The first follow-up to my posting yesterday “A gay life”, which had material about my first male lover, Larry Schourup, from earlier postings of mine. About 55 years of the loving friendship that succeeded our original relationship, a lifelong conversation carried on through enormous changes in our lives. LS ended up in Japan, with a long-time Japanese partner, Isao; they had to conceal their homosexuality and their relationship for many years, until recently it became possible for them to live openly, and to apply for domestic partnership in Kyoto (which I now have learned was granted on 5/29/24, wonderful thing).
My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago). I am, however, overwhelmed by the firehouse of fascism being sprayed on a daily basis by the overlords in my country, which needs a variety of responses, all of which take time — so I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence.
In addition to our chat on many subjects, LS and I regularly exchanged birthday greetings, mostly of the “I am glad you were born” variety; my birthday is 9/8, his 10/16.
Meanwhile, back a few years, LS was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Since then his life has been a nightmare of pain, devastating treatments, side effects, and life-threatening crises. Which he described to me in a measured way in mail. Interspersed with reflections on our lives, things we read and saw and listened to, and topics we were writing on.
I got a message from LS on 3/18/24 about his daily life (including some hair-raising medical stuff), and nothing after that. I sent him a ritual birthday message on 10/16/24, but got no reply. And then, on 2/19/25, I sent him a gravely anxious note asking if he was ok. No response for weeks, so I began to fear that he’d died (which would, after all, not be a surprise — a great sorrow, but not a surprise).
I then discovered that I apparently had no way of finding out. Everyone I could think of who might know had died or vanished — excepting Isao, who certainly would know, but I had no way of getting hold of him (if he has an e-address, I don’t know it and couldn’t find it, and in any case I don’t speak or write Japanese). I vexed about this for weeks, started drafting memorial recollections of our time together, and dithered.
Yesterday, a message that began:
Yes, I’m OK, but the past year has been another rocky one.
A year that no one should have to live through. I will spare you.
But he was alive. I exulted:
Oh, oh, oh, you are alive. I was sure you’d died but had no way to check. And I’m overwhelmed by dead friends, still trying to write about most of them. You were impossibly hard to write about.
Adding that I had the quote for the occasion. From the musical / light opera / whatever Candide. From Act I, some fabulous lines when an astonished Candide comes across Cunegonde:
[CANDIDE] Dearest, how can this be so? You were dead, you know. You were shot and bayonetted, too. [CUNEGONDE] That is very true.
But she lives, she lives, and they are deliriously happy.
When my caregiver J arrived today, I told him an abbreviated version of the Larry story and added the lines from Candide. A piece of musical theater that he had seen performed (in English, as Leonard Bernstein intended) and loved. He recognized the reference immediately.
So I pulled up the original Broadway cast album of the show on my Apple Music and cranked the volume up high so we could hear it all over the house as we worked. I did a lot of singing along, but I really can’t do Barbara Cook. Irra Pettina, yes, Barbara Cook, no.
Somewhere along the line I referred to the show as a Broadway musical, and J was baffled by that, because he knew nothing at all about NYC. So I had to explain the grid of streets and avenues in (most of) Manhattan, and Broadway the broad street cutting slantwise over the grid, with the district in midtown where most of the theaters are — on or close to, Broadway. (These cultural and linguistic lessons go both ways. I have been getting a serious education in the politics and culture of Latin America, plus a lot of Spanish vocabulary and syntax. And I’m trying to learn the names of the letters in the Spanish alphabet, the way I can rattle off the ones in English and German.)
Meanwhile, I can belt out “Feeding the pigs and sweetly growing old”.
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