Read Online White Girls by Hilton Als - Free Book Online

helps, and there is sometimes less of oneself, or one’s I in the effort. SL and I were comrades, we would get through it, the world would love him as much as I did. But the world would not. Once, after we became friends and SL moved on from the weekly where we met to a magazine that was part of a big, lady-centered corporation—they published magazines whose major themes were weddings, eyebrows, and the like—SL would describe how few black men worked there, and how they never talked to one another. Some time later, I got a job at the same company—by then, SL had quit to pursue his own work—and as he waited in the lobby for me one day, SL looked on as I talked to two black men who worked in fashion. As we walked away, SL exclaimed: “Oh, my God, when I saw that, I couldn’t believe the building didn’t explode!” Presumably the city’s cultural life—which, after 1980 or so, was dominated by white female gallerists, curators, critics, and the like—would have exploded if it had accepted SL’s photographs and video work along with my praise, and that is how they treated him: as being too much. In 2001 his pictures were too much. In 2002 his appearance was too much. In 2003 his morals showed people up too much. Where was this man of high principles supposed to fit in the highly unprincipled worlds of art and fashion that he aspired to and disdained, a world where successwas based as much on personality, body type, and eye color as it was on any recognizable skill (sometimes more so)? And by aspiring to those worlds, was SL not returning to Europe in a way, hankering to love that which he could not be, which is to say a white woman?
    Since I have always preferred to live in the next generation of hope, it was the children of those art-world ladies who worried me. Living in their male-identified world of having it all, the mothers who toiled in the corridors of photography and literature and the like couldn’t be bothered with feminism because what is feminism but humanism; they didn’t want their children—particularly their girl children—to make the mistake they’d made at Brown or Yale or Berkeley or whatever, which is to say believing feminism and thus humanism had any value at all, and would get them anywhere in this stinking world. So they let their daughters say whatever they wanted under the guise of free “self-expression,” but what amused those mothers—the same mothers who would not mother SL’s longed-for career—was listening to, and watching, their daughters’ aggression. One such little girl told me that if I shaved my beard, I’d look like CeeLo Green. Another little girl told her mother that she didn’t like the way I smelled. Another asked how I could be happy, considering that I looked like a gay Unabomber? These were the children of the mothers SL longed to kiss, and protect, even as my wounds would not heal and shall never heal because now I have the hatred of a white woman and if SL doesn’t think his unconditional love of them and ultimately wary love of me didn’t contribute to the immense loss of our love, he’s crazy.
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    But by 2006 my pain was becoming less real to SL; he was struggling for his own survival, but how do you do that when you’re a twin? Or what I believed to be a twin? That was one reason I encouraged SL to leave occasionally, and join the world of living white women: our twinship not only needed other blood to survive, but, until the end, and even now, we believed our twinship could take it. Our we could survive anything, including this fact: that SL knew perfectly well that my I liked skating on the edge of abandonment, it had always been that way, there was my father in one direction, and my mother in another, and it was their coming together at certain times—to protect me from a homophobic teacher when I was in elementary school, taking turns rubbing me with witch hazel as they tried to bring one of my childhood fevers