Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  I’d studied General Joseph Stilwell on my own; I am a fanatical military history student. Never as celebrated as Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley (the most extraordinary man), Marshall or Mac Arthur, Stilwell fought a dogged campaign in Burma. He not only did his job, but called the situation in China correctly. No one listened of course, as they were enamored of Chiang Kai-shek. When was the last time you heard that name?

  My study of Stilwell impressed on me that Asia is a morass. Napoleon, making that point, threw away one of the greatest armies in all of recorded history.

  Wasn’t anyone reading the paper now? Our “advisors” to the Vietnamese multiplied like salmonella in bad chicken. After the advisors came a few troops to bolster the native troops.

  The FBI was largely focusing on those few students sounding the clarion. There must have been all of fifteen of us at the time.

  Students wanted to protest, make a fuss. I begged them not to do it. Instead I made long, trailing banners that read “Wipe out the CIA” and “Wipe out the Feds.” When the banners were draped over Main Building at the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, they looked like giant rolls of toilet paper, which was the idea.

  The janitor tore them down in a jiffy. They had little impact, but I’d like to think they had more than a handful of pickets toting signs would have.

  And so I gained a reputation for being creative, for catching the opponent off guard.

  At Columbia, the gay students had no program. And why should they? There was no precedent. At the beginning, Stephen Donaldson’s idea was that it would be good for us to gather together, and we might find areas where the university could help us.

  This was 1967. Our efforts appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The school lost over one million dollars in alumni funds in a month. They panicked, but they didn’t shut us down.

  The reason was simple. Columbia exploded like a grenade. Within months of our organizing the Student Homophile League (a terrible name), Columbia’s students overran the school and shut it down. The Students for a Democratic Society were enraged by the Columbia administration’s plan to build a school-only gymnasium in Morningside Park—land that was not part of the Columbia campus. Since none of the residents of Harlem would be permitted to use the facility, the SDS considered this a racist plot hatched by Columbia. When the administration refused to hear out the SDS’s complaint, students occupied school buildings for so long that the school was closed for the rest of the spring semester.

  Columbia has never recovered from that time. It used to be brave about selecting students the way Bryn Mawr and Dartmouth are brave: They take chances on the individualist, the iconoclast. Not anymore. Columbia is vanilla pudding.

  While this was going on, I would occasionally run into Iris Love, who wanted to make certain my studies didn’t suffer. They didn’t.

  Liz, on the other hand, challenged me. “Why do you have to tell people you’re gay? What purpose does it serve?”

  “It’s wrong to lie.”

  “Keeping quiet isn’t lying.”

  “It’s lying by omission.”

  She’d poke me, push me, act like the reporter she was.

  Thanks to her I began to address this issue of invisibility in a broader sense, not just from the standpoint of the individual but also from the community.

  As succinctly as I can put it, a community is a collection of individuals who work for the common good. We don’t always agree. Here in Virginia, where I live now, you can put two people in a room and get five opinions. But we know there are huge issues where we must pull together: a clear program for national defense, an educational system competitive with the rest of the world, job opportunity, affordable food and a little help for those in trouble.

  The Constitution should protect us, but it doesn’t. It didn’t protect Medgar Evers. It didn’t protect the young man who died at the University of Florida.

  We’ve got work to do. If you’re working with people, you’d like to know a little about them. Straight people happily discuss their spouses, their children or, if unmarried, their hopes for same. The gay person, locked into silence in order to survive, either lies outright or says nothing, which in itself arouses suspicion.

  I believe a community has a right to know a bit about its members. Who’s single? Who’s married? Who’s ill? Who needs a leg up? Who needs reprimanding? These exchanges bind us. Under every healthy community lies a net of concern, even affection.

  A community is weakened by any member’s lying, for whatever reason. You usually uncover the lie in a crisis, which makes it twice as bad.

  What does it say about a community if it rewards lying and punishes the truth? This is the moral conundrum each gay person must face. The time has come for all of us to face it.

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell” goes beyond insult; it breeds hypocrisy. If you foster hypocrisy on one level, you’ll foster it on another—like looking the other way about drug addiction or child abuse.

  We need to know who we are in order to work together.

  The United States used to be so powerful, so rich it could afford to assign certain groups to a discretionary labor force or push them all the way to the margins: people of color, people who spoke Spanish (or French in the far north), women and gay people.

  Those days are gone. We need everyone and the best from everyone. We aren’t going to get it by telling them they are so meaningless, their lives so worthless, we don’t even want to hear about them.

  If it weren’t for Liz, I wouldn’t have seen this problem in its broad context even though I knew my Edmund Burke, who wrote eloquently about how the bonds of family led to the bonds of the town and finally to the nation-state.

  The process of identifying with others, of belonging, is fragile. The wonder of it is that so many gay people want to participate despite their wounds. One could say the same about any of the shoved-aside groups.

  The message of inclusiveness created by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and other of our founders lives. No one, no group, has ever been able to destroy it. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

  Liz, Iris, my other professors strengthened my mind just as Mother had strengthened my resolve. If I could survive Mom, I could survive anything.

