Like most political groups, it wasn’t long before our little group split in two. Chicago Gay Liberation (the original name) and Chicago Gay Alliance. I went with the Alliance, though I’ll be damned if I ever knew what the argument was about.
There was another dance a month or so later that was open not only to our Chicago groups but also to groups from the surrounding universities. It was held at the Aragon Ballroom, one of the largest ballrooms in the city.
Our newsletter had been filled with the details and short articles urging one and all to attend, and the various university groups had done the same.
This time I got there early and watched the floor gradually fill. A thousand gays! Five hundred couples! And a number of singles like myself.
I tried a few steps with those nearby, and nobody walked away like I thought they would. I was having a great time when I noticed that on one of the small balconies overlooking the dance floor were Herb and five of his rent boys.
I stared at them for a moment, then out of the corner of my eye caught a glimpse of a single dancer in navy travel blues who was easily the best dancer on the floor.
I asked why he was wearing blues when it was close to summer and the uniform of the day was whites. He shrugged and said they liked blues better at the club. It turned out that on the weekends he worked as a male stripper at a gay nightclub in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago.
I pointed at Herb’s balcony and asked my new friend if he’d come over there, dance with me, and do a strip. He was all for it.
(I didn’t really dance, but when you boogie, it’s free-form.)
I soon realized why people would pay to see him perform. Off came the cap, a few steps, then the kerchief, the shoes and socks, a few more steps, then the jumper, and finally his belt and trousers. He wasn’t just undressing, he was taking them off like he was a male Gypsy Rose Lee, taking them off with a sexy flair that must have left his customers at the club wanting more. A circle of dancers had gathered around to watch and applauded when he had finished.
He bowed at Herb’s balcony, dressed, and then disappeared into the crowd. On the balcony Herb’s group were nudging one another and pointing at me.
I understood from friends later the word was that Robinson was obviously on drugs.
I was a lot more relaxed now and danced with several pickups on the floor, then settled down to attempt serious boogeying with a young man who was dressed completely in white—white pants, white shoes, white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was the only time in my whole short life of dancing that I ended up dancing with somebody who looked like an angel. All he needed were wings.
We switched partners several times, and then he disappeared. I had forgotten rule number one. Get their full name and phone number.
I had no idea who he was.
I put the word out to members of the Alliance, who spread the word that I was hunting for him.
It was a week later when the doorbell rang, and when I opened it, there he was.
“I heard you were looking for me,” he said. He sounded a little bashful. “Sorry I lost track of you—I went to Milwaukee at the end of the dance and spent the week up there.”
I motioned him in without saying a word. This was my first chance to catch up on a lot of lost years, and I was going to make the most of it.
A few weeks later we decided to hold a “kiss-in” at Civic Center Plaza to call attention to gays. Our little group marched down Michigan Avenue past the Playboy Building, chanting “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight!” I wanted to be a member of the group but didn’t want anybody at Playboy to see me. I compromised and bopped along the side of the small parade with a pad of paper and a pencil, pretending I was taking notes.
One of the younger members of the group watched me for a moment, then suddenly thrust his banner in my hands and said, “Here, you carry it for a while.”
The banner read something like “Gay Freedom Now!” I looked the other way, hoping that nobody from the magazine had noticed me.
But if they had been hanging around Civic Center Plaza, there was no way they could have missed me.
The people in the plaza looked at us with absolutely no interest whatsoever. We made a show of smooching for ten minutes (I hugged but never kissed, afraid somebody from Playboy would see me), then shrugged and broke for lunch. Chicagoans make a point of never being surprised at anything.
Something more was needed, I thought. The newsletter went only to ourselves, but what about a newspaper? Something we could pass around just before Gay Pride Week. And maybe even a few stores might carry it.
It was then I thought of a tabloid, something that wouldn’t be too difficult to make. I already had a title—Chicago Gay Pride—and a slogan to go with it:
“The trouble with the world is not that some people make love differently.
The trouble is that most people don’t make love at all.”
I was proud of it, even more so when Frank Kameny, a prominent gay politician in D.C., stole it. But the more the merrier; that was why I had written it.
Gay Pride Week was three months away, the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York. I wasn’t kidding myself on how much work would be involved. I started soliciting articles, wrote a few of my own, and typed up all of them after work for an offset press, even justifying the margins. There were no usable computers then, so I knew I was in for three months of pure ditch work. I stayed late in the office to work on it and during the day invented helpful advice for Playboy’s readers.
A few weeks later a thousand copies were dropped off in front of my apartment door. I was immensely proud, convinced that I had turned out the first gay tabloid in the country. (San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter may have beaten me, but they were a weekly, while I had no idea when I would find the energy to publish another issue of Chicago Gay Pride.)
The paper was a huge hit, with photographs from last year’s gay celebration on the front cover and a shot of our new Chicago Gay Alliance community center inside. It didn’t look like much, but it was where we held meetings, threw parties, and in our own minds established ourselves as a going organization.
