The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White

to the toilet—a discreet bit of European elegance opposed in spirit to everything my father enjoyed, since for him his solemn, conspicuous verification of the waiter's addition and his slow, deliberate stacking up of one twenty-dollar bill after another was the ceremonial bride-price weighed in before his awed guest, the clear measure of his cold esteem.
    Butler and I spent long hours together walking through Central Park. I kept quoting the Logical Positivists to him, philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap or AJ. Ayer, whereas he spoke of Saussure and Roland Barthes; he'd never heard of my men nor I of his, nor was either of us eager to learn anything about the other We each wanted to convince, something we'd always been able to do with friends up till now. I accused him of being uncritical, not sufiiciendy skeptical (I meant original), a slave to French fads, although in 1968 Structuralism and semiotics had not yet triumphed in America and he was ahead of the fad. He accused me of embracing a stony-hearted Austrian Positivism that went against my own artistic ambitions. I saw my Positivism as parallel to my Socialism; I could believe in them both precisely because they worked against the cultural and social elitism my natural allegiances might favor.
    ",\nyway," I said, "your Mr. Barthes or Bardeby, you say, believes in the

    death of the author whereas my ideas merely assign the writer a useful if highly limited role in the ideal society of the future."
    We had but one article of faith in common. We were both Socialists although of the anguished puritanical sort who waste more time on wondering whether to give alms, translate Mallarmc or kill oui' rich parents than on discussing concrete steps toward social justice or taking power. Buder's parents weren't even rich and his imaginary sacrifice of them to the revolutionary firing squad was a form of social climbing. We wanted to imagine personal sacrifices worthy of a saint and cruelty worthy of Saint-Just. China's great Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965, thrilled us as we dimly heard echoes of it, because we liked the idea that intellectuals must endles.sly examine their conscience and submit to work in the fields beside the "people," that entity we idealized in the abstract and despised in the particular, especially the funny-smelling, hard-drinking, unsmiling, racist members of the proletariat we were meeting in New York.
    We may have discussed the faraway Cultural Revolution; what we didn't see was that a gay revolution was happening under our very noses. More and more gay men were telling me their stories, as though the main pressure behind cruising were narrative rather than sexual. "So many stories, so litde time to tell them," might have been a T-shirt slogan back then. The silence that had been imposed for so many centuries on homosexuals had finally been broken, and now we were all talking at once. Sometimes we'd rather talk than fuck; perhaps we fucked so that we could indulge in the pillow talk afterwards. We talked and talked about our lives and even very young men could sound as though they were ancient as they recounted their stories. "Oh, that was years and years ago," they'd say, launching into tales about home, church, school.
    Not all the stories inspired me with sympathy. One night after I left Butler's and Lynne's apartment I cruised a guy my age on Broadway who invited me home with him. He was tall, thick, hairy, his chest operatically wide under a straining white T-shirt, his hair wiry and long, pushed back behind his ears. He had a three-day beard. His dodgy green eyes protruded from his pale boxer's face, itself unhealthily attractive as though he'd just nursed a bruise with a piece of raw steak.
    He spoke grammatical English with a thug's slur and in a low, resonant voice, a voice from the balls. He said, without a smile, "Warm come to my place and get furk?"

    The Farewell Symphony
    "Sure," I said, getting hard, frightened he might be dangerous. We