Looking for love in a dangerous time

“Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One day you’re waiting for the sky to fall
The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time

When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime.
But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.
Got to kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.”

It’s certainly true that nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight, and I sometimes feel like my life’s been one long kick at the darkness, with occasional, increasingly frequent glimpses of daylight.

Sarah Schulman’s novel People in Trouble concerns a love triangle in New York City in the very late 80s or very early 90s: Molly, her older lover Kate, and Kate’s husband, Peter. As each of them tries to figure out what it means to be in this situation, people are dying. AIDS is devastating the gay community, and society takes little notice. Quickly the people whose friends are dying come to understand that they need to make society take notice. 

In her great piece “Ghost World (Like a Bad Dream),” Masha Tupitsyn quotes Kafka as saying that we need books “that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Schulman’s books have been working on me this way (I previously wrote about her novel Girls, Visions and Everything and about her novel Empathy). Kate in People in Trouble seems to need something like this herself:

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I think Kate’s problem is her self-denial, her compartmentalization. At least that was my problem. Kate has a thing with Molly, thinks she loves Molly, but vehemently denies being gay, and can’t see herself letting Molly in completely.

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By not “paying that much attention,” by not fully investing in the connection, it’s not just Molly she’s keeping out, but herself.

 Meanwhile, Molly wants closeness, and it was her expressions of longing that most effectively chipped away at the frozen sea within me. The way she feels like a second-class citizen who would choose Kate’s presence if only she could:

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the way her relationship with Kate leaves her with nowhere to put her feelings:

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and the way she finally finds a connection with someone that makes her realize that she deserves so much more than she’s getting.

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Two things my life has taught me: There is a euphoria in taking control of your own life, and nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.

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