Perry believed that no matter where or when you showed, you should do something entirely original, which seemed like the object of the game to me, too. If I was bored with the status quo, Perry was revolted by it. It was his wont to change everything from season to season. For fall he showed tiny waists and ruffles, the following spring he showed long, spare, shapeless jackets and long pleated skirts. The about-faces were what his fans expected of him. Sometimes he accomplished this within the confines of one fashion show, making a case for one thing—a length, a color palette—and by the end of the show making a case for its opposite. Aesthetics swung in and out at breakneck speed in that studio, and at first Perry was praised for it. After a while he was chastised for that very thing. (A similar fate awaited me.)
Perry was one of the first people to challenge the idea of what a New York fashion show was supposed to be. In the day, European fashion shows were events, unlike the staid showroom shows in New York, where theatrics were put away and business took center stage. Perry wasn’t necessarily interested in theatrics (though some of his best clothes were very dramatic in their own uberwholesome American way), but he was interested in glorifying the American fashion-show event. He had a huge showroom—a loft space with soaring ceilings—which lent itself to a grander effect than the average New York showroom show. He used loud, contemporary music, which was something that didn’t really exist at New York shows till he started doing it. He was also the first in the world to send print models down the runway. To that point there were delineations between runway girls, who could walk beautifully but who weren’t necessarily good in pictures, and print girls, who dominated the pages of fashion magazines. Even in Paris and Milan there was snobbery about this difference. When he hired Kim Alexis and Janice Dickinson for his fashion shows, the editors adored it because they could now see the clothes on the girls they were thinking about. Everyone followed suit after a few years of debates about how these print girls “couldn’t walk,” which was just a cover for the fact that everyone was copying Perry, who was the only one brilliant enough to figure it out.
I worked on many shows at Perry Ellis, and I remember them all. But the first was truly special—my initiation into the workings of a real fashion show. The design for that spring collection had taken place late in the summer and into the fall, just before I returned to school, and I felt myself to be a big part of it. The new collection was inspired by Chariots of Fire, which was set in the 1920s at Eton and had beautiful costumes by Milena Canonero. It had recently opened in theatres and was an obsession among the fashion crowd.
I snuck out of school as often as I could to see the really important fittings. I was obsessed with a tall, thin, blond model named Karen Bjornson, a favorite of Halston’s, whose star power lingered well into the 1990s, and who I got to know. Jed knew I would be devastated if I missed her fitting, so that day he had me called out of class. What that didn’t do for my image: being called out of class because Perry Ellis “needs you in a fitting.” I owned Parsons for weeks after that. Then to arrive across the street and see Karen and the gang standing there waiting for me to start the fitting … I still don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of consideration.
That November, aside from the nights I worked, I took three or four days off from Parsons to work on the show. It was the first collection I worked on from start to finish. The show began, the Vangelis music from the movie poured out into the showroom, the bright lights came on, and the show progressed without any obvious hitches. But backstage was an inspired mess—clothes flying, models running, and any number of assistants and hairdressers stalking the models to reposition a hat or retie a bow. From clothing station to runway, the models rushed back and forth in the nick of time. I was on the verge of tears throughout that first show, and at the end I found a vacant stairwell and wept. I get emotional around beautiful things, especially when I’m greatly stressed. And both beauty and stress were abundant that day. When I got home I found flowers and a note from Perry—he did the same thing for all of us who’d been involved with the collection. He had a way of making everyone feel they were indispensable.
When I got the job at Perry Ellis it was as if the universe were providing me with exactly the information I needed. I was able to pour everything I had into my work, and I had so much to pour! The more energy I had, the more there was to do. Then I’d go home and pick up a sewing project I’d left from the previous weekend or work on sketches of my own that weren’t related to my job. People refer to it as workaholism, but it’s the way I am. I’m more interested in the creation of things than I am with any other aspect of life. I feel best about myself, about my life, when it runs that way. After a day or two off I start getting depressed. And yes, perhaps I neglect aspects of my life in order to accommodate this work ethic, but it’s who I’ve always been, and that seems to be getting truer. Those years at Perry Ellis weren’t just about learning design, developing taste, and understanding the politics of fashion; those years were about discovering that it’s okay to be this way. I was born to work. I live to work.
