QNY Fave: Ivan C. Morales

Here's a recent cute photo of Ivan who is a friend of QNY.

(Image by PhotoFreedom)

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Riis Park, a.k.a, “Screech Beach.”

Perry Brass and his sister Nancy at Riis Park, early 70s. 

My first summer in my new apartment in the East Village, 1967, I learned how to get to Riis Park, the gay beach in New York, known affectionately as “Screech Beach.” At that point, there were three places to go by the water in New York and be queer: Fire Island, difficult to get to; the Hampton, extremely snot-nosy and not yet invaded by share-houses; and "Screech." Riis was a small slice of the Rockaways, bordered by Belle Harbor, Queens. You got there using the subway and a bus, so it was utterly democratic. Much of Riis at that time was still very old-school Queens-Jewish, until you got to Bay One and Bay Two, two sections divided by jetties that had somehow been colonized by queer factions. Even these had designations: one part was very black and tough working-class lesbian, the other was for white guys, with a section for the lesbian allies of white guys.

Named for Jacob Riis, a pioneering photojournalist from the first decades of the twentieth century who captured tenement life in New York in a famous study called “How the Other Half Lives,” Riis was designed by Robert Moses as “the people’s beach,” and has a landmark Art Deco bathhouse, similar to its larger cousin at Jones Beach on Long Island, another Robert Moses gift to New York. Riis at the time of its building had the largest parking lot in the world, hard to believe but true. The park was designed to give working class New Yorkers a seaside playland of their own, since they couldn’t swim on the largely private beaches of Long Island and New Jersey.

What made Riis interesting was that it was extremely friendly. You could easily talk to 20 or 30 guys on the beach. Just being there was an act of defiance, and the cops regularly patrolled the boardwalk and sand to make sure no hanky-panky was going on. Zeroed in were guys who wore bathing suits that showed the cracks of their butts; you could be arrested for this, and hauled off in a paddy wagon. I actually saw this happen several times, and made sure that my suits covered this backside cleavage. Usually the guilty parties were either black or Latino, and their arrest by the cops would also be accompanied by the drama of their friends hissing and screaming at the police.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Riis Park, and DADT

Perry Brass in May, Battery Park City.

            

My friend Toby Grace, whom I adore and who is the editor of Out in Jersey, one of my favorite gay papers, and one of its founders, has an interesting weblog on WordPress called, “The End of DADT - The Begining Of The Right to Die For Insanity,”  in which basically he iterates all the reasons why beautiful young gay men should stay out of the service, and by extension, out of war. He’s right: war is not just hell, it’s Shit & Hell. The best thing, in my opinion, ever said about war was from Oscar Wilde. The divine Oscar said: “As long as men feel that war is evil, they will continue doing it. It is only when they realize that it is downright vulgar that will they stop.”

War is downright vulgar. It’s sloppy, ugly, ruthless, and goes directly to the mangled corpse of the human soul.

It’s the game where all rules are off. Which is probably why at heart humans love war. They adore it. It goes back to those scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 when our near-chimp ancestors duked it out with sticks, stones, and bones.

The only problem is that war has outstripped our capacity to control it. We can’t control war no more. (Forget about “I ain’t gonna study war no more!”—that only worked in a Pete Seeger song.)