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been a source of anxiety and fear since puberty; or just the mating instinct in a new context—Michael exemplified its inexhaustible energy. He had first fallen in love with a professor at Cornell—a married man who left his wife for him and then went back to her—and I imagined Michael searching ever since in the baths for some recapitulation of this youthful love affair. No doubt that was romantic. But in a way the whole phenomenon was. I pictured a line of Yeats’s chiseled above the doorway of the public clinic on Ninth Avenue where Michael and I went to have our stools analyzed, our blood tested. “Love has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement.” Curious location. But then whatever one came down with could be cured. If we were playing on a garbage dump—that heap of black plastic bags on the sidewalk Monday mornings on St. Marks Place—it was under control. Penicillin had made sex possible, the way plastic paved the way for swimming pool liners and airplane seats. It made accessible to the average man a dream of sexual paradise previously confined to the canvases of Delacroix, the pages of The Arabian Nights. When we saw the red tea tent of an Indian mogul at the Metropolitan Museum in the India exhibit, it reminded Michael of the billowing pavilions people set up on Fire Island: a silken dream of Eros.
    It was just that connection between art and life, history and the present, civilization and Eros, that Michael appreciated—his favorite things were art and sex. Paintings, sculpture, architecture—and bodies. One hot afternoon when the beach on Fire Island was closed to swimmers because the sewage that our Baghdad dumped off the coast had drifted dangerously close to land, Michael and I talked for a while beside the sweltering sea. All around us the crowd of men broiled in the sun, beside an ocean they could not enter. Unreal sea! It looked in fact perfectly beautiful, immense, invigorating—so green I stood skeptically at the edges for almost an hour before I saw the first tiny fleck of raw sewage, like a jellyfish in a transparent wave, floating in to shore. Only then did I give up thoughts of swimming and go back. There was no way to know this day—all of us marching up and down beside the polluted sea—was the future. “There’s nothing worse than an ocean you can’t swim in,” Michael said as we returned to town on the nearly empty train. “Unless it’s people you can’t sleep with,” he added with a smile. “I guess that’s why the baths are so . . . relaxing.”
    Years before, a man had told me in a restaurant on Fifty-seventh Street that a doctor he knew was predicting a tremendous epidemic of typhus in the gay community—but it seemed at the time, over chicken salad sandwiches, just an instance of an ancient paranoia, a biblical vision of punishment-for-sex. No one I knew had typhus. Nor did I know that eventually not the outer but the inner ocean would turn foul: the sea of fluids that composed us. Little did we dream, nights at the Saint, when sweat was licked off dancers’ bodies and kisses were exchanged, that years later we would refuse to drink from the water fountain there because of a new gay cancer. It took a while for people to believe in the invisible—the germ—for the same reason it took the nineteenth century a while to accept Pasteur’s explanation of smallpox; but once accepted, the implications were mind-boggling.
    It was thought when this began that those exposed to the virus—“infected” was somehow too harsh a word at the time—were simply the very reckless; the extraordinarily debauched. Then, as the numbers mounted, it seemed they were not very different from you and me. And the next popular hypothesis arose: Everyone had met these germs, but only some would succumb. (People were not ready to believe you could catch cancer the way you caught hepatitis.) When Michael got sick, he would stop and talk outside the baths on my block on his way home from