The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Other novelists McEvoy met there included Vince Patrick (The Pope of Greenwich Village), Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park), and the damaged Fred Exley, whose A Fan’s Notes, published to positive reviews in 1968, is a semiautobiographical novel about struggling with acute alcoholism, trips to mental institutions, and electroconvulsive therapy. Jerry Orbach would play the Exley character in a 1972 film adaptation. “Exley’s was the first jacket up on the wall, as far as I remember. He lived upstate mostly. He’d always show up once a year or something, and he’d be fairly soused every time I saw him.” Exley died of a stroke in 1992.

  The veteran character actors Val Avery and Jack Warden were also regulars. “Val Avery lived right across the street. He was in Columbo. We used to have great conversations in Gristede’s on Sheridan Square, because he was a gourmet cook, and we’d chat in front of the meat counter.” Warden lived on Sheridan Square, “above what’s now a Starbucks, which used to be the bar Jack Delaney’s. Extremely regular guy. I never saw an entourage. None of these guys had personal assistants or anything.”

  In 1969 the big round table in the dining room of the Lion’s Head became one of the unofficial campaign headquarters for Norman Mailer’s quixotic run in the Democratic mayoral primary. Jimmy Breslin ran with him for city council president and Gloria Steinem was persuaded to run for comptroller; Doc Humes, the Voice’s Flaherty, Jack Newfield, Peter Maas (the Times crime reporter who wrote Serpico and The Valachi Papers), and the activist Yippie Jerry Rubin all pitched in. Announcing his candidacy, Mailer called New York City “a cancer and leprosy ward that has infected the rest of the country” and called for a “hip coalition of the right and the left.” In a long piece for the magazine New York, Breslin wrote that “this city is cut and slashed and bleeding from somewhere deep inside.” It was no time for politics as usual, he declared. “The City of New York either gets an imagination, or the city dies.” Their platform did not lack for imagination. Under the slogans “No More Bullshit” and “Vote the Rascals In,” they resurrected an old notion of making New York City the fifty-first state, proposed decentralizing political power to the neighborhood level, and called for, as Mailer put it, “a day set aside, perhaps the last Sunday of the month, when nothing would move or operate in the city—no vehicles, no ships, no trains, no planes, and no electric power but for places of dire emergency.”

  A Mailer-Breslin ticket might seem preposterous on the face of it. Local media certainly thought so. When New York ran Breslin’s piece, which he titled “I Run to Win,” it put a photo of him and Mailer on the cover with a huge headline, “MAILER-BRESLIN SERIOUSLY?” Coverage in the dailies was slight to mocking. Mailer, always trigger-happy when there was an opportunity to shoot himself in the foot, lashed out at the press, which didn’t improve the coverage. Yet most New Yorkers shared Mailer’s and Breslin’s low opinion of the city’s health. When John Lindsay was elected mayor in 1965, he was seen as a kind of local version of JFK—young, handsome, relatively hip for a politician, and a liberal reformer. He was the first Republican mayor since La Guardia, elected on the good government promise that he’d clean up the corruption and ineptitude that afflicted the city under the Democrats and what was left of Tammany Hall. But his own term was so riddled with problems that Time would run a story in 1968 with the headline “John Lindsay’s Ten Plagues.” Crime and drugs were rising, the middle class and businesses were fleeing, the Mafia was thriving, the cops were on the take, race relations went from bad to worse, the city’s youth were in open revolt. Striking transit workers brought New York to a standstill on Lindsay’s very first day in office, striking sanitation workers let mountains of garbage pile up on the streets, and teachers went on a long and bitter strike of their own that pitted black school administrators against the mostly Jewish union.

  Campaigns were shorter in those days. The Mailer ticket announced its candidacy in April and the voting was in July. Breslin began to take it seriously. Mailer did, too, but he couldn’t resist being Mailer. His biggest gaffe was at a fund-raiser at the Village Gate in May, where he got “dead drunk,” he later admitted, and railed at his own would-be supporters, calling them “nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs” and repeatedly telling them, “Go fuck yourselves.” That the media covered. Meanwhile, a citywide poll indicated that 60 percent of voters had never even heard of Norman Mailer.

