In his memoir Stayin’ Alive, Berkowitz writes that after moving to Manhattan from New Jersey in 1979 he found a huge and very ready market for his services as a freelance S&M hustler. Born in 1955, he’d grown up in a working-class environment where homosexuality was a hidden shame. He learned to hustle at the highway rest stops and Howard Johnson’s parking lots where men furtively met. He came out and became a gay activist as a student at Rutgers when frat boys hung an effigy from a tree in front of their house with the sign, “The only good gay is a dead gay. Back to your closets homos.” Berkowitz helped organize a protest rally at which the Voice’s Arthur Bell was a speaker. A lesbian friend introduced Berkowitz to gay Manhattan, taking him to Le Jardin, a midtown disco popular with the Warhol crowd, and to stroll Christopher Street. By the time he moved across the river the Village was such a mecca that he couldn’t find an affordable apartment and took one on West Fifteenth Street, which was close enough. He arrived “a take-charge twenty-four-year-old with an ample supply of anger.” His submissive clients taught him “how to channel that hostility,” and bought him the leather outfits and S&M accountrements until “my apartment started to look like a sex shop.”
Gay entrepreneurs opened businesses all over the West Village in the 1970s, and the mob was only too happy to pitch in. By the end of the 1970s gay bars would be legalized and more than a hundred, mostly gay-owned, were operating legitimately around the city. The Mafia’s stranglehold was finally loosened but throughout the decade mobsters kept a hand in the gay after-hours clubs, sex clubs, prostitution, porn shops, and drug dealing that flooded the Village west of Seventh Avenue. In 1971 the Voice’s Mary Perot Nichols wrote that the Village, “once a relatively harmless coffeehouse scene with some narcotics available,” had seen “an influx of after-hours clubs, pornography shops, prostitutes . . . and an extremely heavy supply of heroin.” That much of this commercial activity targeted a newly emerging gay clientele she left unstated. That the mob was behind most of it was a given. Nichols reported that many Villagers believed the mobsters were acting as shock troops for powerful real estate interests, who hoped that if the neighborhood deteriorated far enough it would empty out and be ripe for new development.
That summer a joint organized crime task force of NYPD and federal agents executed a sweeping raid of gay after-hours clubs in the Village, all reputedly mob-run. Among the clubs they shut down was Christopher’s End (later the Cock Ring), known for its nude go-go boys. It was run by none other than Mike Umbers and was located in the frighteningly sleazy Hotel Christopher, with tiny, filthy rooms rented by the hour for sex and drugs.
“The city was exploding with sexual playgrounds,” Berkowitz says. “There were places to go have sex morning, noon and night.” The nerve center of gay sex clubs was the meatpacking district. In the post-Stonewall 1970s this tiny corner of the Village, along with lower Chelsea and the waterfront, saw an explosion of sex clubs and leather bars with names like the Mineshaft, the Anvil, Ramrod, the Spike, Crisco Disco, the Cock Pit, the Toilet, and Hellfire. Many hosted special theme nights. Mineshaft had a night when you got in free if you were circumcised. There were also parties that happened weekly or monthly. One, for Latino men, was called Papicock. Clit Club was one of the few lesbian parties. Jackie 60, one of the most popular and successful, happened every Tuesday night. It wasn’t exclusively gay and it wasn’t about sex, or at least not as overtly as other places in the neighborhood.
The Anvil occupied two floors of the old Strand Hotel, later known as the Hide-A-Way, at Fourteenth Street and Tenth Avenue. A low, triangular brick building stranded between the booming traffic of Tenth Avenue and the West Side Highway, the hotel had long offered hourly room rates to dockworkers, truckers, and their dates when the Anvil took over two floors in 1974. The main dance floor featured a runway where drag queens lip synched and naked go-go boys “pranced up and down the bars, fucked each other with chains, lit themselves on fire and performed aerial gymnastics on trapezes dropped from the ceiling,” White records. Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo spotted Felipe Rose dancing on the bar there in an Indian costume and asked him to join the disco group they were forming, the Village People. Anvil patrons went down to the dim, stone-walled grottoes of the basement for sex.
A couple of blocks away at Washington and Little West Twelfth Streets was the Mineshaft, a gay S&M club opened in 1976. Before the Mineshaft the building had housed a series of gay bars, including the Den, the O.K. Corral, and the popular after-hours club the Zodiac, one of the spots raided in 1971. White describes the scene one night in the dim back room. Couples had sex in flimsy cubicles, men suspended from the ceiling submitted to anal fisting, others knelt in a bathtub to be urinated on.
