City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (30 page)

We wondered where we were all heading. We assumed that gay life had branched off from normal family experience, sort of like
Homo sapiens
evolving in a separate direction from
Homo erectus
. We thought that gays had a separate destiny, that we were meant to point the way to more elegant and comprehensive models of adhesiveness. We were hostile to the idea of assimilation since we knew that would mean resembling straights, whereas we felt we had something better to offer.

Norm was emblematic of many of the young gay men who came up in the 1970s. He was from Florida, where he’d been a bookish nerd. His father had been a famous college athlete who’d had a devastating motorcycle accident and lost his legs and as an invalid would lie in bed drinking and insulting his big, fearful, skulking son, calling him a creep and a faggot.

Norm was turning himself into someone new. Bruce Mailman, who owned our building in the Colonnades, hired Norm to design and build the St. Marks Baths on St. Marks Place. I had gone to these baths years before when they’d been dirty and Ukrainian with a masseur in the basement rumored to be the cannibalistic original from Tennessee Williams’s story “Desire and the Black Masseur.” Norm put in lots of “wet areas” and solid primary colors and spotlights and warm terra-cotta tiles. He who’d been scared of his own shadow was now wearing a hard hat and climbing on steel beams several stories high and pulling girders into place
and making hundreds of small decisions every day—and they all worked. Then Bruce asked him to build the ultimate disco—what I called “the
Hindenburg
of discos,” little realizing that it would indeed be the biggest and one of the last giant gay dance halls. The Saint opened in 1980 in the old Fillmore East, a rock-concert hall on Second Avenue. A mesh-enclosed ramp led up and up to the immense dance floor of nearly five thousand square feet inserted under a dome in the building with robotic arms shuffling and pinpointing whole phalanxes of lights. In the center was a stage where Madonna or Whitney Houston would perform. Late, late at night (in reality toward noon the following day) the dome would turn into a planetarium and thousands of stars would slowly drift through space. Above and outside the dome on one side were the remaining seats of what had once been the top balcony. There stoned young men would sit in confused isolation in the dark and look down at the illuminated antics of the dancers. If you were properly stoned, they would look like miniature Santa’s helpers manufacturing mountains of invisible toys. Since I lived just five blocks away, I’d sometimes set the alarm and show up at five in the morning and head right to the balcony, where many of those lonely men were ready for sex.

Norm turned himself into a big man among men. He and Louis built the Chelsea Gym, which epitomized gay Chelsea for nearly a decade. I’d see Norm marching down the street with four other young men all in their thirties, wearing jeans and leather jackets, their hair cropped short, their voices loud. They weren’t bullies or pigs. They read books. They listened to classical music. They fell in love. Their politics were progressive. They talked about ideas. But Norm could command a team of straight workingmen on a building site and hide his emotions under a gruff exterior. He was the New Gay Man. A straight journalist would devote a chapter to him in a book on contemporary men.

At Norm and Lewis’s apartment a lot of these big, hearty sensitive men would sit around and eat good food buffet-style and drink white wine and talk about their feelings or their wider interests. I can remember marching in a gay pride parade with all of them, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We were with the leather boys, all of them smelling of hide and beer.

One of the stars of that group was Thom Gunn, the great English poet who’d lived most of his life in San Francisco. Thom was tall, bearded, lean, a serious leather guy and a decade older than all of us (though he looked our age). He was fascinated by Norm and maybe was just a bit in love, even if his “type” was younger and frailer. But when Norm died early on of AIDS, Thom wrote a beautiful elegy to him, “Courtesies of the Interregnum.” If you google Norm you’ll find nothing about the astonishing buildings he designed. You’ll find him only as a link to Gunn’s elegy.

I visited Thom two or three times in San Francisco, and once in a great while I’d phone him from New York out of the blue. He lived in a small commune of gay men and with a lifelong lover, Mike Kitay, an American he’d met at Trinity when he was a student. Each of the five or six men in the commune had his cooking night, and Thom took the meals and the shared responsibilities seriously. The commune was comfortable and calm up on the Haight off the Castro on the other side of Market. I brought Thom out to Princeton once to give a reading, but he seemed uncomfortable and failed to convince the audience of his true qualities. He’d lost his confidence and mumbled. He’d retired from teaching poetry at Berkeley and stopped writing; this silence was painful for him. He was also doing a lot of drugs toward the end of his life, mostly connected with sex.

He’d always been fascinated with America. His mother had committed suicide when he was fifteen, and after Trinity he came to the States. Donald Hall, the poet, told me that he’d seen Thom even at that time in full leathers and on a motorcycle, and a great
photo shows him looking like a Hells Angel on a bike (it’s a 1963 picture by Mike Kelly). He’s in jeans and motorcycle boots and a tight-fitting black leather jacket and a hood, the only incongruous element his broad smile. One of his early books,
My Sad Captains
, has a Shakespearian title that seems suitable to all those leather men he liked, though Thom wrote chiseled, formal, rather impersonal poems early on—the influence of Yvor Winters, his teacher at Stanford. Winters, a critic and poet born in the Midwest at the turn of the century, preached an austere, imagistic ideal of formalist poetry, and Gunn responded to it. Fortunately, in the 1980s, AIDS—and the death of many friends—made Gunn a warmer, more expressive poet, especially in his best collection,
The Man with Night Sweats
(1992). AIDS gave us all a subject and a seriousness that our work had never before possessed. Thom brought to bear on this subject a rigorous technique and quiet control he’d acquired over the years.

Typical of Gunn’s late strong work are these lines, with their beautifully subtle enjambment, written to Mike Kitay:

Nothing is, or will ever be,

Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart

But what we hold in trust

We do hold, even apart.

