Dawn Potter: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know What Love Is

I don’t write much about sex, but not because I’m ashamed, or uninterested, or afraid. Basically, I just haven’t felt like it. Over the years I’ve told myself that my relationship with sex is wordless. I find pleasure, I tell myself, and also peace, in not documenting it.

Which is to say, back in the 1990s, when I first paged through the photographs in Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, I recognized a story that I was not writing, and still have not written.

I’m addressing these matters on a windy Maine day in November, as sun pours through windows, as gusts spin the fallen leaves into maelstroms. The world looks better than it is. A week ago, on Halloween, my friend Ray died in his sleep. Five days later Americans reelected Donald Trump. It’s been hard to see beyond despair.

Still, there’s this sunlight, this wind, this crackle of swirling leaves. And I am thinking about lovers and beloveds. Which helps. Which doesn’t help.

Ray, who was both lover and beloved, is the reason I am spending these awkward moments considering why I don’t write much about sex. I’m sure this would have pleased him. He was generally pleased when he made me lose my composure, and sleeping with Ray was a giant loss of composure. Nor, on the whole, was it much fun for either of us, given that he preferred men and I preferred men who preferred me. Still, it happened because we were twenty years old, because we needed it to happen, because we were drawn to one another like moths, because we had stayed up all night murmuring into the phone, because we had stayed up all night listening to the Smiths wail desire, listening to Tammy Wynette stand by her man . . . because the moon was a blurred crescent, because we were drunk on Budweiser and devotion.

*

I’m flipping through the pages of Goldin’s Ballad now, her photographs of her friend group, mostly taken in mid-1980s New York City, photos of bodies sitting alone at a table, bodies embracing in a wretched motel bed, bodies shooting up or dressing up, always with the eye of the camera lingering, gaze of lover and beloved.

The book is not in any way a replication of my history with Ray and our knot of friends. We were a decade younger. We’d had safer childhoods. We took safer drugs. We kept our clothes on in public. We mostly shut the doors. Still, the dependency: that was true, it was the truth, it remained.

The knot we lived in during those days often came untied. We were overwhelmed, we were distracted, we were flippant, we were stoned, we were jealous, we were reading too many books, or not enough; we were floundering in uneasy seas. But who were we? I think back to the central players of the household—the three young men, among them Ray, who had rented the house on Buck Lane together—and then those of us who came and went. I was in love with one of the young men, Ray was in love with another, I was there nearly all the time I wasn’t in class, but other women also came and went, many other men came and went, we tangled like apron strings in a washing machine.

Queer wasn’t part of our argot. Our definitions, if we used them at all, strove to contain and frame. We had no private language; we had to rely on other people’s words, not our own. It never occurred to me that what we were to one another was what was trembling in the air in New York City and San Francisco and London and Munich. We were white kids who knew how to ace high school English, how to get decent marks on the SAT, how to write college essays that would catch the attention of a jaded admissions officer. We knew how to get accepted at high-toned colleges. A few of us—Ray and me, for instance—were uneasy refugees from the working class, but still we’d figured out how to slip into rooms among the elites, almost as if we belonged there.

*

In her introduction to the photos in The Ballad, Goldin writes, “I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different planets. But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together.”

I was a virgin until I was nineteen years old. Before then most of my ideas about sex were ideas about romance, though my body burned. I read books, I touched myself, I dreamed of wildness, but my thoughts were a sort of darkness.

Those late nights in the rented house on Buck Lane: they were my comeuppance. Morrissey crooned on the stereo, “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more, not much more,” and I, who consumed words like air, wondered for the first time what the books hadn’t told me.

My friend Will, who also came and went and came and went in that house, wrote to me after Ray’s death. “I wonder how unique our pasts are,” he said. “Is this how life is for groups of close friends? Do they all fall in and out of bed in the early years and eventually pair off?” Then, wistfully, he acknowledged, “The ardent psychosis that is youth seems, I dunno . . . so far away.”

Yet as Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City, “that’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.”

Dear reader, you are laughing, I daresay. It’s just like me to learn to revisit my young body via a book. If Ray were here, he would snigger, and then he would flip the record over.

