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"Third nymphomaniac lesbian needed for student mini-bus to Cairo.

"No freaks."

Saint Ennis, Saint Jack

There is a great deal of talk these days about the state of The Gay Community. I know friends who question where the activists are, why the younger gay men are so complacent, where are the signs of togetherness. Here in Seattle, Broadway, which used to be the Gay District in Seattle, has slowly eroded into a ghost town of closed businesses, bordered up stores, dwindling restaurants, and one great bookstore - Bailey Coy Books - that has survived the decades and manages to be one of the few independent booksellers in the city. It used to be that Broadway was packed with gay men and lesbians (mostly gay men) every night of the week. There were a number of bars nearby that were packed (so I hear) and it was easy to run into lots of people you knew.

Gay Pride began as a movement of self-acceptance and overcoming homophobia and shame. When the AIDS crisis began, gay men and lesbians came together to fight against a nation of zealots and politicians who simply didn't care that our brothers and sisters were dying horrible, painful deaths. How we banded together to make a public statement of support for AIDS sufferers - the Red Ribbon, the AIDS walks, the fund raisers, actions which have all become adopted by almost every non-profit fund-raising group - gave us more than a social purpose, it advanced our motives politically and personally. Friends died, and our lives were on the line.

I think it's often forgotten that the purpose of every social movement is to eventually become obsolete. Younger gays and lesbians are coming out at younger and younger ages, and aren't facing the stigmas which were embedded in society when I was younger. Eventually, the general population will shift in the majority (are we already there?) to acceptance of same-sex orientation. And Gay Pride, and the Gay Community, shift and evolve to become something else.

What was a community is becoming a society. Common denominators but not common causes. Being gay is a tenuous connection, much like being blue-eyed or dyslexic. Even our experiences of being gay are changing from generation to generation. The most telling problem for us, as a community or as a society, is our lack of ancestors.

Throughout history there have been countless thousands, probably millions, of gay man and women who faced the most cruel punishments, the most horrible deaths, the loss of everything they own, the banishment from society. We will never know their stories, their lives of consumate shame, the suicides, the despair; we will never know those stories of the ones who slipped through, who managed to hide their love and still let it flourish, who found common souls and a common purpose with others like themselves. They're gone, but their lives paved the way for us.

Since I first saw it, I've thought a lot about 'Brokeback Mountain'. What strikes me most is that it is a story of our ancestors. Of those who came before us, who overcame what they could, and whose utter selves were unmistakeably true to the love they found. And that's where our gay community will live as the political needs lessen - in remembering our ancestors, in honoring their lives, and remembering that our lives affect those who are coming after us. It isn't blood that binds us. It's love.

Even if they're only fiction, Ennis and Jack are as true as life. Their story is our story, and we mustn't forget it.

Old books in other hands

I read a lot. I love books. I love the stories and facts themselves, but I also love the object of a book, especially old ones, the older the better. And the older they are, the less I care about the subject matter. A farmer's almanac of 2005 would be garbage before I finished page one; the same almanac of 1722 would be this year's Harry Potter as far as I'm concerned.

I own many that I've bought from second-hand stores, maybe a garage sale here or there; I stole one from a deconsecrated church in England when I found it shoved behind a box of moldy hymnals. I've been given expensive ones and rare ones and didn't deserve them; there are short ones, fat ones, the original six-volume biography of Lincoln. I like the yellowed pages and I even like the dust. What I most like is wondering who held the book before me, seeing someone's name written in careful script on the upper-right corner of the frontispiece. "Who was 'Burton Brown'?" I wonder. How much did he pay for it? Did they put it in a sack or did he carry it away? Where did he buy it? Was he a nice person? Was it a gift or for him?

Knowing my hand is holding the very thing that his held before helps me be a part of history. His hand picked it up, another put it away; another packed it up, another unpacked it years later. One hand, another, another; another. Now mine. Our eyes reading all those pages, each of us meeting the words on a page for the first time. It's like a message in a bottle found long after the ship's survivors have gone.

Consider this, and imagine you wrote it:

"No eye shall see the poem that I write
For you; not even yours; but after long
Forgetful years have passed on our delight
Some hand may chance upon a dusty song
Of those fond days when every spoken word
Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken
Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard
Murmured through forests as a charm unbroken.

"Merely the plain and ordinary page
Of two who loved, sole-spirited and clear.
Will you, O stranger of another age,
Not grant a human and compassionate tear
To us, who each the other held so dear?
A single tear fraternal, sadly shed,
Since that which was so living, is so dead?"

That poem was written in 1913. It was published in a book called 'Collected Poems by Vita Sackville-West' that I bought in 1992 from one of the last used bookshops in Charing Cross Road in London . The book was published in 1934 and fell out-of-print almost immediately; printed copies became scarce. Over the years, time took the lives of many remaining copies — mine was almost one of them, and the water damage was acute — and now there are few left.

After the events of September 11, 2001, I took the book off my bookshelf and sat reading it, mostly for something to do, and came across this poem.

In 1913, Vita Sackville-West was in love with another young woman. It was a secret she didn't dare let anyone know, so there she is on the page reaching out to those of us who have survived her, like some message in a bottle, telling us her passion, telling us that she was real, that she loved and lived and that she knew we would be coming after her. So some part of her has survived - from 1913 to 1934 to 1992 to 2001 to 2007. That's how long it's taken to tell you this.

And now you know it. And we're right there with her in 1913. So throw the bottle back out there. Our memories will disappear with us, but I hope someday someone picks up your thoughts, your words, your secrets. Maybe my own too, with time.

So write your secrets, and I'll write mine.