“Sometimes he watches the apartment for me when I’m out of town on business,” Frederick said.
“And it was such an unnecessary lie,” Curt protested after Dimitri had gone.
“I don’t want Dimitri Pupek to know about our private life, do you understand?”
“Who gives a shit about him? He doesn’t care whether we live together or sleep together.”
“I see how people smirk when they know they’re in the presence of a homosexual. It’s nobody’s business.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with it. You always act like we’re doing something illegal or immoral.”
“For your information, what we do is precisely that—illegal and immoral, and more importantly, scorned and condemned by the run of humanity.”
“So if the majority says something is wrong, even if it’s a prejudiced viewpoint, the majority must be right? You know, Frederick, sometimes I think you—”
“Leave me to my conscience and my God, and please stop trying to interfere with the way I live my life.”
“Maybe you should live alone, then, because I can’t keep up your charade.”
There was Curt’s trump card. He knew Frederick wasn’t willing to give him up and didn’t want to live alone. But keeping Curt meant having to renegotiate just about every aspect of daily life. And Curt was becoming more and more difficult to negotiate with, for the message he’d gotten from the October Mattachine Society meeting was: Run fast against the opposition. The more they oppose you, the more right you are.
In the following days, wild ideas came to him: What if, every time some homosexual was beaten by a heterosexual or by the police, homosexuals went out “wrecking,” but this time not to ruffle the sensitivities of perhaps well-meaning heterosexuals but actually to bash one, anyone, chosen at random, woman or man? “Well, let’s make it a man, women do tend to be physically weaker than men, don’t they?” (This provoked a prolonged debate with “the girls,” as Curt sometimes called Bev and Kay—“And that’s another thing,” Kay insisted, laughingly, “don’t call us ‘girls’!” He said he was only kidding—didn’t mean it—what’s the big deal?—he spit out half a dozen inadequate responses—the truth was, he’d never much thought about it—“Whatever you say,” he finally gave in, but felt they were being unnecessarily touchy.) Another idea was to give homosexuals a deadline—say, January 1, 1970—by which time they must publicly declare their sexual orientation or else an ad would be run in the paper with their names, and he could hardly get the words out because they were all screaming with laughter at the outrageousness and the brilliance of the idea.
“The point is, we need more people like us.”
“But how do we find them?”
Membership in the New York Mattachine was pitifully small compared to SDS or SNCC, and they believed if younger, more open-minded homosexuals joined the organization, new ideas, new methods of doing things would lead the way. They would see a breakthrough in consciousness about the rights of homosexuals the way the nation—the entire world—was now riveted on the civil rights struggles of the Negro.
“Look what happened after the church bombing in Birmingham and those little girls were killed. Imagine if something like that happened to homosexuals!” As Curt said it he felt the strange mixture of horror and delight that seemed the constant lining of his thoughts and emotions nowadays.
“Well, in fact, that kind of thing happens all the time,” Bev said. “Homosexuals are beaten and killed and harassed every day, everywhere, all over the world. But no one cares. That’s the difference.”
Informal meetings and conversations with older members of Mattachine proved dispiriting to Curt and his friends. George, the editor of the newsletter, for one, feared that any “unmonitored” outreach, as he called it, would lead to an inundation with beatniks, dungareed radicals, and other professional nonconformists. Exactly the kind of people who would prevent Mattachine specifically and homosexuals in general from gaining a decent reputation and, ultimately, acceptance. Any membership drive should be conducted, he argued, with the intention of attracting people with a certain degree of reasonable conformity. That word “reasonable” set off endless debate (what was “reasonable” in the eyes of heterosexuals? for example—if they had their way, every last queer would be put in a concentration camp, Curt insisted, provoking utter disdain from George). The elder members disapproved of affected mannerisms, special shops for homo tastes and styles, sleazy underground bars that catered to an exclusively homosexual clientele—the whole “subculture” idea, which, to their way of thinking, only separated homosexuals from the mainstream and reinforced differences between people that simply didn’t exist.