  On primary day Mailer poled 41,000 votes. Breslin beat him with 66,000 and quipped, “I am mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.” (The city’s voting day blue law was repealed a few years later.) Lindsay pasted together a third-party fusion ticket and managed to save his job that fall.

  Everybody went back to drinking as usual at the Lion’s Head. Flaherty wrote a book about the campaign, Managing Mailer, and a couple of New York novels, before dying in 1983 at the age of forty-seven. “Flaherty would drink a bottle of Remy Martin a day,” McEvoy said. “But he died of prostate cancer, after he gave up drinking. He was clean and sober, lost fifty pounds and everything.”

  The Lion’s Head went through a few owners and managements before running out of steam and closing in 1996. “It was kind of heartbreaking,” McEvoy said. “You never thought the Lion’s Head would ever close.” The Kettle of Fish took over the spot. The interior is basically unchanged, just somewhat cleaner. Stock photos of sports stars replaced the wall of dust jackets, and big new flatscreens and dart boards went up. But the clientele is very different. During football season it’s the premiere spot in the city for Green Bay Packer fans, who line up for hours outside on Sunday afternoons in green jerseys and cheese hats. It’s hard, McEvoy said, not to see the shift from writers’ bar to sports bar as a metaphor for the changes Greenwich Village has undergone since the heyday of the Lion’s Head. He said that the new owner was “a good guy” and liked having old Lion’s Head regulars come in. “But if I recall the old days, the only time Wisconsin was mentioned was in political terms: ‘Hey, Flaherty, who’s gonna win the fucking Wisconsin primary?’ ”

  PART IV

  The Last Hurrah

  30

  Prelude to the Stonewall Uprising

  GAY POWER COMES TO SHERIDAN SQUARE,” THE VOICE FRONT PAGE declared on July 3, 1969. “Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of ‘gay power’ erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never heard.”

  The writer Lucian Truscott was one of two Voice writers who happened to be nearby when the Stonewall riots erupted. He was in the Lion’s Head at the time, just two doors down. Howard Smith was working late in the Voice offices across Sheridan Square. Neither was a likely candidate to cover the birth of gay liberation, though Truscott was by far the less likely of the two. Smith was one of the Voice’s old guard. He’d started out as office boy and gofer soon after the paper began and wrote his first article in December 1957, covering one of Kerouac’s appearances at the Village Vanguard. By 1969 he was a well-known photojournalist and radio personality who made the counterculture his beat; a couple months after Stonewall he’d be doing live national radio reports from the Woodstock festival and a few years later he’d produce and codirect the Oscar-winning documentary Marjoe.

  Lucian K. Truscott IV is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson who in the summer of 1969 was a brand-new lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He comes from a line of military men. His grandfather was the general Lucian Truscott who served with Patton. His father was a colonel who served in the Pacific and met Lucian’s mom, a Red Cross nurse, in the Philippines. Lucian was born in Occupied Japan, grew up on army bases in Europe and America, and followed the Truscott tradition by going to West Point. But even as a youngster on an army base he was reading the Voice, and he started writing letters to Dan Wolf while a nineteen-year-old cadet at West Point in 1965. A lot of cadets subscribed to the Voice for its events listings and ads so they could plan their weekend trips to New York.

  “I think my first letter to
the editor attacked Abbie [Hoffman] and Jerry [Rubin],” he recalls. Staff writers “all went through the roof,” which is probably why Wolf ran it. In 1967 Truscott got an invitation in the mail to attend the Voice’s Christmas party. He took a train down from West Point and showed up at Ed Fancher’s West Tenth Street apartment in his cadet’s dress grays with an overnight bag in his hand. He learned that night that Fancher had served under his grandfather, while Wolf had fought in the Pacific. His first article for the Voice was about “some Christmas be-in at the Electric Circus, with Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farmers, and it was the biggest crock of shit I ever came across.” He continued to write contrarian articles for the paper, guaranteed to draw the angry letters Wolf liked.

  Sometime after 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969, he was drinking in the Lion’s Head with other writers when they noticed a commotion outside through the low windows. Cops were raiding the Stonewall again. Nothing new about that. Cops regularly raided gay and lesbian hangouts. They’d roust the patrons, arrest a few, and the place would reopen, often that same night.