“I went to the Mineshaft, I went to all those places, but I never fit in that well with gay culture,” John Waters recalls. “I wasn’t butch enough. I didn’t have a leather outfit.”
Enticed by his reading of the Voice, Waters had started hitchhiking from suburban Baltimore to Greenwich Village in 1962, when he was sixteen, a sophomore in high school. “I would go on weekends, or tell my parents I was going somewhere else. I used to go with my girlfriend—it was that long ago. I remember once sending her parents phony permission slips to a sorority weekend that was completely fictitious. They had to sign all the papers and give money so we could go to New York.” Waters and the girl were so green that “we used to try to hitchhike in Manhattan, which is impossible. Even at the height of the hippie era, just cabs pulled over. I don’t know how I ever pulled it off. We would just go. We didn’t have anywhere to stay sometimes. We would just ask people and they would say yes. We were young. A lot of bad shit could have happened, but it never did. Except at the Earle, but we stayed there anyway. It was the only place that would let us because we were underage and had no money.”
With an 8mm camera his grandmother had given him for his sixteenth birthday, Waters and his friend Glenn Milstead, who became Divine, began making movies. On his trips to New York in the 1960s Waters haunted Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative, saw Warhol and Jack Smith films, took in a talk by Weegee in the East Village, caught low-budget grindhouse movies on Forty-second Street. He was in the Village for the blackout of 1965. “No one knew what a blackout was, so it was really scary at first. You don’t realize how many planes are flying over New York at night until you turn out the lights. But there was no rioting. Everybody just went to bars. I went to the Ninth Circle.” Opened by Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, the Ninth Circle, in the old College of Complexes spot at West Tenth Street near Greenwich Avenue, was originally a steakhouse and bar. Ruskin sold out in the 1970s and it switched to a gay disco. By the mid-1970s it really did feel like a region of hell. Warhol and Lou Reed visited it in 1974, and its “ugly, bearded, painted, bruised, bandaged, strange” patrons put them in mind of Weimar-era Berlin at its lowest ebb.
In 1966 Waters was a film student at NYU “for five minutes. I went to one class.” He was more interested in smoking pot, dropping acid, eating speed, and going to four movies a day, his real film education. He stole books from the campus bookstore and then returned them for the refund. When he and friends were reported for smoking pot, “They locked us in our room and said we were expelled from the dorm. Six or eight of us were thrown out and our parents had to come get us.” By the 1970s he was the cult auteur of the movies Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, and Female Trouble, an underground celebrity in the Village. “They once did a study. Every one of my movies, every theater it ever played in the world, where did it do the very best? It wasn’t Baltimore. It was Greenwich Village.”
Of the Village sex clubs he saw in that period, Waters says that the Toilet, at Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue, was “the most shocking. I used to go with Fran Liebowitz and all our friends. That was scary. It was so illegal. There were no bathrooms. People just pissed on people. You just didn’t look.” The club Waters liked best was Hellfire, another S&M club, in a basement on Ninth Avenue, “which we
all went to, straight, gay, men, women. That had one bathroom where you pissed on people and one where you didn’t. So at least you had a choice.” Clubs called the Sewer and the Catacombs had preceded it in the dirt-floored basement. “You think back on it and wonder how did it exist?” Waters says. “But you saw famous people in those places. I saw Jerzy Kosinski every night in Hellfire.”
Waters got mugged one night in the area. “I didn’t even see the person. They just waited until everybody got let out and whacked me on the head. I woke up covered in blood and went to Fran Liebowitz’s house,” on Bethune Street. “She answered the door and I said, ‘I murdered five people and came to involve you.’ ” She took him to St. Vincent’s.
He was lucky it wasn’t worse. When the Al Pacino movie Cruising, some of which was filmed on location in the clubs, came out in 1980 gay rights groups protested what they said were its exploitive stereotypes, and deplored whatever influence it might exert in an America where conservatives were vigorously opposing gay liberation. At greater distance it can be seen as a rare mainstream attempt to portray the meatpacking club scene at its height. It’s not a good movie, but if it seems lurid so was reality. It’s the story of a cop who goes undercover in the clubs in search of a serial killer targeting gay men. There was such a cop, and there were at least two serial killers, along with other violent predators, stalking the Village. Through the 1970s the mutilated torsos of men presumed to frequent the clubs kept turning up in the Hudson. Those murders were never solved.
