From Kevin Kopelson's Beethoven's Kiss, Chapter 1

No, I never knew him. I saw him once, from a distance, at the restaurant Lutétia: he was eating a pear and reading a book. So I never knew him; but there were a thousand things about him that interested me.

Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice

Roland Barthes, a writer I can't but love, never met André Gide, a writer I can. But imagine what might have happened if he had. September 1932. Gide, out for a late afternoon stroll, notices a young lycéen reading Le Temps retrouvé and, emboldened by the concurrence of fine weather and good health, decides to cruise the boy. He takes an adjacent seat, sighs, pretends to notice the book's title, and mentions that he'd known the author personally. Barthes, who recognizes Gide but thinks better of saying so, asks whether, in light of that intimacy, he has reason to believe "Marcel" has been less than honest about his sexuality. Gide, impressed by the boldness and cunning of the question, as well as by the charm of the feigned ignorance (for it's clear the boy must know who he is), suggests they continue this discussion at his home, over tea and cookies. Barthes accepts the invitation, of course--in large part because, oddly enough, he finds the old man somewhat attractive.

Gide's rooms are cozy and his refreshments are tasty, but despite the structural implications of the rendezvous, neither party manages a sexual overture. Intercourse, to their mutual frustration, remains literary. Consequently, when Barthes asks his host to play something on the piano, Gide, thinking that music making, which will allow him to reveal hidden talent, passion, and sensitivity, might do the trick, obliges. He makes an unwise selection, however--the Chopin Barcarolle. His performance, as is so often the case when he plays for someone, is completely inept. Barthes, unintentionally cruel, asks whether the piece is harder than it sounds. Gide, intentionally cruel, suggests Barthes play something as well. Hoping to rekindle the erotic interest Gide's poor performance has extinguished, Barthes attempts the last movement of the Schumann Fantasie but, even though the piece isn't very difficult, fails to do it justice---a failure of which he, like Gide, who considers both the rendition and the taste evidenced by the selection to be far worse than his own, is well aware. The rendezvous is now irreparable. Barthes says he must be going, and Gide has no choice but to let him go. Before he does so, however, Gide calls Schumann "unbearable," offers Barthes a copy of his essay on Chopin, and suggests they get together again soon. After Barthes leaves, Gide eats dinner, practices the Barcarolle for two hours, and writes in his journal that he's "perfected" it. Barthes walks home, eats dinner, climbs into bed, reads a few more pages of Proust, masturbates, and waits for his mother to come kiss him goodnight.

It's not a pretty picture--but neither is the picture of these two getting it together. By some standards (mine), Gide and Barthes were sexual amateurs. Gide loathed both anal and oral sex, never mastered frottage, and stuck to mutual masturbation, a technique he learned early in life. "[I] only understand pleasure face to face, reciprocal and without violence, and [am satisfied] by the most furtive of contacts," he writes in Si le grain ne meurt (346), an autobiographical account of more than one youthful transgression. And while Barthes offers no such description of his sexual repertoire, we do know, from Incidents, that he wasn't particularly good at arranging rendezvous and that, when he did arrange them, piano or no piano, he wasn't particularly likely to have the sex, let alone inspire the love, he so craved. In and of itself, however, this sexual amateurism, to use the term figuratively, isn't especially interesting. Plenty of gay men, including ones now called with more than a little irony professional homosexuals, probably feel their sexual performances leave something to be desired. What is interesting are the ways in which the literal status--or, as will be seen, non-status--of these gay writers as amateur pianists speaks to their figurative status as amateur homosexuals. What is interesting is the similarity, if not the identity, of their vexed relations--social, sensual, conceptual--to their non-virtuosic piano playing and their vexed relations to their non-virtuosic sexualities. A similarity or identity that will, I suspect, come as no surprise to the practicing music lover.

It's not a pretty picture--but neither is the picture of these two getting it together. By some standards (mine), Gide and Barthes were sexual amateurs. Gide loathed both anal and oral sex, never mastered frottage, and stuck to mutual masturbation, a technique he learned early in life. "[I] only understand pleasure face to face, reciprocal and without violence, and [am satisfied] by the most furtive of contacts," he writes in Si le grain ne meurt (346), an autobiographical account of more than one youthful transgression. And while Barthes offers no such description of his sexual repertoire, we do know, from Incidents, that he wasn't particularly good at arranging rendezvous and that, when he did arrange them, piano or no piano, he wasn't particularly likely to have the sex, let alone inspire the love, he so craved. In and of itself, however, this sexual amateurism, to use the term figuratively, isn't especially interesting. Plenty of gay men, including ones now called with more than a little irony professional homosexuals, probably feel their sexual performances leave something to be desired. What is interesting are the ways in which the literal status--or, as will be seen, non-status--of these gay writers as amateur pianists speaks to their figurative status as amateur homosexuals. What is interesting is the similarity, if not the identity, of their vexed relations--social, sensual, conceptual--to their non-virtuosic piano playing and their vexed relations to their non-virtuosic sexualities. A similarity or identity that will, I suspect, come as no surprise to the practicing music lover.

But before I describe what I claim to find interesting--an assertion that, insofar as it invites critical scrutiny, is itself performative and that involves its own (or, rather, my own) performance anxieties (for you may not find this very interesting after all)--allow me two self-defensive digressions. First, I'm not using Gide and Barthes to underscore the homophobic equation of homosexuality and failure (e.g., the straight-laced view of homosexuality as an inadequate imitation of heterosexuality or the pseudopsychoanalytic view of it as arrested development). I am, however, suggesting that while it's important to celebrate sexuality and gender as performative, it's also important to realize, or to be reminded, both that we don't always perform our selves very well and that our sexual failures, for want of a better word, can be quite as remarkable as our sexual successes. Second, I must acknowledge, for my unsubtle digs have probably made it clear, that I have a strange, but far from unique, investment in representing, if not believing, myself to be a better (i.e., queerer) gay man, as well as a better pianist, than either Gide or Barthes. There are probably many reasons why I have this investment, most of which escape me and one of which is far too personal to divulge. Let's just call it a male thing and leave it at that. But I've no doubt that on some, and perhaps the most important, level it's all too analogous to the equally strange, and equally commonplace, investment these writers have in being seen as better gays and better pianists than it's fair to assume they really were.

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