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practiced over the last two years, even while the people we have played with over the last decade and a half keep disappearing. We haven’t, really, somehow, believed in this germ. However, the last line of a letter tells me as an afterthought that the weather of March 29 in New York was snow and sleet, “Perfect for Ray’s funeral.” I did not know Ray was sick, much less dead. This evening I am told on the telephone that Michael won’t live past the weekend; CMV virus is running riot through his system, he is bleeding internally. But Michael went to Cornell , I think when I put down the phone; came from a good family; has a little garden on East Seventh Street he was always asking me to come see; was someone I have always had a crush on. What did the germs need with him?
    He was, after all, a talented architect who had come to New York after college to work and enjoy himself—a modest agenda in the scheme of things. We met because I liked his roommate—a scientist with Bell Labs who took a class in gymnastics I attended at the West Side Y. Our first outing ended with my being dropped off in a taxicab at my corner, while Michael, in the backseat, smiled a knowing grin as I bid his roommate good night—as if Michael knew exactly what had, or had not happened; as if he were saying, “This one isn’t what you think he is.” Or, “You got no further than any of the others who’ve tried.” His roommate eventually grew tired of the commute from Manhattan to southern New Jersey and vanished from the city. Michael stayed. What struck me about Michael—the first time we went home together—was that, in contrast to his roommate, he was easy. Very easy. So easy that the fact that our attempts at sex failed in no way affected the affection we felt for each other. Michael was good-natured. Had a good sense of humor. And was less sexually inhibited than most people.
    This was not, in the seventies, something that lowered him in my estimation—nor any of the other friends I had who went out searching for whatever we were searching for with a determination approaching dementia. Sex was partly what we had come to New York for, from families, universities, small towns, other cities. I’d come upon Michael summer nights with his lover, floating down a near-empty Broadway on bicycles; they spoke of moving to a farm in upstate New York, or Georgia, but never seemed to manage to. I would see him instead on the beach at Fire Island. Or on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, buying flowers, on his way home from work. Or in a room at the St. Mark’s Baths. The last time I’d seen him at the baths, in fact, I’d walked into his room before I realized the body was his; and then, in a split second of recognition, two steps from his pillow, we both laughed. It was a compliment, in a way—freed of the formalities of friendship, stripped of his social identity and clothes, Michael was so desirable I’d taken the risk of stepping through the door. That door, of course, had been open to anyone who passed; there was something concupiscent, lascivious about Michael. The sheets he lay on were rumpled and damp with use, the lightbulb by the doorway red, the skin of his body shining with a film of oil. This greasy red chamber of love that eventually ended up as part of the towering heap of garbage on the sidewalk outside the St. Mark’s Baths was something he made jokes about when I met him in a suit and tie there the next day, coming home from work: black plastic bags filled with the detritus of lovemaking, cans of Crisco, lubricant, poppers, paper plates, cups, packs of cigarettes—the whole effluvia of a disposable culture that had decided to dispose of sex the same way the Japanese restaurant a few doors down got rid of its grease.
    Time magazine called it a sexual revolution (which it then declared finito in March 1984). Whatever it was—the pent-up frustration of lonely years in high school; the delayed release of urges that had