VISIBILITY

At 16, Andrew McMillan came out to his father, who responded by handing him a book by Thom Gunn. Reading Gunn’s poems about gay love, McMillan “saw for the first time that who I was might be worthy of poetry, worthy of literature”. Today’s young readers might have a similar experience with 100 Queer Poems, co-edited by McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, in which this brand-new poem appears. It’s one of two substantial new LGBTQ anthologies out this spring, along with the superb Queering the Green (Lifeboat, £15), a selection of 31 Irish poets. “Visibility”, used positively, has become a buzzword, but this poem uses it in another sense; the idea of being hyper-visible, and attracting unwanted looks, will be familiar to many queer readers. Here, a man carrying flowers is a reminder to passers-by of their own less colourful lives; their tutting disapproval comes with a hint of suppressed desire (“it’s as though he wants us to look”).

Tristram Fane Saunders look at him carrying flowers through the town holding them tight in their plastic crinoline

who must he think he is with those colours the skimmed milk of the roses the shy cheeks

of the tulips moving like a silent firecracker down the high street

it’s as though

he wants us to look to recall all the bouquets we never took home

to our wives and see now how the wind unfastens the ballgowns of the peonies

how their petals unfold and then fall each one still whole and curling in the breeze

so now with every step a pink and falling lid a trail of blinking eyes behind him

From ‘100 Queer Poems’ (Vintage, £16.99)

up “selfies at...”, “...funerals” was the third option Google gave me. I clicked on it, aghast to find mourners posing beside the caskets of their dead friends and relatives. Some people had their thumbs up, meaning... what exactly? Great embalming job? Great death?

The march moved west and then turned north onto LaGuardia Place. It bottlenecked at Washington Square Park, so Amy and I took our leave. I walked her home and then continued on foot to my place, another 53 blocks north.

As the days passed and the marches became ubiquitous, I grew to think of them much the way I do about buses and subways. I’ll just take this BLM down to 23rd Street. The people were friendly, the snacks plentiful, and it felt good to walk in the middle of the avenue.

At 23rd I might wait an hour or so before catching another BLM back home, or cross-town to the West Side. While marching, I’d look at the people around me and wonder what they were thinking. It’s like at the symphony. I always assumed that the audience was comparing this rendition of, say, Mahler’s Second to a superior one. Then I started asking around and learnt that people were entertaining the same crazy thoughts I was: How long would it take me to eat all my clothes – not the zippers and buttons, but just the fabric? If I had to do it in six months, could I? If you shredded a sport coat very finely and added half a cup to, say, stuffing, would your body even notice it?

I felt sure that, while marching, everyone around me thought of racism and of the many black Americans who have been killed by the police over the years. We who were white likely considered our own complicity, or, rather, we touched on it briefly – that exposed wire – before moving on to other people who were much worse than we were. But then the time stretched on, and our thoughts strayed, didn’t they?

Something I thought of one afternoon, marching uptown with a sizeable crowd, was a well-known movie actor who had contacted me almost 30 years earlier, when Hugh and I lived in SoHo. He wanted me to come by his house to discuss a possible collaboration, and I was flattered, for I had never met anyone famous. It was snowing, and almost three feet had accumulated by the time I left my apartment. The actor didn’t live far from me, half a mile, maybe, but getting to his house was a real pain given my short legs and the waterproof boots I didn’t have.

I arrived to find his two young children – a boy and a girl – in the dining room, being served by a thin black woman whose hair was covered with a do-rag. She said hello to me as we passed by, and I noticed the steam coming off the soup she was setting down.

“You’re lucky she came in to work in weather like this,” I said to the actor as we made our way to the living room. “And on a Saturday, no less!”

He offered a thin smile. “Actually, that’s my wife.”

My face still burns to think of this, but if nothing else, it taught me a lesson. From that day on, whenever I go to someone’s home and see a person of a different race working either inside or outside the house, I say, “Is that your husband?” or “How come you make your wife do all the cleaning?”

They always answer, “Conchita, my wife? She’s, like, 20 years older than me and has four kids! Plus I’m already married. To a man.” Eventually, though, I’ll be right, and my host will say, “May I just thank you for being the one person in my life who’s not a horrible racist?”

As the weeks passed, I saw more and more protest signs reading DEFUND THE POLICE. That won’t be doing us much good come election time, I thought, worried over how this would play on Fox News: “The left wants it so that when armed thugs break into your house and you dial 911, you’ll get a recording of Rich Homie Quan laughing at you!”

Amy worried, too. It wasn’t taking money allocated for law enforcement and redirecting it towards social services that bothered her – rather, it was the language and how Trump would use it to scare people. He’d already started, and I imagined that, leading up to the election, he would just keep hammering at it.

“Then there are all the statues being pulled down,” Amy said when she and Adam arrived on Emerald Isle. “I’d thought that would be nearly impossible, that they were, like, screwed into the ground or something, but I guess all you need is some good rope and a dozen or so really mad people.”

“Mad strong people,” Adam added.

“I’m not sure the general public really pays all that much attention to statues,” I said. “Don’t you think you could come in the night and replace General Braxton Bragg’s head with that of, say, Whoopi

Goldberg, and it would take months for anyone to notice? Don’t most of us see a bronze figure on a pedestal and think, simply, statue?”

