“My Face in Thine Eye:” On Friendship, Love, and Intimacy in Pride 2024

And now good-morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west.

                                                   –  John Donne, “The Good-Morrow,” ln. 8-18.

For over a fifteen years, on and off, I have had a recurring dream.

In the dream I am laying on my back, my face looking up. My body lies in grass. I am approached by someone. In earlier iterations, I swore it was an angel, but I think “stranger” or simply “other” are more accurate. I cannot say explicitly the sex, although in the burgeoning homosexuality of my teenage years, I saw the other as male in silhouette, even if I could not see the details of his anatomy. Besides, if he was an angel, angels are not sexed: a slate of skin where a human would protrude or invite entry.

Sometimes the stranger stands above me, other times he crawls over me, only a few inches of space between our bodies. He casts a shadow over my face, and his face is dark with the sun behind him. He drags his fingertip from my sternal notch, down, between by breasts, stops an inch beneath. The cavity of my chest swings open.

Inside is the interior of a pomegranate. White and pale-pink pulp cleft to pointed ends of crimson seeds, semi-translucent, glistening. In the core of each bulb, is a light, contained in its matter but luminous, like a pearl. A tear shaped filament in each seed.

I want to sit up, see his face, press our lips together, but he places a hand on my shoulder in warning. If I rise too quickly, the seeds will loosen and fall out. I ask “will you help me gather the seeds if I lose them, if they are scattered by the wind?” But before he answers, in my desire, I jolt up. The seeds pour out. He is gone. I am left hollowed, my heart dispersed.

The dream haunts me as I’ve grown older, gathered more pleasures and pains under my belt. Through aging, sickness, injury, the image of the chest remains, inside an armory soul enfleshed in pieces. But it is not an unwelcome ghost. Potential for new life inspires, despite the very real potential for loss. When I touch others’ chests, I wonder at their insides. If only my finger was a key to unlock you, so I might gaze at your treasury. If only it was so simple to open or be opened up.

***

Recently, I was at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in an extraordinary exhibit of contemporary and historical American art, curated along the philosophical guidelines of indigenous artists and culture bearers. One piece grabbed my attention, a photograph by Minnesota artist Wing Young Huie. It is part of his series of photographs taken in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, not far from where I live.

Frogtown was settled in the 19th century, displacing the indigenous population. This new settlement comprised Polish, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants. Today Frogtown is heavily populated by first, second, and third generation Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, and Ethiopian families. It also intersects with the historically and culturally significant black neighborhood  of Rondo,. Rondo was founded in the early 1800s, but was cruelly disrupted in the 1950s/60s construction of the Interstate 94 freeway, an anti-black, racist action that had a long lasting effect on the community. There is no erasing of the harm done to Rondo’s residents, nor accounting for the tolls violence taken on the families of those who left their countries to live in Frogtown, or the ambivalence of being resettled in a new country where people do not look like you, speak your language, or know your lullabies. In these neighborhoods is poverty, racism, petty and violent crime ,as well as price-gauging, and new waves of gentrification. But there is also incredible life on full display in the coffee shops, Vietnamese bakeries, block-sized pan-Asian groceries, cultural centers, language education and work navigation programs, libraries, demonstrations, block parties…the music and the murals! It is no wonder, then, that Huie was drawn to photograph this rich neighborhood, its layered stories imprinted on the very faces of his residents.

Huie is an extraordinary photographer and a bit of a trickster. His art, including his series on Lake Street in Minneapolis, purposefully implies very different meanings to different audiences based on the viewer’s class or people of origin. Huie flips expectations, recognizing with his camera that for every face on every person we see, we miss another hundred. Huie’s work reminds us of the imperfect pictures we take of each other but also our capacity to see little more, see a little deeper.

In the photo, two boys, 11 or 12 years old, give or take, recline t a tree. They are in the shade: the left of the tree, catching the sun, is the brightest point in the composition. One boy sits center of the image, wearing fabulous zebra printed pants, a baggy long-sleaved shirt, and sneakers. To his right and to the left of the viewer, his bicycle lies on the ground. His blond hair is shortly cropped and his hands rest on his lap forming little circles with his thumbs and pointers. His legs extend forward, a little bent at the knee, right foot pointed to the ground, the other to the sky. His face, smiling, is turned to the left.

There, another boy leans against the tree, his arm and shoulder very close, possibly touching, the first boy’s. He wears a sweatshirt with the white of a t-shirt poking through the collar, dark trousers, and sneakers. His curly hair is cut close to his head,  and he is supported by the tree and the right side of his body. With his torso hoisted up, the rest of him lies down, right leg extended, left is bent and only partially in view. He is smiling has he looks to the boy to his right.

Face meets face; grin, grin; eye, eye.