  What was new this time was that the patrons weren’t going quietly. They were fighting back. As the night progressed toward dawn it turned into a full-scale street battle. It happened again the following night, and again a few nights later. What Truscott saw as he went out the Lion’s Head door and up the steps to the crowded street was the start of the Stonewall riots, referred to as the Stonewall Rebellion or Stonewall Uprising. As the New Left was to the old Marxists, and the Black Panthers were to the civil rights movement, Stonewall was to gay rights—a louder, angrier, more militant new phase of a movement that by then had been around for a long time.

  THERE WAS NO GAY PRIDE BEFORE STONEWALL, EDMUND WHITE has written, “only gay fear and gay isolation and gay distrust and gay self-hatred.”

  The conservative cold war swing in American culture during the postwar years and well into the 1950s came with a renewed animus toward homosexuals. Equating homosexuality with treason, the Red Scare search for Communist spies and sympathizers in every corner of American life included a push to expose suspected homosexuals in government and the military, because they were presumed to be easy targets for blackmailing by Soviet agents. New York State’s antisodomy law made consensual oral or anal intercourse between unmarried persons, hetero or homosexual, misdemeanors punishable by jail time and fines. (The New York court of appeals would rule this unconstitutional in 1980 yet it remained on the books until 2000.) Many states stiffened old laws or passed new ones that were much harsher than New York’s, with jail terms, mandatory psychiatric incarceration, even forced castration.

  In this period, the Village’s role as a relative haven for gay men and lesbians was maybe more critical than ever. This is the Village Joseph Touchette, known to everyone as Tish, moved to in 1952. He was still living there in 2012, turning eighty-eight in the rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment on Bank Street where he’d been since the end of 1955. He sat on the couch in the living room, a slight man, his hair dyed blond, trim in slacks and a bright yellow sweater, his face smoothed by a recent botox treatment, eyebrows plucked, wearing what appeared to be a little makeup. His voice was gravelly and bore a trace of an accent. The wall behind him was covered with framed black-and-white publicity photos of what looked to be glamorous showgirls from the 1950s and ’60s, in sequined gowns and beehive hair and Cleopatra makeup. They were all, in fact, female impersonators, all friends and colleagues of Tish. A few of the photos were of Tish himself.

  Tish was born in 1924 in Connecticut. His was one of the many French Canadian families, like Jack Kerouac’s, drawn to the New England mill towns. As a child he was affectionately known as Ti-Boy. In 1952 he and a friend took a tiny basement apartment on MacDougal Street. Later they moved to 146 West Fourth Street, the old Pepper Pot building, and then to Bank Street. Tish had been singing in New England clubs for a few years by then—standards, Edith Piaf songs, jump numbers the likes of Louis Prima’s and Louis Jordan’s—but never in drag until he went to audition at the Moroccan Village, a basement nightclub at 23 West Eighth Street known for its lavish female impersonator shows. In the dressing room, all the other performers were getting dolled up in their wigs and gowns. “You walk in as a boy and an hour and a half later you’re a woman.” His audition went well. The manager said, “ ‘Look, you can start Tuesday. But you gotta wear women’s clothes. You gotta get a wig.’ ” That’s when Tish became a full-fledged female impersonator. From then on, he said proudly, “The only time I didn’t work is because I didn’t want to.”

  Nightclub entertainment was still elaborate in the early 1950s. Tish’s first year at the Moroccan Village, “It was like a Broadway show.” There were twenty-five to thirty performers, a mix of chorus girls and boys and elegant female impersonators, with a band onstage behind them. Their shows were large productions. A comedian/emcee opened the show, followed by “an encapsulized version of Guys and Dolls.” Solo acts followed—a singer, a dancer. Then the whole troupe was back on the floor for a medley from Chicago. Then solo acts again, then a grand finale, from The King and I, with the impersonators in full frills.

  “Every night was Saturday night,” Tish recalled. “We would get the proms. We would get the straight people. They’re from, say, Idaho. They’re walking down the street.” They see the promotional photos outside the club. “They say, ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ . . . This is 1952, ’53. Guys wearing women’s clothing, Jesus Christ. And they’re coming into this place, they don’t know if they should be there or not. I could see them from the stage. Especially the girls—‘Oh my God, that’s a man.’ ”

  Tish eventually formed a small troupe, usually five or six performers, called the French Box Revue. (The name was a nod to the most famous and luxurious female impersonator troupe of the 1940s through the 1960s, the Jewel Box Revue, a complement of twenty-five female impersonators, with one female dressed as a man in a tux and paste-on mustache: Stormé DeLarverie, who would become a hero of the Stonewall riots.) From 1963 to 1967 the French Box Revue played the Crazy Horse on Bleecker Street, next door to the Bitter End. The Crazy Horse, named after the club in Paris, was a coffeehouse, no alcohol served. Tish’s group did five or six quick shows a night, six nights a week. The owner charged two dollars to get in and split it with the performers.

