Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of my move to the United States
In Angel’s in America — one of my favorite plays — there is a character Louis, who after he learns of the AIDS diagnosis of his lover Prior, abandons him rather brutally. At some point, Prior tells Louis “I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. […] I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.”
The America Prior describes in the play, idealistic but compromised, has never been more visible than today. In the Trump era, in the BLM era, in the Covid19 era, the US feel self-seeking, cruel, dumbed down, unforgiving and self-sabotaging. It is hard not to hate it but strangely I don’t. I would not live anywhere else and certainly not in France. I really would not and the reason is that it welcomed me when my country rejected me and gave me a future when I had none. I jolted down a few memories of these first few months in America. I hope they will amuse you.
In August 2000, my brother Amaury drove me from my parent’s apartment to Charles De Gaulle airport in the small burgundy Citroen he had inherited from my great-grandmother. After I gave him a manly goodbye, I remember bursting in tears by myself after passing customs. I had never left my parents’ house for very long before — besides for a two-months internship in Madrid during which I vaguely remember begging them to let me return early. But I think, that more than anything I was crying that day because I knew that I was unable to take care of myself and was not prepared for any of what was to come.
I also was convinced that I had no other choice but to leave France after a rather disastrous last attempt at heterosexuality. Nobody can say I did not try. To this day, when I read articles on “Why Parents Shouldn’t Force Food on Picky Children”, it makes feel sour that society tries to force-feed me heterosexual sex at the time. I could have done without. Really.
I arrived at American University at the tail-end of the summer. In, the taxi which drove me from the airport to the university located at the top of Washington’s embassy row, I was listening on my Walkman to a mix with “Sandstorm” by Darude, “Freestyler” by Bomfunk MC’s, “Dear Jessie” by Rollergirl and “It feels so good” by Sonique which had all just been released. The music, the combination of jetlag and the prospect of my adventure made me feel high. For a minute, the excitement of new opportunities was stronger than my anxiety and the CDG tears were forgotten.
The first thing that struck me when the car pulled in front of Centennial Hall was the racket sound of the cicadas. Next I noticed a bunch of students congregating in pajamas outside of the dorms. I feel that picture is stuck in my brain, but it might be because I would eventually spend nine months smoking cigarettes in that spot under the judging stare of student-athletes which had already succumbed to a health-craze the Parisians could not comprehend. At that time, the French life expectancy must have been 30 years old at most from all the smoking, drinking and socialism going on and nobody argued that it was a problem. On the other hand, in Paris, circulating in pajama would expose you to the risk of getting lynched by a mob or arrested by the gendarmes. But not in the land of the free! In fact, I would soon discover that cotton sweatpants and t-shirts was an outfit acceptable for almost any occasion besides weddings, proms and funerals with some level of flexibility for weddings actually. I even once attended a wedding in Parma, Ohio where the Bride got drunk but that’s another story. The wedding favors — another strange tradition — were beer cozies. Anyway, looking at this crowd in nightwear, I knew I had arrived home. All rules were off.
The whole American campus thing felt very foreign to me. I was probably hoping for some Oxford-like service with butlers in white gloves but at least expected some linen on my bed and a cover and had therefore not brought any with me. I was also freezing because I had rarely experienced air conditioning before. It felt like the University, afraid its pajama-wearing students — all gigantic by French standards — were at risk of decaying, and therefore had decided on a morgue-like temperature. For the first few nights, I slept directly on the mattress covered with all my clothes and my Descamps bath towels to stay warm.
In my precipitation to escape heterosexuality, I had come too early to AU and had nothing to do after I had accomplished the few necessary administrative tasks. I was shy and did not mingle with the few undergrads lingering around campus. My English was very shaky so I spent my days conversing with squirrels on the quad while writing long letters to my beloved grandmother describing to her the many surprising things about America. I had very rarely seen such approachable squirrels; the one in the Bois de Boulogne next to my house were rare and elusive — much rarer than the prostitutes which still constituted most of the Bois’ fauna in my youth. Since then I think they have reintroduced wolves there.
