Life and Fate
It was Ivo who taught me that I had the ability to make my own fate, to determine my own role in our relationship. Had I once thought of us in the simplistic terms of male/female, active/passive, dominant/submissive? He mocked me for falling victim to historical and literary canon. The ancient Greeks, he pointed out, had defined homosexual relationships as such. Surely in the year Our Lord 1995 I could produce something that if not revolutionary at least altered the paradigm.
He was of course correct. In my youthful insecurity and my near-adulation of his apparent wisdom, I chose to cast myself as the passive, feminine one - coquette to his svengali. But then he even made me question that – calling me a whore for all the women I had fucked to spite him. How very telling, he said in his deadliest tone, that I had had to take a woman to bed to wound him, that I was too bound by tradition to seek out another man. I was worse than any cliche.
His derision left me smarting and when I first began to write, I was determined to emerge the new Genet, on a par with Satre's Saint Genet. My pen would turn heads to tails, make every reader rethink everything they had ever thought before so that future generations would still be pondering the placement of a comma or the isolation of a sentence.
Five years later, I am more realistic, wanting simply to lay to rest those memories that have bound me, dragged me down in chains to the abyss of despair.
Last year, I dedicated my first book to Ivo:
For Ivo, who has long had his doubts about the younger generation.
Only now do I realize that while I owe Ivo much in its creation, I had actually written it for my mother.