Clearly, Curt and his friends would have to experiment on their own. Their first idea was to try to bring in fifty new people for the November meeting. They made flyers advertising the meeting and went all over the Village stuffing the mailboxes of apartments in which two men or two women were listed as occupants. When Curt told Frederick what he’d done, Frederick exploded.
“How could you!”
“What’s wrong with it? We need to get the word out about the Mattachine Society.”
“Do you realize how that might affect people? Imagine a homosexual who is discreet about his private life getting a flyer like that in his mailbox. What is he going to think? Is he going to think, Oh wonderful, an organization of homosexuals, I think I’ll go to the next meeting, or will he be afraid someone has found out about him, and now his private life is public knowledge, and now he has to live in fear for his home and his job and—”
“Why do you always see the negative?”
“I see the practical. This could easily be taken as a witch hunt. Haven’t you ever heard of something called ‘entrapment’? Christ, do you even know who Joseph McCarthy was? The House Un-American Activities Committee?”
Curt admitted, after cooling off, that Frederick had a point, though he also felt a handful of people adversely affected by his action was a price worth paying for the greater good of liberating the homosexual. He felt their next attempt at outreach, however, should be done face to face. He organized his friends into teams of two, one male, one female. The idea was to go out in the evening and hand out leaflets to passersby. They would approach anyone and everyone who seemed at all sympathetic, heterosexual or homosexual—for that had become a new bone of contention: should homosexual rights concern the homosexual only, or did the heterosexual have some kind of stake in homosexual welfare?
They met one rainy evening in Washington Square Park. Curt was thrilled to see everyone in the group looking to him for guidance. He had never before been in so responsible a position. To his surprise, he found himself counseling moderation. “Be composed and polite when you speak to people. And remember, we’re doing this in boy-girl teams because we don’t want folks to look at us and immediately start thinking of guy-on-guy sex or two girls sucking titties.” Everyone laughed. “If anyone insults you, don’t react aggressively, and don’t talk back. Make sure you personally hand each of your leaflets to a person, don’t dump them in a shop or at a bar, okay? Let’s meet back here in two hours.”
Curt and Bev were a team. They stationed themselves on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street near the subway entrance and, more importantly, near one of the busiest cruising grounds in the Village, Greenwich Avenue. Most passersby were nonplussed.
“Good evening. Please take a leaflet for the Mattachine Society. Support the rights of homosexuals.”
A harried-looking middle-aged woman wearing a trench coat and rubbers, with a scarf around her head, stopped to read the entire leaflet. Curt and Bev braced themselves for a stream of invective. “I don’t know anything about homosexuals,” she said, “but your cause has to be good if you’re willing to stand outside in such terrible weather!” With that, she turned and went down the steps into the subway.
Curt and Bev floated on air all the way back to the park.
The more Curt
became involved in organizing his friends outside the confines of the Mattachine Society—and, more importantly, the more he felt flush with his own effectiveness as an organizer and as a person, the more Frederick became moody, anxious, paranoid even. He saw how excited Curt became when engaged in homophile activism, and apart from their philosophical differences it gave him some pain to realize that activism was a way for Curt to really mate with people. What is it, he wondered, that keeps us together? And did he even want to stay together with Curt? For there were occasional flickerings of doubt that Curt was worthy of his love. He had begun to notice something in the boy that, more than his chronic lateness, flamboyance, inconsistency, and vulgarity, diminished his affection: Curt’s tendency, as he perceived it, to treat people instrumentally. He noticed it in activists generally. The tendency revealed itself the more overtly political his views and actions became. Friends were becoming “bodies” he could corral or not to show up at a particular time and place for a particular action (handing out leaflets advertising the next Mattachine meeting, protesting police harassment in the Village). Someone he met for the first time he would invariably describe in terms of their political views, their “stand” on this or that issue, their skin color, and social class. It all went a long way, Frederick thought, towards reducing people to abstractions and body parts, sanding down a person’s individuality, and whether or not they were kind, intelligent, thoughtful, interesting—“Interesting!” Curt ridiculed one time. “What the hell does that mean? ‘Interesting’ isn’t a quality any two people can agree upon. What interests you may not interest me.”
