In response to Susan Raffo‘s original Call for Submissions for Queerly Classed: Gay Men & Lesbians Write About Class, B.Michael and John Manzon-Santos, domestic partners at the time, interviewed each other and themselves and transcribed the following piece.
For the last six years, our relationship, perhaps like any other, has been in search of anchorage. We have learned how commitment, trust, and yes, intimacy, can ebb and flow over time. What grounds us is when we attempt to break our familiar Catholic patterns of silence, especially when it feels most risky. In this case, we hope that our talking through issues together (and sharing them via a transcribed dialogue) — seams and all — will demonstrate some of the ways in which we struggle to understand how class is braided with other factors in our relationship.
Bert: When I was growing up in the Woodrow Wilson Houses in East Harlem, my family went through periods where we seemed to have everything we needed and at other times when we had to go on food stamps. The most important thing was to avoid being on welfare. Food stamps meant that someone in the family still worked, and you just needed a little help. But welfare meant that your parents couldn’t “make it,” and that was not okay. So one indicator of your class situation was whether or not you had a job, and there was a shame factor attached if you had to rely on help from the government. It wasn’t until I went to college that my parameters that defined someone’s class status were expanded to include where you live, what you own, how exposed you are to the world, even how you act in social settings.
John: For me, someone’s socioeconomic class is measured by their access to resources–not just money, but other resources like housing, employment, nutrition, health care, mobility, public-sector decision-making, and education. So, for example, even though I grew up working-class and wasn’t wealthy like the majority of the other college students, I know my Ivy League university degree affords me broader access to middle-class opportunities, like what kinds of jobs I could have, what quality of healthcare providers I’d look for, how possible I’d think it was to travel or relocate, where I lived, etc. ANd meeting students who grew up poorer than me gave me some sense of perspective and helped me gauge where I fit in this landscape relative to all these class markers. I don’t think I and my brother and sisters grew up with any conscious class identity, though I assumed that immigrant status meant being poor or working-class. Like when my family lived in barracks, enlisted men like my father lived with their families in row housing, and the “big brass” generals that my father cooked for lived in gigantic, free-standing houses. Actually, figuring out our living situation kicked up a lot of issues.
B: In 1988, when I moved into the apartment at 528 East 11th Street, the rent was $325 a month, a good deal for two bedrooms in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, even with no sink in the bathroom. At first it seemed like a really family-oriented building, quiet and safe. But a police raid uncovered a large amount of cash, drugs, and a number of firearms, including two AK-47’s, in the apartment across the hall from mine. Our landlord’s solution to deter other alleged drug dealers from working out of the building was to disable the intercom system and remove the front door to the street. It was like that for eight months. There was no collective outcry from the thirty-three apartments, but the situation generated enough attention that a local newspaper listed 528 as one of the top ten worst buildings in Manhattan . . .
J: . . . which I didn’t know before I moved in! That entire first year of living together at 528, I don’t think I ever felt safe going from the corner of East 11th Street/Avenue A to the front door — less because of the drugs, more because I thought I’d be “fag-bashed” or else mugged or harassed because I’m Asian. Even though it’s also true that sometimes people don’t fuck with me because they think I know kung fu or something. But over time I think people started to get used to us as a couple. I even became friendly with some of the neighbors. In a way, the drug dealers who were always on the block kept an eye on everything that went down, a kind of neighborhood patrol! I mean, they’re businesspeople after all, so if you don’t get in their way, they’ll leave you alone.
528 was a decent size for two (and big enough for nine houseguests during Stonewall!), and I was certainly fine with splitting the $400 rent. I was also conscious of the me-as-gentrifier, especially as I was sure people perceived me as one of those outsider Asian and/or Queer artist-types who flocked to the surrounding East Village.
