Sylvester is mighty real. Mighty real is more than just plain real. It’s the kind of real you feel like a punch in the small of your back, a hot rush of amyl nitrate while some man is bearing down on you after a night at The Endup, a dewy kiss on your cheek from your mother. Sylvester sings dark, rich, raw, and mighty real. And it is beautiful.
He sings in the tempo of the times. His voice is like slow, viscous, dark amber honey dripping down a silver, diamond-studded microphone stand. (Goddamn, that should be his next album cover!) There are specks of glitter in the honey from when he shakes his hair. It falls out onto the stage and the audience like it’s disco dandruff. Sit down, children, because this is going to be some Josephine Baker shit right up here. A zaftig Josephine Baker. Just as much glamour as the real one (whom Sylvester adores) and all of her stage presence.
Bow down. Nobody gets a show for free. You must pay with your adoration. When you go home and fuck later tonight, you better fuck with the rhythm that I gave you and nobody else’s. Because all that rhythm and tempo took years of boiling, decades of churn, centuries of stirring, until it simmers on stage for you tonight for one night only. There are no refunds at the door. Remove your barrettes, unbutton the top button of your shorts, show some belly, lose yourself in the tempered wail of a signature Sylvester falsetto.
Sylvester is on stage beneath the hot colored lights at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. He looks out into the audience while he is in between “Too Late to Turn Back Now” and his cover of Billie Holiday’s “Moonglow” for which he has made a quick costume change. He is performing a “One Night Only” concert tonight. It has been billed as a ten-year retrospective, even though he started performing long before 1974. He thought it sounded better to make it a clean decade. He thought no one would call him out on that. But then, Martha Wash, one of the Tons who’s singing backup for him tonight, rolled her eyes as they walked by a poster for the show and said, “Ten years, my fat, black ass!”
He spies Jason and his friends to whom he’s given over the entire third row for the midnight show. They’re waving at him like hysterical queens. One of them is wearing a tight t-shirt with a Cabbage Patch Doll on it. Sylvester has a black Cabbage Patch Doll at home that he named Nina after Nina Simone. Nina is dressed in a fuchsia-sequined caftan and black rhinestone-studded capri pants that he sewed himself.
Jason’s friends are all garish twinks and he loves them, just like he loves Jason. He and Jason had to break up in 1982 because they couldn’t move past the fact that they were both total tops. It’s such a specifically gay, mechanical problem. Men have been mistaking him for a bottom for years. The Discotays back in Watts thought he was a bottom when he first started hanging out with them because he could turn out such feminine looks, but he wasn’t one and he still isn’t. He had only ever bottomed at church.
Jason begged him to play “Here Is My Love” from an album of his called Too Hot to Sleep that no one bought and he’d all but forgotten about. He wanted Sylvester to play the song just for him.
“That song is a total dud and it’s in my man-voice which nobody likes. No, honey. Uh-uh. Not happening,” he said as they sat in the middle of his bed one day sorting glass beads, sequins, and cheap little plastic jewels Sylvester uses to make costume jewelry.
“What if I give you something you’ve always wanted?” Jason said.
And that’s when Jason promised he’d give up his ass for Sylvester if he played it tonight. He would bottom for Sylvester. What a bargain! Sylvester has wanted that tight little white ass for as long as he can remember. So it might just be worth it. The band doesn’t know he’s even considering the song, but they will follow his lead if he wants to play it. The Tons will too. They always do.
He begins to sing “Moonglow” and feels like Billie Holiday would have approved of his rendition. He’s wearing a royal blue velour gown with a white crystal headdress, beads hanging down his forehead, and sideburns like a chandelier. When he performs a Billie song, he likes to really put himself in the full Billie mood. Hell, he would shoot up some smack if he thought that would help the song, but he doesn’t do needles. Billie wouldn’t sing a sad song if she was feeling happy and vice versa. That would’ve been bullshit and you know people can tell. She would sing a sad song because her heart needed it and she knew the audience needed it as well. That’s why she always sounded so damn good. He could always feel every note of what she was singing about. Sylvester is jealous of that. He has sung “Dance (Disco Heat)” before when he didn’t feel like it. But the audience didn’t know the difference. Only he knew. A small fraud, but one he’s rarely pulled over on them.
