Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychology, Gay Men, Monette, General, United States, Gay Studies, Human Sexuality, Biography & Autobiography, Paul, Gay Men - United States, Biography, Social Science
ISBN: 9780060595647
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1992-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

On paper it looked pretty tame—the student tour of the Top 40, cramming every Rembrandt and Van Gogh I could find. Originally I'd put Amsterdam on the itinerary because of a vague and unsupported notion that it was a capital of homosex. (Why did you come to Casablanca? For the waters.) Having had my summer dose of sex—once a year, it was getting to be, up from zero—I averted my eyes from all shadowy doorways and red-lit alleys, steeling myself to walk past sidewalk bins of man-porn.

What was different now was that I would talk to anybody. In line at the Rijksmuseum, in student cafeterias, miming my polyglot way like an interpreter at the U.N. And not just with fellow students. I'd hustle over and engage with anyone who looked alone, making him laugh but somehow not feeling the fool anymore. Even men who were cruising me, I'd grin right back at them and ask them what it was like to be Dutch. No one was going to get this little puppy into bed again soon, so there was nothing to worry about from that quarter. What I was doing instead was being a writer, getting to know my material. And letting them all know too that they were in the presence of a Poet.

I hitched to Paris, sitting on my pack at the edges of poppy fields, one thumb out while I lurched through Pynchon's V and scrawled notes for a novel. Although the City of Light has become such a totem place for me—all bound up with loving Roger, so riddled with déjà vu that certain streets swarm with previous lives, till I'm the Shirley Maclaine of the Left Bank—I hardly took it in at first sight. I spent two days with the Green Guide, scuttling from museum to museum, but it wasn't the France I was after. I made my dutiful pilgrimage to the Rue de Fleurus, peering through a gated arch into a dusty courtyard, the very place where Gertrude Stein told Hemingway: You are all a lost generation.

Damn right—I couldn't wait to be lost. And for me that meant the immortal South, a jumble in my head of Vincent's burning yellow fields and Scott and Zelda at Juan-les-Pins, knocking martinis back with the Murphys and getting the best revenge. I had a very specific image of myself: baking in the sun while I wrote a novel. Paris would have to wait; I couldn't really see into its heart till I had some writing under my belt.

The first ride, a rattling truck that reminded me of my days in the coalbins, took me as far as Lyon by noon. I still thought I could reach Marseilles by nightfall, even if I made an hour's side trip to check out a Roman ruin in the Savoie. Or perhaps it was a ruined abbey, I was very big on those. In any case I never found it, and the country roads weren't kind to hitchhikers—autostop, the French call it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.