Eight: A Source Code
In which I continue to spill all the beans, drop by drop
The first time I met Arthur in the flesh, an antibiotic coursed inside me, slowly curing an STI I’d picked up a few weeks earlier in Miami.
I’d gone to Miami—this was in March 2019—ostensibly to catch the world premiere of an old college friend’s movie at the city’s annual film festival. Really, though, the screening was an excuse to visit a place I love, and at a time—the tail end of winter in New York—when normally I was starved for sunshine and warmth.
I assumed the guy I lived with at the time—we called each other “partners,” a term I now associate more with Starbucks employees—would want to come along, but inexplicably he declined. I couldn’t believe it. Who doesn’t like Miami, at least enough for a weekend getaway to see a mutual friend?
Now, of course, I realize my ex’s lack of interest was symptomatic of the larger breakdown of our relationship—a breakdown that my burgeoning entanglement with Arthur would soon make permanent.
A self-portrait I shot between returning from Miami and meeting Arthur in Williamsburg memorializes the transformation that was underway. After taking samples for the lab in a bathroom at my beloved Callen-Lorde, I glimpsed a new view of my face in the mirror. I could see that I was changing as a person—that the internal work I’d been doing since entering grad school in 2010 was now showing up in my visage. And it excited me.
There were the obvious alterations: I was already growing out my hair, por ejemplo, and I’d lost at least 15 pounds in excess weight after beginning a hot-yoga practice at Modo and resuming the tennis playing I’d enjoyed so much as a kid.
And on that particular day I wore a baseball cap with the logo of a Cuban team on it. I’d purchased the hat—one of several—on a trip to the island the previous summer; every time I donned one it reminded me of the powerful experiences I had there, in both Havana on the northern coast and Santiago de Cuba on the southern.
Put another way: Whenever I wanted to channel those experiences I donned one of the hats. It was an obvious way for me to show the external world that my inner world had changed. And by that point my inner world had changed a lot.
I wish I could remember which team I repped in the picture I refer to here, but—like so many things from before the pandemic—the image has vanished.
Or—that is—I can’t find it.
The Callen-Lorde location I visited that day abutted a building I once worked in and opposed—across the street—another former site of my labor. Indeed, I spent more than three years on that block (Seventeeth Street between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue), toiling first for the late downtown gay rag HX and then for The Advocate, where I served essentially as the “East Coast editor” for the historic L.A.-based LGBTQ newsmagazine.
It was in the lobby of that office tower across the way where I’d experienced a similar “mirror moment” some 15 years prior. Headed to the elevator after lunch one day, I saw my face in a pane of looking-glass with new clarity. It was as if I were seeing myself from a remove, the way passersby on the street might see me.
And what I registered was sadness.
And discontentment.
And anger.
In other words, the kind of emotions that repel other people rather than welcoming them in. And here I was noticing that disconnect objectively.
The self-discovery shook me. It also pleased me, because I knew the revelation was the result of all the psychotherapy I’d been doing, individually with my therapist as well as in a therapy group he ran for gay men.
“No wonder I’m single,” I thought to myself. I was projecting a negative self-image to my fellow Homo sapiens. The reflection was proof of it.
From that point on I vowed to carry myself in a different manner. But in order to do that, I had to change my own mind about myself.
So when Arthur entered my life all those years later—gorgeous, genius Arthur, with whom I felt immediately at home, even in the online context that marked our initial courtship—the proof wasn’t just him. It was in the mirror, smiling back at me.
Recently I finished reading The Joy Luck Club, a book I started absorbing, paso a paso, when I found it in a Goodwill near my West Coast home more than a year earlier. As an English PhD and an inveterate reader (like many of you, ahem, reading this post), I’m always working my way through a range of prose materials.
But this book seemed special to me and I wanted to savor it. Not only was I in awe from the jump—Amy Tan’s craft alone is spell-binding, before you even approach all the wisdom contained in the ancestral relations she traces—but the spine of the paperback bore the initials “A.P.S."—the initials of Arthur’s full name.
It’d be irrational for me to deduce that Arthur had placed the title on the shelf for me to espy. Nevertheless, I felt his presence on every page.
On this fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Gregorian calendar, I note the synchronies in the following passage, voiced by one of Tan’s matriarchs:
But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness, the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.
I haven’t seen Arthur in person in more than three years, but it doesn’t matter. He made me who I am today.
The proof is in the video at the top.
Eureka.