Getting the Gays, Part 3

I was always in love when she was singing.1972.

In Cambridge there was a movie theater and bar called Casablanca. First place in town I ever got served alcohol outside the Phoenix. It was a place to go when you needed to get away. This song was always playing. Loved it. I saw Casablanca in the theater. Black-and-white is spectacular in wide screen. I saw Night of the Hunter there too. The cinematography is like 3-D. Charles Laughton was a genius.

Saddest scene I’ve ever seen in the movies. Shirley underwater with her throat cut, all because she believed the preacher who told her she would be free if she joined him. 

I wonder. I remember the gifted men who let me into their secret enclave, not for sex but for esthetic and intellectual pleasures mostly lost on others. Are they happy now? Every TV show on the air or cable now has its own troubled male romance. Tongue deep kisses. Waking up drunk and hungover like mortal people. Make them feel normal, accepted, free? 

They get to talk about things in public. Can’t tell you how enlightening it was when I first heard a music clerk describe getting mouth-raped in a restroom and how much he loved it. He didn’t seem to know I didn’t want to know.

People forget that secrets are power. The open coat can be an empty one. Oscar Wilde learned that. And all the people who have been mimicking his wit with their own precious quips have not sought to learn from their master.

Secrecy commands a certain respect. Lavish display invites contempt.

I remember a melancholic friend on the roof of Lowell House playing this for me for the first time. It was gorgeous, transformative.

And I also remember feeling disgust about this. Pretty sure I’m not the only one.

But you’ve made your choice, or so I hear. I liked it when you were the best dressed, best educated, most interesting people one could talk to. And I’m still in love with Roberta Flack. In 1972.

See Also Part 1 and Part 2 below.