The Gay Metropolis (46 page)

“When you entered the Anvil, you walked down a flight of stairs to the first level. What was so great was so much was going on at once. It was such a carnival—dancing men were parading around on top of the horseshoe bar, little red lights were strewn across the ceiling, as if it were always Christmas. There was always a pathetic little parody of a drag show on the little stage in the corner. And hundreds of men. It was always packed. The crowd ran the gamut from the most illustrious names in the press to the sleaziest people you would never want to meet. Of course, sometimes they're one and the same, but never mind. It was truly the most fabulous place.

“Sometimes I had sex in the back room at the Anvil, on the level below the first floor. I remember one evening which characterized a deep dark level of my sexual activity, the ninth circle of my sexual experience. Looking back at my twenties, after all that has since transpired, I'm grateful that I experienced that sexual freedom.” Gefter felt he was representative of a time, “the beginning of homosexual identity in America,” and “all of this made sense then.”

“Anyway, Chuck and I had been making our usual rounds. Our drink of choice then was the Wild Turkey Manhattan, and we must have had more than a few of those that night. I'm sure we had smoked a few joints, and, maybe, popped a Quaalude, and ended up at the Anvil at four or five in the morning. Not unusual. I was in the back room having a grand old time. There was a ledge that ran the length of the back room, which I never actually saw, but people would lie on the ledge and get fucked. I remember this particular night, there I was lying on the ledge, my underpants and my jeans cradled in my armpit beside me, being fucked randomly by several different men. I could feel them one at a time inside me, even though I never saw them. Either I was truly liberated or truly psychotic. Who knows? But you know what William Blake said: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.' All I know is, I was in heaven, and I learned a few things while I was there.

“That may have been the darkest moment of my sexual experience, but I had experienced pure animal pleasure. I was having the time of my life.”

However, the Anvil was not the darkest meeting place in Manhattan in this period. Howard Rosenman thought, “The Anvil was like a bunch of fairies and a bunch of preppy boys having wild sex.” The Mineshaft, also in the Manhattan meat district, was the most notorious meeting
place of all. “The Mineshaft was a much more advanced thing,” said Rosenman.

“Much darker. The visuals were darker. The music was darker. I went with Tony Perkins there. I took a lot of people there. It was great. It was the first place that I knew that you had to be dressed in a certain way. You had to be in dungarees. If you had anything else on, they wouldn't let you in. And it was really wanton, wild sex. It was really, really free. A lot of fist-fucking. And a lot of S and M. And a lot of just wild threesomes, foursomes, you know—untrammeled, psychopathia sexualis on Saturday night.”

For most people, the Mineshaft went far beyond the boundaries they were willing to cross. “The people seemed crazy,” said Tom Stoddard. “They all seemed like lapsed Catholics who were working out some deep personal issues, which most of them were—except for the Mormons and Orthodox Jews.”

Rosenman also remembered “huge orgies” that would begin promptly at 6:00
P.M
. in a loft on 14th Street:

“You would check your clothes in a bag. And you would wear boots and you'd put the little check in your boot and you would walk around naked. And there were like four hundred guys in a loft. This happened a lot. Marijuana, poppers, wine, and I think the beginning of cocaine and the beginning of those exotic drugs, MDMA and MDMMA and all. It later became much more ritualized, you know, in the mid-seventies. All of it. The powders and the pills. You had dealers all over the city and you got a form where you would check off your powders and pills, and everybody would have to come at a certain time on Friday. And they would walk into a room and there would be pills on this side and powders over there, and they would fill their order. A lot of that. That was fun. It was all fun. Then it stopped being fun. It became a job. It was too much work keeping up. How do you get high? How do you get that original high? But the scene was changing.