B: I did have guilt about gentrifying the neighborhood, but in a lot of ways, because of my race, my sexuality, and my perceived class background, I was excluded from a lot of other moderate-income housing. On some level I tried to absolve some of my guilt by joining the local Community Board and chairing the Human Resources Committee, where we had N.I.M.B.Y. (Not in My Backyard) debates around AIDS housing facilities, women’s transitional housing (from prison back to the community), and other social service agencies in the neighborhood. I even sat on their Lesbian/Gay Community Task Force to sensitize the police.
J: I think we could’ve lived there longer than we anticipated. We did paint the walls and make other improvements here and there. Then I received a windfall from that legal settlement, which started us thinking about moving and the possibility of a pretty dramatic change, quality-of-life-wise. Like an elevator would help. Some of it had to do with the fact that your relatives, especially your mom and aunts and grandmother, aren’t able to negotiate stairs. Then there’s the weekly schlepping up and down of groceries, laundry, and garbage. I don’t think we talked about it much at that point, but your being HIV-positive entered into it, specifically what it’d mean for either of us to have some potentially debilitating illness. So we started thinking about stuff like having more space, a washer/dryer in the building, a sink in the bathroom, and the possibility of leaving behind our pets (i.e., the roaches).
B: John, you’re the one who brought the roaches when you moved in. Because that’s when we got more into the habit of eating in, since I always ate out when I lived alone!
J: You know, for my parents it was a dream come true to buy a house after my father retired from the Army, but prior to this legal settlement, I never imagined, nor did I have any aspirations about buying or owning anything. The culture of it all made me feel uncomfortable, partly because real estate has such a rep for being a discriminatory sector, partly because I didn’t want to deal with tax planning and all that. I also didn’t want a doorperson, which promotes some sort of urban gated-community dynamic. And as two men, we maybe didn’t need the assumed level of security that a doorperson would provide. Then where we thought of where to live in New York, pickin’s seemed slim. As an interracial couple, there are few neighborhoods where we would feel as comfortable as individuals and together.
B: As a Black man, I had no intention of living in any of the Asian enclaves like Chinatown and dealing with stares or hostility from others. And as a Manhattanite, born and raised, living in any other borough seemed too remote.
J: Harlem, or even Fort Green, wouldn’t prove much more welcoming to me…
B: … because people would think you were working in the markets.
J: There are also the gay-concentrated neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side, but there’re too many white people per capita for my comfort level, especially after spending all those years in predominantly rich, white private schools.
B: After looking at half a dozen lofts and apartments with doormen in view, we walked into the one place the realtor was reluctant to show us — her descriptive word was “funky.” When we walked into this 1,500-square-foot corner loft it had two things that were high on our list — space and natural sunlight, which poured through the five-by-seven foot windows on two sides.
J: You know there’d be very few places we would both fall in love with, as different as I think our aesthetic senses are. But for the first few months–and once in a while even now–I felt very strange being ins such a huge, spacious living arrangement. I definitely associate large living spaces with the rich kids I went to school with and the kinds of houses they lived in. On some level, I also didn’t feel like I deserved to occupy so much living area or to access the kind of stability that you get from not throwing rent down a hole every month. It also felt strange since owning this home wasn’t part of my value system or something I worked for and saved for over time. But like you said, this new home is “full of possibilities,” and the process of buying the loft, especially in its raw condition, has moved us as a couple to look more at life-planning and focus on our needs, something I don’t think either of us have done a very good job of doing up until recently.
I dig the roof, too, and you can see both the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center Twin Towers and how every building in Manhattan over five stories has a cedar-wood water tower like on a West Side Story set or something, which you never see walking around on street level. We got the washer/dryer that we share with the three other couples on the floor, but we did give up the family atmosphere that 528 had with seniors and baby carriages and little kids running around and playing in the street.