“Yes, and most likely will not.”
“Whatever turns you on,” he said dismissively. “The concept is just so…” And Frederick could have predicted the word to follow: “…bourgeois.”
“Well, darling, I apologize if I’m hopelessly bourgeois. If you have a problem with that…” But he couldn’t finish the sentence, because, more and more, the end point of all their arguments seemed to be that they shouldn’t stay together, shouldn’t live together, should never have come together in the first place, and that was something, in varying degrees depending on the heat of the argument, neither one of them was willing to admit, at least not openly to the other.
It was now the end of October, a little more than a year since they’d met and just shy of two months since they’d started living together. Frederick was especially conscious of time’s passage because it was in August of last year that he attended the protest in front of Penn Station. He’d met Curt the night before at the theater, gone home for his father’s birthday that weekend, and returned to the city in a restless mood. That was how this whole crazy affair began. He’d felt hypocritical marching in that picket line, for it seemed an exercise in futility. Either the station wouldn’t be torn down or it would, and in either case nothing a handful of architects, city planners, and (he was thinking of Deborah) their well-meaning wives said or did would have much impact. The only thing a protest of that sort was sure to do was inspire derision (“Fey young men and middle-aged ladies in floppy hats and tennis shoes”—the kind of thing people said about “historic preservationists,” as they were now calling themselves). As a favor to Deborah, he’d helped in the production of New York Landmarks, and tonight the book was being launched at the Museum of the City of New York. It was a rainy Monday morning. Deborah telephoned first thing.
“Freddy, dear, can you leave the office early this afternoon? Demolition is starting at Penn Station, and some of the AGBANY gang are going to protest.”
“Protesting isn’t—”
“Before you say anything, let me explain, it won’t be a big, vocal demonstration. It’s going to be a small, dignified, silent protest. We’ll wear black arm bands and just stand with signs that read ‘Shame.’ The idea is to get some media attention, that’s all.”
“Deborah—”
“Don’t decide now. Call me at noon. We can meet in the lobby of the Statler and then go have a drink afterward and drown our sorrows.”
He was about to hang up when an image of the Parthenon in ruins flickered in his mind. He saw the rain coming down. The spire of Grace Church was dull and gray. “Have you heard anything about the idea to save the columns?” he asked.
“Oh, the Pratt students’ proposal? They wanted to reuse them in Flushing Meadows or something, I don’t know. But it’s coming down, every last brick. This is going to be a wake.”
Frederick found it hard to concentrate at work that day. He was drawing the elevation of a commercial office tower and kept thinking how much better it would look with Greek pediments and Roman arches. He must be losing his mind. At 11:45, he closed the door to his office and poured himself a Scotch. Earlier than was his custom, but it was an awful day, inside and out. He thought of Ishmael and all those rainy Novembers, the coffin warehouses and funeral processions, with Melville’s hero, young in years but old in spirit, pulling up the rear. Maybe, like Ishmael, now was the time to push out to sea. He thought of the war, the midnight train to Camp Hulen, that night in the Pullman car, Jon’s body, the letters full of passion, the stolen weekends, Thanksgiving of ’43, the tryst at the Statler Hotel, and wasn’t there something wonderful, something romantic about those years, even though the world was coming apart at the seams, and every day might be the last day of their lives, which made it, somehow, the best, every one of them, the best they had ever lived. But there was nothing like that now, nothing to compare. And would he want to go back, turn back the clock, be that young man again, if it were possible?
“Mr. Bailey, Deborah Silverstein on the line for you.”
“Tell her I’ll call her right back, I’m in the middle of something.”
