Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Doric Wilson

Doric Wilson, 1962, at the Caffe Cino, courtesy doricwilson.com

Doric Wilson died last Saturday, May 7, at the age of 72. The exact time and cause is at the present unknown, but he died in his apartment at roughly the same time as a new play by Joshua Conkel called “I’m Gonna Destroy You” was being read by TOSOS II, Doric’s own glbt theatre enterprise, as part of the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project. I know: this last sentence was a mouthful, but it seems like every word in it (Bob Chesley, a wonderful, early HIV-killed friend of mine; Jane Chambers: “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove”; TOSOS—The Other Side of Silence, Doric’s bang-up of a name) brings back some part of Lost Gay New York to me, and now Doric Wilson is definitely a piece of it. Lost for us, or maybe not. Because as a playwright you live on, and Doric will.

He was an amazing character: delightful, funny as hell, completely irreverent, crusty, difficult at times, but incredibly sweet and affectionate. I’d known him for so long that I can’t remember not knowing him. I think we met sometime during the Gay Activists Alliance era—or possibly even earlier when I’m sure I panted after him. He was a tall, lean, gorgeously handsome red head, and he moved beautifully like a dancer. Years later, after he had gone through health problems and gained a lot of weight and lost the red hair I kept wanting to see that young man inside him. I knew he was there, and both Doric and I missed him. But he was always bubbling with life and discovering new things, which is what keeps us moving, changing, and young inside. He loved opera, all forms of theatre (including tending bar, one of the great forms of theatre and acting), plays and writing them, and keeping gay theater alive in New York (and elsewhere).

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Lance Loud

Picture of Lance Loud courtesy FindaGrave.com

I was blithely watching “Royal Wedding” the Saturday night before Easter on Channel 13, PBS—one of those vintage movies where the cast (Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, and the ever-tasty Peter Lawford) make the drivelly content worthwhile, when, at the end of it, Neal Shapiro, president of 13 made an amazing announcement: It was going to air the entire run of “An American Family,” all 12 episodes of it, that night. This had not been done in 20 years, and I somehow vaguely remembered that happening: just watching it with my jaw dropping in sheer astonishment. I’m not sure if they did it as a one-gulp marathon back then, but here it was: an entire night of the Pat and Bill Loud Show, with of course their five children in tow, the most unforgettable one being their eldest Lance.

So, although my eyelids were getting very heavy, I watched until the screen went blank, or I did, and had to go to sleep. It was like Proust’s dipping the madeleine into the lime-flower tea, a total recall of a time that is so far back as to seem fictional, and yet so utterly delectable in its youthful perfection (as well as imperfections) that all I could think of was: God, now a whole new generation of kids will want to dive headfirst into an Early Seventies revival: the wonderful, body-fitting clothes, the music, the attitudes, the flowery smell and feeling of it. And at the center of it, glowed Lance and his mother Pat, with a relationship that was so Oedipal, so Hamlet-and-Gertrude, that it shocked the living crap out of mainstream America (and even blasé New York) when it was first aired on PBS in 1973.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Alvin Baltrop at Third Streaming on Green Street

                                               Alvin Baltrop: Men at the Piers, courtesy Third Streaming Gallery

I remember Alvin Baltrop well; I met him several times at the old Hudson River piers down in the Village that are no more. The piers had been part and property of the great, venerable steamship lines that crossed the Atlantic to Europe and back, back when Cole Porter went with his millionaire wife and an entourage of servants, Louis Vuitton luggage, and clandestine boyfriends. Cole Porter went with the Vanderbilts and their cousins the Whitneys, and all the other rich people who knew each other and had fun together. For about a decade or so, during the 70s and into the 80s, gay men in New York were having fun at the hulking remains of the same piers, after the lower Village part of the West Side Highway that had fed the piers into the city was closed for safety reasons. The piers were immense queer playgrounds and the canvas for many artists and the material for writers like myself. I started going to them in the fall of 1974, after I had spent a summer in Provincetown and one of my NY friends told me that he’d never been to anything like them.

He was right: for a sheer expanse of nakedness in the city, there were nothing like them, nor would there be again.