It was a quite modern building, which meant that sound muffling seemed to have ranked low on the list of the Mafia’s construction priorities. I could hear every sneeze and cough in the next studio as if the wall were a tent flap, and was able to follow the psychodrama of every loud telephone conversation as if it were an ongoing improvisation based on Jean Cocteau’s Human Voice, a monologue once found in nearly every college drama department repertory. The young man in the adjacent apartment to me was having chronic boyfriend problems with Billy, whose name received extra l’s whenever my neighbor was distraught. “Billllllllly, why do you keep doing this to me?” Whatever it was that Billy was doing, he kept doing it, because the same desperate plea bargaining was played out over the phone again and again, as if the plaintiff were stuck to a script written on flypaper. Sometimes Billy would come over, and they would fight for a bit and then go out, or go out and then fight when they got back. I would pound on the wall, they would pound back, and really that’s what being a New Yorker was about then. One of the regulars I would come to recognize in the hallway at 92 Horatio was a porn star named Marc “10½” Stevens, whom I had seen on-screen without considering myself “a fan of his work” and who sometimes appeared at parties painted silver, like a spaceship dashboard ornament. While in the army, stationed in Germany, Stevens found himself in the same bank of urinals as fellow soldier Elvis Presley. Legend was that the less endowed Elvis made a quick appraisal of the hose Stevens was holding and drawled, “Ya’ll better take care of that thang.” Words to live by, and Stevens’s thang was later photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, no mean judge of hangage himself. I would often see Stevens in the company of drag queens who partied down as if they had LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” playing nonstop under their wigs. They sometimes popped poppers in the elevator on the way down to the first floor, wanting to hit the streets with an extra goosy bump.
Sunset aside, my studio hadn’t much of a view. The windows overlooked a stretch of the underpass of the original High Line informally known as “The Trucks,” named for the fleet of trucks parked there at night. My first summer on Horatio, I was standing at the window, wondering who the hell was honking the idiot car horn below (a perennial New York question), and noticed a man entering a gap between the trucks while another man exited from a different gap. Then another man emerged from that same gap, as if whatever business were being conducted with the first exiter had been completed. I wondered if drug dealing was being done, since it was being done most everywhere else. Perhaps it was, but that wasn’t the main draw. It took a few surveillance moments to realize that my windows afforded the scenic view to a major cruising spot, this overpass shielding a Pac-Man shadow maze of pickup action. (Pac-Man hadn’t been invented yet, but no other analogy quite dings the bell.) From the detached perspective of my overhead view, the intrigue had the abstract quality of a Jacques Tati comedy, a man on the hunt vanishing down one aisle and reappearing from another one soon afterward, as if he hadn’t found what he was shopping for and was retreating into the shadows again while another man discharged himself from the lane between a different pair of trucks, he too having come up empty. One night I saw a man materialize between trucks in a pair of leather chaps over a pair of jeans that had been cut in the back to bare a heart-shaped bottom, his butt cheeks hosting a cucumber or a dildo shaped like a cucumber—in any case, something dark green was poking out. Had he inserted it himself, or did someone insert it for him and was he searching for the original owner? He paused on the sidewalk in a moment of Hamlet indecision, his “jewel pouch” carrying the seed of doubt, then turned back into the shadowed aisle between the trucks, his night not quite done and for all I knew may have been just getting started.