B: It’s definitely not a residential neighborhood. The street’s bustling between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., when only commercial parking like the loading/unloading of UPS trucks is allowed. Then there are the import/export businesses dealing in fashion, furs, toys, and sundries, the motorcycle-repair guy working on the sidewalk, but the street really shuts down in the evening, and it’s not too safe for single women who visit. The area’s zoned for light industrial, full of converted manufacturing facilities, garment sweatshops (like the one across from our bedroom window), printing presses, photography studios, and we’re on the perimeter of all these communities: the new Korea Town, Gay Chelsea below West 23rd Street, the Garment District, the Flower District, where wholesale vendors sell cut flowers and potted plants. And in a two-block radius there are five weekend antique flea markets. However, real estate brokers of course promote the neighborhood as the “new SoHo” (New York’s premier artists’ colony), which is slowly becoming more residential–the building we live in, anyway.
J: I have mixed feelings living so close to Chelsea. I generally feel ambivalent, at times hostile, when walking down Seventh or Eighth Avenue, two of Chelsea’s main arteries, and I never do it alone, if I can help it. All these uniformed, gay male soldiers at attention or at ease help shore up the rep that gay men make wonderful consumers, like the patrons of the all-gay-while-male-run, community-based, mostly service-oriented institutions, some with multimillion-dollar operating budgets: often double-income in a single fabulously decorated household, no kids, fashion-conscious, theater-going, bar-hopping, globe-trotting, time-sharing, alcohol-abusing, iron-pumping, steroid-shooting. It’s no coincidence that Chelsea is where these superstores have all sprung up–Barnes & Noble, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Today’s Man, Filene’s Basement. This is the gay community that I am supposed to identify with. It’s the upwardly mobile, queer-nationalist culture that turns me off the most.
B: In order to feel more at home, it’s people of color-focused lesbian and gay networks which both of us have gravitated toward. We’ve had some involvement in establishing, supporting, or having active membership in several of the organizations in the “gay community” with which we identify: Other Countries: Black Gay Expression, APICHA (Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS), GMAD (Gay Men of African Descent), Project Reach (a mutliracial, youth- and adult-run youth advocacy, counseling, and organizing center), GAPIMNY (Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York), and the Lesbian & Gay People of Color Steering Committee (a coalition of almost thirty indigenous, grassroots groups). Most recently, we’re working as members of the founding board of the Audre Lorde Project (a lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, transgender people of color community center based in Brooklyn, New York), a community space and spiritual home base whose vision includes multiracial, co-gender programming and organizing activities and an initiative that’s not based on pathologizing our identities, experiences, or worldviews.
J: And it’s through this community that we met. Though Bert may have a different recollection, I first met him at a meeting of the Lesbian & Gay People of Color Steering Committee to secure a spot in the People of Color contingent of the New York City Pride March for GAPIMNY, at the time a new affinity organization. I noticed Bert, one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen, who was really quiet and cautious—the opposite of me. He was a writer and refreshingly not a graduate of an Ivy League school, like my ex-lover. I was happy to learn that he didn’t grow up with money and, like me, received financial aid to get through mostly all-white schools. I felt safe with him from the beginning, and not ashamed of unpacking whatever personal baggage I may have brought with me. I wondered about Bert being Black, having experienced too many Black people telling me I wasn’t oppressed enough.
B: I first noticed John at a general meeting of VOCAL (Voices of Color against AIDS and for Life), a fledgling group of lesbian and gay people of color who worked in AIDS. I was there to announce the marching order of the People of Color Contingent in the 1990 Lesbian & Gay Pride March. He reminded of a high school friend I had, who has one-fourth Black, and three-fourths Chinese. John didn’t look anything like my friend, but they did share one feature: black hair. There was something about John that seemed familiar. We saw each other at a couple of other joint People of Color meetings–after one such meeting I asked him to dinner, and he accepted. After one or two other dates we got together and somehow developed a relationship. Physically, John is similar to almost all of the other men I’ve dated–slim. I was and am most attracted to John’s mind, quick mouth, and energy, some of the very things that cause tension in our relationship. I was thirty-two when I met John, and feeling young but old. Old from so many consecutive deaths of friends from AIDS. When I found out John was seven years younger than me, I was a little reluctant to continue our relationship because he seemed politicized in a way I wasn’t familiar with. There were some early signs that we have had very different life experiences.