What is in their shared expression? Obviously love, but nothing obvious about that love. What was the depth of their love? Did their friendship last? And what of their families, their schools live, the activities they shared or did when they were apart? How was their speech with one another  compared to other friends, parents, strangers. Was there a particular intonation, a certain ease with which they talked? How did they hold one another?  

Wing Young Huie, Two Friends, 1994, photograph (gelatin silver print), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis.

***

When I was 11, I felt wrong. I wanted something from boys I was not supposed to. I wanted intimacy, and who doesn’t? But that core desire for connection is so often mocked, ruined, and denied those who are raised as boys. But if you hunger for greater intimacy, proximity of skin to skin, intermingling of bodies and imagination and words altogether, well…  To be gay is to breach the contract of masculinity. In the hormonal crucible of pubescent arousal and repression (middle school) I looked at boys in ways I was not supposed to. As if my searching eyes gave off a scent, my peers could sense. So, I learned, very quickly, to hide the look. It is the first give away. It is very dangerous to stare at a friend too much, too obviously, too vulnerably, too wanting their love.

To save our skin, we think, male gays adopt the male gaze. Watch and speak of girls like property. If you cannot muster that betrayal of the sex who, more often (though not always) has your back, then you at least nod in agreement when others describe so and so’s rack or another’s willingness to put out or the other overly thought-out, often non-consensual things boy describe wanting to do to girls. Anything you observe in a girl that doesn’t objectify, you keep to yourself, because a real boy shouldn’t give a fuck about that crap.

But, if you cannot stomach betraying the girls, you can at least lash out at other faggots: ridicule that other boy and his queer interests and the way he talks and moves his body. Some employ physical violence on top of the verbal assaults. Others direct the need to cut other down back to themselves, splitting their lips to bleed or slicing their wrists. But the gay who wears straight expertly and the sissy whose un-nature cannot be smothered out, are both isolated. Both alien to who they are and who they want to be with. Trying hard not to be seen, we watch out but forget how to look.

***

What is special about museums is how many different worlds are collected in one building. Each artwork, each artifact provides a view into Renaissance Italy, Edo Japan, Ancient Sumer, Romantic Era London, 1960s Greenwich Village, 1970s Southwest, Gothic Germany, Colonial Mexico, and the Pre-Colonial Tenochtitlan. Of course, one Lucretia, Llorona, Judith, Sebastian, Yeshe Tsogyal, and Demogorgon does not tell you everything about the that world. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a ton from even one face of many.

After spending a good amount of time in the American gallery, on the way to the exit, I decided to revisit an exhibit of works from Mannerist printmaker and draughtsman Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). I am a big fan of Goltzius: his psychedelic line work, his skies especially. You look long and closely enough at his art, and the defined shapes give way to mesmerizing abstractions. His biblical and classical mythological themes reveals layers of story within story, revealing in one composition, bodies unfurling bodies, in unexpected contortions.

One print in the exhibit is of The Holy Family: Mary, Joseph, John (the Baptist), and infant Jesus. What first caught my eye was a very cute if unnatural looking cat, stretching its body in a window in the upper left of the image. But then, I followed the window to rest of building, covered in vines, then to the tree beside in front of distant mountains and the sea. I then took a better look at the foreground. Against the tree, looking down, was the jolly, fat, hook nosed, and bearded Joseph. At his elbow, Mary’s head, round cheeked, dimple chinned, pointed nosed facing her child Jesus, muscular and fatty, thick curls about his head, holding cherries or flowers in his fist. Jesus is not, however, looking at his mother, but turned, instead, to his left, at another boy, a few years older. John, son of Elizabeth, the Baptist, holy announcer, cousin, friend. Jesus’s left arm reaches forward and around his cousin’s head to caress his cheek. On John’s lips is a calm wide, smile. Across from him, Jesus smiles back.

Just an hour earlier, in a different gallery on different faces, I saw those doting eyes, the same, and like, parallel smiles.

Hendrick Goltzius, The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist, 1593, engraving, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis.

***

When I think about my dream, the chest opening, the stranger approaching, it is peculiar to me how our faces appear. His is silhouetted against the sun, mine overcast in his shade. The both of us obscured.

The maleness of his body does not stay fixed, dream to dream, nor the field of grass beneath us. These elements shift over the years. Androgynous and feminine forms, indoor and outdoor settings, but always there a source of light behind him and a shadow before me. And the stranger never comes prepared, with a basket to collect my spirit or even a makeshift bowl of her hands. Sometimes, our roles are reversed. Not that the stranger is opened and I, Max, fail to collect his seeds. But rather, that I am the stranger with my body hoisted over Max, my finger the stranger’s on Max’s chest, mine eyes the stranger’s gazing at Max’s cavity. And when the prostrate Max ejects from the earth, scared, excited, grasping…I, as the stranger, flee.

