American Queer Life- Love: The Divine Swoon

It’s time to send my Valentine’s valentine to Loveland for the city’s special postmark. 

February 14 can be emotionally tricky. I lived six decades without a lover, so I look upon the day as a gratitude checklist: my partner (best to list him first), our home and spiritual centers, friends, chocolate cake, theater, peaches, Colorado, Angkor Wat, Depeche Mode, doggies, bridge, gel pens, and Italian men. When I focus on love, the list is endless. And there are endless ways to interpret love. Like love of country. And we know the variety that inspires.

Robert G. Ingersoll—essayist, friend of Walt Whitman, and his eulogist when America’s openly gay Poet of Democracy died in 1892—described love as “that divine swoon.” I picture queer artist Edward Gorey’s cartoon woman from the opening credits of PBS’s Mystery series: prone on a roof, waving a kerchief, crying out feebly. I’ve loved fiercely—once I felt sick to my stomach for a week—but have never fainted. Still, I like Ingersoll’s purple prose metaphor.

My first “true” love (or sort-of-swoon) happened in first grade. Lynn Anderson (not the country singer) wore cat eye glasses, had a slight overbite and petite build. I can still see her smiling, freckled face, and her scuffed, red Keds as we pushed the merry-go-round and jumped on, spinning with giggles and glee, dizzy with wide-eyed wonder and innocence. Her family moved away; just as well since boys had caught my eye.

They grew into teenage hotties in junior high. That didn’t stop me from attempting to like girls. Once, I hosted a kissing party. Floor-to-ceiling, crepe-paper streamers encircled a couch in a corner. Kathy Sasaki and I broke the record: two-and-a-half minutes! Quite a notch on my belt, but no swoon, through no fault of Kathy’s.

In high school, Gary Garland … sigh … was dreamy and sweet. Occasionally, at midnight, I’d sneak out, and he’d pick me up in his ’63 Triumph convertible. We’d drive to the old Stapleton airport—his dad’s six-pack in the back—and park on the frontage road where, prior to landing, the planes flew so low it seemed we could scratch their bellies. I hated beer, but I’d do anything to be with Gary. Nothing physically happened; I probably would have swooned.

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In the 70s, I reaped the benefits of the sexual revolution of the 60s. Promiscuity was the reward that ironically became the curse when the “gay cancer” invaded my world in the 80s.

In the early days, the disease was 100 percent fatal. I and half of an entire minority experienced one mother of an existential crisis. All the death was impossible to ignore, then impossible to process. I would realize I hadn’t heard from so-and-so in days, weeks, months, sometimes years. My worst suspicions were often confirmed. 

Like Michael Calvert who died in 1986. He was a cutie-patootie, a ‘Bama boy with a melodious accent to charm the pants off you. (It worked.) Michael and I had an intense fling approaching a swoon on my part; he got sick; I moved home to Colorado, he to his; I never saw him again. Variations of that timeline were common. 

His ghost appeared last summer when a producer of WNYC’s public radio podcast United States of Anxiety contacted me out of the blue. She had interviewed Michael, an early AIDS activist, rediscovered the cassette tapes, and within the context of the current pandemic, wanted to revisit the AIDS pandemic (available as ACT UP, Fight Covid on their website). When she found me, hoping to record someone 34 years later who knew Michael, I exploded with memory … little bursts pop as I write this … we were so young … 

Love is the perfume of the wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts;but with it, earth is heaven and we are gods. (Robert G. Ingersoll, Orthodoxy, 1884)

All we can do is try to make sense of a senseless universe, uncaring and unpredictable, yet resplendent with infinite possibility. I experienced plague, loss, grief, fear, rage, but luckily, and more importantly, also friendships, affection, love from lovers, strangers, friends, family. I’m so blessed to make new memories with my new partner of love and contentment and confidence.

Turns out, AIDS was about love after all: the search for it, the discovery of it, the meaning of it, living and witnessing it, giving and receiving it. As a longtime survivor of its slaughter and glutton for guilt, naturally(!) I read The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus. After horrific strife during a bubonic plague outburst in the Algerian seaport of Oran, the hero comes to this realization: “He knew, too, to love someone means relatively little, or rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it.”

We try to describe love, yet words fall short of what it means and does for us, how it feels and forms us. Many things in life—and not only romantic love—offer us opportunities for a “divine swoon,” but hopefully, not when we’re driving or operating heavy machinery.

To get Loveland’s special postmark, buy a valentine, address it with postage; put it in a larger envelope with postage, and mail to: Postmaster – Attention Valentines, 446 E. 29th St., Loveland, CO 80538-9998. Your loved ones will love it