GLR May June

The Gay & Lesbian Review

WORLDWIDE

cure, for PPS, which involves progressive muscle deterioration,

accompanied by pain. Doug developed chronic sciatica, and then

a veritable plague of ailments—two strokes, diabetes, weakened

lungs, and kidney failure—necessitating frequent hospitaliza-

tions. He’d long since given up booze-and-talk marathons with

political buddies, but toward the end he was rarely able to leave

his shabby East Village apartment—nor able to pay the rent for

it. Long-time friends kept him this side of homelessness.

Yet to the end, his voice gravelly from muscular debilitation,

he continued to work the phones and—somehow—to write oc-

casional reports and reviews for

Gay City News

. When Hurricane

Sandy hit in 2013, John Berendt sent a car to collect Doug from

his blacked-out apartment and installed him in a bedroom in his

elegant townhouse. Doug reported to the political consultant

Ethan Geto, his friend of many years, that the food was “

very

good” and that he wouldn’t mind staying. Courage and humor,

not complaint, were Doug’s stock-in-trade. Another old friend,

Sean Strub, the founder of

POZ

, dropped by one evening and re-

ported that despite the muscle deterioration that made it difficult

for Doug to hold his head up, intellectually he was in scintillat-

ing form—so much so that Sean regretted not having brought

along a tape recorder to memorialize what was “a master’s tuto-

rial” about “the global political environment.”

After returning to his apartment from his stay at John’s,

“Dougie”—as his close friends affectionately called him— rap-

idly declined. He died on October 26, 2013. A voice of uncom-

mon clarity and charm went silent, his passion and wit emptying

into the void.

Indonesia, and Uganda. The provincialism of gay

Americans infuriated him.

For his pains, Doug was himself criticized for

judging other cultures according to the degree to

which they did or did not conform to Western notions

of “gay identity.” Widely read, Doug was delighted to

discover that most Arab countries had a strong tradi-

tion of male-to-male love and lust, though it typically

co-existed with opposite-gender attraction. Doug re-

sisted any automatic acceptance of cultural relativism

in the name of certain universalist claims. It is

never

right, he’d thunder, to hang two adolescent boys (as

happened in Iran in 2005) for “heretical sodomy”; one

can

never

justify clitoral surgery for young girls as es-

sential to teaching them their “proper” gender role.

For Doug these were criminal acts, and no theocratic

or historic justification could excuse them.

Saints or Sinners—the dichotomous approach

sometimes looms large in Doug’s political writing (as

well as in his personal friendships). Yet his critics from

the

far

left were much more likely than Doug to avoid

shades of gray. This was particularly true of those who

denounced him and, by implication, all those who oc-

casionally blurred ideological categories (meaning

most social democrats), for swinging between the

hope that they could “work within the system” to

bring about progressive change and their gut-level

awareness that only a far more drastic stance—non-

violent revolution? anarchistic localism?—held out

any real chance for substantive social change.

In working with anti-war Democrats like Al

Lowenstein and Bella Abzug and thereby encouraging the belief

that electoral politics could ever dislodge corporate capitalism’s

predatory domination, some critics accused Doug of bolstering

the iniquitous “permanent government” and sabotaging the so-

cialist vision to which he rhetorically adhered. To this Doug

would reply that the conservative mindset in the U.S. that con-

tinued to blame individual “failure” on a lack of ability and/or

effort rather than on structural obstacles relating to race, class,

and gender, dictated a step-by-step pragmatism, a willingness to

choose “the lesser of two evils” as the only alternative to despair

and retreat. To Doug theoretical purity was a form of snobbism.

The last half-dozen years of Doug’s life were full of suffering.

Afflicted with PPS (post-polio syndrome—the return of the dis-

ease many years after recovering from the initial viral attack),

Doug’s health inexorably declined. There’s no treatment, let alone

Psalm

For I shall praise Hasbro, for Big Jim and Big Josh, for the

safari jeep, the boots, the beard. For preparing the way.

For I shall praise Jim Palmer, star pitcher for the

Baltimore Orioles, whose underwear ads were holy writ

of adolescence. Praise for David Hodo, whose torn jeans

and hard hat were an annunciation. Praise, oh praise, for

Tom Selleck, Magnum PI.

Blessed be the one who touched my leg when I sat on

the second pew at church with all the other boys, for the

shame of it, the snickers, for what I learned.

Blessed be the furry attorney from Waco, whose letters

mapped the terrain of the closet. Blessed be his locked

trunk of porn, book of revelations.

Blessed be the priest who listened in the dark

confessional of a hotel bed as we both looked back, brush

of skin, taste of salt.

Blessed be the architect in Hyde Park, who ate a sweet

green apple as he kissed me, fruit of knowledge.

ADDEN