(STONEWALL AND EVER AFTER)
“The prelude and postlude of any historical event intrude upon the event itself by way of its dialectical exposition. Moreover every dialectically manifest historical event splits itself into polar opposites, generating thereby a force field in which the clash between its prelude and its postlude is enacted.”
—Walter Benjamin
“What was it in the beginning, the thought, the word or the deed?”
—voice from a cubicle at the Continental Baths
Wherein the narrative sweep of events effectively replaces the events themselves. Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground peak. At the Factory, the Warhol-Morrissey moompix studio on Union Square, Valerie Solanis, having a couple of years since shot Andy (on the day before Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles), the masterpieces Flesh and Trash are, well, shot, and elsewhere (on Fire Island) Frank O’Hara is run down by a beach taxi and dies of the injuries sustained. Tendered report of O’Hara’s funeral, James Schuyler experiences the Moment of the Wasp in the Room, the transcription of which, in “Funeral at Springs,” ushers him out of the New York School into the visionary company of Blake, Keats, Hopkins and Joyce. Author returns from London to scissor-dive into the deep end of the pooling story, of poetry, pictures, pornography, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. (“Not that again!” “Yes, that again. Seems it never ended, so get with it!”) Abandon Itself bursts forth uncontrollably in queer life, taking hostages, savaging lives. “Fuck art—let’s dance!”
(“This seems too much, even to me.”
But darling, don’t you see? What we’re doing is terribly important—simultaneously protesting and imitating construed sex-violence as components of a single force field!”
Those two words again—he doesn’t even know what they mean.)
Theater of action: hustler/drag bars in Midtown and the Village, the Everard, as always, and the new, so to speak, upscale places: the New St. Marks, the Continental, the Club Baths.
Also, such more ramshackle, lean-to and carnival-tent establishments as Man’s Country and the Broadway Baths, not to forget the trucks on West Street in the Meat Packing District, from just after midnight until dawn, and most celebrated of all, the Morton Street Pier.
The “S.T.D.” code, introduced c. 1970 at the Everard.
“Do you think she is a serious toe dancer?”
“That woman is a serious toe dancer.” (Or “a deeply serious toe dancer” for a bad case, particularly of rectal rather than urethral gonorrhea, or for syphilis.)
Author, in sight of actually being published, ventures again into the (largely heterosexual) Fifth Avenue salon of Kakia Livanos, to which a pod of shipping-millionaire Greeks, a single serpentine, drunken defrocked Irish Jesuit priest (had he really been the dead fat pope’s confessor? Would he go into a blackout and tell?) and the earnest, brilliant young editor of The New York Review of Books have been lured to spar amicably with their hostess on current events and world affairs.
Retreating downtown, Queer Temperament, the author, heady with that publication prospect, instead of intelligently regrouping his meager forces (staying home reading Ulysses), ridiculously imagines himself as another Addison DeWitt in the back room of Max’s (Kansas City: in the back room at old Max Patrick’s on Fire Island he might still draw a small crowd). Ridiculously. There is neither call nor occasion for another Addison DeWitt at Max’s Kansas City. The position is already held fast by the beyond-formidable Donald Lyons, no man’s fool, least of all his, although, not coincidentally both kind friend and benefactor to QT in the matter of putting out (the work, the work; Author was most emphatically not otherwise merchandisable product).
Therefore, he wisely and without hesitation, moves sideways. To, of all unlikely places, the Stonewall Inn.
Stonewall. The last of the événements of the sputtering sixties (“I-I said to Drella . . .”) which, like the Civil War in the history of the Republic, provided the dividing line and break in the history of queer experience, and which, like all traumatic ocurrences rendered the beliefs and assumptions of the preceding generation naïve, complacent and obsolete in the eyes of their successors, whose war-cry rings out thus:
“And be our oriflamme today
Judy’s last-filled script!”
Thereafter, from an unobtrusive, sharply angled coign of vantage, he watches unfold the story of Gay Liberation (or queer creep) in the wake of the declassification by the American Psychiatric Association of homosexuality as a disease.
Narrated through the phenomena of the first onscreen queer hardcore porn, of the GAA and the Firehouse dancer/activists, relentless drugged dancing as the gay lockstep march-in-place.
Psychobabble.
An answer to psychobabble: “To give oneself permission is nothing other than to take a chance on not getting caught.”
Also, as has been said of the first generation of Russians after 1917, they are as enthusiastic and happy as only the young can be when completely wrapped up in tasks which have almost no actual relation to their personal lives.
The first Stonewall commemorative parades. The Changing of the Guard: post-war compliant and closeted Cherry Grove queens relent.
(“The generation sacrificed to the epoch of doctrinal metamorphosis remains essentially alienated from and directly hostile to the evolution at hand”—Auguste Comte, Un Appel aux Conservateurs.)
A great wave of the affluent decamp from Fire Island to Long Island’s East End, to Quogue, Southampton, East Hampton and Sag Harbor. Those left behind, the medium forever gone in which their ardent deeds took shape, the bright new day of their post-war ebullience overwhelmed by the low scud and gathering shadows of an alien, grubby sadistic devolution of values, taste and performance, hole up at the Firehouse, in what has become known as So-Ho (Miss Dean dubs it “So-ho-hum”) in the upstairs lounge, and in wrinkle rooms around the city: Uncle Charlie’s, the Beau Geste, the Menemsha Bar, Julius’s.