***

I don’t need there to be a specific reading about the sexuality of the boys in Huie’s photograph. Nor do I suggest lust between Jesus and John. But let me be clear: there are boys who lust for boys, whose pulses turn erratic at another boy’s closeness, whose dreams are filled with boys enjoined and joining, boys whose skins bear the marks of unrequited want. It is important for such boys to see that looking at another boy can be met with looking back, that sight does not have to be the site of betrayal. We can be held in one another’s gaze without the world falling to pieces.

***

One of my greatest fears is to start having romantic feelings for a friend. In some of my closest friendships, I harbored that worry: what if I want their body to be with mine, to love them with my full creative, sexual self? I cannot risk speaking it, having known the violence or ostracism such desire can meet. I stopped being close to most boys, and, as I got older, most men. As an adult like when I was younger, I have wanted to be with men I knew would not reciprocate my hunger. But after gaining something as precious as a friend, I could not risk losing the friendship by being honest. This fear became obsessive, as I denied even the intimacy of hugs, caresses, or kisses. I would only have sex with men from online or met once at a party, men who did not know me, my life, my art, even the smallest fraction of my world.

And it has sometimes been great, fulfilling a need for touch, having my body open to another. But the older I get, this mercenary sex has felt empty. I have felt like I am using others and being used. It’s always been consensual, but consensual objectification can still hurt, quite a lot.

As my relationship to gender and masculinity change, so has my sexuality changed. I have found desires for queer and trans, nonbinary people, and female/feminine people, even if part of me definitely desires men. It is odd a nonbinary, feminist person like me only sought cis male sexual partners. I wonder if I felt it was fair game to use men or be used by men, rather than objectify a woman or a nonbinary person, as if that is what sex is, using? I feared, were I to love a women sexually, I’d become another soldier in the army of masculinity, another man, another kind of person who has so often has hurt me. The heterosexual matrix is a pervasive force. It is planted in our blood. But so are other seeds.

 Eventually the pain is too unbearable of unfulfilling sex between tropes of top/bottom, man/woman, dom/sub, not part of but instead of the totality of our subjectivities, more unbearable than the feared rejection, loss, or change in friendship. I think I will suffer more to live in disconnect than to turn to a friend and admit “I see you. I want to be seen by you. I know you. I want to be known by you. I love you.”

***

Patriarchy is sustained through divisions of sex, sexuality, the many pieces of ourselves. Our culture devalues the face then tells us to accept face value. Thus, we are not to be proud of whom we look at or feel pride to be looked upon. But in a 16th century engraving by a German-born Dutch print-maker and a 20th century photograph by a Chinese American photographer, boys, young boys, look at one another, and, defying it all, beam at their friends with love.

Radical gay literature has helped rethink how people relate to one another. Harry Hay, of the Radical Faeries, talked about subject-subject consciousness. Similar ideas abound in radical feminist aspirations for transcending patriarchy and gender divisions. Nourished by such radical thinkers (lovers), I witness these artworks as testament to that love between equals, of worlds colliding and enriched in their collision. Queer boys should see this art. Cis and straight boys should see this art. Women (cis and trans), men (cis and trans), and nonbinary people, should see this art. All of us could bear to look upon our friends, our families, our lovers with the joy this boy looks to that.

***

John Donne, the 16th century English poet and minister, in “The Good-Morrow,” ascribes an alchemical process to looking with love. When we are not watching out, fearing the loss of our status or fearing rejection, but, looking at the other in their entirety, with love, then all our daily vision is transformed to amorous perception: “all love of other sights controls”(ln. 10). We see the worlds in another person: each of us a planet opening to our beloved and to the explorer in them, turning the atlas our own persons to them with a compass and invitation.

We are a world, each of us. But we can also possess a world, when we are given one another: “each hath one, and is one” (ln. 14).  Look at the other with love, and the other looking back with love, we breathe into our landscapes, sweep our seeds into the air, until they, released from their confines, settle down in both our feels. Donne concludes his poem “Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;/ If our two loves be one, or, thou and I/ Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die” (ln. 19-21). This is the sacred mystery of mutuality: we can love and love each other fully without diminishing ourselves or smothering the other nor without forgetting that each of us has uncharted waters, hidden grottos, secret woods yet that cannot be rationally contained: our unknowables are not unlovable. The task is to love each other completely without completing each other. We are not made wrong, but just depleted by life’s woes. Love is the rain that fills the wadi and nourishes our fruits.

With the Frogtown boys or Jesus and John, seeing one another in love reveals a binding spell. From that binding a bond. A bond that is immortal, even if we eventually grow apart within our lives. For, the confluence of one opening to a second, third, infinite others, yields strange arithmetic where it all goes back to one. Each act of love, fully given, fully received, participates in the force that sustains life and is life’s origin. Let us celebrate this truth, this Pride, 2024. For when “my face in thine eye” and “thine in mine appears,” each of us holds the world.