Most of the articles were political in nature—at least one mentioned gay marriage, and this more than forty years ago! There was a list of all the activities that would be occurring during Gay Pride Week—workshops, a demonstration in Civic Center Plaza, a picnic in the forest preserves, etc.
A prose poem, “Queer Fear” (reprinted fom Chicago Seed), was about a man who doubted his homosexuality and was afraid to break out of his closet when a friend came out of a Gay Pride parade and kissed him. It was too much for the man, who scurried back to the safety of the closet, where nobody would think he was gay. Except himself.
Life went on as usual at Playboy, with me trying to slip in the occasional sexual double entendre and my watchdogs catching them all. I think it became a contest.
The next big thing was a party at the mansion (a remodeled nunnery on the near North Side, I was told.) Everybody on staff was expected to come, though I didn’t know anybody who would have refused. Most of our more prominent contributors would attend even if Playboy had to fly them in.
It was early evening when Bob Shea and I got there. On the door was a bronze plaque that read (in Latin):
If you don’t swing, don’t ring.
I understood that was Spectorsky’s contribution.
Inside there was a hat-check girl, and young men in waiters’ uniforms carrying trays of hors d’oeuvres circulated among the guests on the crowded living room floor. At one side of the room were glass portholes, which some of the guests were looking through.
I wandered over and got my first look at the “woo grotto,” of which I’d heard so much. A swimming pool sunk one floor lower than the one I was on. Sometimes guests would swim there in the nude; other times I suspected Playboy bunnies were pressed into service.
I helped myself to some of the finger food, and Shea and I p
layed a game of identifying the various celebrities who were there. At one point I spotted a youngish man, probably in his thirties, wearing a few thousand dollars’ worth of Italian suit. Handsome for his age, maybe a little too handsome. With my experience with Herb and his tribe I considered myself something of an expert on rent boys. I knew what he was immediately.
“Who let the hustler in?” I asked Shea.
Shea looked at me, surprised.
“Jesus, Frank, that’s Rudolf Nureyev.”
He was in his early thirties but looked much younger. There was the possibility that Shea was putting me on, but Hefner collected celebrities like they were postage stamps.
Or maybe Shea was simply mistaken. But I really didn’t think so.
That spring I got my second never-to-be forgotten assignment. Playboy’s interviews had been very popular, and Spectorsky figured wouldn’t it be great if we ran a dialog between two celebrities rather than having the Playboy reporter constantly butting in with questions.
The first subjects were to be Arthur C. Clarke and Alan Watts. Clarke was one of the most popular science fiction writers of the period (he and Stanley Kubrick had written the script for 2001) and another of my favorites. Watts was the leader of the popular Zen movement, about which I knew absolutely nothing. I hastily boned up on an article or two and then realized I’d have to fake it.
There was another problem. I was halfway through organizing the next issue of the club’s tabloid, now retitled The Paper. In addition to information about Gay Pride Week, it would carry a lot of news about community theater in Chicago and various musical groups in an attempt to broaden the interest of the paper. It was taking up a lot of my time, and with the new assignment, I’d be stretched to my limits. How badly, I didn’t know at the time.
I flew in with Watts to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Clarke was staying. When Watts and Clarke met, I thought, oh, Christ. They hated each other on sight and didn’t bother to hide it.
Clarke was a scientist as well as a writer. Watts regarded science with more than a little suspicion, probably because there was little of it that he understood. Clarke regarded Watts as nothing more than the leader of a popular cult. The only thing they had in common was that both were frequent contributors to Playboy.
The first evening’s supper was a disaster as far as I was concerned. Watts was wearing his Zen robes, and Clarke had on similar Sri Lankan attire. I walked a good three paces behind so nobody would think I was with them.
Our destination was the last (I think) of New York’s Automats. Stick a quarter in a slot and you’d get a piece of pie; two quarters would get you a dish of macaroni (or something).
Both picked at their food, and we went glumly back to the Chelsea.
The next morning both Watts and Clarke were similarily attired but took one quick look at each other and both had the same thought. Why the Automat? Playboy was paying for all of this!
Clarke knew all the booksellers on Eighth Avenue. Alan, on the other hand, knew all the millionaires and Zen enthusiasts—frequently the same—and the best (and most expensive) places in New York to eat. Alan was immediately appointed our personal restaurateur.
They immediately went back into the Chelsea and came out half an hour later dressed well enough so no maître d’ would throw them out.
I don’t remember what we had for breakfast, but I was immediately seized with the idea of calling Playboy and telling them I needed a few more days.
Clarke loosened up quite a bit and was trading little-known facts of the coming computer age and offering to demonstrate his personal handheld laser when it got dark. Even Watts brightened at that.
Unfortunately I wasn’t aware that I was making one of the bigger mistakes of my life. I was no longer a reporter, taking notes and worrying about what I should ask that would get conflicting commentary from both of them.
I was a writer, just like them, and the three of us were having a ball. It had become “Alan” and “Arthur” and “Frank.”
Of the two of them, Clarke was the more fascinating. His mind was a storehouse of little-known scientific facts and questions, and he delighted in springing them on us.