Not yet completely conscious that this trip was about having sex with boys, I was enthralled by the squirrel’s conversation and company for the first few days. This is by the way the reason why you always see French tourists spending hours feeding and photographing diseased squirrels in Central Park. Your vermin are our exotic species and vice-versa as proven by the interest of Americans for Houellebecq. My fancy New York roommate with whom I had been conversing by email had not arrived yet either. Every other day, I would go for a jog among the gigantic mansions behind American University. Their manicured gardens, the sport cars parked in front and the architecture impressed me. I had never seen such large homes and large cars with nobody ever in sight. It confirmed what I always knew for true from the episodes of Dallas and Dynasty I had watched: America was a country where everybody was filthy rich and the help was invisible. I also confused the “AAA” sign on the back of their car as the indication that they were all recovering alcoholics. Rich alcoholics in Embassy row; I was actually not too far off as I would eventually realize at Jim Courtovich’s parties.
One day, the fire alarm went off at Centennial Home. I sat on the lawn outside of the building. The weather was a bit oppressive as it often is in August in DC. I met a girl called Becca and a boy called Jordan who approached me. That was my first conversation. Jordan was a flaming queen, something I would only discover months later in the absence of a functional Gaydar. In fact, I would soon discover that most of the boys I encountered at AU were gay, like Preston Meche who manned the front desk at Centennial and that I would insistently stare at because his bleached hair turned me on. AU had been nicknamed “Gay Jew” and unbeknown to me I had landed in the mecca of homosexuality. Becca lent me a blanket after our conversation. What is ironic is that my choices were either Tampa University or American University and that my father had insisted on DC — where he had been because of an argument to the Federal Trade Commission — because I would have “too much fun in Tampa”. If by “fun”, he really meant “sex” then he was gravely mistaken and was in for a rude awakening a year later but let’s not hurry.
My roommate appeared in my room a few days later with his entire house neatly packed in ugly plastic containers. He was not the sophisticated and hot prep student from New York City I had imagined. I was hoping for a bi-curious cosmopolitan dude like Sebastian in “Cruel Intentions” — a 1999 teen drama I loved like every single homosexual of my generation. He was actually an intellectual from Binghamton, NY who had studied both Arabic and French and was developing his master’s thesis on some obscure guerilla leader called Ben Laden who had managed to blow up an American warship (in the port of Aden on which I was once taken on a tour by the Coast Guards during my World Bank days). He spent his days eating junk food, talking to his mother on the phone and watching the Simpsons on TV and at night would call his platonic German girlfriend and have fight with her (that relationship ended abruptly in the second semester). He kept a large personal computer in our room. A personal computer something that was as elusive to me at the time than a country home in the Hamptons is today. I ended up using the computer all year long to download music on Napster to listen en boucle to “pull marine” by Isabelle Adjani. He had had brought his canoe on campus and some rock-climbing gear which he installed on the fire escape route. He was a little crazy but kind.
Soon my program started and I found myself in an international crowd of professionals who had interrupted their career to get like me a second rate overpriced MBA program. At 22, I was the youngest there and the least able to speak or write in English. I was also broke as my father — resentful of having partially funded the expensive tuition — would reluctantly send me a couple of hundred bucks every month. All my classmates had a little money and would go on week-ends to party at Cities, a bar in Adam’s Morgan which had open as part of the Georgetownization of Adam’s Morgan. The French girls in my program — rather sleazy exchange students from Dauphine University — were easy lays and I was taking advantage of their popularity to parlay it into free round of drinks for myself from other graduate students. In retrospect I was basically pimping them out. I would follow that straight crowd reluctantly and get trashed on long island iced-tea to forget how boring and noisy they were and deal with my sexual frustration. Soon all the French tramps had secured gorgeous boyfriends while I was still deep in the closet.
