City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (7 page)

I’d never lived alone before. When I’d come home from work to my new solitary apartment, my heart would start to beat harder as I approached the door. I bought Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and began to prepare elaborate meals, recipes
that would sometimes take two days to execute—
veau Prince Orloff
or
boeuf à la cuillère
(in which a big square of beef was boiled, cooled, hollowed out, the minced meat then mixed with sautéed mushrooms and shallots and combined with a sauce, then reinserted into the beef shell and covered with Gruyère and heated up under the grill—or something like that; I can’t remember, I only did it once, and it was pretty dry). I realized that despite my therapist I probably wasn’t going to get married, and that I should start giving dinner parties to fill up my lonely evenings.

Much of my spare time was devoted to sex—finding it and then doing it. In those days before online hookups and backroom bars and outdoor sex, when there weren’t even very many gay bars, we had to seek out most of our men on the hoof. Back then people glanced back over their shoulders, though few do it now (or do I say that only because now I’m old and uncruisable?). Then we had to look back or we’d spend the night alone. The whole city was awash with desire and opportunities to satisfy it. Now people can afford to be arrogant and to scurry past one another haughtily, knowing they can always go online later, but then they were driven to tarry and gawk. Typically we’d walk up and down Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street—not with friends, which might be amusing but was entirely counterproductive. No, only the lone hawk got the tasty rabbit.

If you looked back and he looked back as well, you’d pretend to scan the contents of a shop window. He’d do the same thing twenty yards down. You’d keep exchanging reciprocated glances at an ever-increasing rate. Then you might just smile simply and stroll toward him and he’d pull away from his window and the two of you would form your little conversational duo. If you were still afraid of being rejected or arrested or beat up, you might ask him the time or for a light. It was considered especially cheeky to ask for a light while you were already smoking. Usually you’d just say, “Do you live around here?”

If he was willing, you’d invite him back to your apartment, which in your mind you’d refer to as your trick pad, since he was the trick you’d just scored. Sometimes you’d trick more than once in an evening (“Oh, God, last night I was a real nympho, I tricked three times in a row, my cooze was oozing, must have been the full moon”). The way you could tell the difference between your friends and your lovers is that you never camped with a trick. When discussing him the next day, you might refer to him as “she,” but never to his face (“I thought she was so butch, but within seconds she had her legs in the air!”). As one of my friends said, “If God had wanted men to be fucked, he would’ve put a hole in their ass.”

We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but we reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties. I’d clean my apartment carefully, change the sheets and towels, put a hand towel under the pillow (the “trick towel” for mopping up the come) along with the tube of lubricant (usually water-soluble K-Y). You might even “douche out”—sometimes, if you were a real “senior girl,” with a stainless-steel insertable nozzle attached to the shower. You’d buy eggs and bacon and jam and bread for toast, if you wanted to prove the next morning that you were “marriage material.” You’d place an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter on the bedside table. You’d lower the lights and stack the record player with suitable mood music (Peggy Lee, not the Stones) before you headed out on the prowl. All this to prove you were “civilized,” not just one more voracious two-bit whore. Once you’d landed a man, there was no way to know what he liked to do in bed. No frank discussions about who was a top and who was a bottom. Not yet any color-coded hankies in back jeans pockets or keys on the left or right. You usually walked home with the minimum of small talk, sometimes in total silence. Everyone knew that you could lose a trick if you were too mouthy; a sibilant
s
could make an erection wilt in a second. Only once you had him back home behind closed doors and curtains did you serve
him a drink and then begin to kiss. If you had to say something, you’d keep your monosyllables in the baritone register. You could tell his intentions pretty quickly by whether he felt for your ass or your cock—but even that wasn’t done instantly. A slight pretense of romance was still required, some closed-eyed necking and French-kissing before his hand would drift down into the exciting zone. With any luck he’d claw your clothes off and shed his own in one quick shrug (“My dear, you could hear the Velcro ripping!”). If he folded his trousers neatly and looked around for a hanger, you knew he’d be a bore (“She turned out to be an accountant, of course. I could see that by the way she fussed over that pleated skirt of hers. Betty Bookkeeper…”).

From the time of the World’s Fair in 1964 to the beginning of gay liberation, the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the city was repeatedly being cleaned up. Subway toilets were always being locked shut. Bars were constantly raided. I remember one, the Blue Bunny, up in the Times Square area near the bar where they first danced the twist. There was a tiny dance floor at the back. If a suspicious-looking plainclothesman came in (supposedly you could tell them by their big, clunky shoes), the doorman would turn on little white Christmas lights strung along the ceiling in back, and we’d break apart and stop dancing while the music roared on. I can remember a two-story bar over near the Hudson on a side street south of Christopher that was only open a week or two. When the cops rushed in, we all jumped out the second-story window onto a low, adjoining graveled roof and then down a flight of stairs and onto the street. I used to go to the Everard Baths at 28 West Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway. It was filthy and everyone said it was owned by the police. It didn’t have the proper exits or fire extinguishers, just a deep, foul-smelling pool in the basement that looked infected. When the building caught fire in 1977, several customers died. There was no sprinkler system. It was a summer weekend.

On Fire Island it was scarcely better in those days. Of course the Suffolk County police couldn’t control what went on in the dunes or along the shore at night, but in discos in both Cherry Grove and the Pines, every group of dancing men had to include at least one woman. A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren’t observing the rule. At a dance club over in the Hamptons, I recall, the men line-danced and did the hully-gully, but always with at least one woman in the line.

Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the “A-trainers”), and who were jumpy because of the extreme heat and who’d imagined the police persecutions of the preceding years had finally wound down. The new attacks made them feel angry and betrayed. They were also worked up because Judy Garland had just died of an overdose and was lying in state at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home. At the end of Christopher Street, just two blocks away, rose the imposing bulk of the Jefferson Market women’s prison (now demolished to make way for a park). At that time, tough women would stand on the sidewalk down below and call up to their girlfriends, “I love you, baby. If you give it up to that big black bitch Shareefa, I cut you up, I’m telling you, baby, I cut you good.” Inside the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by the long-legged, fierce-eyed antics of the S.T.A.R. members (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). Angry lesbians, angrier drag queens, excessive mourning, staggering heat, racial tensions, the examples of civil disobedience set by the women’s movement, the antiwar protesters, the Black Panthers—all the elements were present and only a single flame was needed to ignite the bonfire.

* * *

The Stonewall wasn’t really a disco. It had a jukebox, a good one, and two big, long rooms where you could dance. Bars were open till four in the morning in New York; gay guys would come home from work, eat, go to bed having set the alarm for midnight, and stay out till four. Of course there were no Internet sites, but also no telephone dating lines, no backrooms, and up till then no trucks or wharves open to sex.

There was a lot of street cruising and a lot of bar cruising. We had to have cool pickup lines. We were all thin from amphetamines; my diet doctor was always prescribing “speed” for me, and I’d still be up at six in the morning reading the yellow pages with great and compulsive fascination. We had long, dirty hair and untrimmed sideburns and hip-huggers and funny black boots that zipped up the side and denim cowboy shirts with pearlescent pressure-pop buttons. We had bell-bottoms. We all smoked all the time (I was up to three packs a day). We didn’t have big showboat muscles or lots of attitude. Our shoulders were as narrow as our hips. We didn’t look hale, but we were healthy—this was twelve years before AIDS was first heard of and all we got was the clap. We had that a lot, maybe once a month, since no one but paranoid married men used condoms. I dated my clap doctor, who spent most of his free time copying van Gogh sunflowers.

I would go to the Stonewall and drink three or four vodka tonics to get up the nerve to ask John Stipanela, a high school principal, to dance. I had a huge crush on him but he wasn’t interested in bedding me, though we did become friends. One night there I picked up an ultra-WASP boy working in his family business of import-export, but I found him a bit too passive—until I discovered he was the guy my office-mate at work was obsessively in love with and had been mooning over for months. I felt bad about cock-blocking my office-mate (“bird-dogging,” as we said then) and sort of impressed
with myself that I’d scored where he, a much better looking man, had failed.

Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille. On June 28, 1969, the bar was raided, and for the first time gays resisted. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staged the raid, since they’d discovered the liquor bottles in the bar were bootlegged and that the local police precinct was in cahoots with the Mafia owners. As the patrons and workers were being led out of the bar and pushed into a paddy wagon, the angry crowd that had gathered outside began to boo. Then some of the queens inside the van began to fight back—and a few escaped. The crowd was energized by the violence.

Everyone was so pissed off over that particular police raid because once the World’s Fair was over, the cops seemed to forget about us and lots of new bars had opened. There were raids, but only once a month and usually early in the evening, so as not to spoil the later, serious hours of cruising and dancing and flirting and drinking. Now we had a new, handsome mayor, John Lindsay. But he only looked better. He was in constant conflict with the unions, with antiwar protesters, with student radicals who took over Columbia—and with the gay community.

Before the Stonewall uprising there hadn’t really been much of a gay community, just guys cruising Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. But when the police raided Stonewall and gay men feared their bars were going to be closed once again, all hell broke loose. I was there, just by chance, and I remember thinking it would be the first funny revolution. We were calling ourselves the Pink Panthers and doubling back behind the cops and coming out behind them on Gay Street and Christopher Street and kicking in a chorus line. We were shouting “Gay is good” in imitation of the slogan “Black is beautiful.”

Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group—with rights, a culture, an agenda. June 28, 1969, was a big date in gay history.

GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don’t listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.

A Black Maria had carted off half the staff and a few kicking, writhing drag queens, while the rest of the policemen waited inside with the others. I’d been walking past with a friend and now joined in, though resistance to authority made me nervous. I thought we shouldn’t create a fuss. This was bad for our image. I said out loud, “Oh, come on, guys.”

Yet even I got excited when the crowd started battering down the barricaded door with a ripped-up parking meter and when someone tossed lit garbage into the bar. No matter that we were defending a Mafia club. The Stonewall was a symbol, just as the leveling of the Bastille had been. No matter that only six prisoners had been in the Bastille and one of those was Sade, who clearly deserved being locked up. No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what’s available.

Two weeks later I wrote a letter about the event to Alfred and Ann Corn, a young married couple I’d only recently met and who were away for the summer on the West Coast. I obviously had no idea how serious the uprising was or would prove to be, how it would usher in a whole new era of gay consciousness. It would turn out to be as epoch-making as the 1934 Nazi raid on and destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, which ended the first gay liberation movement in history. In the late 1980s I concluded a novel,
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
, with a lengthy description of the event.

Chapter 7

About this time I met Richard Howard, the poet, critic, and translator. A guy I’d been dating named Frank had started chatting with Richard at a West Village gay bar. Frank told Richard that he had a friend (me) who’d written a “brilliant” novel no one would buy. (In truth, Frank hadn’t read it.) Richard scrawled out his phone number on a trick card provided by the bar and kept close to the entrance and told Frank to have me call him.