  On his nights off Tish would go dancing, partying in bars and after-hours clubs around the Village. “I used to go walking, in full drag, to Arthur’s Tavern,” the piano bar next door to Marie’s Crisis on Grove Street. Beat cops, bar owners, and bartenders all knew he was a man in drag, he said, but they never hassled him about it. He believed it was because he was polite and respectful with them, and they returned the favor. He carried himself according to a motto he sought to pass on to the Village’s next generation of more outrageous transvestites: “You are never going to be a lady if you weren’t a gentleman first.”

  IN 1950, IN THE DEPTHS OF THE RED SCARE’S HARSH ATTITUDES toward homosexuals, two gay males in San Francisco founded a homosexual rights organization they gave the intentionally obscure name Mattachine Society, from a medieval term for masked jesters who were allowed to criticize the king. They coined the term “homophile” as an alternate to the more loaded “homosexual,” held meetings and lectures, and published Mattachine Review. A lesbian counterpart to Mattachine with the equally recondite name Daughters of Bilitis, from Pierre Louÿs’s 1894 book of pseudo-sapphic erotica The Songs of Bilitis, started up in San Francisco in 1955. They published the first lesbian magazine in the country, the Ladder. Reflecting members’ tightly closeted lives, both organizations were virtually secret societies at first; DOB members didn’t even know one another’s real names.

  In 1958 twenty-year-old Randy Wicker saw his first copy of Mattachine Review on a Greenwich Village newsstand and went uptown to a meeting of the New York chapter on Sixth Avenue near Forty-eighth Street. He’d soon help prod the organization to become more visible and vocal. His Hoboken apartment toda
y is crammed with files, photos, news clippings, and memorabilia documenting half a century as a political activist and social gadfly.

  Born Charles Gervin Hayden Jr. in Baltimore, he grew up there and in Florida. His father was a corporate accountant, his tubercular mother spent several of his childhood years in a sanitarium, and his grandmother helped to raise him. He says his mother was “really a rather dreadful person” and “extremely puritanical,” and remembers watching his father slave away at the office to buy her fancy clothes while “he himself was wearing dollar ties and fifty-dollar suits.” So he grew up believing that “all women were extremely puritanical and antisexual like my mother. For that reason I really began life as a misogynist, which I now view as a mistake, because I missed out knowing half the human race. I believed all women just lived off men and used men. So when I found out I was gay my emotional reaction was, ‘Oh thank God, I won’t be a slave to women all my life.’ ” As a kid he made a pact with the other boys in his neighborhood that when they grew up they wouldn’t spend their whole lives working for some girl. “Everyone agreed. Then when puberty set in I was the only one who kept the true faith,” he says with a laugh.

  “I knew I was gay from the age of fourteen or fifteen, but I had no sexual contact with anybody.” At Washington and Lee and the University of Texas he studied psychology and sociology, partly to try to figure out the meanings of sexuality and sexual social norms. At eighteen years old, on a break from school, he decided to seek out other homosexuals. “I had read that Greenwich Village was a gathering spot.” He came to New York and headed for Washington Square Park. “I put on bright red socks, which I thought was very obvious. I sat there in the park, and sure enough this balding, beady-eyed guy, around thirty-two—some ‘old man’ of thirty-two—came up and started talking to me. He took me back to his place,” on MacDougal Street, “and seduced me.” He later took Wicker to his first gay bar, Lenny’s Hideaway. “Here I entered this world that was just filled with these gorgeous, normal-looking, normal-acting young men, boys from Yale and Brown and young lawyers who were starting their careers. Young, upper middle class. That was probably what fueled my identity as a gay activist. I said, ‘My God, this is what gay life is like? This is nothing like I read about in the paper, with lisping queens and Communists and child molesters and everything.’ ”