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White's study overlooks a small park by the Seekonk River, a remote area where sex-obsessed men in cars come to cruise. Although he practices safe sex, he is a man of admitted compulsive-obsessive sexual behavior. Looking out at the cruisers, he says, "You know, nobody believes me when I tell them I rented the house not knowing about this, but I didn't. Anyway, I won't get involved, I'm too busy."
That afternoon White and his class of 30 view a BBC interview with Genet. It's something the class has been looking forward to for weeks, and a strong buzz of intellectual fervor is in the air, academia at its best. But before running the video, White has an announcement. It seems that next week there will be someone in the class to evaluate him, "so . . ."
"I know," a bright young man cries out, "clap at the end."
Lots of laughter, White smiles graciously, and then on to Genet. White helps out with some background information:
"These are scenes from a porno movie made in the '50s. It was shot in a nightclub called La Rose Rouge . . .
"That's Lucien, Genet's lover; see how cute he is! He's now running a garage." Discussing a scene where two prisoners, in separate cells, share forbidden cigarette smoke passed through a straw, White notes, "It's totally improbable; in reality you couldn't put that straw through a brick wall, but it's sexy, isn't it?"
Each day the phone at his apartment begins ringing by 8 in the morning. White speaks on the phone in soft tones, patiently, calmly, in both English and French. He lived in France for seven years, returning in January of this year. The calls, he says, are "generally from French gay boys sick with worry about coming down with AIDS." Or about those already sick, like Herve Guibert, a young Frenchman who just published a book titled To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. "He's dying. He was beautiful, and now he looks like an Auschwitz victim."
In the early 1980s White and several other men helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis to deal with the cases of "gay cancer" that were just being reported. Of that group, only three survive, including activist-writer Larry Kramer. White is perplexed about the pathology of the illness. So far, although he is HIV-positive, he does not have any symptoms of AIDS. "But I don't understand it," he says. "So many others have already died. Forty of my friends, including my best friend, David Kalstone . . . my editor, Bill Whitehead. Students of mine have died. It doesn't seem right, students dying before their teacher -- like children before their parents, the worst tragedy."
But White has learned to cope. "A close friend is visiting on the weekend," he says. "We have so much fun together that I forget how sick he is, that he could die very soon -- that I could too. Denial, that's how we're all dealing with it."