“Everything’s changed.”
“You’ve noticed.”
In reaction to the mustaches, flannel shirts, construction-worker boots, faded Levi’s, leather-tongued key rings (with more keys dangling from them than can possibly be necessary in a single civilized life) and color-coded handkerchiefs (“They call that cruising? I call it the cruising equivalent of painting by numbers”), they, the old proud, dress in pressed chinos, button-down shirts and striped ties, and in rumpled pebble-weave tweeds, drink bourbon old fashioneds, stingers, brandy alexanders and awfully good old vintages. They smoke Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Kents, and play and sing the golden oldies.
They venerate Ruth Draper, Bea Lillie and Judy, making homosexual proof texts of the lyrics to “The Man That Got Away,” “Alone Together,” “Smile” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Also Madame Spivvy, Frances Faye and Elaine Stritch (“Stritchy”) and refuse to jump into the political fray. Laudator temporis acti, they stage their own incredibly long last stand.
Like characters in epic poetry, older battle-tried men are surrounded, and, calling out to younger men (of the class that used to furnish them with eager protégés) for aid, are largely ignored—the cadets, in fact, having almost to a man turned on their elders, whom they denounce as paleozoic losers, damning the lives they have led as essentially lives of furtive, obsessional, voyeuristic longing.
The great exceptions are those somewhat anachronistic eager-beaver preppie types who work the men’s room at Grand Central Terminal (“Why do these same men keep reappearing here in their droves, several times a day?” a talking candid camera might ask. “Surely they all have keys to corporate toilets”), in which venue far more elaborate signal systems operate than in the subway tea-room network, and cluster like sub-debs at a Junior Miss cotillion in back-lit corners of the lounge at Penthouse East. They can be had.
Unbowed, the old faithful, subscribing to the myths surrounding their emergence from the Second World War (myth understood as the collective memory of a group about its past, a memory which sustains a belief system shaping its view of the world in which it wishes to continue to live, that is, something that never was and always will be true), maintain that they would rather die than serve and propagate the new religion, the religion of the Marlboro Man clones, with its tattoos, cockrings, tit-clamps, cigars and ritual hot-ash frolics in cavernous back cellar rooms in the Meat Packing District (“Tell me, dear, where is the Meat Packing District?”), a program of order and conformity whose power to contain was surpassed only by its ability to define.
Recalling Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (and noting the desperate irony of the switch), they quote a signal passage back and forth to one another. “The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.” Ironic, because for them the only hope for stability in the coming lean and hungry years appears to lie in a program of pre-ordained steps, in which they must revert to the very behavior of the preppies who seem to batten on them, oil up old rusted gears and set about making new and strenuous efforts at attracting women more superannuated even than they themselves, to whom they must rigorously audition, one entire season minimum, as walkers. (There’s gold in them there hulls, and hotel cabanas in Palm Beach.)
The righteous and the ungodly (in contrast to the preppies in the Grand Central men’s room and at Penthouse East, who are reverent and pious, patient and kind . . . but can they be trusted by a battered heart?) remonstrate in choruses, exhorting one another thus:
“‘Let us not reverence the gray hairs of the aged, for that which is feeble we have found to be nothing worth. Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous, for he was made to reprove our thoughts.’ The Wisdom of Solomon, darling, 2:10–12. Look it up.”
Harry Hay, however, does none of these things, but instead devises the Radical Faeries in spiritually evolved New Mexico and blossoms anew.
Overnight, or so it seems, the relaxation of the laws governing censorship (also bigger and better deals made with the police and the Mafia by an increasingly upwardly mobile and mobilized Faggotry) facilitate the explosion, alongside the straight product, of queer male art pornography—amazingly to those for whom the prediction made by Rodney Harrington in Grace Metalious’s ’50s best-selling shocker Peyton Place, that actual unsimulated fucking would become a commonplace attraction on the motion picture screen, had been for twenty years a dripping-pipe dream.
Directors such as Gorton Hall, Wakefield Poole, Jack Deveau, Arch Brown, Francis Ellie, Arthur Bressan and Fred Halsted blaze the trail, preparing the way for the triumphant entry into the New Jerusalem of sexual expression of Sam and Joe Gage, respectively the Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk of hard-core homo melodrama.
Overheard (or overthought):
“Although it is accurate enough, darling, to nominate Joe Gage the Douglas Sirk of queer porn, it is hardly sufficient tribute. Yes, the great romantic trilogy is deeply Sirkian, but in Closed Set, in the more problematic 501 and finally in the apotheosis of the form that is the New York sequence in Handsome, that aggregate we call Joe Gage—and why shouldn’t it be an aggregate? Shakespeare was—composed of Sam and Joe Gage, Richard Youngblood and Russell Ballard, the mantle of Caravaggio falls on howevermany shoulders. Still-frame enlargements of the New York sequence of Handsome would encompass the erotic charge and the facture of thousands of full canvasses and detailed moments from every painting in the Merisi canon, leading up to his Seven Corporeal Works of Mercy translated into cinema. The corporeal work of mercy that is the New York sequence of Handsome is the redemption of the torments of . . . I cannot go on.”
The spanking new queer glossies trumpet the new line, and soon enough their impact is felt on mainline print advertising. Fabulous drag queens crash-land on the pages of Vogue. Putassa de Lafayette, the six-two-in-socks bolt of black lightning, shod for style in size elevens and gorgeous beyond telling, transcending radical chic, embodying the post-modern, hits the big town.