As the seventies progressed, gay sexual tastes became more and more outré. Gunn celebrated those extremes. He quoted with approval an article in the
Village Voice
by Ellen Willis in which she said that the lesbian movement of the seventies was not about liberating desire but about extending female solidarity. “For the gay male community,” on the other hand, “solidarity was, at its core, about desire.” I suppose another way of putting that was, lesbianism was to feminism as male homosexuality was … to nothing. There
was no fourth term in the equation. Gay men had never suffered as men but had been stripped of male privilege by the straight community. They wanted back what they considered to be their birthright.

Gunn saw gay men in the seventies—the ones who were out there, sexually active—as heirs to the drug-taking hippies. Gays at the saunas were “drug-visionaries.” “At the baths,” Gunn wrote, “or in less organized activity, there was a shared sense of adventure, thrilling, hilarious, experimental.” Gunn saw gays as crossing dramatic, enormous gulfs “on the huge pinions of our sexual momentum.” Referring to a San Francisco baths, Gunn wrote:

This was the Barracks, this the divine rage

In 1975, that time is gone.

All here, of any looks, of any age,

Will get what they are looking for,

Or something close, the rapture they engage

Renewable each night…

I can remember that in the midsixties New York had just one leather bar, and it was inconspicuous and customers would wear their normal clothes and carry a change of costume in a bag, then switch to their chaps and black leather vest in the taxi. They were terrified a friend, even a gay friend, might see them going out in this freaky rig. Sadomasochism still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky—sort of New Jersey. And elderly. As if working-class, old gay men who couldn’t compete in the real bars could look appealing in leather, or at least threatening.

By the seventies all that was changing. In 1972
L.A. Plays Itself
, a hard-core porn film starring the charismatic director Fred Halstead, opened on Fifty-fifth Street and ran briefly before the cops closed it down. It had a notorious fisting scene, and the whole
atmosphere of the second half of the movie was in complete grim contrast to the plucked pretty-boy look of the new East Coast porn such as
The Boys in the Sand
. The Anvil, a bar with go-go boys, opened in 1974 just south of Fourteenth Street. Boys danced on the bar on the ground floor while men had sex downstairs in the darkened bowels of the building. I never saw it, but people claimed uptown customers—even elegant women—fisted the go-go boys after carefully removing their rings.

In 1975 a hard-core S&M monthly magazine,
Drummer
, started publishing. It had fairly technical information about how to torture and submit to it—we read it with avidity. The whole look and smell of gay New York culture was changing toward beefier bodies, beards, and the odor of brew, harness, sweat, and Crisco. Keith McDermott said that New Yorkers were so pale and unhealthy looking that black leather was the only look that suited them.

The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached Twenty-first Street and Eleventh Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At five foot ten I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Spike and the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at Sixteenth Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defense—a fairly effective system. I thought back to the fifties when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby-blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not anymore. Now many of us were taking judo classes.

And now the dress code was strict:

At one time, the Mineshaft was New York’s most notorious “members only” club. Membership was granted on the spot if one passed muster—no designer clothes, no sneakers, no cologne. Located on Washington Street at Little West Twelfth Street in the heart of the meatpacking district, it was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a clothes check, dungeons, and other amenities. Yes, one was allowed to check all one’s clothes and stroll about naked or in a jockstrap—undress
was encouraged. The Mineshaft opened in 1977 before the AIDS era and was finally closed by the city’s Department of Health in 1985, four years after AIDS was first diagnosed.

People from out of town were astonished by the club and the neighborhood. All night long in the neighboring blocks, butchers in streaked aprons were unloading skinned and dressed calves and lambs onto overhead hooks traveling from the refrigerated trucks parked on the sidewalk (slick and smelly and black as varnish with blood) into the huge refrigerated warehouses. The butchers’ voices were loud and their faces lurid as they bent over oil drums containing warm-up fires.

Within the nondescript street-level door of the Mineshaft were stairs leading straight up to the doorkeeper sitting on a barstool, no longer the stogie-smoking Mafia guy of yore in a porkpie hat but rather a bearded and equally heavyset gay man in jeans and workboots. Inside was the big bar area with its low lights and pool tables. Behind a partition was the “action” part of the club on two floors. There was an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections. A fist-fucking sling was suspended on heavy chains from the ceiling, and a small crowd of men stood around looking at the nearly gynecological examinations. A whole rabbit warren of small rooms was downstairs and in one was a bathtub where men would take turns being pissed on.

In 1979 I wrote an essay in the left-wing
New Times
justifying gay S&M. I acknowledged, “As for gay S and M, it is as disturbing for heterosexuals to contemplate as was the thought of fair Celia on the potty for Jonathan Swift.” I was alert to the drama and romanticism of glimpsed scenes at the Mineshaft: “In the basement two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire’s swan bathing its wings in the dust.”

My main argument was that S&M was a scaled-down way of enacting and exorcising the brutality of our class society. As I put it, “Whereas ordinary social interactions are characterized by the joke, humor has always been inimical to sadism, just as light is to vampires. This humor that defuses outrage, no matter how justified, and dampens indignation, no matter how righteous, is just another name for surrender. Sadomasochism rejects the laugh that paralyzes social conscience. Within the charged space surrounding the master and his slave, true deeds are performed. One man does submit to another. One man does humiliate another. The same relief we experience in watching a Shakespeare play, the relief of participating in action devoid of irony and freighted with clear values, is the release offered to the sadist and masochist. The couple perform the mysteries of domination, of might, that obsess our culture. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri have said in the
Anti-Oedipus
, ‘Class struggle goes to the heart of desire.’ “