*

Until I met Ray, I didn’t know I’d already met men who desired men, women who desired women. Of course I just hadn’t seen. I’d had no context to see. I grew up with parents who often behaved as if our family had been cast adrift in a Conestoga wagon on an empty prairie. They were deeply afraid of the professional academics whom they’d scrabbled through graduate school to join. They were at the mercy of the strange intensities of their laboring-class backgrounds, the detachment and mental illness and sheer meanness of their own parents, their choking religious upbringing, their country ways, their deep naïveté about modern life. For my mother, sex was beyond the pale, unmentionable unless it could be safely encased in literature. Despite her great physical beauty, she was ashamed of all things relating to the body. She could barely admit to urinating. Bodies were not for touching. Bodies were not for looking at. Bodies were for hiding.

Yet bodies were everywhere in the world. Each week I took a violin lesson from Miss Barstow, who lived with her friend Miss Adams. I didn’t know why my mother rolled her eyes. I didn’t ask.

*

My father’s mother was one of the cruelest people I’ve ever met—a sadist puffing her Salems beside a distorted family hearth, deriding her children, pitting her grandchildren against each other. She was a Presbyterian, a Moral Majority conservative, a despiser of hippies and liberals and Catholics and Jews and homosexuals and immigrants and arty-farty types and women who were bad at housework, but she was also a night nurse at Trenton State Prison. So when I heard her tell my father, sometime in the early 1980s, that AIDS was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen, I knew enough to listen. I knew enough to know that she knew.

Meanwhile, a kid I’d gone to high school with, just a kid, lanky and carrot-haired, a kid who’d show up at the bowling alley on Saturday nights, who sat behind me in English, who was always Dan, just Dan, just regular Dan: I came home from college for Christmas and someone said he had died of AIDS. I don’t remember anyone talking further, sharing details. I don’t remember that anyone understood anything.

*

Queer, I’ve told you, was not part of our argot. What we had were awkward clinical terms, like bisexual, and humiliating labels, like fag hag. What we had was desire and envy and entrancement and curiosity and the plain puppylike urge to cuddle under a blanket on a cold night.

We had records to play, so many records, and we had gossip and arguments and beer and long walks under the half-dark urban sky. Nothing we said was wise. We thought we were the first people to truly understand the books we were reading. Or we couldn’t be bothered to read them at all. We were convinced we possessed the germ of greatness. But that didn’t mean we needed to go to class.

We smoked other people’s pot, and we forgot to wash the dishes for days on end, and we wasted an entire weekend before exams transforming a Barbie convertible into a paisley-bedecked chariot for a Michael Jackson doll.

It was all so dumb.

It was our Eden.

*

I hate any suggestion that the gods protect humans from their own stupidity. On their mountain, they watch, but they do not watch over.

We were supremely careless. Yet no one in our knot contracted AIDS. No one got pregnant. Or no one admitted that they did. 

What happened is that we got old. Ray and his lover broke up, and Ray moved out of the house on Buck Lane, then left school, went home to Kentucky for a while, then started working for Greenpeace, opened a bar in Brooklyn, married a beautiful man, gained weight, lost his hair, became a fixture, a success, a neighborhood icon, an unstoppable drinker, a crank, a gadfly, a delight. I broke up with my lover and got back together with him and broke up again, and in the midst of this chaos Ray’s old lover and I took the train to Philadelphia during a hurricane and returned to campus sopping wet and euphoric. His name, I may as well tell you, was Tom.

The fractures. The splintering. The mending. They were the beginning of the rest of our lives. Tom and I stayed together, we got married, Ray and Will stood up with us, we moved to Maine, we lived in the woods, our two sons were born—

Eden morphed into flat and slatey daylight.

*

In The Lonely City, Laing writes, “Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.”

But loneliness has its graces. Sometimes it allows, even requires, us to say aloud what we took for granted before.

When I think back to the photos in The Ballad, the word tenderness always rises into my mind—which is strange because its most famous photograph is Goldin’s self-portrait of her battered face, beaten raw by a man whose image appears repeatedly in the book.

