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.

Perry Brass: All Human Wisdom: Revisiting Angels

picture courtesy Signature Theatre Company

“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.”

Alexandre Dumas Pere, last words in The Count of Monte Cristo.

My partner and I and another friend went to see the revival of Ton Kushner’s Angels in America at the Signature Theatre last night; my partner actually sat through both parts in one day, seeing Part One (“Millennium Approaches”) in the afternoon and then staying with us for Part Two (“Perestroika”) in the evening: an almost Wagnerian day of theater in the sheer exhaustion of concentration it takes.
Altogether, it was seven hours of sitting, so he could have flown to London in that amount of time, with little spurts of getting up to go to the bathroom. We did have dinner in between, so it was kind of like the way Eugene O’Neal’s 4-hour play “Strange Interlude” used to be staged, with a dinner break between the middle acts. But, again, Tony Kushner blows “Strange Interlude” out of the water: Eugene O’Neil must be choking on envy someplace, because, sadly enough, everything that he ever wanted to do, or be, or say but couldn’t is in Angels in America. We had both seen the original production of the first part when the plays were originally done on Broadway. I was blown away by the ending then of Part One, but since we actually saw on its last day of its Broadway run, there was no way to see Part Two. So I was all set to see how Angels ends, and I did. 

This Day In Gay History

For the past year or so, sometimes with a few interruptions, Bo Young and Dan Vera of the White Crane Institute, the publisher of the venerable White Crane Journal, have been putting out an online column called "This Day In Gay History."

It is fantastic. Truly amazing. Not just because it's informative—there have been a lot of glosses on this topic over the years, and many of them never get too far away from Madonna's birthday—but because it's such a passionate assertion of what I have called for ages "gay tribalism." This is the idea that there is an invisible cord running through the soul and spine of queer men and women that links us. Christopher Isherwood referred to this as "our kind," as in his wonderful book Christopher and His Kind.

This does not mean that we all have something in common, like Judy Garland (OK, maybe we do all have her; who can look at Meet Me In St. Louis or The Wizard of Oz all the way without tearing up?) but that we have an understandable, common core of sensibilities and feelings that we can tap into and that are indeed the real "gay roots." I love this idea; it feeds me every day. This is our own family, and it has sustained me all my life. It is seen in a line of glbt writers, thinkers, acters and actors, explorers, scientists, martyrs, lovers, fighters, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, artists, dressmakers and artisans, and just plain common folk who were brave enough either to come out or not be hidden totally at a time when hiding was forced on us.

So get to This Day in Gay History. Bo and Dan run it on the White Crane website, and it also runs on their FaceBook page. You can reach it at:

http://www.facebook.com/l/e4fbbh-zovzPFisRD3_u7nPB03A;GayWisdom.org 


And let them know how much it means to you. 

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Love at First Sight & The Walk Between the East & West Village

Peter Orlovsky & Allen Ginsberg, mid-60s.By Richard Avedon 

About six weeks after I moved into Jerry Borensky’s apartment in the East Village (still trying very hard to escape Borensky’s constant efforts to get into 19-year-old pants), I was at Julius’s one very packed Friday night. Suddenly from the depth of the crowd in the back of the bar, a young man emerged uttering the oldest pick-up line in the human race:

“Don’t I know you from some place?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked at him. He was about six-foot-one, handsomely built, with very sweet regular features, blue-green eyes, dark silky hair, and a deep voice. I didn’t care where he knew me from; I smiled and he smiled back. But his next question was more direct.

“Can I go home with you?”

I did a slight double-take. I was used to men trying to pick me up—when you’re nineteen and been sneaking into gay bars since you were seventeen, you expect it. But this was fast. He was slightly older than I, maybe twenty-three.

I just shrugged. “Sure.”

So we left Julius’s, and I realized that I didn’t know his name, so he told me.

 
“Dick.”