For those were marathon weekends many of the men in the West Village seemed to be putting in, stamina-testing contests, judging by their grizzled, battle-weary condition on Sunday mornings, some of them still bearing the darkness in their eyes like coal miners who had just come off a brutal shift. I, on my way to pick up the Sunday Times, would sometimes find myself downwind from a couple of sexual platooners who had pulled an all-nighter, a cloud of sweat, leather, alcohol, urine, semen, cologne, lubricant, and industrial might invisibly tentacling from them like a collection of short stories waiting to be written by Edmund White. The look of so many men on those mornings after the night before was the ink-drawn definition of “fucked out.” Evidently, a lot more martial effort went into what they were doing than what their straight counterparts got up to on weekends, more ritual and regalia. Because gay life had been criminalized and stigmatized for so long, forced underground or into pocket enclaves, it had developed its own cryptology, but now the codes were more open, flashing in daylight. A yellow handkerchief in the back pocket signaled one thing, a black handkerchief signaled another, and left or right pocket designated whether one was a top or a bottom, although rueful word had it that there were a large proportion of men who claimed to be tops who were only fooling themselves and disappointing others. (Just as the ratio of masochists to sadists is so lopsided, putting a premium on the latter.) Post-Stonewall, the West Village was one of the prime vector sectors of seventies sex with the safety catch off. Monday mornings it was not uncommon to spot a businessman leaning back in the driver’s seat of his parked car, receiving head from a drag queen before driving off to the office, one way to kick off the workweek. Horatio Street was a short throw from the meatpacking district, when it really was the meatpacking district and not a Marc Jacobs mini-mall, its brick streets, angled shadows, and abandoned atmosphere at night drenching the area with a Brassaï-photograph mystique or Jack the Ripper air, depending on the threat level in your head. The Anvil, which opened in 1974 and soon earned a niche as “a gay bar with a rough-trade rep” (in the words of the Village Voice), was on Tenth Avenue, its main action taking place downstairs. That’s what a large part of the seventies was about, venturing downstairs, into the orphic melee, the gladiator pit of the members-only Mineshaft on Washington Street reputed to be even more of a docking station of battering-ram abandon.
A bystander in my own neighborhood, I only had the scratchiest outline of what was happening around me. It wasn’t until Richard Goldstein’s groundbreaking article in the Village Voice, headlined on the cover as S&M: FLIRTING WITH TERMINAL SEX and illustrated with a photo of a mannequin head encased in zippered leather mask (ideal for asphyxiation-training purposes), that the uninitiated got a field report on the complete panoply of specific practices grappling away in the groaning penumbra—the glory holes, the golden showers, the fisting. “People brag about how many fists they can contain, and there is even an organization, Fist Fuckers of America, whose insignia, a clenched fist, adorns the Anvil,” Goldstein reported. Today, Fist Fuckers of America sounds like an apt name for whatever organization Newt Gingrich is fronting at the moment, but at the time it gave proof that pierced-cheek punks were clearly pikers compared with these pro leaguers at the punishing extremes of pain exploration—this leather guild of edgeplay. Although the S&M subcult that Goldstein depicted may have been padlocked off from everyday experience—its energy forces trapped and released behind its own containment walls, its violence consensual and ceremonialized—rough trade freelanced the night, and depending upon the kindness of strangers in the pickup scene could get you pulped. One heard unconfirmed stories of tricks roughed up by their johns, johns being stabbed and robbed by their tricks, bodies being found disposed along the piers. Sharpening the shadows were gay-bashing attacks carried out by gangs of youths, attacks not limited to the immediate radius of Christopher Street. (One horrific summer night, the gay cruising area in Central Park known as the Ramble was the site of a homosexual-hunting cull in which the serial victims were clubbed with bats. “Dialogue was sparse throughout the rampage,” Arthur Bell reported in the Voice. “Each attack was guerrilla-like—swift, and without warning. Quick clubbings, then onward to the next target.”) When the director William Friedkin started shooting Cruising in Ne
w York, a noir policier that took the first reverse-periscope look at the Crisco disco inferno, the Voice raised a ruckus and location sites were picketed, the extras who were trooping out of the bar scenes catcalled as “traitors” by waiting protesters. But for all of the finished film’s howlers (including the spectacle of Al Pacino in Tom of Finland leather drag), it nevertheless captured the dark riptides of mortal danger and paranoia in the ambiguous prey-game. In 1978, a year before filming began, a twenty-three-year-old man—a disco dancer—was found dead one morning outside the Anvil, where he had been seen earlier that evening arguing inside with another man. He had been stabbed with a chef’s knife.