Nightly sex marathons rumble in the trucks and on the piers. The author remembers his high school and college job as longshoremen’s paymaster and, speaking of reminiscence, is stung by nostalgia over the vanished glamour of the New York waterfront, when the Hudson south of the Bronx was correctly called the North River (bon voyage baskets were always labeled Pier 84 or 88 or 92, et cetera, North River), the plethora of sailor and longshoreman bars, the “I’ve got a right to hang around, down around the river” opportunities (and very serious risks) taken, the wild seeing-pals-off parties on shipboard (sometimes, as in the legendary disappearance from on deck, and subsequent retrieval at dawn on the shore of Fire Island, of Jazz Age party hellion Star Faithfull, emblazoned on the front pages for a week and echoing in “the columns” for months, even years), and of his own glamorous return from Southampton on the France, to undertake a literary career.
This new volume of waterfront traffic produces a decade-long gridlock so stymying that when, a decade later, in the panic of the first terrifying reports, first of “the gay Cancer,” then of GRID, and finally of AIDS and the metaphysical Human Immune-Deficiency Virus (and what in every epoch has been simultaneously more terrifying, more seductive and less coherent than its metaphysics?), the cry goes up to GET OUT OF TOWN!
Few do. The spiritual paralysis and moral accidie (“A virus has no morals!”) has become as baffling and as over-determined as the force that keeps the cast of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel locked up behind church doors.
Not to mention the amphetamine, dope and downs ingested, inhaled and injected (almost interchangeably) by spectators and spectator-participants as well at the exhibition fisting-sex shows held nightly at the Mineshaft (where nobody had to pass any tests, or submit to the anxieties attendant upon audition, because, as Addison DeWitt a generation earlier had remarked of television, that’s all it was, nothing but auditions) and on the dance floors at Flamingo, 12 West and the Saint.
PISO MOJADO (and how!) SOLO BASURA. Skid marks.
Thus dawned an era of queer trench warfare, from the back alleys off Broadway to the chic and exclusive gated mews: Patchin Place, Milligan Place, Pomander Walk and Sniffen Court.
The young bloods wish the old would die off. Instead, they speak clearly, loudly and incessantly of the profound attachment they felt (and feel still), of the penetrating concerns that animated and sometimes tormented them in those days now long gone in the company of that noble society of beautiful and valiant young boys, whose every utterance is remembered as an example of a mode of speech as poignant and meaningful as the langage clus of the troubadours. (Such are the repressions of memory in the face of the overwhelming distractions of whatever present obtains.)
CHORUS OF DRIVEN DANCERS, MAD TO BE HELD
“We’ve all gone crazy lately, darling, rolling ’round the basement floor.”
“So What? Butterflies are free to fly away.”
“Love leaves its stains.”
“Pedal to the metal, muthafucka!”
Years later, when it all blew up in everyone’s face, some realized the cruel irony of the obliviating ubiquity of “I Will Survive,” the disco anthem, at a time when the dancers were already succumbing to amoebiasis and taking every drug there was in the world to go on dancing. Then, when the curtain at last did come down, Donna Summer found her stage-door Johnny in Jesus, but her orebaisia gay-boy cult found theirs in Mr. Death (and he didn’t look anything at all like that Brad Pitt.)
And in those years to come, the author would spend time with friends in Westbeth, often gazing down on what remained of the Morton Street Pier, a blackened slab, like an enormous Anselm Kiefer canvas year by year dismantled further, until the blackened surface had been torn away and the pilings had almost completely sunk into the North River, like the Sunken Cathedral and the Kingdom of Ys.
Excerpts from A Historical Document: The Warehouse Newsletter (kindly entrusted to the author by the artist-collector-gay archivist Barton Benesh).
The Warehouse was one of a succession of dance halls with free-for-all back rooms then known as “waterfront fuck pits.” As the following excerpts demonstrate, the convergence of Civic Activism and Vested Interests, like that of any two streets on the Queer Street map, created any number of Speakers’ Corners.
WAREHOUSE NEWSLETTER
THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 1975
VOL. 1, #8 - 2,500 COPIES
Printed and Distributed in the general interest & welfare of Gays in the Village to become more knowledgeable and aware of the dangerous conditions that exist in and immediately about Warehouse Piers 48 and 51—STAY OUT OF THERE AT NITE.
MICHAEL’S THING PRAISES “WAREHOUSE
NEWSLETTER”—NITE ACTIVITY ON PIER
48—SLOW!!! EXTREME FIRE HAZARD EXISTS ON ALL PIERS
—EXERCISE CAUTION WITH CIGARETTES!!!!
As the last issue of the Newsletter was being distributed the article that appears in the current Michael’s Thing was called to my attention. It begins on page 37 and continues for about 4 pages. I am very grateful to this publication for taking the position it has on this matter. I had no idea that they had planned article and it was well presented including a little history of the gay activities that began a couple years ago and has since grown into one of the most dangerous nite areas in the city. On a par with this dangerous situation in our Village area would be Central Park, Morningside and Riverside Parks and the inevitable subway “T” rooms. Many times I have thought the motto of promiscuous gays, including myself, should be a variation of the Post Office motto: Through rain, hail, sleet and snow, the “gays” will get through!!! I recall the “land’s end” area in San Francisco when I lived there years ago—it was more like mountain climbing than casual cruising.
