The only person I could discuss any of this with was Kevin, who was cast as Jacques in the production. In theory we were gay, but we sat on the sidelines of it for the entire four years of high school. It was around that time that Kevin and I coined the phrase “Jewish affair,” named thus because of the overthinking and lack of action-taking Judaism seemed to teach. A Jewish affair is when you make eye contact with someone in a restaurant or a theatre from across a room but never follow through, never actually meet them or speak to them. It ends when you leave the room and never see each other again. We had our Jewish affairs every day, but never actual affairs.
Death in Venice, which Kevin and I passed back and forth in our senior year, is a tragedy about the ultimate Jewish affair. It’s a novella by Thomas Mann, a beautifully wrought story about a homosexual attraction that occurs between a young boy and an older man, so delicate and subtly shaded that it’s easy to miss the implications. The characters eye each other for weeks; one even dies before meeting the other. We talked about that story for months, its subtleties allowing for broad interpretations and bold skirtings around the subject of its relevance in our lives. Then, finally in the dead of winter 1978, at the Fairway Deli across the street from PA, eating powdered sugar donuts, we touched on the subject. Wondering aloud about the straight couples at school—“How far do you think John and Amy have gone? You think they actually did it?” Then a long silence. Ironic stares exchanged. Finally, nervous laughter, and Kevin said, “I’m pretty sure neither of us will be dating girls anytime in the near future.”
* * *
In the 1970s and ‘80s Manhattan was a wicked place. It had many more lurid, burned-out neighborhoods than posh, trendy ones. SoHo was a deserted, dark place with mostly broken street lamps. The thirty blocks north of Lincoln Center, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was the definition of urban blight. There was a sliver of a bourgeois residential neighborhood where Gina and Kevin lived on West End Avenue, but that was bordered on all sides by a depraved, charred cityscape. Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t full of restaurants and luxury high-rises then. It was called Hell’s Kitchen because it was the hottest, filthiest place in hell and on Earth. It extended into Times Square and the theatre district, where my school was located. You risked great danger if you set foot into certain parts of Central Park in broad daylight, and you’d be nuts to venture there after dark. On a daily basis my friends and I witnessed lurid things—things you’d think I’m making up. Dead bodies. People being chased down and slapped into handcuffs. It was a real-life cop show that played out inches from the noses of New Yorkers, and we were completely unperturbed. For every example of glamour there was twice as much decay, decay that sometimes dominated the scene. Grand Central Terminal was in ruins, while two doors down a sleek new skyscraper had just gone up. This kind of high contrast defined New York City at that time and was a big part of what informed my aesthetic as a kid—the juxtaposition of beautiful new things among squalor. Always something rotting next to something fresh. You can’t trust something handsome unless it’s laid alongside something really ugly. This idea, this contrast that existed in New York City, was a central influence on me and a whole generation of postmodernists.
* * *
I learned to drive in 1977 when I was sixteen. I drove a huge, brown, hand-me-down Cadillac that my father gave to my sisters and me, which made me feel completely omnipotent, completely exempt from any danger. The same year I enrolled in two evening classes at Parsons, and on the nights I wasn’t at night school, I was driving that car, circling for eternity to find parking on my way to any number of nightclubs. If my time at Performing Arts left me with anything, it was a superb appreciation of disco music. “We Are Family.” “Ring My Bell.” “The Hustle.” Learning to dance the Spank and the Rock were part of my initiation into society. Donna Summer was a goddess. “Bad Girls” was a defining part of my last two years at PA. It’s funny now to consider the fact that underage kids all over the city were dancing and singing along to songs about hookers.
Hearing that same music at full volume on the massive speakers in a club made it all the more heady. There were so many clubs, intimate ones, arena-sized ones, and each with its own personality. One on the Upper East Side called Hippopotamus, filled with reserved, rich white people. In Midtown, in the bowels of Port Authority was GG’s Barnum Room, which had a trapeze above the bar and a clientele made up exclusively of transsexual hookers and johns. There was Escuelita in a basement on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, which felt the most dangerous and fun. I remember descending the stairs and having to be frisked at the door before entering. Inside were Latina drag queens doing shows into the wee hours, competing for attention on a runway lined with tinfoil and colored Christmas lights, while their families, their old mothers and wives and babies, sat at long tables drinking and cheering them on amidst the gangsters.