18
In the fabulous world of Perry Ellis, for all the newness and excitement, there were also a few personal setbacks. I was extremely conscious of the aesthetic and social hierarchy that existed in the design room, and I knew my place was low in the pecking order. For one thing, Jed and Patricia patrolled that gate night and day, making sure that I never advanced too much in Perry’s good graces. I worked hard in that studio, but I didn’t want the kind of career positions they had; it was always my intention to eventually strike out on my own. I looked up to Perry, and I always remained slightly scared of him. My work relationship with him was reverent, even if joke-filled, and the occasional allusion to friendly affection was all I could manage. Although there were days when I didn’t interact with him, he was my all—a father figure even while my real father was alive.
The gay culture in that world nourished me in some ways and fed my self-loathing in others. In general, thin, handsome men and women abound in the fashion business, and the offices of Perry Ellis seemed to be their international headquarters. Jed and I were the jesters who entertained Perry and his gorgeous friends, and while they went on with their gorgeous lives, Jed and I, and the rest of the lowly design staff, were left behind to do the dirty work of organizing shows and seeing to the making of the collections. The more we catered to the whims of these beautiful people, the more alienated I felt from the whole fabulous scene, and the more proof I had that I was the fat, ugly kid from Brooklyn I saw in the mirror, unworthy of a second glance.
The harder we worked and the more devoted we were to fashion, the further we all seemed to get from our own sex lives—and the more we used fashion as a diversion from deeper, more meaningful things. It was a phenomenon at Vogue, too, and a few other seriously immersive fashion offices. One traded one’s sex life for a life of fashion servitude. There was even a name for us—we were referred to as “Fashion Nuns.” At Vogue they made a joke of it: “The only dick you ever see at Condé Nast is Avedon.”
But the world of fashion and my personal body image weren’t the only things that stood between me and sexual awakening. The other was a threat that I had no control over, and that struck very close to home.
A young man who worked in the sales department at Perry Ellis, a gorgeous blond named Daniel, was suddenly stricken with a mysterious new disease called AIDS. One day he was there—beautiful, dashing, turning heads, dressed entirely in Perry Ellis—and a week later he was rushed to the hospital with heart failure and mysterious lesions. A month later he was dead. So many cases of this mysterious scourge cut close to the bone. One particularly heartbreaking case: I had become dear friends with a classmate of Kevin’s at Juilliard, Christopher Renstrom, and his lover, Brian Greenbaum, a wonderful young movie producer. They were part of my surrogate family whom I saw three times a week, including a standing Sunday brunch at a little place on the Lower East Side called Everybody’s, which was a
round the block from where they lived. Christopher and Brian were a kind of “married” couple years before gay marriage was even a glimmer in the collective LGBT eye. Out of the blue one day Brian was taken ill and raced to the hospital. And from that day on he was never the same, wracked with all sorts of terrible ailments and ugly symptoms, from respiratory failure to lesions. I accompanied Christopher on the final occasions when Brian was rushed to the emergency room near their home. Brian died a few weeks later.
The following summer Laughlin Barker, Perry’s boyfriend, came down with a case of hepatitis, and those of us who worked in close proximity were advised to be vaccinated. There was all sorts of good humor, even jokes in the design room in an effort to dispel our angst and paranoia, and after a month or so, Laughlin returned to work. Despite our attempts to make light of it, after the hepatitis there was an eerie pall cast over that happy place, and although no one talked about it, we feared the worst for Laughlin. Ultimately our fears were confirmed. He was in and out of hospitals for the following four years and finally died of lung failure.
