Times Square was shot on location in Times Square in the year 1980, and in that way it will remain forever a historical document of that place and time. The director, Allan Moyle, whose later film Pump Up the Volume may be more familiar to you, cast the neighborhood itself as a main character, with its denizens—street folk, OG hip-hoppers, pillheads, hookers, primarily people of color—as the vital, living, breathing landscape. The flashing neon lights, sex cinemas, and liquor stores aren’t sinister, they’re the blinking, cheerful midway of the neighborhood’s carnival. There is a moment in the movie when the teenage heroines are on the run from the cops and outwit them by dashing through a porn theater. One girl stops briefly to mock the sex on the screen, and all the perverts in the audience cheer, and cheer on our outlaw girls. Times Square illuminates Times Square as a sort of community of outsiders—sexual, chemical, economic—who have each other’s backs. And, of course, there are other, darker sides to the story, but we know those movies—girls get exploited, raped, hooked on dope, murdered, etc. We don’t know this one—the playfulness, freedom, and community that exists on the outskirts of sanctioned culture.
So, what is this movie about? It’s about two young girls looking to find safety in the world, and they access it, briefly, in one another and in this seedy, dismissed neighborhood. Pamela Pearl is privileged, the motherless daughter of a wealthy politician running for mayor of New York City on the platform of cleaning up Times Square. During puberty, some of us acquire an invisible set of antennae that allows us to begin to see the world as it really is. It is a sometimes-cataclysmic revelation, inspiring and clarifying and crazy-making and terrible. Our Pammy is waking up to the hypocrisy of her father and, through him, the hypocrisy of the elite world she was born into. When she dares speak out, her father has her tossed into the loony bin, “for testing.” Her roommate, whom she is instantly captivated by—to the point of writing poetry—is the flower-eating, cigarette-smoking Nicky Marotta, a butch street punk, the same age as Pammy but a million years older. Nicky seduces Pammy into sneaking out of the psych ward by lingering outside her door blaring “I Wanna Be Sedated” on her busted-up boom box. Together they steal an ambulance and make their way to an abandoned warehouse on the river where they begin to play house.
Times Square is a butch-femme queer-girl love story. There were actual lesbian make-out scenes shot, but they got cut per the order of a producer who had just made a bunch of cash off of Saturday Night Fever and didn’t want any underage homosexual love mucking up his chances for another box-office smash. He also weaseled some disco into the incredible punk rock/new wave soundtrack, and drove the director off the project—which is why the movie ends in such a disappointing manner, but we’ll get to that.
I want to dissect the butch-femme dynamic that exists between these young lovers, because it is very familiar to me. Pammy, who is more functional than Nicky not only due to her upbringing but also because of her gender normativity and lack of PTSD and mental illness, makes their ramshackle squat a home. She nurtures Nicky, listens to her song lyrics, and Nicky listens to Pammy’s poetry. It’s a freaking punk rock runaway Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. For Nicky, a nobody, someone who risks falling through the cracks daily, who arguably already has, safety comes from being seen, and fame offers the ultimate protection, artistic fame in particular. She wants to be a rock star—she is one by nature—but like so many cast-off queers of past generations, there is no path for her. Pammy, with her wider, class-based belief in possibility and her understanding of opportunity, nurtures Nicky and pushes her to actualize her dream. With the help of Johnny LaGuardia, a sleazy radio DJ with ulterior motives, Nicky’s music creates a movement of young women who also feel both ignored and abused by the culture—Sleez Sisters. As Nicky’s anthem goes—trigger warning—“Spic, nigger, faggot, bum / your daughter is one.” A sort of sloppy stab at intersectionality; a proclamation of alliance, using the language of the street and the day. A young girl defiant, fumbling the commonality of struggle, the common roots of xenophobia. Knowing it intuitively, via emotion—the young girl’s genius—and allying herself with the objects of racism, homophobia, homelessness. Your daughter is one. I had that painted on the back of my leather jacket in 1994, in a banner floating above a dumpster-diving dyke in a trash can, eating a piece of secondhand pizza. The name of the song is “Sleeze Sister Voodoo,” and another chorus chants, “Stick. / Pins. / Into. / You.” Sympathetic magic. All girls are witches.
