 I always feel that we should take a moment of silence to think back to the people that we knew and the activists that we knew and the people who really made it possible for us to be here today. I mean, that's really true that those people who fought in the streets and who gave their lives enabled in a way there to be a Hormel Center and for us to be in our palmy place today. And I know that we don't, I think, remember those people enough. So I would invite you to take a moment to think of someone, either an activist or someone who died or just someone in your life who you'd like to recall to and we can double their numbers in this room. See, we have more people in the room. A lot more people. I can also thank Kathy Seligman and Barry Owen, who is here somewhere. There's Barry. Both these essays go back a long way. The essays in Everywhere Home and Kathy and Barry and Melanie Bean have been at various points really great readers for whom, without whom I could not have written these essays. So it's nice to be able to thank them in person and of course to the Hormel Center for having us here. I'm going to read a fun piece and then a little bit about San Francisco because there's a whole section of this book which is called Journal of the Plague Years, which are the essays that are collected that I wrote during approximately 1988 to 1996 and then finish up with a sort of everywhere piece. So this is from my first home, Kentucky. It's called On Fire. I ordered my first drink at the Club 68 in Lebanon, Kentucky, 13 winding country miles east of my childhood home. It was owned by Lebanese Christians, a long story, but the short version is that prosperous Anglos have always farmed out what they call vice to black people and rural people and newly arrived immigrants. People the Anglos can trash and persecute and imprison after they service the Anglo obsession with sin. The Irish, the Jews, the dark skinned people, the hillbillies and of course the queers selling hooch or pot or heroin or meth or sex to the prosperous or our trouble thrown in the slammer after the goods are passed but before the money changes hands. Fleeing violence abroad, these Lebanese Christians settled in Lebanon, a town of 5,000 which some two centuries earlier Presbyterian Scots had named after the Middle Eastern homeland of the Club 68's owners. An exile and an outlier, Hylene George, patriarch of the family, situated his nightclubs on the Chitlin circuit, an assemblage of road houses scattered throughout the then segregated south where African American musicians en route from winters in New Orleans to summers in Chicago performed in exchange for a room and a meal and a percentage of the door. Fresh from the multicultural patchwork of the Middle East, unburdened by the south's crushing obsession with race, Hylene George understood that white audiences would pay to see and hear black artists. He hired a black manager, this is in Lebanon, Kentucky, nowhere, 5,000 people. He hired a black manager, Obi Slater, and if you're interested you can find it via interlibrary loan, Obi Slater wrote this fantastic self published memoir of his being the manager of these clubs. He hired a black manager and cross-programmed acts among his clubs, one all black, the club cherry, one all white, the Club 68, and the all white one was across the street, across the road I forgot the name. And the third mix, that was the Club 68, and the list of musicians he hired to play this town is a roll call of mid-century American blues and jazz and rock and roll. B.B. King, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix en route from military service at Fort Campbell in western Kentucky to the formation of his own band in Cincinnati. Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, The Supremes, James Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Etta James, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, Hank Ballard in the Midnighters, Junior Parker, Joe Tex, Laverne Baker, The Coasters, The Charelles, The Platters, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, not to mention a few white boys tagging along for the ride, among them Creighton's Clearwater Revival, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Steppenwolf. I had a friend who was 16 and thus possessed of a driver's license and his parents' car, Billy Frank Carded actually to give him a name. I had no idea who was playing that night on my first purchased drink and didn't much care. My friend and I were only looking to get drunk and, as was widely known, the clubs in Lebanon served alcohol to anyone tall enough to push a bill across the bar. The club legally held maybe 300 people. That night there were easily 500 under a ceiling 20 feet high. Most of us were male, all of us were white. This was 1968 at the club 68 on US Highway 68. I was 15 years old. On stage, I can Tina Turner and the IKETS. I do not recall what I can Tina sang. What I recall is the discovery of desire. What Tina Turner did with her body I hadn't conceived that anybody could do with a body. As a gay boy, I'm aware that there were words to name what I was. I wasn't in heat in the manner of most of the men around me. Nonetheless, Ms. Turner taught me that evening that the body was something more than a suitcase for transporting the brain. Almost 50 years later, I of the two vivid imagination have to work to imagine