Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 12:33:25 -0500
From: Brandon278@aol.com
Subject: Interview with a Gay, Jewish Wagnerite: Dr. Larry Mass

MASS APPEAL
by Brandon Judell
(Originally appeared in the Bay Area Reporter and Au Courant)

As Shakespeare so grandly advised, "Be not afraid of greatness; some are born
great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
Somewhere Dr. Lawrence D. Mass fits into those lines. The first journalist to
write about AIDS regularly in the world, a founder of the Gay Men's Health
Crisis and co-author with Nathan Fain of the first medical pamphlet about the
disease, author of the critically acclaimed 2-volume Dialogues of the Sexual
Revolution, director of two substance abuse clinics in New York City, a major
supporter of the gay arts over the years with his lover/author Arnie
Kantrowitz, Mass is something of a phenomenon. How close you want to get to
this phenomenon might well depend on your reading of his Confessions of a
Jewish Wagnerite (Cassell).  
The book, a collection of autobiographical essays, has already been assaulted
with raves from Ned Rorem ("readable, lively, raunchy"), Christopher Bram
("strange and fascinating"), and Michelangelo Signorile ("penetrating and
profound as it is stylish and entertaining"), is a Ulyssean journey into the
self-awareness of a paranoid. Like with James Joyce's Leopold Bloom, we are
led into a world that watches its main character sometimes with bemusement,
sometimes with hostility, and Mass glares back, sometimes with ferocity,
often with fear and anguish, but almost always with a tinge of humor.
What is like to be gay in America today? To be a Jew? A Jewish gay? A Jewish
gay who relishes the operas of the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner? ("Like a gay
person trying to fit into straight life, a Jew trying to be a Wagnerite is an
awkward fit at best.")
In the section "Chocolate Operas of the Coral Reefs," a comic masterpiece of
hysteria, Mass wanders from one possibly anti-Semitic, homophobic encounter
and thought to another. He asks, "How much of gay porn is ethnocentric and
how little of that ethnocentricity is ever Jewish?" Have you wondered how
many Jewish porn stars have taken on Italian names? When have you ever to
jerked off to a Moshe? 
A quick trip to the cinema can be the cause of hours of anguish. Take Silence
of the Lambs: "My paranoia fears, on the one hand, that a monolithic
Hollywood run by Jews (I sound like Spike Lee and Leonard Jeffries) is
intentionally fostering the scapegoating of gays (Does Spike Lee give a shit
about gays and lesbians? Is Spike Lee gay?) by continuously perpetrating the
myth of gender identity confusion as the cause of murderous psychosis, to say
nothing of the gross fag-baiting that still goes on in so many Hollywood
films. Although there have been a few homosexual, lesbian and bisexual
killers in history, I know of none who were what we would call a transvestite
or transsexual. So much for Psycho, Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs and
countless other such films (and novels) suggesting the contrary."
In the 1,300-square-foot West Village apartment he shares with Kantrowitz, a
few cats and nibbling fish, Mass was exhilarated that he was finally chatting
about a completed text that has at the moment sold out in Manhattan. "You
know I didn't write this book with a purpose. There's that old cliche: A book
is like a pregnancy. This certainly was the case with this work. It just
simply happened. I had no clue or plan or intention for it. It was my story,
and the only way I could live was to get the thing out. It has taken ten
years."
With a decade to sort through forty plus years of life, it's hard to imagine
what was left on the sidelines, especially when you read such admissions as
"When I was growing up I knew that I didn't want to be who I was underneath-a
Jew boy who wanted to dress up in girls' clothes-and I also knew I didn't
want to be like my father, who was so much more critical and punitive than my
mother."
Mom had her moments, though. "I was jerking off in my bedroom in front of the
closet door mirror, observing myself as I inserted a discarded lipstick case
in and out of my anus, not realizing that my mother could see directly in
from the garden. Suddenly there was that piercing scream: 'MAX, DO YOU KNOW
WHAT YOUR SON IS DOING!?"
In 1974, Mass built up the courage to take his mother to the Russian Tea Room
and come out. "I looked in her eyes and said, "Mother, I'm gay.' But as so
often happens with my mother when important feelings are being expressed by
others, she got distracted. 'Look,' she said, 'isn't that Lena Horne?' "
Placing the fabric of his life out in public is "terrifying," Mass admits.
"I'm a full-time person working as a physician. I have a wonderful job that I
deeply care about, working with a lot of different colleagues, and I'm
totally exposing myself in this book. I'm putting myself out there and really
telling the truth as best I know it about myself. It's not fiction. It's an
autobiography. It's scary."
And it's a revelation that scrapes the veneer off Germans without a sense of
humor like former Hitlerjugend Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (He quotes a friend
saying, "It's the ones who don't laugh very much who put other people into
ovens. You don't have to worry about people who can laugh at themselves."),
closeted classical music critics, Opera News, ex-lovers, past tricks, Lauren
Hutton, and S&M.
Over a diet root beer, Mass notes, "There's a lot of swastika imagery in the
leather world, but most of it is not overt. There are these gray areas, and
there are a lot of people crossing the boundaries in ways that are
inappropriate. For example, two people might be into a scene involving
swastikas, and where that's consentual, that's their business. Not anyone
else's. But in San Francisco, there were a couple of instances of people
wearing swastikas to public events, and there I think it's troubling. I don't
want to go to a party where somebody's going to wear a swastika unless I've
been warned."
In the foreword to Confessions . . ., Dr. Gottfried Wagner, Wagner's
great-grandson, writes: "The physician, gay activist and pioneering writer on
AIDS was confronted, through the spread of the epidemic, not only with his
identity as a gay man but also with his own internalized anti-Semitism. In
doing so, he underwent, as he explains: 'a metamorphosis from an unconscious
masochism to becoming easily suspicious and never confident of my impressions
in a society that was consistently telling me I was either wrong or
overacting, i.e., paranoid.' " On the final page of the book, Mass writes: "I
was on my way home." Home is a healthy, sane mental retreat where everyday
fears can be left at the door. This journey to peace is one heck of a trek
but, believe me, it's one worth taking. If I were you, I'd make my travel
reservations now.