Where The Boys Are by William J. Mann Read Free Book Online Page A

remember AIDS? It’s really not such an outrageous question. Javitz would be so pissed off to see how everyone seems to have forgotten about AIDS these days. It hasn’t been four years since he died, yet already the world seems so different. To those boys on the dance floor tonight, the world of AIDS seems as foreign and unfamiliar as Zaire or Antarctica or the surface of Mars. Or maybe it’s not so unfamiliar. Maybe they just like to pretend it is. The way Jeff does.
    Javitz died just as most people were starting to live, just as the new drugs came in, just as a powerful hurricane was rushing up the arm of Cape Cod. It sent winds so fierce along the finger of Provincetown that the old oak on Commercial Street that had been growing since 1875 was finally felled. In the morning, the town awoke bewildered and bewailing, and Javitz’s body was taken out of his house on a stretcher by the coroner in the middle of a driving rain.
    Yes, Javitz would be pissed to see how people have forgotten about AIDS.
    And is pissed, I’m sure, because I believe he’s still here, just in a different form. Before he died, he promised he’d come back to me, and he has. Okay, so it’s been in dreams, but maybe that’s the best he can do. Jeff says he doesn’t even dream of Javitz. I feel sorry for him. I would go crazy without my dreams.
    Although we weren’t sexual with Javitz, in every other way we were, in fact, lovers. Sure, it was Jeff and I who lived together with our cat and celebrated our anniversaries and hung our Christmas stockings side by side on the mantle. But Javitz was, from the start, an integral part of our union. Straight people just never got it, and a lot of gay folk had trouble with it, too. The three of us were fused together, a family—but, as we always added, even more than what family usually means for straights.
    How do I explain who Javitz was to us? He was teacher, he was mentor. He got us angry, got us inspired, got us out onto the streets shouting about how the government had blood on its hands. Oh, we were such earnest young boys then, so ready to fight. Our anger was righteous and indignant, and Javitz had been proud of us. Javitz taught us that gayness meant opportunity, that it was a gift which allowed us to rethink the old paradigms that had proved so unsuccessful for straights—like marriage and monogamy. He infused in us the radical notion that queers weren’t just equal to heteros but, in a way, actually superior: at least we had a leg up over easy, conventional definitions. We could forge something new, something that worked better—more honestly—than what straight culture had created.
    Javitz had been one prickly, political queen, but he’d also represented the one solid thing in my life, the one person who was always there, one hundred percent. Unconditional love he’d promised, and Javitz had delivered. The most important thing he taught Jeff and me was that friendships and relationships didn’t need labels or definitions or limitations; what mattered was the love, and how unconditionally it was shared.
    Every summer for six years we rented a place in Provincetown. We became a familiar sight walking together down Commercial Street, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, Javitz always in the middle, slightly taller than Jeff and me. The gossips wagged their tongues over our three-way friendship, our age difference (Javitz was more than ten years older than Jeff and I), and the nonmonogamy we all so prized. Many were known to wonder: “What do the three of them do together in that house? Are the two younger ones his boy-slaves? Or is he just their sugar daddy?”
    Sitting on our summer deck, Javitz had sighed dramatically. “How to disentangle the myths of age?” he asked, waving his cigarette in the night air.
    Jeff had responded in kind: “How to explain to a world fixated on the paradigm of two the power of three?”
    Those were the discussions we had, late into the night. I laugh now at