Oh L'Amour

One night in the fall of 1986, after I'd just come out.

The script for the story I told at Sid Gold’s Request Room for Live Piano Karaoke with a GenX crew assembled by Sari Botton of Oldster Magazine— Kera Bolonik, Alexandra Auder, Emily Gould, Mark Armstrong and Blaise Allysen Kearsley. And pianist Paul Leschen. After I tell the story, I sing the song at the end.

I came out formally in the fall of 1986, my sophomore year at Wesleyan University, and by this I mean I began with the man I was in love with and then proceeded, after he rejected me, to tell everyone I could. I didn’t wear a suit but I wanted people to know who I was. Middletown, Connecticut now was much as it was then, but for those of you who have never had to stop there off of Route 91, imagine a small college on a hill above a working class town on the Connecticut River, a very old town, settled by Puritans in 1650 who murderously displaced the tribe that lived there and whose ghosts, no doubt, were busy disapproving of the several thousand students in rotation there at any given time. Students who had since displaced them. I was living at the edge of the campus in an apartment in an old Victorian house on Lincoln Avenue, well-known to any alums. We called it the Munster house because it was dilapidated and looked, well, like the Munster Family house from the old tv show. When I wasn’t busy trying to be an art major that fall and teaching myself how to read Tarot cards, I had a job at a pizzeria near the apartment, owned by someone who used to drive for the Columbo crime family, and who liked to call me “Alphonso,” after Alphonso Columbo. I had just come out to my housemates, early in the process, which had led to all four of them questioning their sexuality in what seemed to me to be a very sweet moment of solidarity, the social chaos I would come to call queer liberation.

The man I was in love with, the one who’d made me face myself, he was one of those housemates, so the stakes of this chaos were high, for me. He was a brilliant artist punk from New Jersey who looked like Tintin, if he’d run away from Captain Haddock and dyed his tuft of hair blue. He seemed to be free in some way I wasn’t familiar with, some way that I felt I needed to be, and so in addition to being in love with him, I had made a study of him. He was a rebel, of course, the son of a Buddhist scholar and a poet, and he had a beautiful girlfriend who went to Rutgers who we all liked, but she struck me as a little suspicious of me. And I think she had a good reason to be.

At this time, everyone on campus thought we were boyfriends. If I mentioned his name, people would say, “Your boyfriend?” And then be confused when I said no. This man and I had been inseparable since we met in January of that year, borrowing each other’s clothes. We’d had the same haircut when we met and people were fond of saying we looked alike. I remember a night that fall, maybe it was this night, even, when we danced together at a frat party and dodged the beers some of the brothers had decided to chuck our way, never stopping and even laughing, before we decided to leave. We would dance late into the night together, party after party, across campus, insatiable for the music, sharing cigarettes, the steam off our bodies and the smoke rising into the night as we walked home at 3 or 4 AM.

I had worked myself up to leaving him a long dramatic love letter, sliding it under his door, then going out to drink in a graveyard with a close friend who, I would learn years later, was also in love with him. But she patiently got drunk with me, and then made me laugh, and then I went home to learn how he’d come to the decision that he wasn’t like me, didn’t feel that way, and he wanted us to still be friends. This may still happen but such was the 1980s.

And yes, a few years later, he would admit to me he was in love with me, but that “he didn’t want to be gay.

So back to this night in October, a few weeks later. I was with him and my other housemates and some friends who didn’t live with us, and I was drunk. Very drunk. It was midnight or thereabouts on a Friday and I was walking arm and arm with my friends, singing Erasure’s Oh L’Amour at the top of our lungs. And then, according to them—I don’t remember this or most of what happened next—I ran away from them down the road, still singing that song, and went into the woods.

This is a little funny to me. The song’s chorus is difficult for me under sober circumstances, and requires me to go into my now vintage falsetto to get there, which feels like slipping a glove on, but in my throat. It isn’t so very high but it’s in that difficult spot, just over the border of my adult baritone voice. The kind of song I will convince myself that I can sing in the car but that betrays me at Karaoke. The idea of me singing it with abandon, running through the dark tree-lined streets and into the woods, drunk, well, it happened.

What happened next is that I came out of my blackout in the woods. I was lost, didn’t recognize where I was. And that was when some kids, maybe townies, maybe frat brothers, who knows, that was when they found me and beat me up, leaving me curled up in a ball where I stayed until my friends found me after searching for me, calling my name for hours.

I don’t remember that part either. What I remember next is that I woke up in the infirmary on campus, my wrists tied to the bed. One of my housemates was there, reading a book beside me. He’d been the one who hadn’t gone to the party, hadn’t been on the street. When they all came home after finding me he left to be here, for when I woke up. He was not the one I was in love with, but another one. He saw me look at my wrists. “They thought you did it to yourself,” he said. I started laughing. “Did you,” he asked, with the gentle fear for my wellbeing that is part of what I loved him for.

“No,” I said.

The nurse who came later told me they’d taken this precaution because I’d admitted to experiencing suicidal tendencies when I was younger. The idea that it was easier to believe I’d harmed myself than that others had harmed me, that I’d beaten myself up somehow, that has stayed with me to this day. It was the first time I learned the college might have been worried about me in any way.

All these years later, studying the song to prepare to sing it tonight, it’s funny to me. If also heartbreaking. I don’t think I understood that night until now. Specifically, I didn’t understand that I was singing it with those friends that night, all of them wondering if they were also gay, including the one I loved. It’s the story of a gay man in love with someone who has no ability to admit to the way they reach for and miss each other. And no ability to love or admit to loving him. A story as old as time but in 1986, it was my first time hearing it. It’s not entirely my story but it lines up, line for line, pretty closely.

And so now I’m going to sing this song and I’ll need your help on the chorus because I still cry when I sing it.

Happy Pride, everybody. Sending you all love.