Sunscreen

Because I sometimes forget to put on sunscreen before I leave the house, I carry a spare bottle in my bag for application on the go. But that usually means I have to smear the cream on my face without the benefit of a mirror and can’t see what a poor job of blending I’ve done. So then there will be these traces of white stuff here and there.

“Is that cocaine residue under your nose?” someone might say.

“Good heavens, no,” I’ll reply. “That’s just Coppertone.”

When I buy sunscreen, I look for the highest SPF number I can find at the store. Usually that’s 50, though SPF 100 does exist. If it would mean avoiding a sunburn at the beach, I wouldn’t mind wearing one of those lead aprons like what they place over you at the dentist when it’s time for mouth X-rays.

After all, I’ve seen people wear uglier things at the beach. Teva sandals, for starters.

When I was a kid, people—okay, well, white people—were very into tans for some reason, so a lot of the sun-related oils and lotions on the market at the time were low in SPF or even designed to accelerate the skin-roasting process. I assume the active ingredient in those products was PAM Cooking Spray.

Indoor tanning, where you’d pay a spa to let you lie in a carcinogenic UV pod for a while, was also popular in my day. I seem to remember my older sister tanning in that manner on occasion, but I never followed her example. I tended to resist the activities in vogue with my peers—going tanning, playing sports, being heterosexual. All of those pastimes struck me as deeply embarrassing.

According to the journalists who churn out the nation’s trend pieces, Gen Z has revived the tanning fad, with UVA-emitting sun beds and orange-hued complexions proliferating on TikTok.

That development makes me feel the same way I felt when I was at a bar in Provincetown earlier this summer and the DJ played Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” Everyone squealed with delight, except for one baby gay standing near me.

“Am I supposed to know this song?” he asked me.

“I just hate young people,” I answered.

If I were the type of elder queer who feels compelled to enlighten the youth, I would have referred my new friend to the perfect poem to tie this whole thing together: “Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982” by Sandra Cisneros.

In the poem, the speaker describes the celebratory atmosphere of summer in the LGBTQ+ haven of Provincetown in the early 1980s, before AIDS crashes the party and the revelers learn that “there was an expiration date to summer.” Writes Cisneros:

We were all on the run in ’82. 
Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”
the summer’s theme song.
Beat thumping in our blood.
Drinks sweeter than bodies
convulsing on the floor.

The poem even has a section on sunbathing, for that was the season when Cisneros “taught myself to sun topless at the gay beach,”

where sunbathers
shouted “ranger,”
a relayed warning
announcing authority,
en route on horseback,
coming to inspect
if we were clothed.
Else fined. Fifty
dollars sans bottom.
One hundred, topless.
Fifty a tit, I joked.

It gives me a pang to think of all that tender flesh exposed to outsize forces—the sun, the Plague, time—bearing down without mercy.