Amy guessed that I was right. “For those few exceptions who pay closer attention, you could keep the monument and change the plaque,” I said. “It could read something like CHESTER BEAUREGARD JR – UNFORTUNATE BLACKSMITH WHO BORE A STRIKING RESEMBLANCE TO THE TRAITOR GENERAL BRAXTON BRAGG.”

My friend Asya, who is Jewish, thought otherwise when I brought up the issue on the phone the next day. “If there were statues of famous Nazis around, even ones with replaced heads and nameplates, I still wouldn’t want to pass them every day,” she said. “I mean, ugh, what a slap in the face!”

I see her point. To those upset about the monuments that were recently toppled, I guess I’d say, “Look, times change. Jefferson Davis overlooked your godforsaken traffic circle for 100 years. Now, we’ll just put him in storage and make it someone else’s turn for a while.”

“Who could argue with that?” I asked my friends John and Lynette, who have a house not far from the Sea Section. I’d thought the streets in our neighbourhood were named after the developer’s children, but it seems I was wrong.

“That’s Lee Avenue as in Robert E,” John said. “Stuart Avenue as in

Jeb, and Jackson as in Stonewall.”

When I repeated this to Amy, she said, “What about Scotch Bonnet Drive?”

“That’s after, um, General Jedediah Scotch Bonnet,” I told her.

Then there was the street called Coon Crossing. A year earlier, I might have thought nothing of it, but everything was getting a second look now. I was surprised to learn that John and Lynette’s neighbourhood in Raleigh – Cameron Village – was now called simply the Village District, this because the Cameron it was named after had been a plantation owner. This made me wonder about the men behind my elementary and high schools. Who was E C Brooks? Jesse Sanderson?

In the meantime, Uncle Ben’s rice was now called Ben’s Original. The box was still orange, but there was no longer a face on it. Eskimo Pies disappeared as well.

Flash mobs that were predominantly white would chant: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’

“I was fine with all this Black Lives Matter stuff until they went after both Aunt Jemima and Mrs Butterworth’s,” our friend Bermey said. “Now, I’m like, ‘Hey, don’t f--with my syrup!’”

One of the many shops on the island that sells inflatable rafts and inexpensive clothing had a Confederate flag beach towel in its window. I saw a fair number of these in eastern North Carolina. Some were discreet – a decal on a windscreen – and others were loud: fullsized standards billowing in front of houses, often beside a TRUMP flag or affixed to massive pickup trucks that would tear up and down the main road.

The trucks were unnaturally high off the ground and most often had jacked-up front wheels that made them look like they were forever going uphill – Carolina Squats, they were called, or bro dozers. Their mufflers had been modified as well, or perhaps they’d been removed altogether. Engines roared as if to say, “A--hole coming through!” Should there be any doubt that the driver was insecure regarding his masculinity, one could often find a pair of lemonsized testicles dangling from the trailer hitch.

“Lord, son,” Bermey said when, astonished, I described them to him. “You ain’t never seen truck nutz?”

I was eight when we moved south from New York. It was the first time I heard the words Yankee and Rebel. In school, at cub scouts and the country club, you were on either one side or the other. People who win the war move on. People who lose turn their flags into beach towels and hang hard rubber testicles from their bumpers. They make it easy for the rest of us to hide. “Over there!” we say, pointing to a bro dozer with a Confederate flag affixed to it. “That’s what a racist looks like.”

When I was in seventh grade, I acted as campaign manager for Dwight Bunch, one of the three black students at Carroll Junior High. He ran for class president – and won – with my brilliant slogan “We Like Dwight a Bunch.” Two years later, our school was desegregated. Fights broke out in the parking lot. My friend Ted had his nose broken with a Coke bottle.

In our 20s we both dated a number of black guys, which I always thought made us the opposite of racists. I didn’t have sex with them because of their colour but just because they were there and willing. Now, I was reading that sleeping with black guys meant you were racist, that you were exoticising them.

Everything was suspect, and everywhere you turned there was an article titled “___________’s Race Problem”. It could be about anyone: an actor who’d never had a costar of colour, a comedian who used the word “Negro” 20 years ago. The articles were always written by white people in their early 20s.

I saw the phrase POC (White Passing) in the signature of an email someone sent and wondered how long that had been a thing.

Reckoning was the word I kept hearing. It was time for a racial reckoning.

We stayed at the beach for two weeks and returned to New York just as the protests had petered out into bike-riding opportunities. Flash mobs of predominantly white people would pedal up the avenues, 3,000-strong, blocking traffic, chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and, occasionally, “Black Lives Matter!” – but strangely, in the sing-songy way a fishmonger might call, “Freshcaught haddock!”

I came upon a bike march one Saturday afternoon, the last day of spring, at around five o’clock. People lined Third Avenue, most raising their phones to shoot pictures and videos, or to turn their backs on the cyclists and take selfies. Beside me stood two white girls in their early 20s, both frantically texting. Both had tans. “Where can we get bikes?” one asked the other. She tugged down her mask and commenced filming herself. “Black Lives Matter!” she shouted. “Wooooo!”

“How do I get across?” asked a frail-looking elderly woman who had suddenly appeared beside me. Her rust-coloured wig was pulled down low on her forehead, and she wore a sun visor. In her hand was a heavy-looking bag from the nearby drugstore.

“You wait until these people are done,” snapped one of the suntanned girls.

I – who, of course, needed to pee – was wondering the same thing: How might I cross? How do I, how do all of us, get to the other side?

© 2022 David Sedaris