Would you believe that there are still some people in the New York City Gay Community who are not aware of the dangerous conditions on the Pier? It is up to all of us to discourage people from going to the piers at night. When someone asks you where the pier is—go ahead and tell them, but I believe you also have a responsibility to advise them NOT to go there and WHY. If they still insist that’s their business. If they have no more consideration or respect for themselves than to take the risk I hope they have their life insurance paid up. It has been mentioned in this paper previously that because of the big decline in nite activity at the pier, and that about the same number of pick-pockets-muggers continue to work the pier, that your chances of being ripped off and/or physically assaulted have gone up. YOUR CHANCES OF BEING ROBBED, HURT OR IN FACT KILLED ARE BETTER THAN 50 PERCENT. Pier 48 continues to be a questionable place to visit during the day and is continually visited by people “other than gays.” Nearly every evening that it is not raining I have made several trips around the area at night, and occasionally during the day. It just isn’t the place to go for “fun.” Now that the Federal House of Detention has been closed and all the men moved to the new prison downtown the immediate area in front of Pier 48 has become more deserted during the day hours and at night. When you go up those stairs to the second floor of Pier 48 ask yourself how you are going to get out of there when the local teenage gang invades the pier. If someone throws down a cigarette on the stairwell and it smolders into flames, how are you going to get out? You should think of those things before you go up the steps. There are also a few areas on the second floor where the floor is very weak—watch your step—is the guy you are cruising for real, or is he a rip-off?????????????????????????????????????????????????
The NEWSLETTER is available at most of the bars. Kellers, Danny’s, Peter Rabbitt’s, Choo Choo’s Pier, Ty’s, Boots & Saddles, The Underground and the Studio Book Store. They are also available on Piers 48, 49 and 51. You will find them hanging on nails for easy pull-off, or lying around. At the One Potato they are on top of the cigarette machine—at the Studio Book Store they are near the bulletin board. Copies can be found occasionally on the piers during the day but are usually torn down by evening by the muggers, pick-pockets or a few others who seem to be opposed to informing people about the dangers of the piers.
An incident at the Ramrod when I distributed my last NEWSLETTER puts a question in my mind. Until last week I have been leaving copies at the Ramrod. After I left several dozen copies there last week, including hanging some on the coat hooks near the pool table, I was curious where they had disappeared to when I passed by about 15 minutes later. Was informed by the bartender at this point that he had been told by the manager, and also that I had been informed that they did not want copies of the NEWSLETTER in the place. No one has ever told me not to leave copies there. I have no problem in dealing with that in and of itself. What pissed me off was why didn’t the bartender say so when I came into the place and proceeded to pass them out to those few people at the bar, hang copies around the room, saw the bartender reading the article, BUT ONLY after I left did he remove the copies and throw them in the garbage can. I expect that copies will be thrown away by some for whatever their reason, but to willfully destroy copies in the manner in which the Ramrod saw fit was certainly in poor taste to say the least. It is also curious that the person who was responsible for trying to take down the barricade to the second floor of Pier 48 identified himself, not by name to me, but as being from the Ramrod—whether he works there, hangs out there, or includes himself in a social set that goes there I do not know, I know only that he identified himself as being from the Ramrod. All the other bars have been very cooperative in allowing me to hang the NEWSLETTER on their walls, give it out to customers, etc. They seem to support the concept of disseminating information about the piers—it is to their advantage businesswise if nothing else. Many thanks go to Arbie, Joe, Dennis, Choo Choo, Julio and Cy for their cooperation.
An observation on Pier 51: The crowd there seems to be a different attitude as opposed to the attitude that existed on Pier 48 when it was the popular place to go during the day. The discretion and general conduct of everyone is much less blatant than ever existed on “48.” On Pier 48 the attitude used to be “everyone for himself” and completely independent from anyone else for good or bad circumstances. At Pier 51 today there is a very healthy attitude of being concerned about each other and accepting the conditions of the physical structure as being hazardous, but reasonably safe when discretion and care are exercised. That kind of an attitude is healthy and doesn’t seem to distract from playing fun games—just watch your step with bare feet or sneakers—lots of chips of broken glass and loose boards with rusty nails sticking up. AGAIN, LET ME REMIND EVERYONE THAT ANYONE WHO ENTERS THE PIERS IS IN VIOLATION OF THE LAW FOR TRESPASSING.
To clarify a comment at the end of last week’s NEWSLETTER about being “sitting ducks for muggers in the area.” The “made to order mugger area” DID NOT mean that the bars were mugger areas, but that the Pier(s) are “made to order mugger areas” and should be avoided. Let’s face it gentlemen, there are literally hunderds of people in the area at night and especially on weekends. The muggers and pick-pockets know this and will take advantage of it whenever possible IF YOU ARE IN THE MUGGERS TERRITORY—PIER 48 AT NIGHT.
Chorus of Appalled Elders (for whom the Clones are the Gadarene swine, being driven by demons into the Sea of Galilee):
“It’s worse than the Soviet Union, really—worse than any five-year plan; their relentless program has necessitated the sacrifice of the comfort, the nerves and the embedded customs of an entire generation.”
“They feel strongly that personal comfort is irrelevant.”
