Free In the Shadow of the American Dream by David Wojnarowicz

force by his excitement, his great eyes so full of energy from form and design and the sense of touch. His ceramics were beautiful, a great deal of sensitivity in them. The thing that really hit me was his interest in nature—it brought me back fully into a huge cargo of senses and memory, the whole denial of the love for nature that had taken place from so much city living, that whole period where I ceased drawing and my desire for writing precluded just about every other sense, my many animal books down in some faraway basement uptown.
    We made love and it was exhilarating, the passion something I had not felt to that degree in some time, mostly because of the concern over all events transpiring in last two or three months. He talked about Findhorn Gardening —have to read the book—it made him aware of the presence within a forest of all these living things. Sort of like an entity of its own. I didn’t want to leave but had told Brian I would see him later. I left around 2 A.M. and went home. I’ve been kind of in a dreaming daze from all the thoughts produced in that meeting with him and have not stopped thinking about him since Friday night. We might get together Monday night. I hope so as I’d like to see him again before I go. We made plans to correspond with each other while I’m in Paris and Normandy. I feel kinda confused ’cause my emotions have run away into an area of little control where I hardly know the fella but feel such a great deal for him. He’s a teacher in a school that has a semiexperimental setup, a setup that every school should have. His contact with the kids is on the same level both ways: he’s in touch with a great deal of their ideas and needs and desires, and he teaches arts and sciences, tries to merge the two, which by the looks of his work he succeeds greatly, by furthering the textures of nature in the surface of clay, always striving to bring it further along.
    August 29, 1978
    We drove onto the upward ramp and into the second-story platform of the garage, hunted awhile for a space, found it and parked. We walked down the ramp, he with his hat on, the fine drizzle sparking the night, and my feet were fluid. I could walk for years just thinking about possibilities and the endless listening which somehow became so important to me, like I wished I knew him for all of his thirty years just so that I could say or respond to what he was talking about in the way that would most put his mind/heart at ease. I could see how much he was troubled by it all, the story of homosexual lifestyles and drawbacks that could very well be spoken similarly by Dennis, Harold, myself, and Brian, and so many other people I have known. What knocks me away is that there are all these men who feel similarly but they never find each other or partners in each other. Here I feel like I could spend a great deal of the time with Phillip but am struck by the seeming senselessness of this thought because I met him now for the second time and I’m channeling all this emotion and thought to him—how right is all this? how possible for it all to work out someday in this lifetime for all of us? But it isn’t senseless in that I do see the heart of men by and through their eyes, that space of liquid in the aperture of the head that reveals energy and life and sensitivity, all the positive energy rushing from him in the things he desires for his own mind (the fool who left him after eight years).
    I gave him a long massage and from his head to his toes, kneaded and rubbed to work the tension out—what feelings I try to move through the tips of my fingers. We went to bed without having sex and I really didn’t care, sleeping next to his warm body was enough and when I woke the seven times during the night startled awake from high-strung senses from realizing I would not see him again after tonight I wanted the night to move so much slower wanted the breath to leave me