I came to New York in August of 1966, a month before my nineteenth birthday. I had grown up in the Deep South, in Savannah, Georgia, and New York was strange to me. It felt immediately huge, rude, cold, and unfriendly. And also, quite ungay. You have to remember, this was only a year after the New York World’s Fair (1964-65), when Mayor Wagner had closed down most of the gay bars in the city to keep hordes of tourists and their families from stumbling innocently into queerness. So the few bars that remained open or were re-opened later by the Mafia (and in this period, Tony Soprano and his cousins ran virtually all gay enterprises in the city) were still vulnerable to shake-downs by the cops.
I’d also been away from home (or at least the city of my birth) for more than a year. In order the escape the South, where I had already come out, and the literal threats of murder I’d had there, I hitchhiked, at the age of 17, after a year of college at the University of Georgia, to San Francisco. Gay Nirvana. This was the interesting period of my real coming out—being a 17-year-old attractive kid on his own in California, where I could not wait 10 minutes for a bus without guys cruising by and trying to pick me up—but it’s another story. So by the time I got to New York, I’d already had somewhat of a life, and New York seemed less than welcoming. But immediately I got a job. In those days it was simple: there were more jobs than people in the city, during the boom period of the mid-60s, and since I had wanted to work, in my naive way, in the “art field,” I got a job as a messenger/apprentice at an art studio in the East 50s.