No teenager would make it past the front door of nightclubs like those today. But way back then there were no such discriminations. Nothing like “carding” had yet been invented. My friends and I looked a lot older than we were, and we dressed like freaks. We loved thrift shops like Canal Jean Co. and Reminiscence, and we wore our strange, beat-up remade secondhand pieces like they were haute couture. I made a bright-purple leather bubble jacket with matching pants and brightly colored jumpsuits out of tablecloths that I bought cheap from a small housewares store that was going out of business in Brooklyn. A fluorescent-yellow jumpsuit was a standout. So was a metallic silver leather vest and pants that I wore under a thrift jean jacket, BeDazzled within an inch of its life. I wore everything with high-top sneakers and lots of pins and bracelets, all concealed from my mother and father under a big loden-green coat, which I ditched in the car.
The center of the world at that time was Studio 54. It was an abandoned theatre that had been remade into a massive disco with soaring ceilings and a dance floor right below the fly-space of the original stage. It had a wonderful theatrical lighting grid overhead that emanated mind-blowing lighting effects before anyone was used to that sort of thing. At climactic points in the music, scenic flats would fly down just above the heads of the dancers. A neon skyline. A desertscape with a horse. A half-moon with a twinkle in his eye flew down from one side of the dance floor and was met from the other side by a spoonful of cocaine that sent chaser lights up his nose—it was known as “the moon and the spoon.”
Marc, a good-looking guy with fringy blond hair wearing a huge Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat, ran the door. He would see me and my motley group—a mix of my high-school friends and my new friends from Parsons, and would part the sea of people and welcome us into the club. On the off nights when that didn’t happen for whatever reason—Marc was too distracted, or worse, not working the door—I would squeeze my way through the crowd and mention Jack Dushey’s name to one of the bouncers. Jack Dushey was one of Sarah Haddad’s best friends; he and his wife, Sonia, were charter members of the Sephardic community Jet Set, but also, one of the three main investors in Studio 54, with Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager.
I was enthralled by the scene at Studio 54. Extravagantly dressed and undressed people from every aspect of society. All kinds of boys. All kinds of models and celebrity sightings. Halston. Andy Warhol. Cher. Lauren Hutton. A fabulous drag queen called Rollerina, who worked as an accountant by day; on weekends he put on flouncy dresses, loads of makeup, jeweled cat-eye glasses, roller skates, and glided around Studio 54 till the wee hours. Other flamboyant people like sports stars, writers, socialites.
Up the carpeted stairs in the front of the house was a landing where there were bathrooms that acted more as dimly lit lounges with all sorts of louche goings-on. Farther up the stairs was the balcony, where people went to sit on carpeted platforms and watch the crowd dancing and partying below. Things went on in that balcony. All sorts of making out, and more. When I was finally through dancing I would separate from my friends and make my way upstairs alone to stand around and pose and watch others standi
ng and posing, or I’d watch those seated together passionately making out, groping each other. I had a drink or two and smoked a lot. I wasn’t there to participate, I was there to watch.
The one time I did partake of anything close to sex at Studio 54 was when I was standing by myself at the rail in the balcony. Like a miracle, a tall blond guy in jeans and no shirt, smelling of poppers, approached and started kissing me. It seemed like he was mistaking me for someone else. But his lips felt like heaven, and his hands roamed my body. I followed him out that night but didn’t go home with him. We shared a taxi and made out in the backseat till he got off in the Village and I continued on to Brooklyn in a dream that evaporated the next morning.