He was in the middle of everything. Middle age. Middle and muddle and muddy shoes and rain, rain pouring down. Who wanted to stand outside in the rain with signs dripping and smeared? “Shame.” Shame on you, me, shame on all of us. How incredibly pathetic. But he remembered Curt’s triumphant night in the Village, handing out leaflets in the rain, and he came home dripping wet and was sick in bed with a cold for a week. Frederick was happy to nurse him back to health, feed him, cheer him up, tell him everything would be all right. He loved taking care of Curt in those moments. When Curt fell ill, he was more pliable, more tender. He remembered rubbing his belly, and then he got an erection and Frederick began stroking him, and they made love, and Curt was hot with fever and sniffling from cold and Frederick didn’t care if he caught it. Funny, he thought, I never did catch that cold.
But what was he going to do about this afternoon? Penn Station was coming down at last. It was inconceivable such an enormous building, which had occupied that spot his entire lifetime, should come down. But it wasn’t such a long time after all. The life of a building could not, in that sense, be compared to the life of a man. The building would only have been (he made a quick calculation) fifty-three years old. In the life of buildings, that was nothing. That was infancy. A baby wouldn’t even have cut its first tooth. He thought of little Clare. Marge had called the other day to say she’d started teething and was driving her mad.
And to think she might have had an abortion.
But what about this afternoon? If no one bore witness to the wanton destruction of landmarks like Penn Station, we as a society were saying, in effect, murder is okay.
Murder?
He dialed Deborah’s number. The line was ringing. He hung up the telephone. There had been a photo in the paper of the AGBANY protest last year. AGBANY, small, ineffectual as it was, did have the ear of the Times. It garnered press. Did he want to risk ending up with his picture on the front page, exposed, one of the losing team?
He dialed again. He would make some excuse. In any case, he would see her tonight at the book party.
But this was history in the making, and shouldn’t he be part of it?
But his contribution to history was his work, and that would outlast any passing act he performed on a given day.
But life wasn’t just about monuments and paintings hung in museums. It was also about living, breathing, perishable, flesh-and-blood people. The things we do, here and now. In the moment.
But he was human, too. And it was human to hide, be afraid, crawl into the dark where it was safe and warm and no one could see him.
Once again he hung up the phone.
Was he going mad? Of course he would go! What was a few extra hours out of his afternoon, to take his stand, make his mark in the world, not someday in the future but here and now, to ensure that buildings survived—not Penn Station, but other buildings, maybe even his own, for wasn’t the sad story of Penn Station all the evidence anyone needed that nothing lasted forever, there would never be an American Parthenon, it would have been torn down many times over by now…?
He dialed the number. He saw the rain coming down like tears. He hated wakes and funerals. He hadn’t even attended his own grandmother’s funeral (the one person in all his life whose love was unconditional), and he knew his family never understood why, but he needed to keep his grief to himself—not to hide it but cherish it, keep it from being disseminated into some larger, public, corporate grief that no longer bore the stamp of his own personality, his individuality, his particular relationship to the beloved… Deborah answered.
“I have a meeting at one,” he lied. “It just came up. I can’t get out of it. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be at the book party tonight, won’t you?” she asked. He heard the frustration in her voice.
Of course, he promised.
And he did go to the party, and congratulatory speeches were made. He went through the motions, but something had happened to him today. He felt bereft. The book, everyone acclaimed, was beautiful, “The kind of thing any cultured New Yorker will want on his coffee table,” the president of the Municipal Art Society, Harmon Goldstone, said, patting him on the back.
“But the symbolism of it was revolting.” Deborah was describing the demolition ceremony at Penn Station earlier in the day. One of the giant stone eagles had been removed from the 33rd Street façade and lowered to the street as the chairman of the Madison Square Garden Corporation, the vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the president of the Long Island Railroad, and other officials looked on with lip-smacking satisfaction. “The sight of Felt, Jones, and Goodfellow in their hard hats, posing next to the eagle like it was some big fish they’d just bagged off the coast of—”
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