In 1985, at the tail end of the meatpacking scene, a young man named Eigil Vesti, a Norwegian fashion student and masochist, left the Hellfire with a man named Andrew Crispo. Crispo had allegedly been a gay hustler in Philadelphia when he came to New York in the mid-1960s and, after serving a few years of apprenticeship in the art world, opened his own gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street. Crispo developed a client list that included wealthy European nobility, while, according to the Times, he personally earned a reputation for Caligula-like scenes of cocaine-fueled S&M parties and surrounded himself with thuggish young “bodyguards” like Bernard LeGeros, troubled scion of a wealthy upstate family. Vesti willingly went home with Crispo for an S&M session. He was never seen alive again. Several weeks later some kids on the LeGeros family estate in Rockland County found his corpse, burned, mutilated, with two bullets in his brain and still wearing the leather masochist’s hood that gave the case its tabloid title, the Death Mask Murder. LeGeros, who testified that Crispo ordered the killing, was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five to life; Crispo was never charged for lack of evidence, though he later served time for tax fraud. Strange tales continued to circulate about Crispo and LeGeros in the following decades. Soon after his release from prison in 1989, a gas-leak explosion demolished Crispo’s Southampton mansion and multimillion-dollar art collection, but he escaped injury and won a huge lawsuit against the gas company. And in 2007 LeGeros, still in prison, sued for custody of a son conceived by his estranged jailhouse wife during a conjugal visit. In 2010 he was denied parole.
ALONG THE WATERFRONT, HUNDREDS OF GAY MEN STILL MET FOR anonymous sex in the trucks most nights. And increasingly in the 1970s they “took over the abandoned piers,” Agosto recalls. Through the ’60s the piers and their cavernous sheds had moldered, rotted, and crumbled. A few had burned and stood as charred, twisted ruins. But they were not unused. All sorts of West Siders appropriated them as makeshift, dilapidated beaches—lower Manhattanites’ first access to the water in generations. Breaking through flimsy chain-link fences, they went out onto the piers to sunbathe, roller skate, smoke pot, walk their dogs. Homeless people squatted in the sheds. A few of the piers, including Pier 45 at the foot of Christopher Street and Pier 46 between Perry and West Tenth Streets, were known as gay piers. On good summer days men sunbathed nude and had sex on the open spaces out near the end of the piers, to the point where Circle Line cruises directed tourists’ attention to the New Jersey side of the river when passing them. They also met for quick sex in the dark, stinking, rubble-strewn, and rat-infested sheds.
“It was open enough, you saw who was coming and going, they weren’t going to arrest you, and it was twenty-four-seven,” Agosto explains. Cops didn’t care because “there’s no reason to protect an empty pier that’s full of queers. What damage could they do?” Crowds would peak in “that desperate time” of the wee hours, after the bars closed and you hadn’t made a connection. “You could smoke weed, you could bring your poppers, and you could find somebody or a group to have sex with.” The sheds were unlit but light came in from out on the street and across the river, “and believe me, more people were attractive without direct lights . . . We could see the lights of the World Trade Center being built as it went up. It was like Christmas lights year-round.” The piers were crumbling underneath them. In the dark you had to be careful of the holes and rats underfoot. You also had to beware of muggers and gay bashers. “But the scary thing was seeing bodies of cats. Of course they weren’t well cats, but rats really attacked them and ate part of them.”
The art historian Jonathan Weinberg, who grew up in the Village, points out that artists gay and straight also appropriated the piers in the 1970s. Conceptual artists including Vito Acconci and John Baldessari used them as apocalyptic settings, and numerous photographers prowled them. Filmmakers shot documentaries and gay porn on the piers. The crumbling blank walls attracted muralists and graffiti artists including Keith Haring and Gustav von Will, aka Tava, whose cyclopean, priapic figures at the ends of the piers also caused the Circle Line tourists to turn their heads. The Soho artist Gordon Matta-Clark cut large geometric shapes out of the walls of Pier 52’s shed at the foot of Gansevoort Street to create his environmental piece Day’s End. That pier was demolished in 1979. In 1983 David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo turned the shed of Pier 34 down at the foot of Canal Street into a decrepit art gallery for a group exhibition of murals, sculptures, and installations. The shed was torn down the following year. Many of the other piers would also be destroyed in the years that followed as part of the waterfront’s transformation into today’s Hudson River Park.
