Free Liberation by Christopher Isherwood Page B

quake seemed stronger. The bookcases creaked and swayed. I sat there absolutely suspended, as it seemed, beyond feeling, thought or action. Didn’t even have the presence of mind to worship the earthquake as Shiva! Elsa, whom I talked to today, says she said to herself: how good that this is natural, not human—it might have been a man coming in with a knife!
    Supper with Sandy Gordon and his friend Bob Griffith. A good comedy situation, namely that Bob and to some extent Sandy are star worshippers but they expressed it by telling me everything they’d read in books about the habits and life of Garbo, Monroe, Garland etc.; they realized I’d met these women but that didn’t particularly interest them. They preferred to know their stars thirdhand, so to speak, rather than second. Sandy has just recovered from hepatitis; he had that rose-bloom look one only gets for a few days after an illness.
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    September 18. On the 14th I got a traffic ticket for making a sharp right turn at the bottom of the off ramp from the freeway onto Santa Monica Boulevard, just as the light changed to red. It astonishes me how comparatively much I mind a thing like this; any contact with the police makes me feel slightly nauseated.
    Then on the 15th I went to a meeting of the Society of David. It turned out to be quite a production, with sophisticated sound recording equipment to pick up everything we said. (So sophisticated, it turns out, that a lot of offstage whispering of boys in the kitchen is also on the tape!) As far as I was concerned, this was a kind of trap; my being there was turned into a confrontation between an old liberal square celebrity and the young activists of the Gay Liberation Front. A big swarthy baldish guy named Don Kilhafter (I think) 41 put me down, without absolutely directly attacking me personally. Old Kight aided him without seeming to. Most of the others were genuinely friendly and pleased that I’d come. And the boy who has organized this society, Gary Hundertmark, is only twenty and quite a jolie laide doll; I liked him . But all in all I regret having gone, rather. (Don warned me not to.) It will all be used in some indiscreet way, for one thing. And for another I feel I fell stupidly into their trap and began defending myself, as I so often do, with fake humility under which there is a cold determination to relieve my wounded vanity by hitting back hard at my trappers much later when they have forgotten all about it and are not on their guard. I really did dislike this Don [Kilhefner]; he had the more-engaged-than-thou, dogmatical rudeness of a thirties left-winger. No doubt he does a lot of good work, helping queers out of jams, but oh why can’t he be nicer about it!
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    September 20. Yesterday evening we went with Billy Al Bengston, his girlfriend Penny Little, Joe Goode and his wife, to see motorcycle races at Ascot Park in Gardena. We did it, as Don said, for “business”—that is to say, Don feels he should respond to any overtures Billy makes to include him in his circle. It was bitterly cold, and it went on endlessly—not the racing but the waiting for the racing to start. But I enjoyed seeing it greatly; the only one drawback was that we two couldn’t leave when we’d had enough. The boys who take part are, many of them, curiously Early American types; gaunt thin faces, with a quiet determined look of preparedness, like young soldiers in the Civil War or boy outlaws like Billy the Kid. The race itself seems almost super human. The incredible daring and speed of it. The riders seem to be straining to hurl themselves to destruction. When you stand down by the wire fence you feel quite sick (though you soon get used to it) seeing them hurtle past you, crowding each other so tightly; and then, when they’ve passed, the shattering noise—that adds to the feeling of animal terror. And when they move ahead into the straight they accelerate until you