Stambolian's Diary, 79-80

mucous membrane begging the night

Stambolian as faculty DILF and high school sweetheart

I’ve never kept a diary, so I’m a bit puzzled lately as I’ve been reading the diaries of George Stambolian and Michael Denneny. The latter, written when he was a PhD student, are similar in tone to Sontag’s journals—self-critical, self-edifying, a bit self-bullying. Lists of things to do and ways to improve. I guess this is, or maybe was in the 70s, a popular technique for provincial girls who found themselves at elite universities (or anyway at the University of Chicago) to keep reminding themselves to do/be better. I find it pretty grim stuff!

Stambolian’s diary, kept in 79-80, is also quite SERIOUS but different in tone, scope, aim, etc—he was then just over 40, teaching at Wellesley, and spending his summers and weekends fucking his way around gay New York while working towards beginning to write about What It All Means. He seems to have usually written in his diary after getting home from the baths, the club, a date, etc., smoked a joint and gotten into a big think. It’s a bit of the spirit of long voice-messages from a friend talking through something, although they’re shaped by a certain form of Diary Voice that comes from I don’t know where—the dropping of certain grammatical features, like “I” from sentences, and short, sometimes three or four word sentences, giving a telegraphic quality as if to signal that this isn’t an essay, article, letter, etc, but something private, condensed, hard-boiled. Short sentences, dashes, a spirit of the fragment—but also, from being a fussy lit professor with a specialization in Proust, I suspect, oddly c.1900-touches, such as “Yet” and “in a manner” and “one who,” an inescapable fussiness.

There’s on the one hand a desire to turn very recent, mostly sexual experience into Ideas, and on the other a desire for this turning to be solid, staid, terse, just-the-facts— distinctly unlike the campy florid clownery of his letters from Holleran. The diary is masculine, intellectual drag that never quite succeeds. Even when the content is a sensitive middle-aged man afraid he’s entering the FuckPit too late and too old, yearning for love and for his own desirability—what’s the pathos of young love, when you’re not even risking anything when you risk yourself for recognition (because, after all, at 20 you aren’t anything yet, and certainly won’t be loved, if you are loved, for who you are), compared to the pathos of being an achieved person and wondering if anyone can love—and want to suck—what you’ve made of yourself?

As he says in one entry: Is it not humiliating to be judged this way at 41? To let me happiness depend on the caprice of others?

Although the night before he’d apparently fucked a bottom so hot he’d assumed the guy would run when he caught a better look…

Made love to a “knockout” (I love Stambolian’s Jamesian quotes around anything “slangly”) in the meatrack last night. Spent a lot of time at it. Two or 3 times another joined us—to suck or to get sucked in turn. Having made love to a monster recently, I was afraid that the regular features of my beauty seemed so only because of the dark—and that they hid a true ugliness. I was wrong. Later, after his orgasm, so sweet in my mouth, I saw him again. Now his beauty, so evident, made me fear his reaction on seeing me—exposed at last. Yet we touched and kissed again. I had passed.

He was a slave, this one. He sucked with abandon. Moaned when I fingered his hole, eagerly took my load in his mouth. Yet it was his cock that set me off. It was sweet with a good scent of the male.

Stambolian hadn’t had such a bad time either with the aforementioned monster, who gave him too some inspiration—the style, heating up, begins to get properly camp, with fairy tales, wonderment, night-wishing membranes…

The man who fucked me last night was not attractive. At one moment, while he was fucking me on my back, he looked deformed, a fool in some medieval court plugging away in a demented fashion. Yet he fucked well, as one who truly enjoys it, who truly hungers for it. And how sweet it was when after withdrawing— for rest of perhaps even to give up, I turned over and offered him my [bum?]—as it pleases me. And then how he plugged away! Was he amazed at the absence of pain, at the looseness of my hole, at the hunger that was in me. I might have imagined myself a prince caught unawares and seduced by this creature. But I did not. I offered my ass for what it was—flesh in need—and yes—mucous membrane begging the night for a little friction, a little pressure.

Stambolian thinks a lot about body parts. Here the asshole, here the neck:

What the Emerson quote—now the title of a new monograph on him (pace Pistelli, Nietzsche and all [other] spiritual Yankees, I don’t get the appeal of Emerson—from whom indeed flow both BAP and NPR, as well as much bad poetry—if the red slayer thinks she’s slaying, that bitch must have lost her damn mind)—is doing, I have no idea.

'yet this caressing has an irresistible center...'—how wonderfully awkward!

Being really into a guy’s neck allows Stambolian to understand vampirism—each lover and part of a lover is an invitation to a broader cultural reality. Now I get Baudelaire!

Other fetishes, however, were nearly life-long:

One afternoon when I was fourteen I walked with pounding heart into the sports department of the largest store in Bridgeport, Connecticut and asked the man for “an athletic supporter, please.” (This scene would be grist for an essay he’d write a few years later for the New York Native about the pleasures of the jock strap—a number of the more ‘literary’ lines in the diary get worked-over this way).

Aside from this funny scene, it’s all a bit too in-the-head for me—although not of course nearly as bad, sex-writing-wise, as the risibly digressive and mannered scenes in Cleanness (follow our leading gay writer’s Ozempic journey in this recent interview)—I have never much noticed myself to be thinking-thinking while getting pounded, unless I’m really counting the seconds down until I can go to sleep—but there is something touching, and, as Stambolian keeps saying of orgasms, “sweet,” in the faith that sexual experience is worth fully feeling, thinking, remembering, and trying to make something out of—a way of staying faithful to what Stambolian had taken the ‘lesson’ of Proust to be.

On the other hand, nearly every gay guy (and Becca Rothfeld) seems to think that the fact of fucking is original and fascinating (just the other day I had to hear a professor, a few years older than Stambolian in the diary, telling me about his husband and his boyfriend and the tattoo artist in Berlin they fucked, who had given him his septum piercing, which I somehow managed to all hear [I had not, of course, asked] without screaming), with a faith in autobiography, confession, sexuality, embodiment, that it’s hard for me to share. But then, just as one belongs, like it or not, to the people for whom the Bible was a revelation and to whom God spoke, one belongs to the people to whom Cock is Still Speaking—even if, as in this sad diary entry from a 1980 trip to Paris, the prophets have disappeared:

Shopping for books—explosion of publications: Barthes book on photographs and preface to Tricks [Renaud Camus]—Sartre dies after making final remarks on h.[omosexuality—Stambolian put Sartre’s not-quite-final thoughts on the topic in his 1979 edited volume, Homosexualities in French Literature]. Barthes dies before writing his novel that I hoped would say more (of later Foucault if death should take him, where would we be?)… how long will I be haunted by these deaths—enough for today.

The sense that gay life, in France and America, is still so new and fragile, so much in need of intellectual and cultural foundations, of thinking through that can only be done by visionary leaders, who might be taken from us, on whom our hopes depend, is, I think, right in an important sense—a culture is, in no small part, how and what it thinks itself, and by whom—and, of course, tragically premature. He thought 1980 was a year of unbearably sad early deaths, and from the vantage of the next fifteen years, that was the last good one…