners who are already pre-disposed to homosexuality turn to it in prison, and the priesthood attracts those with pedophilia tendencies. I suspect both are true. Anyway….

Here are a few interesting facts related to Genet. The American premier of his play “The Blacks” featured such people as Maya Angelou (who knew) and James Earl Jones. The film version of Genet’s play “The Balcony” featured such people as Shelley Winters, Leonard Nimoy, and Peter Falk. (Note to self: Try to find and see Genet’s short film called Un Chant d’Amour, or Song of Love. White says it’s a minor masterpiece in gay cinema.) In October, 1955 Genet had dinner with William Faulkner in a restaurant in Paris. Edmund White says of the meeting, that it was “reminiscent of the equally taciturn earlier encounter between Proust and Joyce.”

Today I had an HIV test. While I sat in the waiting room for the required 20 minutes, after swabbing my gums with the test stick, I couldn’t decide quite how I should react. It’s so easy to take the dramatic turn and view it as a chilling experience in a clinical setting, which it is. We poor gays, woe is I, to have to live with this, etc. But then I think that, well, HIV is not the death sentence it once was, and to react that way is to dishonor those living with HIV, blah blah blah. I didn’t expect to be positive, but that makes me want to prepare myself even more for the possibility that it might deliver the unexpected. For we have to preserve the unexpected in our minds, don’t we? My mind is constantly playing these games of balance and counterbalance, the mental ticks of the mildly autistic. Every morning when I cross the street between the parking garage and the office building I note in my mind how long my foot hit the curb before a car passes behind me, the car which might have hit me had I been slower or the driver faster. This bit of information in case I am hit one morning by a car and am testifying in my own personal injury suit months later. I have a million of these private rituals that clutter my mind. The truth is that had I been HIV+, I would have remembered that scene the rest of my life—the dark hallway between the testing room and the empty waiting area, the glass between the waiting room and the reception area, where two workers talking softly about a man’s unlikely story of his sexual history. I would have remembered the darkness of rooms, and the janitor running the vacuum as I thumbed through the Out and About magazine. I would have remembered the blue line across the stick, but even more, the jolt I felt upon seeing it. I felt some relief upon getting the result, but then guilt for being in any position to feel relief. I truly had no good reason to worry, but neither do I want to be complacent. I want to feel this and that, but never too much of anything, just so that my mind balances perfectly between all ends, as if I’m standing tall above it all on a thousand different tight ropes, boasting about how deftly I keep my balance while all the while moving the pole forward…in a thousand different directions, to the awe of an adoring crowd below. I need to sleep.