First, the obvious: he’s Filipino, I’m of African descent. I was raised in a housing project in East Harlem, he was raised in a house in Daly City, California; he worked as a counselor at a community agency in Chinatown, and I had just quit my job as an account marketing representative selling mainframe computers for IBM. Now the not so obvious–he had gone to private school since sixth grade and then to an Ivy League college; I went to public grammar and middle school, a specialized public high school, a small, east coast private college, and had already graduated from a top-ranked public-interest private law school. My previous experience with men who attended Ivy League school also left me a little cold–they seem to never be satisfied with things. They always seem to have access to information and invitations to events and always acted as if they were entitled to everything they desired. I also felt I was considered desirable by these men because of my degrees and career track: they assumed I was their “class peer.” John was very different–he is one of the few men I trust.
J: Even in a racially diverse city like New York, striving for visibility and recognition as an interracial couple of gay men of color is not very supported. Fact is, we’ve interacted with only two other Asian/Black male couples, one in New York and one in Boston.
Class determines a lot of the dynamics between Black and Asian communities in New York, where there isn’t much widely documented history of peaceful coexistence, as with the relations between Korean grocery store owners and the inner-city Black neighborhoods they’re often located in. In these same stores, check-out clerks never assume we’re together, even as we talk animatedly and commingle items-to-buy on the counter.
B: When we began going places together, we’d sometimes take cabs, though I rarely took cabs myself, especially at night. In fact, I’d only flag down a cab when I was dressed in suit and tie. On some level I really resented being with someone who never had problems with gaining access to something like a taxicab. I’d been frustrated enough times by the indignity that passing taxicabs represent to factor in enough time for public transportation in my daily travel plans.
J: In fact, I didn’t grow up in a place with cabs and didn’t know until I met you that Black people were routinely passed by because of what the drivers assumed.
B: I think less of it that I’m going to mug them; more of it is the assumption that I’d ask to be driven somewhere that might put them in a dangerous situation. The cab situation brings up how we negotiate on a day-to-day basis–you run up to cabs, stop them, or you run halfway up the block to flag one down. What allows you to do that, to think that it’s safe, for you or the driver? Is there some intersection of race, class, and sexual orientation that gives you the freedom to run in the street? (Most Black men running in the street would seem suspect, and more than one woman would clutch their pocketbook.)
J: It’s funny you perceive my running up to catch a cab as some kind of privilege or some manifestation of my level of safety. (A) I don’t feel safe in New York generally, especially being on the thin side in a city where anti-Asian violence has topped the hate crimes stats, with queer-bashing a close second. And (B) when I see a cab, what I immediately think of are all the times cabs have passed me because, I assume, I’m not dressed like a businessman or whatever, or when they have refused to unlock the door until they know where I want to go (and agree to take me there). The cabs are supposed to be there for people, so I run up to the cab and open the door so as not to be passed over. It’s an accountability thing and maybe there is some privilege I have to be able to do that. The dodging-traffic scenario is something I’ll do only if I have to get somewhere. So it doesn’t feel like a comfort or safety level I have; it feels like a risk I have to consciously take to get what I need. Also, in this city, I take public transportation more often than not. At times, when I’m on the subway, the racist vibe I get from people is that I might karate-chop them, so they’ll keep their distance. However, at other times people generally perceive me as weaker and totally non-threatening because I’m Asian, like the time I was mugged between the Delancey and Second Avenue stops on the F train.
B: Except when we were both treated similarly on our way back to New York from Montreal, when we were stopped by the U.S. border patrol, interrogated separately; our rental car strip-seached presumably for smuggled drugs, our gay guides ridiculed.
J: I also learned that we respond differently to authority. You became cool as a cucumber, not attitudinal, but terse, measuring your words per your lawyer training. I eagerly answered their questions and tried to send out easygoing energy, as if to say, “OK, officer, whatever-you-say, just-leave-us-alone.”