Although Nicky and Pammy’s relationship is one of the most passionate and romantic I’ve ever seen on film, their affair is also horrifyingly dysfunctional. Is it because I first viewed this film at the tender age of twelve, my body teeming with hormones, desperate for romance, that their specific dynamic imprinted itself on me, setting me up for decades of valorizing and romanticizing, really worshipping, the gender misfits I nurtured and supported? Is this why it took me into my forties before I finally understood that that certain something, that spark, the je ne sais quoi that mysteriously drew me to those I would love, was actually a stormy gray cloud of mental illness? Anxiety, depression, sociopathy, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, Nicky seems to have them all, as have many of my lovers. Unlike those I love, I am traditionally female, gender conforming, and there is no underestimating the way that this has protected me in the world. Though Nicky and Pammy’s passionate love checks all the boxes of fantasy love, it is in reality a codependent femme’s nightmare—trapped in a relationship with a person so reliant on you, who drains your many resources, who you feel too guilty to leave because you understand all too well the honest way they have come by such damage. Never mind your own female damage acquired from this world, the way you’ve been molested or date-raped or casually humiliated your entire life. You get a job stripping and support your unemployable butch. Which is what Pammy does, though magically she gets to keep her clothes on. Which probably fucked me up more than anything else in the movie.
But the way Nicky and Pammy’s affair unravels is also a butch’s nightmare: the straight-passing, normatively gendered female begins an intrigue with a cisgender man, one who possesses all the power and cachet the butch never will, one who wears the same indicators of masculinity and is never punished for it but celebrated, and is ignorant as the dumbest beast of this privilege in the world. The butch sees they were wrong to trust the femme, that her gender privilege will be traded upon, the potential for straight privilege latent in bisexual women actualized while the butch remains cut off from society. Ugh.
I was oblivious to all of this when I first found Times Square at the age of twelve thanks to Night Flight, a deliberately strange, proudly countercultural punk and new wave TV show that aired on USA Network Friday and Saturday nights from midnight to 6:00 a.m. from 1981 to 1988. I vividly remember lying on my scratchy wool couch printed with autumn-colored flowers, an afghan knitted by some random neighbor draped over my body. The couch and the afghan and the throw pillow I laid my head upon, my hair and my skin and everything around me smelled of cigarette smoke, because I lived in a house of smokers. I gazed out at the television set over a coffee-table landscape of ashtrays, empty plastic cups sticky with soda, and crumpled bags of potato chips. Saturday Night Live had just ended, I flipped to MTV to see if anything interesting was on. Nope. I surfed over to Night Flight, which screened documentaries about the Clash, a show called New Wave Theater featuring Gary Numan and other sexy androids, concert footage of Lou Reed and Fear. Cult-classic films, black-and-white movies like Reefer Madness screened ironically alongside ridiculous horror films and newer, cooler productions like Times Square. I watched the film and I watched my dreams and fantasies and longings take shape and stream out of me, into the dark colors of the film and back through my unbelieving eyes. Two girls, alone together and free in late-seventies New York City. This was everything I ever wanted. To run away. Always I waited to see if my life would get bad or weird enough to call for it, but never did it. Yes, my mother’s boyfriend woke up drunk and pissed in the corner of the bedroom, hallucinating a urinal. Yes, tough kids regularly menaced me in the streets. Tough girls slapped me, tough girls I was too frightened to slap back for fear I’d be slapped even harder, forever. Packs of boys on dirt bikes following me in the street, barking because I was ugly like a dog, but still it never felt like enough to break my mother’s heart. Oh, how I longed for Times Square, where I could hook up with girls like Nicky who used her toughness for good, not to bully. I would find clothes on the streets and dress like them, in men’s leather and gauzy scarfs. I would no longer suffer through school, so boring and irrelevant, so many nuns, and instead spend days doing what I wanted to do: writing, making music, maybe becoming an artist, maybe I already was an artist, but I would never learn this about myself stuck in smoky, sad, racist Chelsea, Massachusetts. I would have to go to a city to become an artist. I would have to go to a city to become myself.
A major theme of Times Square is gentrification. The enemy, Pammy’s dad, sees the whole neighborhood as a scab needing to be ripped off in order to allow a healthier neighborhood to heal there, one with Trump towers and fifty-foot LED advertisements crawling with Disney characters. Pammy’s stand for truth is a stand against gentrification and the idea that the people who go there are somehow disposable, throwaway people. We queers, artists, activists, intellectuals, misfits, know with the instinct of any migrating animal that we must go to the city to find ourselves, our lives, and our people. Times Square shows beautifully what is lost to us when we lose our cities, our scruffy, scuzzy, cheap, and accessible cities; our inspiring, cultured, miraculous, dangerous, spontaneous, surprising cities. A place that’s not the suburbs, where everything is already known and experience is as prefabricated as the houses. In the city anything can happen and so everything happens, the kinds of things that happen when so many people from so many backgrounds come together in respect and mutual need. Times Square ends before gentrification wins, but we all know what has happened.