  Good thing, too.

  42

  Horse Shit and Greasepaint

  The theater blazed on despite the deepening debacle in Vietnam and the prairie fire engulfing American colleges. I walked everywhere, the distance from the East Village to the theater district keeping me fit. I wore trenches in the sidewalks in front of the various theaters. The ladies who seat you, the ones who look as though they’re wearing doilies, began to recognize me. Since I couldn’t afford tickets, I’d ask them if there were empty seats in the house. Occasionally they’d allow me to take the seat. More often they’d wait until intermission and then let me come in.

  In media res, in the middle of things, is how The Iliad begins. I learned plots in media res because I’d reconstruct the first act, training that has served me well since structure is the base of the triangle that becomes a novel or a play. The other sides are character and spirit. Rarely are the three in balance.

  At this time I read and reread (and still do) the plays written during the fifth century B.C. in Athens. The plays surviving from that period represent the best of the best. I’m sure audiences snoozed through dross then, too. But what has survived over two thousand five hundred years is the pinnacle of literary creation, of theatrical creativity.

  In case you don’t know theater history, you’re in for a treat. I hope you read the plays and histories someday. But in the beginning, plays were written for two great festivals, the Dionysian festival and Lupercalia. A playwright wrote three connected plays with a satyr play, their version of the cartoon before the feature. The plays, dedicated to specific gods, were to entertain and draw you closer to your compatriots and put you in awe of the power of the gods. Each selected
play was assigned a choregus, who funded the production or raised the funds. Then as now, this cost dear.

  Pure art, art separated from the marketplace, is a Victorian myth. In Western life, the theater and literature are not far removed from the obel, the talent (Roman money, giving us the word talent, obviously), the franc, the mark, the pound, the dollar.

  Academic writing may be “above” commerce, but the rub there is that so few people ever read the work or know of it.

  Luckily I saw every show on Broadway, off-Broadway and even off-off Broadway. Since New York University has an excellent theater and film department, I could sit in on their classes occasionally.

  I remember Al Pacino in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The established stars were Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, Robert Morse, Ethel Merman (still kicking), Elaine Stritch, Richard Burton. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Joan Rivers pushed stand-up comedy into new realms. Because they played more intimate houses I could never get in to see them, so I listened to their records. You could listen to records in music stores then. The clerk might not allow you to hear the entire record but you could listen to one riff. I didn’t own a record player or radio. In a strange way that may have saved me artistically. I never fell victim to fashions. And no one made judgments for me. I approached each work pure.

  Judson Memorial Church, on the south side of Washington Square, produced Aristophanes’s Peace. A bawdy, broad production with next to nothing in the way of sets, it was hilariously funny, as is all Aristophanes, but it was also poignant. The playwright wrote during the Peloponnesian War, which was tearing apart Athens and draining Sparta, too. Written in the fifth century B.C., Peace felt as if it had been written for us. It had.

  The Classics Department produced a tragedy in Attic Greek. Less than one hundred of us attended, but seeing and hearing Euripides in his language intoxicated me. To my ear, Greek sounds harsh. Lots of k sounds, and it’s aspirated, which means you sort of swallow a little breath, then spit it out. Japanese is a bit aspirated, but Attic Greek wins the prize for this strange technique. But hearing the language in its original rhythms, in the different voices of the characters, was one of the great revelations of my life. Language is music.

  Scansion is rarely taught in high school now. I don’t even know if colleges teach it in poetry classes. If you want to write or if you care about language, learn to scan. You will soon see how sounds are built, how they flow together or stand apart to communicate to you, to express whatever idea or emotion is necessary. The sound is every bit as important as the sense.

  I had to go to another language to learn that. You and I are so accustomed to the rhythm and melody of English, we aren’t aware of it. We can’t hear it as building sounds anymore.

  French would seem the logical choice, but don’t look there. The sensuousness of that tongue will distract you. I’m not saying don’t learn French. I’m saying, that if you want to hear this symphony of sound, seek a less golden tone.

  Well, I found it in Greek, a language I don’t especially like. With Greek, I could lose the sense in a minute because the language is so difficult for me, especially Attic Greek (old, old Greek).

  I arranged my classes so I could go to the theater more. Dreaming of writing for the stage, I soaked up everything.

  I watched as many movies as I could, sitting in on film classes. I loved the silent movies best. Still do. No one can touch Mary Pickford for luminosity or Douglas Fairbanks for masculine grace. Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler make your sides ache from laughing. Charlie Chaplin is hailed as a genius. I suppose he is, but I think Mabel was better. She had fewer chances than Charlie, though, and she found the wrong men and the wrong substances to play with. My favorite director was Mack Sennett. D. W. Griffith and Eisenstein impress me, sit me down with their majesty, but the sheer energy of the comedies, the wild movement, is what delights me. Isn’t that what it’s about, pictures that move?

  Once sound arrived, the camera moved precious little. Great films managed to get born. Dinner at Eight being one of my all-time favorites. Seeing Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow in the same picture is a little bit of heaven. Once the sound equipment improved we got more movement again. I love John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder.

