The following is an excerpt from Landscape in Lavender: A Young Man’s Search for His Gay Identity by Brooks Kolb, available now from SparkPress.
In this earnest, hopeful memoir, Kolb explores the conflict between his personal and professional identities as he traces his round trip journey from Seattle to Paris, Philadelphia, London, and San Francisco against the backdrop of the 1970s sexual revolution and the devastating AIDS pandemic that followed.
During his travels, he becomes a landscape architect, comes out of the closet, crosses racial barriers to win lasting love, loses that love, and finds belonging. Along the way he learns that freedom demands that one construct their own morality in the face of social ostracism, that loss is an inherent attribute of love, and that the need to belong can be just as urgent as the need for love.
Heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring, Landscape in Lavender will charm readers across generations—LGBTQ+, cisgender, and straight alike—who struggle, or have struggled, to live a truly authentic life.
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In those heady days of my new life in San Francisco, all the traffic lights turned green, promising me freedom and gay liberation. I had a brand new, highly evocative city to explore, and its exceptional features—the wind-blown fog on the pastel-colored hills, the cable cars, the landmarks of Coit Tower, Twin Peaks, and the bright red Golden Gate Bridge—were all so much more exciting and cinematic than prosaic, flat, red-brick Philly, where I had recently quit my job as a landscape architect.
In every neighborhood, gay men could be seen out walking singly or hand-in-hand. In North Beach or Russian Hill, I spotted a few here and there, but larger numbers joined the commercial river on Market Street. Even more flowed through Haight-Ashbury, and in the Castro, our numbers turned into a dense, rejoicing crowd. I felt a brotherhood I had never experienced before, a dim sense of belonging to a giant, multifaceted community of men.
It was January 1982, not even four years after America’s most charismatic gay leader, Harvey Milk, had been assassinated along with Mayor George Moscone in City Hall. Although I had seen highlights of replacement mayor Dianne Feinstein’s press conference about the murders before leaving Philadelphia, the news had seemed like no more than a far-off headline. Still a fresh, agonizing memory for gay men living in San Francisco at the time, the tragic hate crime felt to me like an event from the remote past.
Meanwhile, I had only the dimmest awareness of the freight train that was even then bearing down upon us, its cyclops-like front light no more than a distant dot on the horizon. I had heard hushed and vague snippets of conversation about a “gay cancer,” but those rumors seemed scarcely more worrying than concerns about a bad flu season. I didn’t realize that I was living in a sunny bubble in time between the violent horror of Dan White’s murderous rampage and the dark killing fields of AIDS to come. All I knew was that, for the moment, gay liberation seemed to be winning the battle against hate, intolerance, and violence. The long, cinematic, candlelit protests marches down Market Street were now over, and a new time to party was at hand.
Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night were for going out. The first place I discovered was the I-Beam, a gay disco on Haight Street, only a block and a half from my apartment. The best time to go to the I-Beam was for Sunday tea dance. The place was rarely jumping on a Friday or Saturday—Sunday evening was its time in the sun.
Housed in an ordinary-looking wooden building, the I-Beam announced itself with a wide outer stair that led up to the second-floor entrance. Once inside, the club was like a gigantic version of Equus, my favorite club in Philly, except that it was all on one level and there was no dry ice fog on the dance floor. And it had one striking innovation: Two large video screens above the dance floor played snips from the campiest Hollywood films in a continuous loop. Bar videos were a new feature that year, and it was not possible to visit the I-Beam without witnessing Joan Crawford glaring fiercely as Mildred Pierce or grimacing while wielding an axe in Strait Jacket.
The I-Beam boasted new eighties dance music, with a generous sprinkling of Euro-pop. I tolerated Tony Basil’s “Hey Mickey,” but the DJ played Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” so relentlessly that I soon came to detest it. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby” was my favorite song until “Tainted Love” debuted on the Top 40, and I never tired of its odd beat that mimicked the double beep of a streetcar. The colorful city, the vivid gay dance scene, and the heavily amped eighties soundtrack—I loved it all.
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Having no friends in town yet, I always went to the I-Beam solo. When I heard a song I liked, which was pretty much every number apart from the histrionic “Gloria,” I resumed my practice of trying to find a boyfriend by asking guys to dance. Dancing was an activity, and if a guy said no, technically his “no” referred only to the song, not to me, so it felt less rejecting than when someone brushed me off in a conversation. On the other hand, if he said “yes,” most likely he enjoyed the song as much as I did, generating a tiny thread of common enthusiasm from which to weave a conversation.
Once the dancing started, I studied the guy’s movements and facial expressions. If he smiled broadly, snapped his fingers, and threw his head back while he bopped, that meant he was having a good time, which was a win. It was even better if he reached over to grasp my waist, and it felt like a score if he grabbed my butt.
By contrast, sometimes the guy danced too well, which was a bad sign. It wasn’t that I didn’t admire good dancers—I very much did; I could spend hours watching their sexy moves—but I had learned that, if they were too showy, it meant their lives had no discernable meaning outside the nightclub. Never was this truer than when I clocked a guy watching himself dance, not only in the mirror, but via his stealthy habit of gauging the reaction in all the pairs of eyes tracking him on the floor, while he assiduously ignored me.
