Lost Gay New York: Muscle Queens, Hair Fairies, and Dentures

By Perry Brass

It was 1966. I was 19 years old, and my roommate, Bob Schwiller, 42, introduced me to two of his best friends, a 30-something gay couple named Larry and Pete. Larry was beefy, butch, and loud. He was also a body builder. I had never met a gay body builder before. Ever. At that time, you didn’t see guys with muscles in the bars. You saw a lot of what we used to call “cologne queens” in cashmere sweaters and slacks, or even occasionally “hair fairies,” guys with teased, bleached or dyed hair parading down the street, especially in the Village. Hair fairies were the poster boys of fruitdom: they were blatant, wild, outrageous, and their prodigy, the street queens who’d riot at Stonewall a few years later, were actually a milder version of them. Street queens often could fake it as girls, but hair fairies were not trying to be women; they were outrageously, wildly gay.

I knew some hair fairies in California, the kind who rarely appeared in daylight, and made a living selling drugs or themselves in the dark to horny closet cases. But Larry was one of the first muscle queens I’d ever met; as you can imagine, he fascinated and attracted me. He appeared at Bob’s apartment  off Central Park West (stylishly decorated: walls painted bright Venetian Red; plaster details accentuated in gold paint) in a tight white T-shirt, his glossy dark hair slicked back, James Dean-style. A pack of cigarettes was tucked into his rolled left shirt sleeve, displaying a large smooth bicep.

“May!” he called out. Bob’s pet name was May. “I needa cuppa coffee, Schwiller!”

Lost Gay New York, A Series by Perry Brass

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.