Studio 54 has been depicted and described so many times as a magical place where the elite met the street, celebrities hobnobbed with common folk, nights would be whiled away in an energized, sexy, druggie haze. The Studio 54 that I observed as a teenager wasn’t as carefree as that. Drugs were a big part of the scene; what I witnessed was a kind of desperation to be high. Or higher. People dancing in frenzies, not wanting to come down, disappearing into the bathrooms on the mezzanine to find others with cocaine or Quaaludes in an effort to tweak and prolong the synthetic ecstasy.
It was a glorified “boy market.” It seemed the only people in the whole club that anyone paid any sexual attention to were the young, shirtless boys. There was certainly diva worship—gay men hunting for fabulous women to either emulate, gossip about, or fawn over. Jerry Hall or Bianca Jagger walked in and all action and time stopped dead. But for the most part it was sexy bartenders in booty shorts on roller skates, or boys trying to further their social ambitions who got all the libidinous attention. Recently I was talking to a friend, about fifteen years older than me, who, as a fashion editor, spent a lot of time at Studio 54 in its heyday, and she vehemently agreed that it was a desperate, sweaty meat market where girls were “sexual persona non grata.” Lecherous older men eyed the boys, who objectified themselves in order to move up the food chain. And as eager as I was to get in the front door, and for as many times as I returned, a lot of times the scene there made me sad. I would never be one of those beautiful boys who seemed to have the world by the balls. And I would never want to be a lecherous old man. Admittedly, I wish I could have been wanted for my body. To be one of those boys dancing on the speakers in booty shorts. And yet I was the furthest thing from that.
We stayed out till all hours of the morning. There were dinners or parties, then discos, then after-hours clubs. Sometime in the spring of that year, when my parents were away on a trip to the Bahamas, I was out for the night. Around 4:00 A.M., after dropping off Ted and Francesca, two of my closest friends from high school who lived on the Upper West Side, I was all alone in my Caddy, and it was raining hard. I was on Riverside Drive, about to make a right onto the West Side Highway, when suddenly the car just stopped. Right in the middle of the intersection. Kaput. I tried a few times to restart it, but it wouldn’t budge. I sat there for a minute, not too anxious, wondering what to do, when I noticed a free taxi in my rearview mirror. I got out of the car, locked it, hailed the taxi, and without so much as getting wet, I was on my way home to Brooklyn, thinking of myself as very clever to figure out such a great solution. The next day I called my uncle who lived near us in Brooklyn. He and I went to collect the car, which was still there intact, in broad daylight, not a hubcap missing. He gave it a jump and we were on our way without even a fine.
That story is only remarkable for how it illuminates the way the world has changed. Things like that could never happen in New York City now. I guess every generation feels that way about their own past.
* * *
If I wasn’t at school or out dancing, loath to go back to Brooklyn, I found places to spend off-hours. The Museum of Modern Art was a place I loved to go. You could be alone for hours in that garden with your thoughts and the Rodins. I also loved the Guggenheim. But I loved the Met especially. There were some afternoons in those days when it was empty. And it felt fuller with work that I didn’t understand. Gallery after gallery with art I was desperate to know more about. Going back again and again, with no agenda except to pass time. I studied the permanent collections, especially the painting galleries, which seemed to get bigger and more complex every time I revisited them. I sat alone at the wonderful Dorothy Draper cafeteria with curlicue chandeliers and drank coffee that came out of portly carafes with crimped wax paper lids. That spring of 1978, when I was seventeen, wandering around the Met with no specific destination, I came across an exhibit, at the entrance of which was a huge black-and-white photograph of a woman named Marella Agnelli. I had noticed images like this but never realized they all came from one source. A sign on the wall said RICHARD AVEDON PHOTOGRAPHS, 1946–1976.
A picture of Dorian Leigh in an evening dress by someone called Robert Piguet, standing in a powder room in a place called the Ȋle Saint-Louis. An emaciated, elegant woman wearing a dress by someone I’d never heard of, in profile, looking in the mirror at her own perfection, posing but not pretentious. There was no question of her belonging in that grandeur. The huge, square bottle of perfume on the edge of the marble sink, the dress, the hair, the enormous jewels, all seemed to be a secure part of her life. There was a picture of Dovima in a Balenciaga cloche seated next to a large Afghan dog named Sacha at Les Deux Magots. What was more affecting, the image or the words on the wall describing it? What is a cloche? Who were Dovima and Balenciaga? And what was the social significance of Les Deux Magots? From what I could tell it was a world that existed in Paris, a world where women were thin and had pointed, arched eyebrows and heavily glossed lips. There were some good-looking people I came across in my daily life, but none on this level, or at least none that affected me the way these old Avedon pictures did.