Sylvester likes to warm up backstage with a bump and a prayer. Martha used to eat a bucket of fried chicken and an orange Nehi before going on, but Sylvester needs a different kind of jolt than just food can provide. Because this is his church. This is gospel, baby. Performing for a crowd is like doing the same thing at church, like when he was a little boy, a wee gayling. The church folks from back in Los Angeles love him now but they didn’t always. He started out as their darling little fem boy with beautiful skin and a high, majestic voice like a dazzling chorine, an angel. A little girly, but there are all kinds of queens in church just hiding in plain sight. Nobody cares. Until they do. He had to tell his mother that his anus was ripped up and he needed medical attention. There was no way around it. He was shitting blood. The choir leader, a man in his early forties, had been fucking him. Can you imagine little Sylvester at eleven years old, ankles raised to Jesus or bent over a brocaded chair in the choir room? That’s how he first got turned out. But he quite liked it and never considered himself to have been “abused.” No, it would have been unfair to use that word. Unfair to those who really had been abused. He never let people say that about him. But when word began to travel around the church about what had happened, it was clear that he was no longer welcome there. No more of his voice of an angel act. He was a fallen angel. Maybe he should have called himself Gabriel on stage later instead of Sylvester. Chocolate Gabriel from the Heavens. Tie him up in black licorice whips and perch him on a cotton candy cloud. That was the last time he ever bottomed.
Bette Midler is in the audience tonight because Sylvester invited her. He was in a movie with her five years ago called The Rose. Bette had heard his records and invited him to appear in a scene with her. He played a Diana Ross drag queen. A heftier Diana Ross—Diana Ross after a buffet. Bette’s character was supposed to be a Janis Joplinesque singer who comes back to a drag bar she used to patronize. Sylvester was surrounded by a Barbra Streisand queen, a queen dressed as Baby Jane as played by Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a Mae West queen, and one that looked like Bette’s character in The Rose. During filming, he became convinced that the audience would know exactly who all the other white drag queens were but they would think he was just Moms Mabley dressed up in Halston. In the movie, he looks like he’s going to step on all of them in order to get onto the stage first (and he would have).
He remembers encountering Bette for the first time years before at the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel when he was in New York performing with the Cockettes. It only cost seven dollars to get inside. A bargain for a man who had always let cash slip through his fingers. He bought two tickets and gave one away to a roadie because nobody else wanted it. Bette sang “Am I Blue?” poolside as a boy did an elegant dive off the board. During her performance, men tried to hand her poppers, but she admitted to the audience that they were hard for straight people to get into. “No one understands what they are,” she told them. “What is there to get into?” he remembers wondering. “Just sniff it!” She was so wonderful there in her element. No futz or frills. Just Barry Manilow on the piano, Melissa Manchester as a Harlette, and Bette singing to the men in towels.
Bette smiles at him from her box seat and he dips himself low to bow to her as he has reached the end of the song. Bette’s red hair reads so electric in this light. She reminds him of a madam in a 1920s gay brothel in Chicago which is one of the scenes in his imagination that he keeps alive, adding details here and there whenever he can. He even purchases props for them as if one day he might make the scene come alive. Maybe he will in a music video one day. There she is, Bette-as-madam keeping all the boys in line, paying off policemen who double as customers, turning down the lights in the parlor so the young men she oversees might appear younger against the dusty yellow light under a February moon when they position themselves, languidly draping over upholstered chairs and a fainting couch for the johns who’ve come to rent them for the night. Maybe he’ll tell Bette about this one day. She can help him bring it to life.
There is a short intermission and Sylvester moves backstage to his dressing room. He passes by black balloons and white flowers that are arranged on the stage and make him think he’s at a funeral for a mime. He is thinking about the songs left on his playlist. He misses his friend Patrick who would have been here tonight if it wasn’t for the simple fact that he is dead now. Dead like so many of the other boys in San Francisco. He can feel it when he walks down the streets now. Men are still partying and cruising each other, sure, but there are somehow not as many as there once were. Or they do it all in secret now somewhere Sylvester has not yet been invited to. Patrick wrote a couple of Sylvester’s best songs like “Make it Come Hard” and “Menergy.” He helped him create his own publishing company to trademark the songs. It’s called Sequins at Noon.
When he comes back out, the stage has darkened and the Tons are singing their slow version of “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” swaying back and forth like a wave is just beneath them. He’s supposed to be the match that strikes the beat and brings that song to the real, like they’ve done before in London, New York, even Huntsville, Alabama once. But there’s Jason in the third row looking right up at him with a big smile on his face and it’s well after midnight. And he still hasn’t played that song for him.
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