The straight dating scene had its own homicidal overhang of “stranger danger.” Pop historians recall the seventies as the decade of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, and the “zipless fuck,” impromptu, liberated, guilt-free penis-hopping a bouncy pogo ride away. It was also the year that a teacher at a school for deaf children, a twenty-eight-year-old named Roseann Quinn, was found naked in her bed, fatally stabbed multiple times in the stomach and bludgeoned about the skull with a statue of her own likeness. The assailant was a stranger she had met on New Year’s Eve in a bar across the street from her West Side apartment and taken back to her place for a one-night stand. The day after her brutalized body was discovered, the Daily News ran the headline story ONCE MORE, BACHELOR GIRLS ASK: WHO’S NEXT? Unlike so many tabloid horror stories, this one’s shock waves didn’t thin and recede with the next news cycle. They cut a neural pathway, put down tracks. Two years later, Quinn’s “sex slay” was novelized by Judith Rossner into the sensational best-selling cautionary tale for girls about town called Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a catchphrase title that captured the prowling sweet-toothed hunger that vampired inside even nice girls. And two years after the novel arrived the movie version, starring Diane Keaton, taking Annie Hall out for a walk on the wild side, a creepy, defrosted William Atherton, and a jacked-up rabbit of Method-actor jism jive relatively new to the screen named Richard Gere (whose performance turned out to be the tryout run for the studly calisthenics of American Gigolo), and directed by Richard Brooks as if he were carrying a wooden cross and crying, “Repent!” A date movie for the damned, Looking for Mr. Goodbar looked as if it had been coated from floor to ceiling with contraceptive jelly, with a perv reading Hustler in the subway train in the very first scene, one slick barfly after another vying to worm into Theresa’s panties, with Keaton’s father, Richard Kiley, bellowing like a prototype Bill O’Reilly about kids today and their do-your-own-thing attitude: “I don’t understand your crazy world—free to go to hell! Freedom! Tell me, girl, how do you get free of the terrible truth?” How do you get free from such terrible Arthur Miller–sounding dialogue? might have been the better question.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar was accorded the socially relevant deference that Miller’s plays and Stanley Kramer’s films (Ship of Fools, Judgment at Nuremberg) once received as Documents of Our Time until people sharpened up. Looking for Mr. Goodbar hammered like a judge’s gavel, rendering a guilty verdict against the zipless fuck and everything it heedlessly promoted. It wasn’t a lone psycho who killed this wayward wren, argued Molly Haskell in New York magazine; it was the Sexual Revolution and its miniskirt morals. “This is far and away Richard Brooks’s best film. It is harrowing, powerful, appalling. It may even be an important film, particularly for the media gurus who propound the glories of swinging singlehood and sex-on-demand without ever setting foot in the bars, and who remain comfortably immune from the demons that the rhetoric of liberation has unleashed. Never has the gap between the rhetoric, the exhortations to ‘control our bodies,’ and the out-of-control reality been drawn more clearly.” Pauline Kael, for whom the film had the “pulpy morbidity of Joyce Carol Oates,” agreed that Theresa’s cock-luring appointment with death (“Do it! Do it!” she orgasmically cries as the knife blade plunges into her) was intended to nail home “the consequence of living in a permissive society.” But Pauline wasn’t the impermissive type and rejected censorious browbeating dealt from a stacked deck. “Terry has been maimed; her parents have neglected her and didn’t notice that polio had affected her spine; as a result of her not having been loved enough, she is left with a scar on her back and a faint limp. It’s as if a woman [who] wouldn’t want sex unsanctified by tenderness … was crippled, psychologically flawed, self-hating.” Such tragedies happen today, as witness the murder of the young designer in the hotel bathroom at Soho House, but they’re treated in the press as individual collisions of intimate violence, not Indictments of the Times We Live In.