So many of the fashion glitterati were to die over the course of the next ten years. John Duka, who had been such a fixture in Perry’s design room; and Charles Suppon, who had only four years earlier awarded me his Gold Thimble, both died in the early eighties. And of course the scourge didn’t confine itself to the fashion world. Both the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre were hard hit, as was the Broadway theatre community. You couldn’t go to a museum, a gallery, or a theatre in New York without coming in close proximity to at least one tragic history.
I took these losses personally on two levels. I grieved for the people I loved. And I was terrified for myself. Just as I was coming into my own sexuality, a terrible plague emerged—which seemed to place a target square in the center of my back, attacking all the people and things I cared about the most.
I left Perry’s employ in 1982 to take another job that seemed to offer more autonomy. This was before I knew Laughlin was terminally ill. About a year later Perry called me and offered me a job designing an offshoot brand called Perry Ellis America, which I turned down because it was a jeans line, which at the time didn’t appeal to me. Later it came out that Perry had AIDS, and I realized his outreach to me was part of an attempt to put things in order with his company before he died. His death hit me very hard but I was spared the funeral because I was on a business trip to Hong Kong and couldn’t get back in time. I wasn’t ready to memorialize that period of my life and I didn’t want those days to be remembered sadly. I remember him smiling and laughing.
But the epidemic didn’t go away. It got worse and worse as the 1980s wore on. The disease became associated with death. My whole generation was affected, stricken with terrible fear. My friends and I were all sure we’d die young. And after all these years, I often think of myself as lucky to still be here.
* * *
There’s a fine line between my natural aversion to boredom and my fear of commitment. It’s a part of my personality I can’t master. No matter how great things are at any given point, I start weighing the pros and cons of staying in the same place, and usually I come to the conclusion that it’s time to get somewhere else. Partly this is due to my gift for seeing the bad aspects of a good situation—and just as often, vice versa. But it doesn’t really have to do with right or wrong. I leave parties at the height of the fun, and sometimes I’m too impatient for the fun to start. While moving on too soon has been an occasional cause for regret, usually this instinct works out well.
By 1983, after three years of great happiness and fulfillment at Perry Ellis, I decided it was time to go. Frank Rizzo introduced me to Jeffrey Banks, a menswear designer who hired me to help launch his women’s collection. When I told Perry, he deflected his annoyance with humor and said, “She’s leaving me for a black woman!” As difficult a decision as it was to leave Perry Ellis, I was energized by the change. My college friend Peter, who’d been working for Christian Dior in Paris, had just moved back to New York City and was living with me, sleeping on a cot in my small studio while looking for his own place. We were having a lot of fun together, up to our eyeballs in parties, clubs, theatre of all kinds.
Had you told me ten years earlier at my bar mitzvah that I would be living my life in the epicenter of the design world, flying around the globe, fulfilling my creative bent, I might have believed you. But had you told me—the fat, pimply, bar mitzvah boy I was—that I would live out my identity as a homosexual and have a fulfilling sex life, I would have dismissed the idea as nonsense. But that is what came to pass. It was totally different than what I imagined it would be like. As a fat kid you grow up seeing a fat person in the mirror no matter how thin you get. When your father tells you that you have “other qualities,” and that good looks are not your strong suit, you go through life thinking of yourself as unattractive physically, and when attractive people make passes at you, you assume it’s a joke or a mistake.
When I was seeing Dr. Kahn those years in college before I came out, whining on incessantly about my sexual insecurities, he said something that affected me deeply. It wasn’t necessarily what he said as much as the way he said it. In a very clinical way, almost as a medical assessment, he said, “You won’t have any problem finding as many lovers as you want. You’re tall and you don’t smell bad and you have good hair and teeth.” The matter-of-fact way he put it sounded less like an opinion and more like an evaluation of a laboratory rat being assessed for its eligibility as a test subject. It was reassuring in its unvarnished practicality. That was the moment when I began to think I might be okay. I was ready, even with a gamut of insecurities lined up against me, not to mention a deadly scourge, to enter the fray.