When, he asked us, did man first invent the computer? Alan was entirely at sea, not sure of what Clarke was getting at but perfectly willing to go along for the ride. I was thinking something like 1950 or maybe late 1800s.
“It was an ancient Greek,” Clarke said, eager to tell us all about it.
Both Alan and I just gaped at him.
“A couple of fishermen discovered this twisted mass of bronze in Pireaus Harbor around the turn of the century. It ended up in the back of the Athens Museum and was discovered again by two American scientists in the fifties who figured out it was an ancient computer, cogs and all. It displayed a degree of complexity not duplicated until we built a grandfather clock centuries later.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to ask him, and Alan had started to study the menu.
Clarke suddenly shot another one at me.
“Frank, what was the advantage of the horse collar?”
I was born in Chicago, not on a farm, so I had no idea.
“It was the first time beasts of burden could pull more than their weight without strangling themselves.”
Well, yes, I could see that.
“How about spectacles?” Clarke went on. “The advantage there?”
I was trying to concentrate on my bread pudding. This was turning into Twenty Questions.
“I haven’t the faintest,” I murmured.
Clarke was delighted to have found a student.
“They multiplied the lifetime of the scholar. Early scientists ruined their eyesight copying ancient manuscripts. Glasses were a godsend.”
His most thoughtful question came while I was paying the bill with Playboy’s credit card.
Clarke hesitated before springing his last one, and I stopped computing the tip. Even Watts was suddenly alert.
“What’s the one thing a fish could never conceive of?” Clarke asked quietly.
“Air,” I said.
Clarke shook his head, and both Alan and I gave up immediately. Both of us thought there were too many possibilities.
“Fire,” Clarke said quietly.
It wasn’t a science question so much as a philosophical one. Humans were like fish, swimming around in their tight little world and thinking they knew all the answers to the mysteries of the universe when in reality there were so many things of which they couldn’t possibly conceive.
That evening Clarke took us to the top of the Chelsea to demonstrate his laser. I was aware that a laser generated coherent light, that the beam would not spread out as in a flashlight. If the lens were a half dollar in diameter, when its beam hit a wall the spot of light would be exactly the same diameter.
Clarke turned on his small laser, and when the beam hit the sidewalk, there was the tiny spot of light the same diameter as the lens of the laser. He moved it around at just the moment a matron came walking her poodle. She glanced at the moving spot, then carefully walked around it and continued on her way.
We got more response from a drunk who spotted it, and when Clarke moved it around, the drunk danced with it. All three of us were fascinated.
The next day it was time to catch a plane to Chicago. Alan and I piled on board, and once seated, I pulled out my notebook to get Watts’s response to his meeting with Clarke. Alan was no help. He mumbled a few words, then closed his eyes and slept until Chicago, where he changed planes for San Francisco.
He was profuse in his thanks and I made all the appropriate replies, desperately thinking my notes wouldn’t fill a small address book.
It was nice to know that Alan now regarded me as his friend and maybe he would be more forthcoming when I phoned him for his reactions.
He wasn’t.
The only thing I had to go on was my memory.
I started putting in seventy-hour weeks, finishing up the issue of The Paper
and then trying to fill the sheaf of blank pages of the dialog between Watts and Clarke.
The Paper was a harder job to put out than I thought—I had lost one of my chief assistants, Harry, who had been running for the down escalator in the subway, tripped, and broke all the fingers on his left hand.
The estimated cost for putting them back together was $600 (doctors were cheaper then). Harry went to his parents—Mormons—for the money, and they refused. Harry was an out gay, which they detested. They considered him no longer a member of the family and hated his guts.
Harry had known they didn’t like his sexual orientation but until then he had no idea they hated him personally as well.
I lent him the money and he got his fingers fixed but I could do nothing for his loss of self-esteem. He got a job as a night clerk in a sleazebag hotel and finally decided to leave town and his family behind. If only he had the money …
The hotel kept a gun behind the counter in case of trouble, and Harry took it and went upstairs to a room where there was an old man who had a reputation as a miser. Harry pulled the gun and asked for the money. The old man wasn’t going to let a goddamned faggot hold him up and went for him. In the short tussle that followed, the gun went off, and Harry made the six o’clock news.
His parents came to the trial—a little late—and Harry was sent to state prison. A young, white, somewhat pudgy gay kid was an easy target for those in prison who considered “white” as beautiful. Harry had no friends and little ability to defend himself.
A number of the prisoners were heroin abusers at the time when there was no test for HIV. Some years later Harry died of AIDS in prison. I have no idea whether his parents bothered to go to the brief funeral.
I spent a lot of hours finishing up the second issue of The Paper and started putting in more seventy-hour weeks trying to fill the sheaf of blank pages of the dialog betweeen Watts and Clarke.
It wasn’t working; it was never going to work. I’d have to make up a lot of the conversations from memory, then invent others, and finally make two copies and send one each to Clarke and Watts and let them fill in the gaps.
Not So Good a Gay Man Page 17