Koch never witnessed any payoffs, but he was certain there were “Christmas gifts” for the local precinct, and he believed the owner had “big dealings” with police headquarters. “That cost him some money. He’d make a pretty big contribution there, which protected him all the way down.”
Everyone remembered Stormy the bartender, whose real name was Norman Sabine. He had walked into the bar for an interview in 1974, and Koch was immediately beguiled by him; he started work that same night. Eventually, Koch broke his own rule against sleeping with a staff member and became Stormy’s lover after the bartender seduced him on Fire Island.
Stormy was the fastest bartender most customers had ever seen, serving drinks with amazing speed—and making matches among his customers between almost every two pours. From where the customer stood, Stormy always looked utterly smooth. But he benefited from the camouflage provided by a dark bar, which hid his shortcuts; after washing a glass, he never bothered to dry his hands. As a result, “When we’d take his drawer out at the end of the night it would be half full of water,” said Koch. “All the money was soaking wet. And when he came home from the bar, he was literally soaked from the waist down. He was the messiest bartender I ever knew in my life. But he got it done.”
Eventually Stormy and Koch worked behind the bar together on Wednesdays and Thursdays. “We made so much. We used to take the money home and we would just throw it in a dresser drawer. And it used to be such a pain in the ass, like once a month, to count that damned money. We hated counting that damned money! We’d always argue about it: ‘It’s your turn to count the money. I’m not counting it!’”
Naturally the owner was delighted with his booming new business, but success was not without its consequences. “He ended up going to a psychiatrist over this,” said Koch. “Bobby was so freaked out that his friends were going to think that he had turned gay.” According to others, Krivit also spent all of his profits on drugs, gambling and girlfriends. Krivit died in 1990, and the bar finally closed in 1993.
PHILIP GEFTER was twenty-five in the fall of 1976, a beautiful young man in New York City, where young men and women come to be beautiful. Gefter had graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In college, he was a fixture at demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and he had been tear-gassed during the March on Washington in 1970. “My view of the world was shaped by the Utopian values of the sixties.” Gefter said. “My attentions were always divided between art and politics, and my life quest was to find a way to integrate the two.” He was involved in GAA activities at the Wooster Street firehouse, and he had joined the Gay Academic Union. He worked as a picture researcher at Time-Life, but there was no question about his favorite activity.
“I was a slut,” Gefter remembered, laughing out loud. “And proud of it. I mean that in the highest sense of the word, you know. An ironic locution that signifies my reckless abandon to the pleasure, joy and celebration of sex.” In 1976 he left his “respectable career path” at Time-Life and took a job as a waiter at Berry’s in Soho.
“This period was really fun for me,” Gefter said. “Almost every afternoon I would go down to the Christopher Street pier, where there were always people hanging out. I would inevitably meet some cute guy. We’d talk for a while, smoke a joint, then end up at his apartment or mine, and have sex. My daily recreational activity.
“Sex was like a handshake at that point in time. It was so accessible and easy, and there were always attractive people on the street. So many beautiful men parading around in T-shirts and cutoffs, and sex was on everybody’s mind. The streets were so fertile then.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Gefter thought the constant pursuit of sex certified him as a liberated gay man. “I recorded every sexual encounter in my journal as if they were running tallies of my gay identity, as if they were proof of my defiance of convention, as if the highest number of sexual encounters meant that I would win in the Olympic sport of ‘being gay.’
“At one point during this period, I had accrued enough fuck buddies so that I didn’t even have to leave my apartment. For several months, a different fuck buddy would come over each day of the week. There was Nick on Monday. Rodney on Tuesday. Tucker on Wednesday. David on Thursday. Michael on Friday. I had them on a schedule. These are their real names; I don’t remember now if those were their days of the week. I met Nick while riding my bike through the Ramble in Central Park. He was Italian, he was great. I met Rodney at the gym, in the showers. He was a tall, blond baritone who went on to sing with the New York City Opera. I met Tucker in the back room at the International Stud. Michael I met at the pier. Nick was a school bus driver, and came over in the afternoon because he had a lover. Tucker was in graduate school at NYU, and came over at night. Rodney came over in the daytime, after his voice lessons. We’d talk for a while, smoke a joint, fuck, and shower. Or shower and fuck. They were all such lovely interludes. Such easy relationships.”
But none of this activity prevented Gefter from going out at night.
“As a waiter at Berry’s, I’d work from five to midnight. After my shift, I’d have several drinks at the bar, usually with Chuck, the chef, who became my cruising buddy. Chuck and I would go off into the night, often smoking a joint along the way, sometimes after taking drugs of every variety: cocaine, MDA, Quaaludes, and angel dust—which I rarely did because it numbed me, made me feel stupid, half-conscious, subhuman, unlike MDA, or THC, which made me feel alive, made everything seem to glisten, as if everything were outlined in electric pastels. I hated angel dust, but a lot of people used it. Chuck and I would begin our rounds at various bars. We’d arrive at the Ninth Circle to see who was there. We’d walk down Christopher Street, which was still lively at one o’clock in the morning. We’d hang out for a while at Keller’s across the street from the trucks, or the Cock Ring, where people would dance with handkerchiefs doused with ethyl chloride clenched between their teeth. Eventually, we’d wend our way up West Street to the Stud and to our inevitable destination, the Anvil.”
The Anvil was an extraordinary establishment in the meatpacking district of the West Village, located on the two lower floors of a building at the corner of 14th Street and Eleventh Avenue. Tom Stoddard remembered its special “Weimar Germany” quality, which meant it sometimes felt a little bit like the cabaret in Cabaret. Upstairs, after 4:00 A.M., the closing time for regular bars, hundreds of gay men would move in waves around a bar decorated with go-go dancers, one of whom later became the Indian in the Village People. Downstairs customers checked their shirts, watched grainy porno movies, and had sex in a pitch-black back room. Pickpockets were a permanent fixture, prompting the shouted warning constantly repeated by one of the bouncers: “Gentlemen: watch your wallets!”
“I remember long lines to get in on Friday and Saturday nights,” said Gefter, “and, sometimes, you’d see women on line masquerading as men. Women were not allowed inside, and there were always rumors that Bianca Jagger or Diane Von Furstenberg or Susan Sontag had been spotted there in disguise.
“The Anvil was my favorite bar in the entire world. It was what I imagined Weimar culture to be like—on acid. It seemed more like a club with a kind of festive, ersatz honky-tonk atmosphere than the dingy, seedy dive it appeared to be from the outside. Not that it wasn’t seedy. It was. Dark, dank, dirty. Thank God the lights were out in the back room. I can’t imagine what really lived and crawled on those floors in the vague light of day.
“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.”
The Gay Metropolis Page 33