Cruelty and desire and longing and despair . . . how does the eye behind the camera remain so generous, even when the eye is blackened and bloodshot?

I think back to those nights in Buck Lane, the melodramas of sex and desire, the intense affections but also the cruelties that we all practiced on one another—not beatings, not physical damage, but the ruthlessness of self-absorption. I think back and I see Ray as the pivot, the eye of our hurricane, gathering our winds around him—not in the manner of a charismatic leader but as a storyteller might: pulling together threads of narrative, wisps of characters, seeding us with anecdotes, creating complications, ironing them out.

He wasn’t a writer. He wasn’t even much of a reader. He seemed to have no ambitions beyond sitting on that borrowed couch, smoking Marlboros, drinking beer, listening to one record after another—Neil Young, Charlie Rich, Chrissie Hynde. Cajoling us, sweet-talking us. Making us his dear ones, his irreplaceables, his heart.

*

Eden morphed into flat and slatey daylight.

And children entered the story. They were born, they grew, they grew up. Behind them they now trail their pasts. They breathe secret passwords into their own legacies of body and time.

Off and on for years, as I changed diapers, as I spread peanut butter on bread, the phone would ring at 7 a.m.—Ray, still awake after a night of drinking, slurring his need down the line: “I just wanted, I just wanted, to tell you, to say I love you.”

Tom and I went to him whenever we could, whenever we could afford it. At first one of us would stay at home in the woods with the babies, but soon enough all four of us were driving the nine hours to Brooklyn, drawn like addicts, to the city, to Ray—the little boys swept into his hurricane, tumbling over themselves with joy. Meanwhile, he was still at his old game. Cajoling. Sweet-talking. Making our children his dear ones, his heart.

This is a sentimental story. But sometimes there are sentimental stories. Sometimes they are the tenderness of a shared life.

What that means is that our sons became the people who got the phone call, after the body was found.

*

I’ve always had a tendency to play the same song over and over again, sometimes for months at a stretch, until suddenly another song replaces it or I fall into a craving for silence. Lately the song that pleases me most is Elvis Costello’s “Every Day I Write the Book.” Because, of course, that’s what I do, that’s who I turned out to be: the person who, every day, writes the book, then writes another one, and another one. But I’m also lured by the song’s sweet, sly disquisition on the complications of long attachment: “Don’t tell me you don’t know what love is / when you’re old enough to know better.”

I am. I do.

Probably I first heard the song with Ray, though I don’t really remember. It could have arrived to me via any number of late nights, dim rooms, guys with stereos. It wasn’t a song that mattered much to me in those days because I wasn’t yet a writer, just a worshipper. Also I didn’t know what love was. Or I recognized only the bare edge of it.

In The Ballad, Nan Goldin writes, “In my family of friends, there is a desire for the intimacy of the blood family, but also a desire for something more open-ended. Roles aren’t so defined. . . . People leave, people come back, but these separations are without the breach of intimacy.”

So often, song serves as a sensory emblem for such relationships, luring members back through time, retelling their myths again and again.

After Ray’s death I told one of my sons I was purposely listening to the Smiths’ first album so that I could cry. Two days later he called to tell me he’d listened to it, too, but complained that the lead singer Morrissey was too posturing and annoying for him to take the songs seriously.

My son is not wrong. But also he is. Because in 1984 he wasn’t in the room.

*

Near the end of The Lonely City, Olivia Laing muses on how art intersects with grief:

There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people. . . . It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

Listening to songs that make me weep: it’s a way to keep the wound open, keep sorrow fresh. Ray and I were not always kind to one another, not always patient. For a handful of years, he and Tom barely spoke. These separations made no difference. When we got the phone call, when we learned that he had died, Tom and I turned to each other. We said nothing. Our bodies fell together—our old accustomed bodies. Beyond us, in the dark, the waters of the Atlantic rattled gently against stones.

~~~~~

Copyright 2025 Dawn Potter.

Dawn Potter directs programs at Monson Arts and offers online poetry classes via The Poetry Kitchen. She is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry–most recently, the poetry collection Calendar. Her memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won a Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Dawn lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband, the photographer Thomas Birtwistle.