Queers have always needed the city. And now the city is a suburb. As Sarah Schulman writes in her brilliant book The Gentrification of the Mind, “To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomenon: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences for the future lives of cities.” I watched Times Square as a jaded adult, on my thirty-ninth birthday, when I rented out the lovely, dumpy Red Vic Movie House on San Francisco’s Haight Street, a co-op theater collective you could join, seeing movies all the time for free in exchange for working the box office or snack bar—a snack bar that had shakers of nutritional yeast for your popcorn, a theater whose seats were couches and that once a year screened Harold and Maude, handing you a daisy as you exited the lobby, a theater that buckled under the city’s now-famous gentrification, run out of town. I rented the theater for $300 and invited everyone I knew to come watch Times Square with me. I wondered, because how could you not, where Nicky and Pammy would run to today. Patti Smith suggests Detroit. “New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling,” she has said. “New York has been taken away from you. Find a new city.”
I want to return to Nicky and Pammy’s relationship dynamics and the way I lived those dynamics in my own life. Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. Perhaps this is changing—I believe it is changing, perhaps in some locations the transformation is complete. But in the nineties and in decades earlier and surely so very often today, queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through our families’ rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we’ve faced, the ways in which we’ve violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we’ve endured as a result of society’s loathing, unharmed. Whatever of these wounds I didn’t experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not in some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex.
So in this way Times Square gave me a real notion of queer romance, the kind that happens between gender-variant and gender-normative females. In this way, it provided me with a Romeo and a Juliet, role models of passion and glory, so that I could know that the difficult relationships that broke and squeezed and fucked my heart were this kind of love, a Nicky-Pammy thing, like when Nicky makes them practice screaming one another’s name in the industrial wasteland of their squatted home, NICKY! PAMMY! NICKY! PAMMY! until it is no longer bearable, because she knows that their world is dangerous and that they must have one another’s back, they must know with their whole bodies that they are there for one another, that they will answer each other’s screams.
But they don’t. I hate the end of the movie, hate it worse than people hated Thelma and Louise with their fatalistic drive off the cliff. I wish Nicky and Pammy jumped into the East River together, their lungs filling with garbage. No, instead Pammy betrays Nicky, by doing worse than intriguing with Johnny LaGuardia—played by sexy Tim Curry, after all, so who could blame her—by returning to the safety and privilege of her father, her family, and all that it—I was going to say symbolizes, but it’s not a symbol, it’s the real thing. White, heterosexual, moneyed, patriarchal power. After all Pammy has experienced—goofily mugging dudes under Nicky’s tutelage, go-go dancing at the Cleo Club, experiencing the nightly bonhomie on the streets of America’s most vilified neighborhood, and most of all, loving Nicky Marotta—still, she goes back to her normal, privileged life. She watches Nicky’s big show with the girls below, and it’s the smile that gets me, this condescending little smile, like she’s proud of Nicky. Why does this irk me so? I want her to be humbler in the face of Nicky. I don’t want to see her proud. There is a sadness in the smile, but a light sadness, sweet, and you can see the hint of nostalgia that will grow, and see how she will come to look back on this moment with a type of gross wistfulness, sharing the stories with future lovers, men and women from her own class background: “Yeah, I ran away once and lived with this street girl, she was really a genius but so troubled …” At the end of the movie Pammy returns to her life, which makes her a slummer in Nicky’s reality. And at the end of the movie there is every reason to presume that Nicky goes to jail.
Oh no, did I just shit-talk my most favorite movie in the whole world? It is only because I love it so and have thought so much about it. Times Square is an inspiring document of New York City during possibly its last lively era, its last era of possibility. Nicky is a completely authentic late-seventies teenage butch, played to raspy, passionate perfection by Robin Johnson, a straight woman by the way, who last I knew made her living doing traffic reports for a Midwestern radio station. In 2016 there is nary a rough-and-tumble scuffed-up butch who wears her working-class history on her sleeve on the television. There is Bullet from The Killing, a Seattle street kid with more emotional stability than Nicky but less physical safety. Can you think of any others? Not a soft butch who blurs into tomboy, something the culture has always made some room for. I mean an “Are you a boy or a girl?” genderqueer, a “You’re in the wrong bathroom” type of butch, the type of butch who is always working-class because you simply cannot get employed when you strike gender panic into the hearts of employers. I’m coming up empty. But we have Nicky. Always and forever, my first queer love.
From a 2016 talk at Butte College in Oroville, California.