At the end of these endless nights, I would stumble back to the dorms and ask my roommate to bring me the bathroom garbage out so I could puke my guts out which he would oblige while continuing to implore his girlfriend in German. I would have probably died of cirrhosis within a few weeks if it had not been for a chance encounter with Father Brien McCarthy.
Father M. was the Catholic chaplain of American University since 1987. He once described his job duties in the “Eagle” — AU’s student Newspaper as: ‘a chaplain loiters with intent’. And loitering with intent is definitely what he was doing in August 2000 on the quad of American University far from an office in the basement of the “Kay Spiritual Life Center”. In fact, I think loitering with intent defines M.’s entire existence much better than priesthood. He also called it very appropriately “catching the flock that doesn’t always come into the fold”. One day some loud German student in my program introduced me to him as I walked by.
Brien must have been in his fifties by then. He was not a beautiful man and his skin was prematurely aged by heavy smoking and drinking, but he was well-mannered and had a very intentional stare. He looked at you with an intense and curious stare as if he wanted to get into your head. He appeared to me as your typical American with a chiseled Irish face, deep blue eyes and a few well-placed wrinkles. He had a head full of hair which was carefully dyed to hide the creeping gray. If observing him insistently, one could notice that Brien was working hard to appear more youthful than he was. I would discover later on that he also frequented tanning salons regularly. I felt at the time that he channeled something Kennedyesque. In retrospect the only things Kennedyesque about him were his alcoholism and insatiable libido.
M.was originally from Massachusetts. He had learnt American Sign Language in grade school alter he met several deaf playmates in baseball and football teams. After he was ordained a priest, he had a number of parish assignments in various cities around DC such as St, Bernadette’s Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Because he spoke several different sign languages, he then became the chaplain of Gallaudet University. M. would eventually share with me the little known facts that gay people are over-represented among deaf people for some mysterious reason. M. had been associated with French deaf people since 1969 and therefore spoke French very well although with a detestable American accent. He told me he would love to have frequent dinners with me to practice his pronunciation.
His immediate interest in me made me feel that I was “with the band”. I never belonged to the cool crowd. I remember dancing in the famed Parisian nightclub “Les Bains Douches” with my girlfriend in 1999 and feeling so uncool and childhish in slacks and collared shirt. Hanging out with a priest was the closest thing to being with a celebrity. He would bring me to the Chi Cha Lounge in Adam’s Morgan and the owner would give us drinks. Also it was unusual for an adult man to express interest in me, beyond my Jesuit scout chaplain (of course) and my grandfather who had died in my teens. While priests represent authority figures which I tended to hate, I also craved for their attention. I was flattered by his unexpected interest in me. I justified it by the fact that I must be quite exotic as this slightly old-fashioned Frenchman singled out in this pajama-wearing student body. I was also fed-up of having conversations exclusively with rodents. I accepted his invitation to dinner. He called my landline in my room in Centennial Hall — at the great surprise of my roommate who picked up probably expecting more insults in German — and came to get me in an ugly car which smelled like smoke — something I did not care much about as I was myself a heavy smoker.
Our first dinner was at Clyde’s of Bethesda. There was a little train that ran through the restaurant, which put me in a giddy mood. He downed a few Martinis and I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea. I got buzzed quickly and we became fast friends. When I picked up the bill, he did not make a gesture to stop me. The first few conversations must have been benign. Eventually he took me to more trendy spots. His drinking got more and more serious as we got to know each other better. We even had dinner at the least gay restaurant stuck in the middle of a stretch of gay bars including JR.’s, Cobalt, Annie’s. I remember that last restaurant because he parked his car in front of it, removed his roman collar, took some weed from the glove compartment and smoked it before getting out. He told me that some poor family had given it to him in exchange for his pastoral services. I found this charming. I was quite a credulous twink.
I cannot remember exactly how M. got me to admit I was attracted to boys but he did — priests particularly gay priests can be crafty like that — and the rest of the story is for another time.
Happy 20th Anniversary America. You have definitely aged poorly in twenty years but to me you will remain forever that cute little spot where people can hangout outside in pajama. Love
Fabrice