QUEER FOLKS, DO YOU HAVE FAVORITE VIRTUES?
Being Selflessly Present with My Gay Friend in Need
The ideal me I would like to have been
Sometime in the late 1990s when I was a graduate student living in New York, having ended my eleven-year self-imposed exile in Europe several years before, I received a phone call from Joep, a Dutch friend of mine from my early years in Berlin. I hadn’t heard from him in at least five years.
Joep was a warm, witty person who, like many Dutch, could fluently speak four languages — Dutch, English, French, and German. He was my expatriate booster. For, unlike my two closest friends, Georg, the straight Viennese waiter with whom I was locked into a hopeless emotional relationship and Paul, my British gay platonic “sister,” with whom I would frolic around Berlin when I wasn’t with Georg, Joep understood my attempts to live the life of an expatriate writer. Despite the fact that I rarely wrote during my years in Berlin.
I always suspected that Joep had a crush on me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t prod my heart to reciprocate. I liked Joep, but I wasn’t physically attracted to him and for some reason, I couldn’t entice myself to try. I really don’t know why, I’d have to ask my hormones. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to communicate very well.
Joep and I remained in touch through letters during the three years I was away from Berlin in the mid-1980s. These years were the peak of my expatriate experience. In those letters, I recorded what I was writing, my dissatisfaction with my current living situation in Stuttgart, where I spent two years teaching at an American language institute, and my dreams of moving to the former mecca for American expatriate writers, Paris, the city of light.
Joep encouraged me to go for it. However, he had a European passport and I didn’t. While I managed to be able to live and work in Germany, I couldn’t do so in any other European country unless there was divine intervention.
Joep visited me in Stuttgart once and we spent a lovely weekend together. He stayed in my tiny furnished room and I sensed that he would have probably been fine with us sharing the twin bed, but I graciously — callously? unfeelingly? — gave him the bed and I slept on the floor.
Maybe my unreceptivity to his feelings for me was the work of my guardian angel. While I have no way of knowing whether he was already HIV positive, he might have been, although I really doubt it. I recall visiting him in Amsterdam the following year and he was the perfect picture of health. So, I can’t let myself off the guilt-hook that easily. AIDS was not on my mind during that weekend. It had still seemed to me that the “gay plague” was spreading only in New York and San Francisco. I rarely followed the news.
During that surprise phone call I received in New York in the late 1990s, Joep told me that he was HIV positive and not doing very well. He had recently moved back to his home city, Maastricht. Needless to say, I was shocked when he told me and really didn’t know what to say to him. The ideal me would have immediately generated inquisitive compassion, wanting to know everything about how he discovered it, what he was doing about it, his treatment, the prognosis, etc.
But the me of that time didn’t want to know. I offered unfounded optimism only to protect myself from addressing the seriousness of Joep’s condition. I was immersed in the pressures of the doctoral program and didn’t want to be distracted by Joep’s shocking news.
This is not the me I am proud of. But it is the me that I was. I wonder if I have really changed that much since then.
When my brother passed away three years ago at the age that I now am, I didn’t offer my sister-in-law, with whom I had at times a tense relationship, the support that she craved, especially from me, the only brother. I simply chose not to see her need.
So hard-hearted and self-engrossed. What kind of Buddhist am I? Certainly not the me — even recognizing its socially constructed, not really real, existence — that I wish I could be.
In that conversation with Joep, I was content to utter platitudes to him, commenting that I had heard that the AIDS medicine “cocktail” was effective in combatting the virus. Joep agreed and said that he had been taking medication at certain times of the day. That was why he was still awake at 1 am (CET).
I really didn’t know what to talk about with Joep, who didn’t seem to want to end our conversation. Maybe he sensed it would be our last one. He never hinted at it though. But I didn’t want to deal with his illness. It was an unwanted intrusion into my carefully directed life. I have always been very adept at focusing on one task at a time. And my current task was finishing my mammoth dissertation, getting my degree, finding a tenure-track university position and living the perfect academic life.
If I could, I would travel back twenty-six years to scold that self-centered me and shake it out of its ignorance. For, what prevented me from being fully present with Joep during that conversation, giving him the love and support that he obviously wanted from me, was the impregnable wall that I had built around myself to protect me from an unwanted invasion.
I paid a price for my self-centered callousness. About a year later, I received a package in the mail from Holland. I didn’t recognize the name. I opened it to find a note from Joep’s sister. It included a memorial announcement and a little book she had prepared which was a tribute to Joep’s life. He had passed away less than a year after our phone call. She had also included packets of letters. He had apparently saved all the letters I had written him during the height of my expatriate years.
As I read through the many letters of the “me” of those days, stopping periodically to dry my eyes, I thought of Joep saving all these letters.
And now twenty-five years later, with a little more self-knowledge, I can not only wish, but, more importantly, actually try to become the selfless me I wish I had been then.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Queer Folks, Do You Have Favorite Virtues?
Read other amazing responses to this prompt here:
