Experiences Poly…Gay

I’ve been back rereading some books and rewatching some films of gay literature, in particular Andrew Holleran’s novel Grief and the film The Naked Civil Servant, dealing with Quentin Crisp.  I tried to go on to the film’s sequel, An Englishman in New York, made thirty years after the first film, but the DVD was damaged.  I’ve also read the autobiographical novels of Edmund White, and one of his memoirs; plus the earlier novels of Christopher Isherwood.

Isherwood left England in 1929 to live in Germany.  When Hitler came to power, he spent some years moving from country to country, before settling in California in 1939.

Crisp spent most of his life in England, where homosexuality was illegal, but spent his last years in New York, in the time “after Stonewall.”

Andrew Holleran was a member of the “Violet Quill,” a group of gay writers who met and exchanged ideas in New York in the early 1980s.  Several have since dealt with life since the AIDS pandemic.

One theme I’ve picked up on is the great sense of liberation which followed the gradual loosening of anti-gay laws, leading to many people feeling that “anything goes.”  Edmund White remarks that, during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, he was puzzled by the advice to “know your partners.”  Wasn’t the whole point that you could just have sex with anyone, as many strangers and however often you wanted?  Holleran’s novel Dancer From the Dance apparently deals with drugs and gay orgies at Fire Island.  In An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp and his friend are asked to leave a gay club in New York because they’re dressed “normally” rather than bare to the waist or in leather.

I’m still tossing around the question of how much “poly” is an orientation (“I’m naturally happier with several lovers”) and how much it’s an ethic we can choose.

For me, “anything goes” has to have limits:  I need openness and honesty.  I need mutual respect and caring.  Then “anything that works for all involved goes.”