how she could strut an entice and seduce 500 screaming drunk Anglo country boys. That is what we call art, and she a true artist. Though as I write that sentence, I speculate that she must have reveled in asserting her power, her black woman artist's power, in one of the few ways and places available to her. And so I encountered in art, her art, the catalyst for my lifelong project of dismantling western civilization, separation of body from mind, heart from soul, and what was shown, not told that evening at the club 68 by Anna Mae Bullock, former Nutbush Tennessee Baptist Church choir girl. No duality, no separation. Love your neighbor as yourself. We are all one in Christ Jesus. We are all one in desire. Driving home, my drunk friend got us lost and didn't get me to my parents house until four o'clock in the morning. For the first and last time, my mother was waiting up, and her expression I understood that she thought that I, her youngest son, was not going to be a hellraiser like her three previous sons, and she was sorely disappointed. Soon thereafter, segregation ended, at least officially, and doors opened for black artists to perform in first class venues, even in the south. The Chitlin circuit faded into history. A few years after that, Tina left Ike. I doubt she ever again performed in a venue so humble. But she had awakened a force that was not to be denied, and though I am not condoning that drunk drive home, and though I mourn all those fine men and women lost to AIDS, I have no regrets about my forays into the demi-monde, the days and nights given over to seeking connection, communion with the gods with God. Not long afterward, I graduated from high school and went wandering, an ancient and exacting and honorable calling. Later in these pages, I will confess that I do not believe in time, that I do not believe in death. Looking out the window on a chill December day in my beloved Kentucky, my left ankle broken in a cast from an accident involving a hibernating groundhog's hole in the woods surrounding the hermitage of the trappist, monk, mystic and writer Thomas Merton, I find the sources of that observation so obvious as to need no explanation. The bare trees raised limbs etch lines against the pale blue winter sky. Another six months in these same trees will present a curtain of green. Only the smallest liberation of consciousness is required to understand me, the groundhog, the trees and you as seamlessly unified and continuous elements of that same cycle of life, of birth, death and rebirth. Nothing is absolute. Everything changes. Everything moves. Everything revolves. Everything flies and goes away. That's Frida Kahlo, who knew whereof she spoke. Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence. Our intelligence, yours and mine. The smallest sprout, Walt Whitman writes, proves that there is no death. Eternal life, a process some call desire and some call God and some have the wisdom to respect in silence. From sayings of the Desert Fathers translated by Sister Benedicta Ward, Abbalot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office. I fast a little. I pray and meditate. I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, If you will, you can become all flame. In fiction and nonfiction, my lifelong subject has been the reintegration of desire and the sacred, a lifelong becoming of the flame. So that's the introductory essay. This is the opening paragraph. I'm going to read just a few passages, a couple of paragraphs of the introductory essay of the section called Journals of the Plague Gears. In my late 20s and throughout my 30s, fate placed me in the midst of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, arguably the world's hardest hit city in those first years because of its compact size, its relatively large gay population and its history of sexual liberation. The gay writers of that era were the bridge between a generation for whom writing for mainstream publications required remaining in the closet and a generation of openly gay men and women who have risen to editorial and political power. I was born to the generation in between, the generation that made that change possible, though to give fate its due, AIDS gave us little choice. Silence equal death. And I read that to remind us that someone like Edmund White, for example, who is 10 years older than I could not publish in mainstream publications because he was gay man. He was publishing in places like Christopher Street and those kinds of magazines. And then you get a generation of men who are 10 years and women who are 10 years younger than I who kind of took for granted, I have to say, their access to mainstream publications. And then there was this bridge of people that was in between and that's where I happened to be. I tell the history of all that. And now a little bit about San Francisco in an essay called City of Innocence and Plague. But before I tell that I want to tell a story that's not in this collection, maybe it'll be in the next collection. But we're all, most of us, all of us maybe, San Francisco, San Franciscans Bay Area residents. And I want to give you something to take away other than our reading. So I was sitting in Kentucky with my then 100, now 101 year old mother. And she kind of goes in and out of what we call reality. But she was kind of there that day. It was last October. It was a