“So is sable, darling, but we covet it all the same.”
“Loudly as their apophasis megale [great declaration] goes booming through the universe, the basis of their existence is correspondingly slim, for in order to exist in reality conscious reflection is demanded.”
“Dank black holes, full of creeping murmur and the poring dark.”
“Their so-called fierce, incomparable joy in succumbing to a state of outrageousness, dissipation, restlessness, and desecration has resulted in immense exhaustion and amoebiasis on a massive scale. Also, herpes and hepatitis; everybody is getting transfusions, as if indeed Dracula were loose in Gotham.”
“Dracula indeed! Night life and vampirism have always been connected, dear, althought the bat angle is oddly apt. Most humans would fail miserably in the environment designed for bats, hanging stark naked from the ceiling in caves cluttered with dung, catching insects in one’s open mouth while flying at high speeds through the night. Not them however—they glory in it.”
“Are we talking, darling, about what is coming or came down at the Mineshaft? What flecks of gold in the sluice of the experience? Primitive and palingenic elements. Shit. Men lie on the floor while other men shit on them. That’s a religion? People are eating each other’s shit at the Mineshaft. Nice people don’t eat shit, darling. They eat what we are eating, here at the Coach House!”
“What I say is, when your idea of a base camp at the summit of ambition is a time-share in some jerry-built lean-to in Island Pines, you are undoubtedly a troubled woman.”
Then, turning on a dime—a trick they’d mastered dancing the Madison out in Cherry Grove—inverting in sudden mood swings the amorous terms of the above conviction, they set about leveling vociferous maledictions against the new young, the lately beautiful, declaring in effect, “You, the ungrateful, are set to betray to a hostile world the doings of a secret brotherhood, for which crime the penalty is annihilation.”
Thus, when the Firehouse is itself burned down by the Mafia, some said ’twas with the blessings of the Old Guard, who, like the character in that notorious-faggot-and-big-Camp-Yukio-Mishima’s The Temple of the Gold Pavilion, felt that the place had to be destroyed to become eternal. The Mafia had always gleefully cooperated with a cunningly abject faggotry, but could not abide the arrogance of a rampant new one, the recusant retreat to dim, pricey haunts muttering, “We told you so!” In them, as they attempt to find repose in lavish love seats, easy chairs and soothing fireplaces, the candles they’d burned at both ends gutter out.
(Yukio Mishima [Shining Star, the English translation of his nom de plume/guerre]had become in the sixties not only a global literary phenomenon, but in his spare time—when he wasn’t either writing another knockout book or training his private army to return Japan to glory and reinstate the Mikado as a divinity—an astronomically priced hustler, brought from Tokyo to New York to drive hordes of rice queens mad with desire by Tennessee Williams—operating out of the Monkey Bar of the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street, and, desperate faggot rumor had it, charging a hefty agent’s fee.)
Finally, to complete the grisly metaphor of flaming faggots, constant flames, carrying the torch and so forth, the curse seems to snap back fiercely at the howlers when, one sorry night in 1977 at the venerable Everard, in a scene reminiscent of the immolation of the Old Believers in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, a token number of those very old believers are indeed incinerated. An era completed. Mayor Abe Beame expresses outrage that the nine dead men were asleep in an establishment intended for bathing. He is not renominated.
Not that the arriviste commissars really constituted a unity, no matter how much of a united front they seemed to put up. They were sharply divided on many issues, of which one in particular became emblematic: the problem of Stephen Sondheim. Extraordinary lyrics, innovative dramaturgy, a driving theatrical vision . . . and fake music.
In the end the controversy, faulted as too fatiguing in a time when energy was everything, was unceremoniously snuffed out. The upshot: either you hailed Stephen Sondheim as a genius (as in a similar vein, and with similar political correctness, the majority would hail Steven Spielberg) or you could kiss goodbye to any invitation anywhere. It seemed that even in the pitch-black back rooms and in the trucks (where they couldn’t clock you according to your color-coded back-pocket handkerchiefs), unless you could hum “Here’s to the Ladies Who Lunch,” you couldn’t, as the English—arriving in their droves in the wake of the utter collapse of Swinging London—liked to put it, “Go toss yourself off in a corner, darling!”
So far as Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret was concerned, no such vexing aesthetic problem sprang up. Kander and Ebb were not constitutive of serious argument; there simply was not enough there there, a lack, however, magnificently overcome by Joel Grey, the most explicit Broadway musical actor since Larry Kert in no matter what class of vehicle. Joel Grey was Cabaret. No male singing actor since Ezio Pinza had made such an impact on Broadway, and no female since Ethel Merman. Joel Grey brought to Broadway the artistry that Judy Garland had brought to the form she virtually invented, the single-performer spectacle, forerunner of both Performance Art and the Happening.
Cabaret became something else, in retrospect. As A Berlin Diary was prelude to the Holocaust, so it was prelude first to the devastating amoebiasis and hepatitis epidemics of ’70s homosexual New, and ultimately to AIDS.
Meanwhile, the author, who never did again return to the Stonewall, except by way of watching pass by the first several commemorative parades, returned to Max’s Kansas City, in time to be in at the death of Candy Darling and to participate in the liberation, re-invention and apotheosis of decade-long famous and fabulous Holly Woodlawn (of whom her alter ego Chi-Chi Castanets declared, “Holly es muy chic; ella compra en Bloomingdale’s”).