In 1978 Random House published a novel satirizing the whole scene, with the incendiary title Faggots. After growing up middle class in suburban Washington, D.C., Larry Kramer had gone to Yale at his father’s insistence and tried to commit suicide there by swallowing two hundred aspirin. He came out at thirty and spent much of the 1960s in London, where he earned an Oscar nomination for adapting D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love for the Ken Russell film. He moved to the Village in 1971, just as the scene got rolling. Faggots is about a gay man approaching forty (Kramer was forty-three when it came out) and looking for love when everybody else seems just to want sex. It offers a litany of what had become by then the scene’s self-imposed clichés and stereotypes: the obsessions with youth, the “ass kerchiefs” and trips to the gym, the rote overindulgence in extreme sex and drugs in the discos and bathhouses, the cruelly rigorous and supercilious way gay society enforced caste and class in its ranks. Many gay men were scandalized. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop declined to shelve it. Kramer’s grocer on Fire Island refused to serve him. “People would literally turn their backs when I walked by,” he later told The New Yorker. The orgy rolled on.
VILLAGE LESBIANS HAD THEIR OWN ISSUES AND INTERESTS IN THE post-Stonewall years. They found gay men at least as condescending and obsessed with their penises as the rest of male society, were disgusted by all the public sex, and refused to serve as “the ladies auxiliary of the gay movement.” Withdrawing from groups like the GAA, they formed their own “womyn’s” organizations, such as Lesbian Feminist Liberation and Radicalesbians. At first, mainstream feminist organizations like NOW were as wary of lesbians as gay pride organizers were of street queens. They called them the “lavender menace.” Lesbians instantly printed the words on T-shirts they wore to rallies. Rita Mae Brown was 86’ed from the organization. Betty Friedan “went so far as to tell the New York Times in 1973 that
lesbians were sent to infiltrate the women’s movement by the CIA as a plot to discredit feminism.” Some lesbians joined conservatives in opposing pornography and S&M, while others defended it. Some became radical separatists, advocating, in language not much different from the SCUM Manifesto (“A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion”), complete withdrawal from American society to create their own “Lesbian Nation,” as the Voice’s Jill Johnston titled her 1973 book. Johnston, who’d started out straight and writing dance reviews for the paper in 1959, had a nervous breakdown, spent some time in Bellevue in the mid-1960s, and emerged a lesbian. She stopped writing reviews and started handing in unpunctuated, usually inscrutable personal journals that read like E. E. Cummings on LSD. Dan Wolf, characteristically, shrugged and continued to publish her. At a Town Hall debate on feminism in 1971, where she was on a panel that included Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer, she declared that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” and invited two friends on stage for a group grope, rolling on the floor as Mailer squirmed and complained, “Come on, Jill, be a lady.” She went back to more conventional writing eventually and died in 2010, age eighty-one.
Lesbians had their own Bob Dylan in the Village folksinger Alix Dobkin. She was, like Suze Rotolo, a red-diaper baby, born in the Village in 1940 to parents who were Communists. An uncle was caught and executed by Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, and her father was a member of the National Maritime Union. He and her mother pushed the infant Alix around the Village waterfront in a baby carriage as they handed out NMU leaflets. After growing up in various places, Dobkin returned to the Village in the early 1960s and dove straight into the folk scene, getting gigs at the Gaslight and elsewhere, becoming friends with Van Ronk, Dylan, and the others. She once brought her father to the Limelight to meet some of them. Afterward, Dobkin’s father asked her, “That one with the polka dots, who is she?” It was Dylan, entering his mod phase, his hair in a wild ’fro. Dobkin and the Gaslight’s Sam Hood got married in his parents’ apartment on Seventh Avenue South, had the wedding party at the Dom, and honeymooned in the Gramercy Park Hotel. She left New York with him for Coconut Grove, Florida, where they opened the short-lived Gaslight South Cafe. When they returned to New York toward the end of the 1960s, the Gaslight had changed hands and was now called the Village Gaslight. The big folk and folk-rock acts of that period, Van Morrison and James Taylor and many others, passed through before it closed for good in 1971. Around then, Dobkin discovered the women’s movement, left Hood, and came out as a lesbian. Combining tunes as pretty and innocuous as Pete Seeger’s with lyrics that occasionally verged on anti-male hate speech, she built a songlist of lesbian-separatist anthems and fight songs—“Living with Lesbians,” “Amazon ABC,” “The Lesbian Power Authority”—making her a revered cult figure inside the movement.
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