“The downtown thing was the new world. The Cockettes were the apotheosis of the downtown thing. Ahmet Ertegun had an evening where he invited all the uptown folk to go downtown to the Second Avenue theater. These San Francisco queens would have beards and long eyelashes and dress like fantastical women, with motorcycle jackets, and motorcycle boots on motorcycles. They were unbelievable. That's where Sister Mary Indulgence came from. She was in the Cockettes. And they had this moment, that was 1972,1 think that was, the most glamorous thing that I had ever seen in my entire life: that particular evening when the Cockettes
were performing downtown, and uptown came to downtown, and it was the mixture of Andy's world and the social world and the art world and the music world and the fashion world and the film world. And it was very very electrifying for me.”

THE EFFECTS
of the sexual revolution were hardly confined to the homosexual community in Manhattan. In the seventies, there was an explosion of massage parlors, thinly disguised brothels where scantily clad women satisfied their male customers. The going rate was $15 for half an hour. Gay Talese, who was already famous for his books about
The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power)
and the Mafia
(Honor Thy Father)
decided that his next volume should be about sex, and he became the manager of two different massage parlors to research his subject.

The attitude of hip heterosexuals was suggested by Talese's willingness to let Aaron Latham accompany him to a massage parlor and chronide his exploits in a lengthy feature in
New York
magazine. The story included the reactions of Talese's very understanding wife, Nan, a prominent New York book editor. Mrs. Talese explained that “she did not want to take a lover for every lover Gay had because to her sex was ‘terribly private.'” But her husband had a very different point of view: “I want to get into my subject and I did,” he said. “Getting head from an NYU student is not going to threaten a marriage of fourteen years.”

Latham recorded this nude scene during his visit with Mr. Talese to the Fifth Season massage parlor on West 57th Street:

Amy reached out and took hold of Gay's penis as calmly as if it had been a pool cue. She was ready to play a new game.

“I'm going to tear it off,” she said.

“I love it. I love it,” he said. “Do it. I have dreams about it. I have fantasies about it.”

Amy continued to tug gently at Gay as if his appendage were the knob of some reluctant bureau drawer.

Gay kidded, “Next time I work there [at another massage parlor] you can chain me and then whip me.”

… Gay lounged beside the Fifth Season's pool like some decadent John the Baptist waiting for new believers to baptize. He welled with the fervor of someone new to the faith. He seemed to want everyone to dive head first into the wet, warm sexual revolution.

The frankness of Latham's account caused a sensation in the summer of 1973, but it was only one of the earliest indications of the similarities between the appetites of all kinds of sex-crazed New Yorkers. Five years
later, what had been the Continental Baths, a gay sex club where Bette Midler made her debut entertaining comely men clad in towels,
^*
metamorphosed into Plato's Retreat, exactly the same kind of establishment, only this time for a heterosexual clientele. On December 26,1978, the club's owner, Larry Levenson, threw a Christmas party for the children of club members and their friends. The
Times
reported that the children (mostly in their late teens) did not seem to look askance at their parents' behavior.

TOM STODDARD
had grown up in upper-middle-class white suburbs all over the Midwest, “very much a repressive culture.” In 1970, he had graduated from Georgetown University in Washington. During college, he “felt lonely and confused” and he knew he “wanted to meet men, but I would have rejected them if I had met them.” But he did meet an important role model, a straight student who contributed to Stoddard's decision to get involved in politics. Eventually, Stoddard would become one of the gay movement's most thoughtful and effective activists, writing the gay civil rights law for New York City, running the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund for six years beginning in 1986, and serving as an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law from 1981 to 1997.

One of Stoddard's earliest role models was two years ahead of him at Georgetown. He was “very cute,” and Stoddard had a crush on him.

His name was Bill Clinton. “That's one of the reasons I've remembered him for twenty years,” Stoddard recalled. “He was also an appropriate role model for me because he was smart, he was political and he was very well known. He ran for office at Georgetown, and he made a friend of everybody he met, a quality he's kept. I knew him not only because he went to Georgetown. We were both in the School of Foreign Service and he also worked on Capitol Hill, on the Senate side, which I did. He worked for [William] Fulbright, his U.S. senator, and I worked for Chuck Percy, my U.S. senator. So we met through the Capitol Hill connection as much as anything else. Particularly when he won the Rhodes Scholarship, I was in awe.