Whereupon, chiefly through the management of the redoubtable Bill Corley (recipient of the Letters from London, Chapter Sixteen, and constant telephone sidekick), who wrote for her publicity kit, “Holly holds the telephone in a hanky—she is far too chic to touch plastic,” and the encomia of George W.S. Trow in The New Yorker (“Holly is the very best transvestite”), record-breaking engagements at Reno Sweeney’s and Trude Heller’s sealed the reputation of this charismatic Latin from Manhattan as the Goddess of All Downtown.
Additionally, the author is at long last published, initially in New American Review (cover story: rapt introduction by editor Solotaroff) and finally, through the good offices of Susan Sontag (the Benefactor, whom he had not as yet met formally, but with whom his partner had struck up a friendship; as production manager of The New York Review of Books, they had been working together long hours nightly—her essays being written and delivered to press with thrilling celerity), who, by dint of her gimlet eye for the new and startling, had brought Mawrdew Czgowchwz to her own publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mawrdew Czgowchwz, well reviewed in columns across the country, sells selectively (“Oh, a book like that has to be allowed to get up steam”). Nevertheless, promptly disappearing from library shelves everywhere. What a camp.
Soon the author, wondering what next, hears a familiar voice, the Guardian Angel’s, whispering admonitory words in his ear.
“Write something else, something new and exciting.”
“What?”
“Plays, sagas, essays, anything.”
Scribblings in notebook from that tricky time:
A note in the personals of a gay newspaper. “Never been rained on; no one’s ever sat in the back seat.” (With telephone number.)
“Busy little—seeking indeed to foster those sinuous fluencies needed to make one’s way among strangers. Or as somebody once remarked, not too unfairly, a fairy-dust factory running at full bore.”
Overheard at the Beau Geste:
“Do you realize, darling, that this Directoire has renamed the month of Judy Stonewall? I want them all beaten to death with baseball bats!”
Something terrible is going on at the Continental, the New St. Marks, the Club, Man’s Country. Nothing less than the destruction of traditional bath culture (conversation/repose/meditation/sex) due to the drug explosion and the introduction of Muzak over the PA systems: calculated to get-’em-in and get-’em-out, without concern for sleep cycles or overnight accommodation or any civility at all.
Significantly (but it cannot last), the horror has lately been valiantly counteracted by the Continental’s introduction of the triple-goddess cabaret: Eleanor Steber, Bette Midler and Holly Woodlawn. Habitués sitting on whoopy cushions in slouchy postures redolent of Levantine ennui in the fabulously appointed souterrains of the majestic Ansonia, have prompted the very old to declare a new ’30s-Berlin decadence.
“The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!”
From the Plaza Fountain through the Ice Palace to the Mineshaft: the downward trajectory of a culture.
“I would build that dome an air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And I should cry, Beware! Beware!
Their flashing eyes, their floating hair!
Weave a circle round them thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For they on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
The author has discovered John Waters—remembers him as a kid at Max’s. Crazy brilliant; wishes he could work with him (like, say, on a fake documentary about all of the above), but he is one star who flies strictly solo (like Mawrdew Czgowchwz fleeing Prague).
(“I do think people tend to look their best under arrest”—John Waters.)
He has also come upon (in this instance and because of his time abroad some years after the knowing few) the chronicles of one Boyd McDonald. Thousands of vagrant “voices” of Queer America.
At last Richard Plante has been heard: the pink triangle victims of the Nazi death camps are being recognized.
“Myth is something that never was and always will be true.”
—Socrates, to the youth of Athens (hemlock words)
The seventh anniversary of Stonewall. More and more people are claiming to have been there, on the spot at the barricades, hurling things and shouting. How should the author know? He got out. The only thing he can’t figure is, he got back to Mott Street a little after twelve. (He remembers because the V., sitting home reading Balzac, said he wasn’t going to start worrying until midnight, and he was just about to start worrying.) But the reports say it didn’t even start until twelve-thirty. So, they’re asking him, “You were inside, right?” And he answers “Yes, but I didn’t see anybody throw any shot glass or any cops in uniform duck down behind the bar.”
He saw one demented queen on speed throw a drink—a stinger it was—in the plainclothes cop’s face—there were two cops, and he decided by the look of them that one was Italian and one was Polish, on the principle that the Precinct would never send an Irish cop in to take the Friday night payoff in such a toilet, they’re so sensitive, so volatile—and the queen tossed the drink and hissed, “That’s for Judy!”
He remembers thinking, that’s what George Brent says to Bette as he’s leaving to go off to his medical conference and she, unbeknownst to him, is going blind and about to die, and he’s talking about a cure for brain tumors, and with each strike, he’ll say, “That’s for Judy, that’s for my wife!” And he—the author, not George Brent—knew it was a stinger, because he was sitting at the bar with the distressed queen, both ordering the same drink and getting buybacks and putting them away each about one in ten minutes, and in fact the queen, as a gesture of commiseration over Judy had given the author two Dexamyl, and he kept looking up at the platinum blond go-go boy with the filthy feet dancing on top of the bar while the prismed ball flicked specks of light all over the room, like at Roseland.
