Life Is Not a Rehearsal
Brudnoy, David
Life Is Not a Rehearsal David Brudnoy Doubleday 1299 pages / $22.95 REVIEWED BY Matthew Scully I t's been two years since David Brudnoy, the popular radio host and conservative writer, turned up...
...When I wasn't studying or doing good, I could be found lingering hopefully on the sidelines of life, glancing at handsome classmates, wishing that someone would drag me into the arena of action...
...In high school Brudnoy dated girls half-heartedly, but arrived at Yale still in a state of inner turmoil...
...That "almost" suggests he sees his rationalizing for what it is—an attempt to prettify something deeply distasteful, something not easy to square with Brudnoy's own sense of order and "just so" temperament...
...But his own story confirms one's worst suspicions...
...Why are homosexual men still carrying on as before...
...One would think that answering such questions is a step toward finding a measure of 7,,, real peace...
...Over the next two months he survived pneumonia, congestive heart failure, liver problems, shingles, and the prospect of permanent paralysis in his legs...
...But Brudnoy rejects this explanation on the grounds that if it were so, "then millions of boys—all of whom grew up while Daddy was away at war or grew up with no dad at all —would probably be homosexual...
...pretenses, and describes a sense of "healing" when the inevitable "outing" came...
...The Best Little Boy in the World," the chapter about his childhood, describes a mostly happy youth in a small Minnesota town and his growing sense of disappointed expectations...
...and his early years in Boston as a teacher, media personality, and prolific writer for both National Review and this magazine...
...Today, at 56, Brudnoy is back on the air, broadcasting from home to save strength, and, as this book attests, in full possession of his writing powers...
...During his first three years, his father was away in the Army...
...that absence, he writes, fulfills "one of the hoariest clichés of the etiology of homosexuality in young boys...
...a three-month tour of Europe...
...Though some of the details are troubling, there's something admirable in Brudnoy's refusal either to supplicate for pity or seek absolution from readers...
...His story of being taunted as a "fairy" by a schoolmate recalled for me painful memories of using similar words in grade school, and the eon or so I will spend in purgatory for the hurt they caused...
...Though he can be ruthlessly introspective on other counts, here Brudnoy never does quite tell us how he now regards this behavior, or what basic questions it might raise about homosexuali book, Brudnoy talks about the "myths" surrounding homosexuals...
...Nor, easy as it is for a heterosexual to say, does even a genetic predisposition to do bad things make them good...
...The first arena of action turned out to be Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library...
...He disdains, for the most part, what he calls the attitude that "all my woes are somebody else's fault...
...Life is not a rehearsal," he writes, "it's the real thing...
...One long stretch of the book takes us through his summer working in New York City in 1961...
...But for me, an undiscussed pleasure at the movies was watching not the screen goddesses but the supporting gods...
...Whatever else we might say about homosexuality, it does no one any good to dress it up as a yearning to "solemnize" that one true love...
...so we'd better avoid the role-playing and each be the person we are...
...A "seemingly unlimited capacity for denial," as he tells the story, led him to shrug off the early symptoms until finally his body experienced a massive collapse...
...He doesn't want to be seen as David Brudnoy, homosexual, or conservative homosexual, or "AIDS celebrity," but just as David Brudnoy: a man with his own share of strengths and weaknesses, achievements and mistakes...
...Why, unlike Brudnoy, are many of them so truculent in defending such behavior, if they own up to it at all, even when the lives and health of other people are in danger...
...Nor do they usually end in the kind of grief so many homosexual men know today...
...But he was uneasy with the MATTHEW SCULLY is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia...
...In many ways the book is truly inspiring...
...Maybe Brudnoy is being very subtle here by letting the facts speak for themselves, as also when he recalls being bound, robbed, and nearly murdered by one of these lust du jours...
...Often with his best friend Clara, a live-in maid, David Bmdnoy's Comeback 74 January 1997 • The American Spectator he went to the local theater...
...Elsewhere in the signal along our way from infancy to the grave to apotheosize that one true love, but we are not allowed to solemnize that as heterosexuals can...
...B rudnoy is bearing his affliction with amazing courage, and is in no need of lectures on decency or manhood from me or anyone else...
...the tour of Europe is unbelievable...
...1 The American Spectator • January 1997 75...
...that this would be perfectly understandable conduct for a gay man in the prime of youth...
...his teaching days in the early sixties in San Antonio...
...If the appeal of variety, to put it politely, is powerful, the boundaries put up by our culture almost propel us into promiscuity...
...But sometimes he gives the impression that, absent AIDS, all would have been well...
...We are betwixt and between, and even having, as I had, a Stephen to love couldn't be acknowledged beyond our small group of other outsiders...
...During that time there seems to be about one encounter per page...
...Even the "double life" he led seems a mostly valiant attempt to be a man first and homosexual second, avoiding the mania of identity politics...
...There were gay bars, more hotel rooms, more parks, "the bathhouse scene," sauna rooms at the Y, and on and on, recalled in a tone bordering at times on nostalgic reverie: In those days before AIDS, nothing seemed impossible or dangerous or unhealthy...
...Someone does, and though we all have our share of secrets and troubles, I must say the next hundred or so pages make a jarring read...
...A sharp wit made up for his being an unathletic, gawky kid, though always Brudnoy felt "something about me wasn't quite right, something didn't quite cohere into a well-rounded boy...
...However mysterious its cause, and however unfair that only some must bear it, clearly there is not just desire involved here, but also terrible compulsion...
...Life Is Not a Rehearsal David Brudnoy Doubleday 1299 pages / $22.95 REVIEWED BY Matthew Scully I t's been two years since David Brudnoy, the popular radio host and conservative writer, turned up in a Boston hospital gravely ill from AIDS...
...Yearnings for that one true love do not lead us after hours into public parks, any more than they lead to brothels or adult video arcades or topless joints...
...For many years he had led a not quite secret double life, conservative polemicist by day and homosexual prowler by night...
...He was always a "just so" person, a neatnik with a sense of order and a love of fine things, like his stamp collection, nicely arranged...
...In any case such reminiscences do not support the argument he makes for homosexual mar, riage: We are led by every tY...
...Let he who is without sin write the first harsh review, but let's also call things what they are...
...After what followed, at a nearby hotel, he felt "soiled, abused, frightened," but also "a wave of satisfaction that I had done what I set out to do and now I had the option to do it again and again...
...The social boundaries, after all, have now been mostly cleared away...
...For nine "lost" days he was nearly comatose...
...I had the sense that whatever I wanted was within my grasp, that whomever I wanted I could have, and that I could successfully function as a college teacher, program administrator, and man about town—a gay blade, though the expression didn't come to mind then...
...I myself have endured the flu with less strength and dignity than Brudnoy has displayed these past two years...
...My energy seemed limitless, and on an ordinary day I would be at the college by seven in the morning, teaching and administering the honors program until late in the day, then at the gym for a strenuous workout—and sometimes a quickie in the steam room —and then, as often as not, I would pop by one of the bars and once in a while find the true lust du jour...
...He was never harshly critical of homosexuals, so it wasn't a case of hypocrisy...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