“He was handsome, he was very well liked, he was political. And, I thought, here is the person I would like to be. When he got the Rhodes Scholarship, I thought, Well, he can get anything he wants. What's remarkable about him is that he's not a bad person. Most people who are that ambitious really are bad people.”

Stoddard thought that working for Bill Fulbright, the Arkansas senator
who was one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam, was an especially important experience for Clinton. “That was very good for him because Fulbright was a principled, very smart politician who did what he did because of certain principles. And he wrote about them. He was a scholar as well. The Vietnam War in a sense produced a healthy Bill Clinton because he was forced very early, as I was, to confront the issue.”

Stoddard was also smart, political, and very good-looking, although he considered himself “very shy and very fearful,” shortcomings he overcame by thrusting himself into hostile environments.

In the winter of 1970, he moved to New York, at the age of twenty-two. He had worried that he might be gay since he had been a high school student outside Chicago in 1965, and he had gone to the biggest bookstore he could find to look for an appropriate volume in the psychology section. The two books he found were by Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber, two of the most homophobic psychiatrists in America. “Both of them took the position that not only was homosexuality wrong, but that ‘single status' was wrong. Bieber's belief was that bachelors were inherently disturbed people, regardless of their sexual orientation. I read these books, they sounded plausible to me, I believed them, and then I hid them in the house.” And during college, he never had sex with a man.

When he moved to New York, he lived in an apartment a half a block from one of the main gay cruising areas of that era—Central Park West and 72d Street. “It was dangerously close.” So the first time Stoddard's roommate went away for the weekend, he picked someone up and brought him back to his apartment. “That was my first sexual experience. And it was extremely unpleasant and painful, as most of these stories run. He fucked me. I had never imagined that people did such things, yet was too young and too fearful to say no. I just found it painful as well as bizarre. I decided that if that was what gay men did, then I wasn't gay. I remember how old he was because he seemed so old to me. In 1970 I was twenty-two and he was thirty.”

Stoddard waited a year before he repeated the experience, and the second time was a little better. But then he decided to retreat from Manhattan temporarily, and he moved to Minneapolis, where he worked for the American Field Service, a student exchange program.

“Minneapolis is much colder than anyone can possibly imagine. I would occasionally give myself frostbite because I didn't know how to behave in that cold weather. But one of the consequences of that cold weather was to accentuate my sense of loneliness. I would sit in my
apartment by myself, feeling very cold. I was quirky then in some ways similar to the way I'm quirky now: I didn't turn the radiators on enough in the apartment. I believed it was a waste of energy and the building was overheated anyway. I thought I would just receive the heat from the other apartments. I did this the entire winter. What I was doing was driving myself into a gay bar. I'm quite serious. At some point I wanted to make myself so uncomfortable that I had to make a change and do something that was otherwise frightening.”

He had noticed a lot of men going into a downtown bar called Sutton Place, so he drove there and sat in his car for an hour until he got up the courage to go in. “It was probably the most important event of my life. I got out of the car, I locked it, and I walked into the bar. I'm
sure
that I had my head down because that's what I do when I'm really frightened. I walked in and I heard this extraordinary music. That was the first thing I remember. It was the beginning of disco. I remember hearing Barry White's “Love Unlimited.” That is my coming-out song. I opened the door, and all of a sudden here was all this activity, this bizarre music that I would not have heard on the radio or anywhere else, and I thought that I had entered another universe. I sidled up to the bar, ordered a beer, with my head down, drank the beer, and the bartender would occasionally say things to me, which frightened me, and went back home. The next night, I went back and met a man who became my first boyfriend. I also met, through him, his roommate and a whole host of people who became my first community of gay friends. Within about a week, I had joined the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights. It was easy for me at that point because I was more of a human being, apart from my sexuality, than most other people at that level because I had done a lot and knew who I was. So it was fairly easy once I figured out my sexuality.”