So he can’t figure it, because the plainclothes were not the vice squad, and it was all over before midnight, and he thought, well now I can go home, now that I’ve witnessed the queen’s grand gesture, and all the wop cop did was smile—almost as if he too were suffering over Judy—and in fact stopped the Pole from retaliating with force, and he remembers saying to himself that was cool; maybe the Italian (who was very gorgeous, whereas the Pole was a slug) has somebody in the family or some goombah who’s queer, or maybe he too is feeling Judy’s death, because she did after all have heterosexual fans too, lots of them, and after all, why would they aggravate the incident futher and draw attention to their routine mission to pick up the weekly hush?
So he wakes up the next afternoon that June to find V. still reading Balzac and the Village threatening to go up in flames, and V. says a couple of the gang have called wanting to know—because he’d been telling them about this new adventure he was on and this low dive, as in Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” he was going to regularly to watch the go-go boys, always fantasizing he’s Audrey Hepburn with George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sitting at the bar getting looped and watching the stripper and saying back and forth, “Do you think she is deeply and meaningfully talented?” “Talented, yes, deeply and meaningfully, no.”
Aubrey wants to know was he at the Stonewall last night? and V. says he doesn’t know, and that night the flames indeed break out, and he of course never goes near the place, tries to say quiet, but has a terrible dream about Judy being burned at the stake, like Falconetti in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc, only it’s really him.
Sex at Gethsemane: phone call from Bill Corley:
“Mard, they’re doin’ it in the bushes! Jimmy Palmieri was feelin’ fucked out and went down there on a meditation retreat, and they’re doin’ it, Mard, same as everybody up here, only instead of lickin’ it off the floors like we are, they’re lickin’ it off the dewy grass at dawn. It’s a scandal! I mean ain’t they supposed to be down there praying for the salvation of the world? It’s a scandal, worse than the suppression of the Latin mass. It’s all because of the pope, y’know.” (Paul VI, who as Carlo Montini, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was said to have had a stable of the most gorgeous models in Europe straight off the runways of the Via Montenapoleone, and was said also to frequent, in mufti, the lineup of ragazzi in the Stazione Centrale.) “The fags have got the pope by the balls, Mard. I’m telling you, the Church won’t survive it!”
Author feels a great desire to write these tidings up and send them to Boyd McDonald at Straight To Hell publications, except that Aubrey insists he writes all those “contibutions” himself, which is the point and why he’s so great.
But maybe this is irrelevant, because he (QT, not Boyd McDonald, who is a loner par excellence) has been asked by Richard Hayes, who’s climbing on the wagon, to join the editorial founding board of something called Christopher Street. The editor-in-chief to-be is somebody called Byrne Fone; lives on Stuyvesant Place, the divine street only a block long, running slantwise between Third and Second, with St. Marks (the church, not the baths) at the Second Avenue end.
Author passed the Christopher Street ed board test and, although by the time the premier issue hit the stands, Byrne Fone (he knew what he was doing all right) had dropped out, was represented in it by a review of Fassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit. That was it for CS, but the experience warmed him up for writing about Fassbinder, and as feature writer and regular New York Film Festival reviewer in Film Comment, for publishing an important piece on Douglas Sirk, right opposite one on the master by Fassbinder himself (in translation), in which they both discussed the same four pictures, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life.
Journal entry:
Aubrey called last night with hideous news. Addison Verrill, Variety stringer and astringent wit, a friend to the otherwise friendless, has been murdered. A. called yesterday morning to announce the death of the Meneghini, of a heart attack, in Paris, una vera traviata (“sola, abbondonata, in questo popoloso deserto che appellano Parigi”). What news will Dame Sibyl bring tomorrow? These things always happen in threes, don’t they? On the other hand maybe he won’t be calling here at all, but elsewhere to announce. . . . CUT!
Addison’s body discovered by Sharon Delano and Luis Sanjurjo with a knife sticking out of the chest (stabbed right to the heart) and the head bashed in with an iron frying pan, lying on the floor smeared with Addison’s gorgeous, quicksilver brains. This is queer life?
Exactly a week after the screaming headline in the Village Voice WHO KILLED ADDISON VERRILL? ran, the murderer, a sickeningly eerie dead ringer for the victim, significantly absent the gleam of a beautiful high intelligence in Addison’s flashing eyes, had confessed to Arthur Bell (“Bell Tells”) “I KILLED ADDISON VERRILL!” and the terrible story was told in full: the pickup at Danny’s, on Christopher Street, the drugs, almost certainly PCP and/or MDA (“Mary—Don’t Ask!”), the psychotic narcissistic rage erupting in bed with the mirror image and the hideous, brutal murder of one of the true princes of the city, who, same as the author, had a right to hang around down around the river, but met his death doing so.
The Guardian Angel, an encore:
“Write something new and exciting.”
“What?”
“Anything. Plays, essays, poems—”
“We’ve been through that.”
“So do it then.”
“One can but try.”
“One might try thinking of succeeding to boot.”
Funny, he’s just bought his first pair of them. Boots.