Another unsuitable type was the exact opposite, the guy who appeared so immensely bored by the music that he was only going through the motions. If dancing to the hits made those men yawn, then most likely nothing else interested them either, which was not a good foundation on which to build a relationship. Regardless of whether it was unconscious or strategic, being blasé was an unappealing pose.
One Sunday night at the I-Beam, I met a guy who became my first new friend in San Francisco. Jesse was a husky, African American with a tall flattop that he pulled straight up with the pick comb that lived in the back pocket of his jeans. He smiled and laughed easily, effortlessly expressing the joie de vivre that so appealed to me in men. When I asked him to dance, I was pleased to note that he was just the right type of dancer, the kind who danced enthusiastically but without trying to win a prize on Soul Train.
After a couple of dances, Jesse and I repaired to the side lounge, with its TV screens displaying the same campy videos that appeared on the dance floor. Once we were far enough away from the speakers to hear ourselves talk, he asked, “Have you ever been out to Sutro Heights?”
“No,” I said.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” he continued, grabbing my hand in his large palm, and leading me toward the front stairs.
“I don’t have a car,” I protested.
“Don’t worry, I do,” Jesse said, already halfway down the steps. The next thing I knew, we were heading west toward the ocean, headlights beaming under the night sky. When we reached the end of Geary Boulevard, Jesse turned right onto a narrow lane overlooking the Cliff House and Seal Rock.
“Follow me,” he said.
Jumping out of the car, he led me between a couple of tall bushes to a small, sandy spot on top of a high bluff overlooking the Pacific. The sky was black, the moon was full, and a corkscrew of white moonlight wriggled over the waves crashing below as Jesse began to kiss me. It was the most romantic moment I had ever experienced in my entire life, except for one small problem. I wanted to feel red hearts pouring out of my chest and into Jesse’s face when he kissed me, while matching hearts emanated from his lips and flowed directly into my soul. Was it even possible for male-on-male encounters to rise to that highest standard of romantic love, the standard my grad school housemate, Birgyte, so adored on screen between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton? I very much hoped so, but I didn’t really know.
Still, no matter how much I craved romance, and crave it I did, I wasn’t feeling it with Jesse. Of course, that was no reason not to go to bed with him. Like the rest of my generation, I came prepared to obey Stephen Still’s anthem urging listeners to love the one you’re with if your true love is nowhere in sight. Plus, it was easy to rationalize. Who knew how many months would go by before I fell in love with someone new or before I could convince Chad to come live with me? I had felt those red hearts Valentine’s Day card emotions with him, but they hadn’t been strong enough to prevent me from moving to San Francisco without him. Nor had we ever discussed our long-term commitment to one another. Were we each expecting the other to be faithful? I wasn’t sure, but either way it seemed irrelevant from twenty-five hundred miles away.
Until that almost perfect moment with Jesse, I hadn’t fully realized what a romantic I was. Sex was just sex, that’s what all the guys implied by constantly switching partners on the dance floor, and even more so by quickly “doing it” with one man in the bushes, only to shove him aside and move on to the next. That was not what I wanted. I wanted chocolate, a dozen red roses, and deep, tender kisses. I wanted to resurrect the memories of Ken’s caresses. I wanted his lips on my neck and the bristles of his goatee tickling my cheek. Most of all, I wanted to hear his soft whisperings again.
Although I didn’t feel romance blossoming with Jesse, the experience of moving so rapidly from the exciting, noisy dance scene at the I-Beam to the serene beauty of moonlight over the Pacific taught me something important about San Francisco that was to reoccur to me many times over the years to come: San Francisco was the City of the Sacred and the Profane. It was a city where you could, in the space of only ten minutes, experience the profoundest beauty that nature has to offer—the sublime spirituality of the sun, the moon, the wind-blown ocean waves, and the lion-like flanks of the golden Marin hillsides—and in the next moment be swept up in the most hedonistic ecstasies of dance, Dionysian parties, and of course, sex.
As if to underscore that point one day a few weeks later, Jesse and I were tooling around the Richmond District, not far from Seal Rock, when he stopped at a small house to say hi to a white friend whom he had spotted outside washing his car. We got out of Jesse’s Toyota Corolla to talk to him, and within seconds, the conversation turned to gay pickups.
“How many men have you been to bed with?” Jesse asked the guy, who was deeply tanned and beginning to display fans of tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “Thousands . . . it’s been thousands.”
“Really?” I asked, more to myself than to him. This was a huge eye-opener to me. People in high school had always said that I was hopelessly naive, and maybe this proved his point. Still, it was hard for me to imagine having sex with that many guys. Truthfully, I could scarcely imagine my count rising to one hundred, let alone a thousand.
Pondering this in some tiny corner of my brain, I remembered those hushed murmurs, the quiet whispers about a gay cancer spreading like wildfire through Manhattan. I took note, although I wasn’t sure what to make of it. No rule book had been published for what was not yet called AIDS. All I knew was that, in the two years since I had come out of the closet, a whole new secret and beautiful world had opened up for my exclusive pleasure. It was unbearable to think that it might be about to close again.
Excerpt from Landscape in Lavender: A Young Man’s Search for His Gay Identity by Brooks Kolb, available now from SparkPress. Reprinted with permission.
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