beautiful day. Sonny and we were sitting outside and she said, kind of an old trope of a conversation with her. She said, so Fenton, of all the places that you've been, which do you like the best? And I thought I might sort of stimulate her thinking to turn the question around. So I don't know, mother, what all the places you've been, which do you like the best? And she said, oh, I haven't really traveled that much. And I said, yes, you have. After Father died, we took you to a lot of places. You went to Athens, you went to Rome, you went to Paris, you went to London. I took you to New York a couple of times. And I let her think about that for a little bit. And kind of as an afterthought, because I didn't think of it as being in a sort of class of those cities, I said, and you know, you came to visit me in San Francisco many times. And she said, oh, San Francisco. And I said, really? Why do you like San Francisco the best? And she said, because everybody there is so accepting. Isn't that great? That's us. City of Innocence and Plague. The epigraph is a poem by Andrew Jakes, who was writing from prison. At the time, still is in prison, so far as I know. Let history lie and lie light as the ashes surrendered to the air off the Golden Gate Bridge. I never knew a city before San Francisco. At 17 years, not knowing how to take a bus or use a paid telephone or order from a menu, clutching a scholarship underwritten by a bourbon distiller, I came directly from the Kentucky Hills to the Bay Area. I was drawn by the hippies, whose images and stories had made their ways into my childhood. I was drawn by the hope that someone would help me avoid the war in Vietnam. I was drawn by the photographs in the Stanford University catalog of hunky guys in Speedos, lounging under the palm trees by Lake Lagunita, and by the temptations of a culture where people, men, so effortlessly inhabited their beautiful flesh. It was 1971, a peculiar moment in transition when the most powerful empire in history was in the midst of being shown the fallibility and impermanence of all human creations, most especially empires. The nation was on the verge of anarchy. My father kept a loaded handgun in his nightstand to shoot the riders when, not if, they rampaged out of the city and into our tiny remote village. By the time I arrived, the hippies had fled the hate, and I had to engineer a conscientious objectorship on my own, but even so, I was in California, a word that still carries a frisson of promise and magic. I saw the place and the waning moments of its glory before the onslaught of real estate madness. Every drive from Palo Alto to the beach was a mystical journey, climbing mountains higher than I had ever seen, on a road more crooked than any I had ever driven, to enter a forest taller and deeper than any I'd ever known. And then, at the roads in, the cold and restless Pacific, free for all, where on a crowded day, I might encounter four or five people on a beach strewn with exotica, kelp and driftwood and anemones and starfish, and from which I caught a split second glimpse of a whale hurling its serially vast self completely out of the water to fall back with a thwack audible above the crashing surf. And I'll skip a little bit too. Some years I wrote, places shape people rather than the other way around. With moderation born of experience, I amend that sentence to read, places shape people as well as the other way around. The steep hills divide the city into neighborhoods isolated from one another so that each develops its peculiar character. The vast supply of redwood that lay within a stone's throw, the relative posity of brick and stone, and construction techniques arising from technological innovations contributed to our ensuring a new and different kind of city from those of the east end of Europe. After the invention of the balloon frame house and the coping saw, could drag queens be far behind, from permanence to transience, from stone and brick to insubstantial wood from reality to illusion. Boston sits ponderous on the earth, San Francisco is poised to rise with its famously steep hills into its airy-fairy fogs. The city is the synecdoche of the west, the expression in gingerbread bedecked wood of people who came here because they wanted to leave reality behind to create and inhabit a myth. Inspect the backside of a Boston Victorian and you find patterned brick and filigreed stone that complement the building's public face. Inspect the backside of a San Francisco Victorian and you find a plain wooden box. The frills and gughaws are so much makeup applied to a stage set city. Did gay people, of necessity students of deception, settle here because it is a fantasy city? Or has it become a fantasy city because we settled here? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The fantasy city or the dragon, leather queens and dykes who call it home? And I'll finish with a piece. That's kind of an ending piece. Let's see. Yeah. Oops. Thank you. This piece is called Light in August. Every summer around the beginning of August, today arrives when I'm walking along in mid-afternoon and I realize the light has slipped. Its angle is no longer that of high summer, high in hammering, light that for the past couple of months I've come to take for granted in my too human fashion as the way things will always be. Summer will never end. No one I love will ever die. Now the angling light signals that the endless summer is ending. In fact, I and everyone I love will die. The question is only who will be the first to reach the finish line? And yet I see I've indulged in a commonplace misperception. Since properly understood, there is no finish line. We are creatures of light, sentient bundles of energy moving through the universe. It is of us as we are of it. There is no death. There is only process changing from one form to another. Through some cartesian sleight of hand, the brain refuses to perceive this. Instead, it cunningly divides the world into dualities. There's a little dab of brain, I'm told, given over to setting boundaries. This is where I end. This is where you begin. Me, you, us, them. Male, female, light, dark. Beginning end, life, death. No doubt these illusions are or were necessary for our survival, no matter that the basis for murder and mayhem and our self-centered understanding of death as, now you see us, now you don't. In fact, death is only another milepost in the never-ending becoming of what it is. Ask your dog. She'll agree. Look to the wagon, her tail. You don't see her moping about in pending doom. In this particular early August, I noticed a slipping light on a walk rendered poignant by the tension of unrequited love. Denied an outlet for my passion, I offered my companion the observation that if I believed in death, I'd kill myself. What do you mean, he asked? No doubt casting an uneasy glance at the pen knife dangling from my knapsack. All that loss, I answered, all that grief. Who could stand it if you really believed death to be the finish line? Not me. I take great affirmation and good cheer knowing that we're light from light, true God from true gods, one form of energy changing into another until billions of years hence when in the entropy of time all our colors will merge and melt into a uniformly still gray, the gray of the paintings that hang in the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Under the auspices of Harper's Magazine, I once moderated a debate held in that chapel. The subject of tan was faith and reason, as false a duality is light and dark or male and female are life and death, but one thing had led to another where we were, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilyn Robinson representing faith and the Nobel-winning physicist Stephen Weinberg representing reason and me wondering how I had gotten myself from my childhood in the Kentucky knobs into refereeing such August company. I chose the Rothko Chapel as our venue, a mistake. I actually chose it because Stephen Weinberg refused to change planes, but I chose the Rothko Chapel as a venue, as our venue, a mistake. It features works by Mark Rothko, painted in the decade before he took his life in 1970. Fast lozenges of a smooth, even gray, surrounded by halos of an almost indiscernible darker gray, hung against the lighter gray of the walls. They're enveloping gray stillness prompts not debate but contemplation. They demand that we sit down, shut up, still ourselves to the essence of being the unbearable gray lightness of being. Robinson burned with quiet passion. Weinberg might be the most articulate man with whom I have had the honor of conversing, as was evidenced in that day's debate in which he, the combative atheist, set forth the case for faith, then argued with himself while the contemplative Robinson listened. But we're not yet at the debate. We've just walked in the chapel and are spending a moment looking at Rothko's paintings. Weinberg shook his head. I love abstract art, he said. I collect abstract art, but I just don't get Rothko. What is it with these great blobs of gray? The most delicate of pauses ensued before Robinson said quietly, it's the moment before creation. I would have been happy to have ended the debate right there. To my mind, the exchange said all that needed to be said about the debaters' different understandings and the way things are. In the first three minutes, Weinberg wrote, even when physicists have gone as far as they can go, there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate. Robinson, the contemplative, grasped what he, the scientist, had not perceived. Stories and art are our means of putting our hearts around the irreducible mystery. Rothko had painted that mystery a few years before he plunged in. To reunify the parts of our broken selves, it seems to me, is to make the commitment to become a whole person, a holy person. A vocation that each of us must discern and fulfill in our particular ways. The good news is that as Rabbi Menachem of Kotzk wrote, there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. Reading and writing are or can be the glue. One means we use to patch ourselves together. They have served that purpose for me. Among the most brilliant of book titles is William Faulkner's Light in August, a novel contained in a phrase. Memory believes before knowing remembers, Faulkner wrote, believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. To read or write poetry or prose is to lay claim to your citizenship among the people of faith. Everything is always, as my friend Barry says, most especially us and most especially memory. And before you ask what he'd been smoking, take a walk in even tide in the light in August, the month of abundance and of loss. Thank you.