B: Yeah, and you almost got us killed when you reached down under the seat for your shoes after they had already told us to get out of the car!
J: Well, we communicate differently according to the situation. We talk different, too. You easily flip between that teeth-flashing IBM, “I’m going to sell you a computer now”-speak and Southern Black Baptist (which you fake).
B: We’ve known each other long enough to know which of each other’s buttons to push. And how easily we fall into a competitive mode like the boys we were socialized to be, which is consistent with the survival strategies we developed as children.
J: For a long time one of the buttons was around HIV. When you tested HIV-positive and I tested HIV-negative, we needed some serious, relationship-oriented “technical assistance” to deal with being a “sero-discordant couple.” You really surprised me ‘cause I thought you’d be resistant to working with a couples therapist. But we did need some structured time to look at HIV-specific stuff and other, non-HIV-related issues.
B: I welcomed the chance to look at HIV/AIDS and its impact on my being able to be in a longterm relationship. In fact, the eighteen months we were together before I went for the test was the longest period of time I’d been with another man.
J: Therapy definitely helped us learn how to call out how we’ve been trained. You know, to question the norm to achieve, get more degrees, be active, make money and babies.
B: I’d say we’re trying to center ourselves more, to carve out a life, develop more discipline and internal structures for us as individuals and as a couple, to create family and rituals, live with HIV and the gamut of health conditions: in short, less doing, more being.
J: I no longer live in fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for you to develop AIDS and die shortly thereafter. AIDS does not rule our lives. It has a place, it may even be a room in the house, but it is certainly not the roof, nor the paint on the walls. Structuring time together was our first step, and committing to planning was another, which I think helps us deal with our anxiety about the future.
B: Being in a “sero-discordant” couple, I don’t think of myself as opposites of things, but it’s another box or demarcation. Given my level of education, I’m in a safe job in the sense that as a New York City school teacher, it’s low-stress and it’s something I enjoy. But the major reason that I’m there is the security that the benefits bring, mostly because the teachers’ union is strong. I wasn’t concerned when I was IBM. Or when I was in law school, or before I was diagnosed as HIV-positive, I was concerned with finding the security that a government job could offer. The bizarre thing is that when we became domestic partners in 1994, all the health and life insurance benefits started coming through my job, which recognizes same-sex couples, but people would say that I’m the most “fragile.”
J: Because the HIV-negative person is the one who’s supposed to bring home the benefits-bacon?
B: Right. So the roles would play themselves out in the relationship, and ultimately I would be rendered unable to work. That is, if you believe the whole “hysteria” about how the progression of HIV disease eventually ends in a crisis-filled, downward spiral toward death.
J: What motivates me is not security at all. The full-time jobs I’ve had were not about security, but more to feel like I was doing something meaningful. What is interesting in retrospect is that, when I was old enough, I found myself landing mostly service-oriented jobs of the type I had known my parents and/or my older siblings to take. Like my first paid job was as a clerk/typist with a temp agency. When I was seven, my oldest sister had done temp work after high school; during one visit home, she and her co-worker at the same time taught me to type. Other jobs were in and around restaurants — dishwasher, busser, salad-maker, bartender, host, waiter, valet — all of which my father, brother, and sisters had done. I volunteered as a buddy to a Person Living with AIDS with the knowledge that my mother frequently took care of older white women who were disabled, homebound, or abandoned by their families. Pursuing other “service-sector” jobs, I drove a college campus shuttle and registered with a couple of escort agencies. In fact, when I became a teacher, I felt a profound inadequacy, in part because there were no role models within my immediate family. But in any case, the motivation was not to save money to either buy a house or have for some “rainy day.” I didn’t grow up in a culture of saving. I now know my parents were committed to saving, but they never talked about it.