I can count on my fingers the number of boyfriends I had through those early years from roughly 1981 to about 1986. Meanwhile, many of my friends were going to the baths or sex clubs and having sex with three or four people a night. The AIDS crisis was just getting started, but not everyone seemed willing or able to curb their libido. Safe sex eventually proved to be genuinely viable, but at the time it was still a theory. The only mistake-proof protection seemed to be abstinence, a state of being that came and went in my life depending on the frequency of depressing news. With so many friends and colleagues getting sick and dying, sometimes months passed—even a full year—that I remained celibate. The AIDS test itself was horrifying—leaving you in a state of panic for two full weeks till the results came in. AIDS made me careful about love and especially sex. I don’t regret that, but it was confusing on an epic level—I was rendered terrified of men even as I pined for them.
In Jeffrey Banks’s office there was a young man who worked as an administrative assistant, a small blond, I’ll call him B. He was a stereotype of a certain kind of gay man in the early eighties. He had standard-issue good-looks and a standard-issue gym body, and in my estimation he wasn’t particularly interesting or smart. When I first arrived in that office I looked down my nose at him, and he disdained me right back. To me, he had the unfair advantages of being thin, blond, and happy all the time. He was an early version of a twink—and it seemed everyone wanted him. There was an ease about him, a lack of complication. To him I was a snotty, weird-looking designer who dressed in this ridiculous way and went on about things that didn’t matter.
One evening it seemed as though B was trying to befriend me, and he invited me to go with him to Uncle Charlie’s, a large, fun, gay bar on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. Unlike so many specialized bars of the time—you were either at a leather bar or a piano bar—Uncle Charlie’s was surprisingly integrated. B introduced me to his friends, who were all young men like him—attractive, uncomplicated. And if I didn’t already feel alien and out of place, I noticed one of B’s friends rolling his eyes after we were introduced. B and his happy bunch disappeared into the crowd after a bit, and I was seated alone on a carpeted platform, finishing my drink and planning my escape, when I noticed a dark, handsome
guy looking at me. He didn’t look away until he caught my gaze, and I smiled out of nervous embarrassment. He came over and sat next to me and chatted me up for ten minutes. Then out of the blue he started kissing me. Even after the first kiss I thought he mistook me for someone else. Then it dawned on me, and I thought, This is what being hit on feels like. But being kissed like that in public was not only unexpected, it was dangerous and erotic. And I let it happen. I sat there getting kissed, and I liked it.
He was the son of an Israeli politician, slightly older than me, who had moved to New York recently and spoke English with an Israeli accent—a total turn-on hearing that accent spoken in a context other than a rabbinical one. He told me of his days serving in the Israeli army—another turn-on, having sex with a soldier. He was a psychotherapist who had recently begun his practice, the biggest turn-on of all. Also he was very funny and had a realness that I wasn’t used to. The things he talked about were outside the realm of what my fashion friends did. He spoke of politics. Current events. When he spoke of art or even of fashion, it had different, weightier significance. He put everything, not merely the physical aspects, into a more political context. He listened well and gave advice. He had a darker sense of humor than I was used to. Late one night he feigned having a diabetic fit, which made me panic. He said he might die unless I found an insulin shot and only revealed it as a prank seconds before I confirmed the ambulance. We stayed together for about six months. It might have gone on longer, but meeting each other’s friends was our undoing. His friends thought of me as superficial (an accurate assessment at the time). And my friends thought he was a bore.
But this first experience at Uncle Charlie’s was a good one. And it boded well for the future of my dating life. I went through my twenties intent on making romantic connections more than sexual ones. In truth I think I was fooling myself that I could have handled a long-term relationship in those years. I was too busy with my work and better off on my own. Boyfriends were messy and slowed me down. But try as I might to have meaningless one-night stands, it was impossible for me. I was needy for romance, so I gave every guy a good chance. Or at least three good chances.
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