MCDARRAH’S PARADES Allen Ginsberg

As friend, cultural co-worker and sometime subject of Fred McDarrah and his neighborly camera I’ve marveled his historic constancy, decades of endurance. He’s a working photographer like his eccentric Manhattan predecessor, the illustrious news pix artist, Weejee. For the Village Voice (radically bohemian in its first decades), McDarrah in place focused his camera at cultural action in Manhattan hot spots—especially Greenwich Village, migrations of underground arts to Lower East Side (later commercially renamed “East Village”), & on transformations of Soho loft and gallery society.

This happened over half a century, McDarrah present, his camera flashing thru 1950s nascent subterranean counterculture, the mind-altering youth culture of the 1960s, Government blockades & psychic disillusionments of the ’70s, desperate upwardly-mobile graspings for personal safety in 1980s, and return to sane tragic Earth beginning 1990s. McDarrah’s photographs present a classic spectrum of themes parallel to alteration of U.S. consciousness—Anarchist street action, art openings, poetry readings, Living Theater, race drama, political spectacles, presidential conventions, folk music years, police riots, drug tribulations, underground cinema days, rock and roll studios and these Gay Liberation parades.

He’s paid humble attention year after year to his beat—curious intersection of journeymen journalist & cultural archivist. He has soulful instinct for human ground under his special subjects. Though not gay, a hard-laboring family man himself, he’s made photo records of gay parades for decades—sign of a real artist’s inquisitive sympathy, intelligent democracy.

Think of the historic importance of coming out of the closet! Stonewall’s cry echoed round the world! Spiritual liberation meant gay liberation also, the liberation of individual veracity against hypocrisies of church, state, and age-old social sadism. A revelation of actuality in the midst of mental hallucination and emotional repression. Truth against “lies, age-old, age-thick.”

What was the fix to begin with? Legendary gay bars owned by organized crime paid off the New York police, and if they didn’t they were closed down. Something went wrong with the payoffs at Stonewall Inn. So the customary repression of gay social life was motiv’d by hypocritical greed & sadism. As the sign says:

“GAY PROHIBITION CORRUPT$ COP$ AND FEED$ MAFIA”

Who rebelled against this police fraud? We see hairy-chested guys with leather caps like cops, curbstone pixies on roller-skates applauding the parade, white-clad pure butch lesbians, poseurs mugging in front of Stonewall’s grafitti’d facade, “Gay Cruise” billboards above Christopher Street’s classic, cigar-store corner, Rock Hudson elegies & T-shirt sociologies on Keith Haring’s shop wall, a gay vet tombstone, Carmen Miranda banana hat clones, transvestite motorcyclists, brown skins dancing, AIDS Die-ins, Peter Orlovsky & myself musing in bed, arm in arm old lovers bald, Baldwin & marble Lincoln, Auden’s wrinkle-faced dignity, Gay Liz comix covers, thirtysomething male hands sharing Affidavits of Domestic Partnership, magic homosex symbols flagged above Grove Street’s old brick roadway, a limp protester dragged off by cops, a “Love Boys” spray-painted door, bath-house queens and bare chest youthful cuties, Priests & Amazons, campy mitered Bishops & Gay Church floats, 1973 night crowds and balloons, Stonewall Inn shut down, a sign for “Bagels And” above its old brick front.

These anniversary parades, and records thereof like Fred McDarrah’s, are now significant as we approach end of millennium. Think of present circumstances—recent revelation of the tortured & torturing blackmail psyche of the mad transvestite J. Edgar Hoover in the closet—the late powerful homophobe N.Y. Cardinal Francis Spellman dallying with Broadway chorus boys on the privacy of citizen Roy Cohn’s yacht! Roy Cohn himself a tax-free anti faggot power head queer lawyer for the N.Y. Diocese, organized crime hats, androgynous politicians & macho millionaires, gay pimp for the Director of the F.B.I. How many magic Cardinals & religious fanatic priests we see unmasked, their tenderest longings hid under the iron visage of censoriousness.

This year Cardinal Spellman’s successor Cardinal O’Connor still dares to put his Biblic curse on gays, no public word whispered of his famous predecessor’s celebrated predilection for young men’s love. Thus while Catholic Ireland herself, through miraculous legislation, presently legitimizes homosexuality, the New York Cardinal scandalously’s prohibited Irish gay brigades from marching with the Green on St. Patrick’s Day parades!

This degraded “Family Values” theopolitics has become a worldwide mask for mind control against spiritual liberation. Hear the late Khomeini Ayatollah and his successor little Satans denounce “Spiritual Corruption,” along with Stalin, Mao & Hitler. Listen to Pat Robertson his confrères & his guru W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist Svengali of a “Biblical Inerrancy” cult, intolerant of any deviance from mind control by their interpretation of the “Good Book.”

These vicious priesthoods are allied with beer magnates and tobacco Senators in hierarchies of political ambition, demagoguery, power addiction, nationalist chauvinism, military aggression, assassinations and war. Intolerant of other faiths, sexualities and folkways! Fraudulent ethical poseurs set family members against each other, & oppose ancient true family values of sympathy, tolerance, forgiveness, intimacy, humor and fidelity.

Fred McDarrah’s views of the Stonewall parades present these true human values. Here we have the onlooker’s inquisitiveness—what a citizen of Manhattan might see over a period of years—gay character epiphanies—A nation in spiritual transformation.

November 15, 1993

Paris