“I find it very strange,” said Walters, “that Jonboat, who was in a relationship with you—a relationship that, despite all the controversy surrounding how it started, by all means seems loving and healthy—I find it strange that Jonboat wouldn’t want you just the way you were. Don’t you find that strange?”
“He did want me the way I was,” Henry said. “He sacrificed his reputation to be with me. He loved me the way I was. Loves me the way I am. And I him. Like I said, though, he would have enjoyed my genitals even more than he already did if my penis were smaller. He didn’t mind that I had a penis, and he would never have wanted me to be rid of it at the cost of any sexual pleasure to either of us, but he’d have liked it to look different, to be a lot smaller. And that turned out to be possible, so we made it happen.”
The interview broke, for the last time, for a commercial, and when 20/20 returned, Walters asked Henry about her plans for the future, and Henry announced her engagement to my father. Walters asked her where and when the wedding would take place, and Henry said that it would happen in Amsterdam in October. Walters asked if Amsterdam was a special place for her and my father, and Henry said, “Not for us, personally. But it is a special place. A very special place, Barbara. It’s the capital of the only Western country in which gay marriage is legal.”
“But you’re not suggesting that the United States considers you a gay couple,” Barbara Walters said.
“No,” Henry said. “I don’t think so, at least. We haven’t inquired. In any case, we aren’t a gay couple. And furthermore, many of our favorite people live right here in New York, so it would be a lot easier for us—and them—if we held our wedding here, but it just doesn’t seem right, let alone very romantic, to legally bind ourselves to one another under the authority of a homophobic legal system when another option is so readily available to us.”
* * *
—
I think it would be right to say that this second 20/20 interview balkanized the different groups of people in America who had strong beliefs about prostitution, Henry, elective surgery, women’s rights, beauty, gender, economic inequality, the patriarchy, my father, and now also gay marriage, but maybe what I mean is that it atomized those groups. Anyway, they splintered, held rallies, and wrote articles. Some people thought marriage was good, but gay marriage was bad. Some people thought marriage was oppressive and legalizing gay marriage would mess up gay culture. Some people who feared or hated or were annoyed by gay culture thought gay marriage would be good because it would tone gay culture down and make it more like straight culture. Some people thought it was romantic of Henry to undergo surgery to please my father, other people thought it meant she was a victim of my father. Some of the ones who thought she was a victim said that her victimhood proved that prostitution screwed women up more than it helped them. Some of the ones who thought it was romantic said it proved that prostitution didn’t screw anything up and that prostitutes could go on to live more traditional lives. Some thought it didn’t matter how well or badly prostitution left prostitutes because prostitution undermined families. Some people said it didn’t matter because gay marriage was looking like it would become legal sooner or later and that would undermine families more than prostitution ever could anyway. Some people said prostitution could save marriages, or lead to more of them since if it was legal and became normal like Henry kept saying it would in her books, then people could do it while they were married and they wouldn’t end marriages just because they wanted to have sex with people they weren’t married to, plus people would get raped and hate and kill themselves less because more money would be going around and fewer people would feel crazed by sexual loneliness and economic poverty. Some people said Henry was bad for transgender people because she decided to be a woman instead of being a transgender woman. Some people said that Henry was good for transgender people because she became the gender she had always been. Some people said that didn’t make sense, and other people said those people didn’t understand oppression. Some people said Henry was good for women because she was an empowered woman. Some people said Henry was bad for men because she was an empowered woman. Some people said Henry was bad for women because she seemed like an empowered woman but she wasn’t even a woman and her empowerment was the empowerment of being rich and engaged to my father, anyway. Everyone continued to agree that Henry was a very, very physically beautiful person. Some people (the anti-beauty/trans-beauty people I mentioned earlier) said that the problem that was underneath everything was the worship of conventional physical beauty, and that if society could just start treating conventionally plain or ugly people as if they were as physically attractive as conventionally beautiful people, no one would ever have a problem with anyone, everyone would be happy with themselves, and everyone would be happy to let everyone else be happy because everyone would be treating everyone else well. Everyone agreed that was probably true in principle, but most people thought it could never happen, and many of them pointed out that the anti-beauty people were, almost across the board, conventionally ugly/weird-looking and that their ugliness/weirdness seemed willful, even prideful a lot of the time, and so it was hard to imagine they could ever be happy, and the anti-beauty people said that sentiment demonstrated their point exactly. And so on.
And then it was September 13, 2001, and our country was attacked, and a few days later, the man who took credit for the attacks made a recording for television where he called the United States “a Zionist haven for infidels, whores, and homosexuals,” and him saying that re-Yugoslavia-ized/re-molecule-ized most of the balkanized/atomized groups I mentioned above into one big and very inclusive “patriotic” group, and Congress legalized gay marriage and prostitution the same week it authorized troops be sent to Yemen for Operation Enduring Freedom.
My parents held their wedding in Central Park, NYC, on January 1, 2002, at 12:00 a.m., which was the exact moment that the legalization of gay marriage and prostitution came into effect.
It is a possibility that without the attack on America, gay marriage and prostitution would have eventually gotten legalized, but it is for sure a certainty that without Fondajane Henry’s Private Viewing, they probably would not have ever been legalized. That is why I am so confident in concluding that my thesis is correct: Private Viewing was the last important work of art of the twentieth century.
*1 Boyle, Procurer.
*2 Henry, Lamborgina C(unt)ock, p. 179.
*3 Fondajane Henry and Michel Houellebecq, “Ad victis spolia (de la révolution sexuelle): Conversation entre Michel Houellebecq et Fondajane Henry.”
*4 Ibid.
*5 2012 Guinness World Records.
*6 Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
*7 Camille Paglia, “Dominate and Protect.”