I remember poor and working-class Third World students I went to college with, who were clear about becoming doctors and other professionals because that was one way out of whatever situation they came from. But one of the things that made me not follow my classmates was coming out as a gay person. Coming out meant such a radical departure from so many expectations–so necessarily becoming a professional was one more that I threw into the trash. On some level, my mother doesn’t understand why I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or otherwise capitalizing on what she perceives as “Brown University degree as ticket somewhere.” And I think one struggle in our relationship is how much security should be a priority for me vis-à-vis you. I think up to now, I’m not preparing for your impending “downward spiral.”
B: For me, not pursuing careers in law or with IBM has a lot to with the expectation that somehow I would be connected to some sort of family unit. Security was less of an issue then, before I left IBM. I had saved, I had already built credit and was looking for the class/access/security issue of station and status, versus the kind of security I’m talking about now. I had a house already, but an investment-property house versus a house I wanted to live in. So I started to re-evaluate what kind of life I wanted to live.
The thing that’s interesting to me is exactly abandoning the expectation of a nuclear family in the sense of “well, there’s no generation I have to look out for, so I can do stuff to feel self-fulfilled.” HIV stepped up my making personal fulfillment a priority. I am not sick or dying; I remain asymptomatic at thirty-seven. What changes do I need to make to get me to sixty, seventy, or eighty?
J: In fact, that’s what I meant by “abandonment.” Coming out as gay (even if it was a certain narrow, white, middle-class definition of “gay”) let me off the hook to a certain degree so that I didn’t have to do what my classmates did. Whatever HIV has done in my life and in the lives of people around me or through my job, it’s also stepped up my schooling in the importance of planning. In particular for us. Growing up, planning was not an issue. I think my parents relied on “God will provide” or “the Army will provide.” They turned over a lot of needs that people would plan for being taken care of. I think what’s difficult as a couple is trying to plan our future together, to make self-fulfillment a priority in our personal and professional lives, and those are big choices (especially in a gay male culture that emphasizes being young and vilifies getting older, and where premature death is so commonplace). And I can think of people in our lives who are more concerned about making money, in particular, gaining status, particularly gay people/professionals. I see a lot of people overcompensating for being gay by seeking status, even if it’s not the status you get for being heterosexual and family-raising.
B: There’s also a lot of freedom and mobility in being gay. And choosing not to raise children. Without the status of children, we’re not validated in society. My point is less wanting to get validation from someone else. It’s more important to be self-fulfilled. It’s a point of empowerment. You’re not trapping yourself by convention, buying into status quo. I still think working toward self-fulfillment will gain the same financial rewards or benefits that “selling yourself to a corporation” would buy.
Having been in a different situation, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to use others’ measuring sticks of how I should view myself in the world. That automatically sets you up for failure. Somebody always has a little bit more, someone else is a little bit taller. Ranking is dangerous. Some kind of status that you fall short of makes you self-hating, self-destroying. What’s the value that society places on you versus the value you put on yourself? What gives you status, or class, or station? Sometimes it’s not education, or financial worth, or where you work, or how much you make, but rather it’s about how you life your life.
J: Like our ceremony, the fact that it was such a public ritual. The ceremony was a series of decisions that we made according to measures that were important to us, according to our own standards. Exchanging beads instead of rings, planning logistics, inviting who we wanted to witness. People came from as far away as L.A. and the U.K. Five generations from your family and four generations from mine were in attendance. Like they say, it takes a village to raise a child and to sustain a relationship, no? That’s the kind of validation that we’re seeking.
B: So why do you choose to be in a relationship? Do you think that being in a relationship has anything to do with class or mobility?
J: Not to sound cynical, but I think that people are in relationships for themselves. You and I are both on our individual paths, doing what we need to do to feel self-fulfilled, and it’s great that we can go down these paths while keeping each other company. Also, couples are far more validated than individuals. But it’s healthy when we don’t lose our identities. And we’re each pretty independent, strong, survivor-types, but the challenge is, how do we create something new that goes beyond our individuality and integrates our values and who we are.
