GMHC reached out to all communities—and learned how confused and
frightened everyone was.
Meanwhile Daniel continued to paint and teach. His MFA from Penn led
to an instructorship at Parsons, then one at Pratt. He enjoyed teaching. He
liked the give-and-take, the public performance, the occasional sense of ac-
complishment. He slowly understood that he liked teaching more than he
liked painting. He felt so smart when he taught, and so stupid when he
painted. Painting offered a strenuous, masochistic kind of pleasure, but it felt
private and trivial, especially when no major galleries showed interest in his
work. He changed his style again, and again, and yet again, and still nobody
bit. He began to lose faith in the future. Around the time he turned thirty-six,
Daniel decided he was never going to be a successful painter. He would be
only a teacher, a good teacher maybe, but only a teacher. He became very un-
happy. This was when he went into his tomcat phase.
Right from the start, during their first year together, Zack and Daniel had
agreed that monogamy was neither important nor realistic. AIDS didn’t scare
them off sex, but it made them more careful. Not that they did very much—
they were usually too busy. They tried a couple of threeways early on, as the
high of requited love wore off and they wanted new thrills. But affection and
voyeurism didn’t mix. Each felt silly watching the other take his turn with a
happy, horny florist from New Jersey; they both became terribly self-
conscious over what they could and couldn’t do with the cute young transla-
tor from Finland. So they dropped the threeways but allowed each other to
mess around when one of them was out of town, so long as he was safe and
told the other. Zack enjoyed hearing the stories; Daniel didn’t. Daniel didn’t
enjoy telling stories either, so their reports became short and simple: twenty-
five words or less.
When his crisis struck, Daniel no longer waited for one of them to be away.
He told Zack what he was doing and began to go out regularly to bars and sex
clubs and back rooms. This was 1991, when gay men rebelled against the epi-
demic and openly played around again. There was a renaissance of raunch, an
era of safe sex sleaze. Zack stayed home and enjoyed the peace and quiet. He
E x i l e s i n A m e r i c a
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understood what was driving Daniel, but his show of sympathy only made
Daniel feel worse, feeding his frustration and guilt. Daniel tried having an af-
fair with a student but found there is nobody more calculating and heartless
than a young artist who has just moved to New York. He told Zack it was only
sex, and maybe it was, although unrequited lust can often feel like unrequited
love. No, it was better to stick to strangers and the occasional fuck buddy.
It was during this tomcat phase that the job at William and Mary opened
up. Jane Morrison, his good friend from Penn, was teaching down there and
reported that they needed someone for next year. It was a short gig, although
the job could lead to a tenure track position. Daniel applied. It’d be good to
escape the ugly art world and easy sex of New York, he said, if only for a year.
But he did not want to live away from Zack, not for an entire year. He had a
couple of months to mull it over before he heard if they wanted him or not.
While he waited, Zack met Eugene Thomas.
This was E. G. Thomas, the social historian and critic. A fifty-three-year-
old professor at Boston University who wore old-fashioned horn-rims and big
bow ties, he spoke at a mental health conference that Zack attended in At-
lanta. A friendly argument about Foucault led to an invitation up to Thomas’s
room to find an old article about Quaker asylums. There Thomas confessed
that, since his wife died a year ago, he’d been “reconstructing” his sexuality.
“I find you very butch and humpy. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but
I’d very much like to go to bed with you.”
Zack flew back to New York the next day feeling foolish and guilty and
oddly fond of Thomas. It wasn’t the sex, which had been nothing much, just
a friendly wrestle with a bulky, middle-aged man. But Thomas had made Zack
feel young and lively; Zack usually felt only old and dull.
“So did you behave yourself in Atlanta?” asked Daniel.
“Oh. I went to bed with one of the guest speakers.”
“Cute? Young?”
“In his fifties.”
“Ugh. I don’t want to hear about it.”
So Zack told him nothing more.
A week later, at his office, Zack got a call from Thomas. “I just wanted to
say hi and see how you were doing. And tell you how much I enjoyed meeting
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C h r i s t o p h e r B r a m