  I’d stand in front of the Thalia, that wonderful revival house named for the Muse of comedy, wait for the exit doors to swing open and then slip through with Baby Jesus. We’d hide in the bathroom, coming out when the feature started. I first saw Alexander Nevsky there.

  The hardship of New York forced me to think quickly, act fast. Once I was hungry, sick hungry, and I rummaged around garbage bins outside a pizza parlor on Macdougal Street for crusts. The fellow inside, a young Italian man perhaps five or six years older than myself, saw me, brought me inside and made me a pizza.

  I’m convinced my guardian angel is Italian.

  The city itself is theater. Each neighborhood shows you a cast of characters, vibrant, contradictory and alive. Little Italy and the Feast of San Gennaro drew me each year—I loved the parade of the BVM with dollar bills stuck on her. I considered dressing in robes and attaching a halo to my head to see if anyone would stick dollars on me. Yorktown, clean, quiet and substantial, was the German neighborhood with Hungarians on the edges. The East Village, filled with White Russians, moved at a Slavic pace. Everyone had a personal story of how they escaped the Bolsheviks.

  The East Sixties, province of the elegant WASPs, attracted me. I liked to stroll along Madison Avenue and imagine how much each woman’s earrings cost. The brownstones exuded privacy and comfort.

  A white person could go to the Apollo Theater in Harlem for talent night. 125th Street bloomed with activity and people impeccably dressed. I saw Father Divine as well as Martha and the Vandellas. Martha made a better impression.

  I never ventured into Spanish Harlem, not because it was especially dangerous but because I didn’t speak Spanish and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself.

  I roamed West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea where lots of Puerto Ricans lived. Two blocks up from where I’d first lived, on Fifteenth Street, it was another world. I eventually moved over there with a classmate, Ed Slough. The Spanish men kept an eye out for me. I learned to love those guys. Often if I returned home late at night, one of the older gentlemen would escort me to my door, tip his hat or put his finger to his temple, bow ever so lightly and wish me a good evening, in either English or Spanish.

  My favorite neighborhood was Murray Hill, then mostly brownstones with few high-rises; it had a cozy feel. I used to trip along, Baby Jesus with me, peering in windows and making up stories about the residents.

  Knowing I would die without horses, I found a stable on Little West Twelfth Street where the police department kept their horses, mostly Morgans. (There’s another stable in Central Park, but the people there weren’t as friendly.) The cops let me groom, pick out stalls, bandage. Since it was a hop, skip and jump from school, I hung out there. None of my friends knew. They weren’t country people, so there wasn’t much point in telling them.

  Kauffman’s and Miller’s, the tack stores, were close to each other on East Twenty-fourth Street. Charlie Kauffman would greet me at the door just as though I were his biggest-spending customer. Charlie had hair then. Recently Kauffman’s closed their doors after their move to lower Park Avenue. Charlie and his father still ran the business, the fourth generation to do so. What a loss. I can’t imagine New York without Kauffman’s.

  Knoud’s closed, too, a pricey saddlery on Madison Avenue in the Sixties.

  Homesick for the South, I’d stand outside Princess Pamela’s or the Pink Teacup. Once Eddie and I sold our textbooks so we could afford a meal of fried chicken, greens with fatback, grits and spoon bread.

  Jerry endured my roommate but lost few opportunities to poke fun at him. Even though Ed was gay, Jerry loathed any other man in my life. Jerry’s sexual life was homosexual now but his social life was heterose
xual.

  His explanation for this duplicity cracked me up. “If I can’t marry you, I don’t want any other woman.”

  I used to tease him about what a lame excuse that was. If he was queer he should be queer, not drag me into it.

  We could say anything to each other and did.

  I was ruthless about his ten-minute boyfriends. Jerry was attracted to dependent, terminally cute men who proved to be as demanding as a woman. The more helpless the twit, the more Jerry swooned over him.

  Prudently I kept any man I was dating away from Pfeiffer. Given my studies and my work, I only occasionally went out, usually with another classics student.

  As for the ladies, Jerry repeatedly picked out women he thought would be perfect for me. They were female versions of his boyfriends. After trying to make conversation with a few of these lovelies, I realized boredom can kill.

  I begged him to stop playing Cupid.

  “If I don’t do anything, you’ll become a nun.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You have to go out.”

  “I can’t afford to go out.”

  He thought this was wildly funny but it was true. If you ask someone out, male or female, you have to pay. I could barely feed Baby Jesus and myself, much less take someone to dinner.

  Unlike Jerry, I didn’t like random couplings. I can’t go out with the intention of romance or even sex, which is easier to locate. I like to meet people through common interests.

  For him the common interest was sex. I thought he was superficial and told him so. He thought I was enjoying my virtue entirely too much. We were both right, I expect.

  Jerry visited each Thanksgiving and sometimes for other holidays. His wit captivated everyone. He’d stay with a friend or with me, then prowl at night. Jerry would check out bars, the trucks over in the meatpacking district—wherever there was the hope of a handsome man with a giant cock, he’d show up.