The threat of violence could thorn the atmosphere in New York almost anywhere you turned in the seventies, and yet I felt safer in the West Village than I did in almost any part of the city at the time. I didn’t court danger, it didn’t court me, no one had a monopoly on the night. While nipples were being thumbed under leather vests at macho-man bars, a cabaret known as Reno Sweeney (named after a character in the musical Anything Goes) was flourishing on West Thirteenth Street, a lyrical springboard for Karen Akers, Peter Allen, Marvin Hamlisch, Phoebe Legere, Andrea Marcovicci, Ellen Greene (later to excel in Little Shop of Horrors), and, for one engagement, the mummy-wrap style icon “Little Edie” Beale of Grey Gardens fame. It, along with similar showcases and piano bars, provided a melodic counterpoint to all the musclings going on, a Sally Bowles anthem call. I was living on Horatio during the summer blackout of 1977, the season that would go down in history as the Summer of Sam, on that humid night of July 13 that began as a collective inconvenience and erupted into what Time magazine would call an “orgy of looting,” with residents in minority neighborhoods streaming out in the streets to engage in five-finger shopping on an epic scale: “Roving bands of determined men, women and even little children wrenched steel shutters and grilles from storefronts with crowbars, shattered plate-glass windows, scooped up everything they could carry, and destroyed what they could not. First they went for clothing, TV sets, jewelry, liquor; when that was cleaned out, they picked up food, furniture and drugs.” Clothes were stripped from store-window mannequins and the mannequins knocked silly, their arms and legs strewn like amputee spare parts. Car dealerships had their new inventories commandeered, hot-wired, and taken for one-way test drives. What freaked out New Yorkers and the rest of the country was not only the hurricane strength and speed of the ransacking hordes hitting the streets, as if on cue, but their merriment, the cries of “It’s Christmastime! It’s Christmastime!” as the orange glow in the city of fires big and small suggested wartime London following a bombing raid. Rickety-ribbed liberal platitudes about poverty and unequal opportunity would be wheelbarrowed out in the days and weeks ahead, but they were no match for pictures of jolly teenagers considerately helping their elders carry large appliances home during this special one-time-only all-you-can-steal sale.
In the West Village, the atmosphere was charged with the radio-static apprehension that was citywide, but windows went unshattered and streets unmobbed, although there was word of a gay orgy breaking out like a Broadway musical on one popular corner, a rumor later confirmed in Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which placed the party on Weehawken Street. While others robbed and raged, the West Village had its own way of celebrating Christmas in July.
If this wasn’t the last hurrah, however, there weren’t too many hurrahs left. No one could have known the magnitude of what was heading down the tracks, the epidemic that by the late eighties would give the West Village a haggard, ghost-ravaged air, a ground zero of loss created not in a single morning but over the toll of years. It amounted to a slow, unmerciful massacre that was both a human tragedy and a cultural catastrophe, depriving the future of more than can ever be measured and properly mourned, a mass grave of unfulfilled promise. The creative ranks were skeletonized by what was first labeled a “gay plague.” Choreographers, designers, playwrights, artists, dancers, actors, photographers, and so many other crea
tives whose names we knew made the obituary pages: Michael Bennett, the choreographer and deviser of A Chorus Line, the musical about aspiring dance gypsies going through the peeling exposure of the audition process that started downtown at Joe Papp’s Public Theater and became such a public sensation that it was transplanted to Broadway, doing more to save Times Square from fatal rot than any other single production; the actor-playwright-director-impresario Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company was the bedlam gingerbread cottage of camp; the fashion designer Halston, whose handsome rectangularity recalled Michael Rennie’s distinguished interplanetary delegate in The Day the Earth Stood Still; the graffiti artist Keith Haring. Maybe I’m telling you what you already know, but I don’t know what anyone knows anymore, those who came to the city after have no idea, they breathe a brighter air. As Fran Lebowitz points out in the documentary Public Speaking (it’s the best monologue in the movie), it wasn’t simply the talent lost to AIDS that was so calamitous; it was the devastation of an audience equally brilliant and alive. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists,” she said. “That audience died in five minutes.” A discriminating, demanding, wit-appreciative audience for the performing arts that has never been regrown, replaced by a shipment of clapping seals for whom (in Lebowitz’s words) “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.”
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