Last week at the bread counter in Balducci’s the young man standing next to me smiled broadly. “And how are you?” he asked. Later on Christopher Street a man sitting on the steps of a brownstone looked up as I passed and nodded to suggest I sit down beside him. Again at the Three Lives Bookstore another man with more than literary interests asked me friendly questions about gay writers. As I walked home that afternoon I felt elated despite the effects of a bad cold and an aggravated concern about my finances. The source of my happiness was no mystery for I had acquired along with a loaf of bread, a novel by Edmund White, and an assortment of fresh vegetables, and in much greater abundance than I had hoped for, my daily dose of admiration!
I’m not belittling by these examples the praise we receive from friends for a job well done or a boss’s words of approval, which in television ads makes the recipient throw back his shoulders, straighten his tie, and walk off in confidence. As satisfying as such praise may be, it doesn’t always replace the remarks and gestures which tell us that we are still an object of desire, still an “item” in the sexual marketplace. Unfortunately the costs involved in these transactions can be as unpredictable and demanding as the rewards. Who hasn’t known someone who has overdosed on admiration and become so hopelessly addicted to it that he wants it less to increase his pleasure than to relieve the anxiety of not having it. And who hasn’t experienced at some time enough indifference and rejection to force him to ponder the truth of Sartre’s dictum that “hell is other people.”
There is an art of attracting admiration and an art of dealing with it. Until recently I was relatively blind to the value of admiration in the sense that I accepted it only from those I myself desired and saw it as nothing more than the prelude to an act. But now, thanks in part to age and a less chirpy libido, I have come to appreciate admiration for its own sake and have learned to receive it as graciously as I can from anyone who wishes to give me a supply. I have also become far less sparing in the doses I give to others. I have even reached the conclusion that it is as much this need for admiration as cruising for sex that motivates our walks through the Village or our visits to bars. So instead of wearing T-shirts that proclaim: Beat Me, Rape Me, Fuck Me, Suck Me, we might advertise our more basic desires by wearing others that say: Smile at Me, Tell Me I’m Hot, Ask Me Friendly Questions. Yet I would never put on such a shirt, not because it might seem silly or in bad taste, but because I have also learned, and rather painfully, one of the cruel laws that governs this world and tells us that the surest way not to receive admiration is to appear to want it too much. ❡