On the theatrical front, after a series of exhilarating and initially promising discussions with actresses Grayson Hall and Viveca Lindfors and a meeting with the director Minos Volanakis, the author’s playwrighting aspirations came a cropper in a welter of what film critic Andrew Sarris once called disruptive career problems. Few murmurs from the Coast (“Some promises of a test, nothing definite”), compounded by the disinclination of arts editors in the downtown papers, for whom he had been working for some time, to put the author in row G on the aisle of any playhouse in town for the purpose of reviewing, lead him to conclude that as a man of the theater he seemed likely to remain for some time in the lobbies category. Undeterred in his mind, he did manage to conceive a postscript to a play he greatly admired then and has continued to admire since, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band. This opus he had found it necessary to defend passionately against virulent accusations in the community (“Ha, ha, hah, Blanche!”) of its author’s selling out to heterosexual fag bashers by painting a “down” picture of a life they were so very committed to publicizing as happy, joyous, boundless and free—without so much as a nod either to old Harry Hay or old Leo Lerman or old Tobias Schneebaum or anybody else except that darling old wanker Dennis Pratt, out in full regalia with a television play all about him under the nom de théâtre Quentin Crisp. The Boys in the Band, a beautifully crafted and passionately true melodrama of shipwreck and survival, was exactly what they should have taken to their hearts, not least of all to fortify them for what turned out to be the torpedoed sinking to the bottom of the sea of their very benighted queer existences.
Postscript to The Boys in the Band:
Michael meets a friend the morning after the curtain comes down, at St. Malachy’s. He’s coming down the steps from mass upstairs in the Actors’ chapel and the friend, an old “Wanna-know-why-I-drink?” sister he hasn’t seen in some years, is coming up the stairs from the Sunday morning meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the basement.
Michael is amazed, and asks what’s happened to the old friend to bring him to this pass.
“Well, you know, darling, I always did like a good trick, in the sleight-of-hand department, I mean, as well as in the other. Parlor tricks, trompe-l’oeil and trompe-l’oreille, and the amazing thing is, all these people—and we number in the hundreds of thousands, they’ve pulled this trick on themselves, and they get you to pull it on you too—meaning me.
“You never saw Gertie Lawrence, darling, in The King and I, right down on 45th Street at the St. James—because of course you came from out there someplace, whereas I didn’t. I came from right here in Hell’s Kitchen. I was the Girl from Tenth Avenue—remember? I remember the time we had that long discussion about it, how you felt like an imposter, and believed everybody else who’d come to New York from Out There must feel like one too, at heart. Very Manhattan Tower, that discussion, and very Dawn Powell.
“Anyway, Gertie sang a little song in that show. Not ‘Hello, Young Lovers,’ the one she sang to the children, grouped around rather like the children gathered around the feet of Christ you see in those sickly oleographs—there’s undoubtedly one up there in that big room you work, hanging in an alcove with a rack of vigil lights all ablaze in front of it. Or like the pictures of the little pickaninnies and slant-eyes gathered around the feet of the Capuchin missionaries they paste on the mission box.
“But in this case earlier in the show—in the opening scene—to her, Anna’s, son. A song, dear, all about fear, and how Gertie fooled the people she feared by whistling herself out of it. Whistling a happy tune—can you stand the pain? Hammerstein’s lyrics are so sickening, really; it was Larry Hart who had the goods, desperate drunken woman that she was. And fooled herself as well—Gertie, that is; poor Larry never fooled himself or anybody else. And this was especially poignant because all the while Gertie was in the most terible pain and dying of cancer.
“Well, dear, AA is rather like that. You might want to give it a try—if only to expose it, yet again, for what it is—you were always as I remember a real stickler for home truths, especially in the case of the homeless homosexual. But y’know, I’ll tell you something. You look pretty exposed yourself this morning—rather more in need of a little cover story than yet another homeless homosexual truth.
“Here’s my number, dear—in case you’ve struck it out of your little black book. I’d be happy to meet you any time—I always liked you, you know: you were as big a sonofabitch as any I ever grew up around, and as anybody I’ve met so far in that den of hypocrites downstairs. Oh, and admitted hypocrites, dear, we even have a slogan for it: Act As If.
“And that, I guess, is my homely, homosexual truth for the day as well as my little bit of twelfth-step work, carrying the message to the still-suffering alcoholic—because you never as I remember made any bones about that, the alcoholic suffering.
“Now I can go get a strong black unspiked take-out coffee from Smiler’s and check into the 55th Street Cinema for Centurions of Rome. Have you seen it? I’ve been every day for two weeks, sometimes sitting—or kneeling—through it twice. An absolute masterpiece, darling, starring the God-man of the Moment, Eric Ryan. I mean seriously, forget Richard Burton in The Robe; forget Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators, never mind the rumors, and anyway I think those photos are as fake as the one of poor Jimmy Dean fucking a pig back home in Indiana.
“Why, do you know, darling, that if you check into the St. Marks any night in the wee hours until the end of the run, you will find him down in the steam room, being worshiped? Yes, venerated and tongue washed—every limb and crevice of him. They say it’s all part of the campaign, and that he stands there for hours, darling, like a statue. I don’t think I could take it, and in any case, I’m in bed by ten or, at the latest, eleven, these days, reading poetry. George Herbert just now:
‘If then all that worldlings prize
Be contracted to a rose;
Sweetly there indeed it lies,
But it biteth at the close.’
“You said a mouthful there, queen. Well, listen, darling, I should be down on my knees in the front row in about ten minutes. I’d light a candle for you if the had any in the joint; as it is, guess I’ll just have to strike a match.
“Arriva-derci, pet, or as Fulton Sheen used to say every week on television, in the springtime of our happy youth, ‘Bye now, and God love you!’ Was she a camp? She acted as-if all right; they should have given her the fucking Sarah Siddons Award.”