When we talk about our values, we reveal tons of information about how we feel about class. And values are things that matter, that we’re passionate about, that we would die for–what’s qualitatively important enough to keep us together. It’s not just about co-existing; the plan is one thing we create together. Our joint plan is like a child and it’s totally informed by our perspectives, our experiences, our values on class and other things, which come to the surface in the process. Our joint plan becomes the embodiment of our joint values; it’s like we’re developing common ground rules, values, culture. Not to say we’re becoming one person. At the point we’re at in our relationship, it’s a challenge to find what that “spiritual child” is.
B: The critical question is: what does a child represent? What’s our third thing? Sometimes it’s community activism; our relation to our families of origin; how we make our loft a home. How does this stuff play itself out day to day? Exactly how does our home look? What kind of feeling do we want to have when we’re inside?
J: My ideal is to be able to live in a space where I share the chores — the washing, the cooking, the cleaning. It feels more like everyone pulls their own weight. That roles are not so rigid. So many gay people I know hire maids to clean the house — and I’m not sure why that’d bother me if we did. Maybe because my mother cleaned and cared for other people, my father cooked for other people. I know we’re busy people…
B: … this notion of always being busy — but busy doing what? How do you prioritize a commitment to what goes on outside with what goes on inside our home? If part of the motivation for hiring cleaning people is that “somebody’s gotta do it so we can have time to be activists in the community,” we need to talk about that. I mean, let’s break it down: who did the cleaning in the house growing up and what is our relationship to chores, and what do we think about chores? What’s interesting for me is that my mother cleaned the house, until my father left. And when my father left and we were pretty much in our teenage years, we all got assigned specific chores. What’s also interesting is that while I want a clean house, I don’t want a clean house just to showcase to guests.
J: I sort of agree and disagree. I do want us and other people to feel warm, temperature-warm, and cozy. I don’t want a space that’s cluttered and prone to dust, but full of things, whether they’re gifts or mementos of places we’ve been. Not to showcase, but to display things that have spiritual value to us. We should have a place where guests can sleep–you know, to the extent that hospitality is currency, because I certainly have relied on and been extremely grateful for people’s floors and extra beds when I’ve needed them.
B: I also want to eat at home with you, my partner, and figure out how to make time for that. It’s a very funny thing. My mother’s a horrific cook, but some of the most fun and bonding I’ve had with my family has been in the kitchen. I remember that no matter what we were doing, we all had to be around the table at 6 p.m. No excuses.
J: Well for me, even though my father did all the cooking and my mother did all the cleaning (except in the kitchen), meals weren’t a family thing. We rarely ate together. I think I learned the importance of meals from experiences that happened after I left home. Like when I lived in co-ops, and when I studied in Italy and saw how much value was placed on eating-as-ritual and sharing during meals, and I definitely want that with you.
B: We did pretty well with the McDougal Plan. For two months we planned, shopped, cooked, and cleaned up after three meals a day–low-fat, no-meat, no-dairy, high-carbo meals.
J: That was challenging, but fun. I know I was sleeping better, dreaming better, shitting better, and people at work said I seemed less stressed out! I appreciated the planning aspect the most and the fact that it structured time for us together.
B: Just like we’re trying to do with financial planning, doing our wills and powers of attorney, naming beneficiaries, and everything that goes along with that negotiation. We’re also doing the same sort of process with each of our mothers…
J: … which ultimately is about our own planning and our peace of mind as well as, hopefully, for theirs …
B: And having to commit things to paper, we’re getting clearer on what’s important and what we need to put in place in order to entertain all of the possibilities.
J: It makes a difference, too, to do this with you in conversation. Trying to get in touch with my views and feelings on class by myself was kicking up some of my negative history with school, like the pressure of having the write the perfect paper. Then there’s the expectation of our collaboration of saying something super-significant together. But documenting our conflicts and differences of opinion definitely feels more real-world.
© B.Michael Hunter + John Manzon-Santos 1995
Published in Queerly Classed: Gay Men & Lesbians Write About Class, Ed. Susan Raffo, 1997