Maybe because I was so young, the pictures felt to me like facts, not contrivances—truthful, not pretentious for a minute. Physical manifestations of my own fantasies—refined to a point I had not yet dreamt was possible. But even when they were at their grandest, they had a touch of reality to them, a way in, a kind of grit that made them even better. It had to do with the women. Always a reserve or mystery in their expressions. No bimbos. They weren’t exactly “pretty” as much as “exquisite.” The backlit pointe d’esprit Lanvin-Castillo hat sitting on Carmen Dell’Orefice’s head would have no reason for being were it not for the angle, the length of her neck, the knowing, almost sad look on her face. Avedon made sure that no matter how grand or frilly the subject, there was a greater thought contained somewhere in the photograph—in the eyes of the subject, in the background full of dirty French acrobats or elephants. For every ruffle there was something rough, for every stroke of eyeliner there was a stroke of reality.
Inspiration presented its usual double-edged sword. The Avedon exhibit filled me with inspiration, ideas, and an impulse to get to work, followed again by the familiar tinge of spiritual nausea. I floated among the beauty in that gallery. But I also sensed that the level of greatness could never be equaled. Contemplating the arduous road ahead trying to get anywhere near that level of perfection, I felt defeat. I went back to that exhibit many times, and I walked back and forth, pondering how beautiful the world could be and wishing I had been born at another time. I longed to be alive in 1957, there in the streets of Paris, when Carmen jumped over a puddle in a fabulous Pierre Cardin coat. A little later that year my sister Marilyn gave me the book from the exhibit for my birthday, and I spent most of that year studying it the way I think my rabbis, years earlier, hoped I would study the Talmud.
* * *
I had a strong work ethic from birth. Nothing ever mattered to me except what I was making or performing. Nothing was going to come between me and my artistic accomplishments. Not my family. Not my love life, whatever that was to become. My sexuality and my creativity were always strongly intertwined, even before I was a practicing homosexual. Kevin and I sat for hours every day at the Fairway Deli, amidst the crumb
s of powdered sugar donuts, speaking of our artistic ambitions, equating our budding sexuality with art, convincing each other that being gay was a privilege reserved for the great. Every day we thought of five new examples of great gay artists. Not just obvious ones like Oscar Wilde or Truman Capote. It seemed the more we learned of the great thinkers and artists of history, the more encouraged we were to enter their ranks.
But as strong as we were in our convictions, we were intimidated by the times we lived in. It took months for me to confide to my closest circle of friends that I was gay, and I was slightly annoyed at the unanimous response: “Duh!” It didn’t seem like anyone at school was surprised at all, and in retrospect, it’s funny that I thought they might be. My classmates were all facing similar situations, difficult admissions about entering adulthood: teen pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse. Mostly they were caught up in their own dramas, so I was met with understanding and love. The closest thing to a bully that I encountered at school was an actor in my class who went on to achieve a kind of middling fame. He solicited other boys in the class to side with him. But the bullying consisted mostly of a series of snide remarks, name-calling, and dark, tasteless jokes; after all, we’re talking about a drama-school bully. Those of us who came out at that time tried our best to be honest and do the right thing, even though we had no idea what that meant. The closest things to role models we had were slightly older kids, graduates we learned who had come out, closeted gay adults, a few teachers we suspected but who kept their identities hidden. I was very careful about who I told and didn’t tell—it was a matter of great trust, because even though my family was a world away in Brooklyn, I didn’t want it to get back to them. But I was also having difficulty not telling everyone I passed on the street. Once the process of coming out was started, it was harder to pretend at being straight.
I.M. Page 16