Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum

It’s hard to imagine that at one time not that along ago, New York was a city awash in fashion, in its own sense of New York style and feeling. Now you walk up Fifth Avenue, and “style” is the Hollister store, the NBA store, H & M, and other dreary corporate dreck-sellers, where the important thing is selling not a look or feeling but the shopping bag that the stuff comes in.

But New York, especially lost gay New York was all about fashion; this sense that you felt fantastic, and sexy, so everything you put on felt that way too—and you could be outrageous with it. One incarnation of this was cranberry red velvet jeans. It seemed that in 1968 they were all over the place. You saw men in them and women in them; they were of a red of such unabashed intensity that it stopped traffic on the street, so walking down New York avenues became like Morse Code: lots of stops and dashes, just looking at this amazing color stretched across the thighs and asses of so many good-looking people. Fashion seer Diana Vreeland once said that the two most stylish periods of American life were the 1920s and the 1960s: she was right. There was this sense of outrage and also just the right amount of money running around—you need money. Fashion needs money, but even more it needs a sense of permission, something that Right-Wing gorgons like Michelle Bachman want to choke the hell out of.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, still running at the Metropolitan Museum reminded me of this full flowering of youth and excess that is now barely glimpsable. The show, the most popular in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, is both wondrous and sad.

(photo: Alexander McQueen, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: George Platt Lynes at Throckmorton Fine Arts

George Platt Lynes, courtesy Throckmorton Fine Arts

We now live very much in the Age of George Platt Lynes, a miraculously queer photographer who died in 1955 at the age of 48 of lung cancer. Whenever you see a stop-in-your-tracks image of a young, well-built, sexually enticing man in an isolated setting—in other words, what you’re looking at is the man, either alone or with another man, nude or with as few clothes on as possible, and that’s it—you’re staring at a George Platt Lynes image.

It can be a gym-sleek ad for GNC, a hot fashion shot for Armani, one of those Abercrombie & Fitch creatures dripping innocent sweat and sex, 2-Xist or Calvin Klein, Dolce and Gabbana, or Dolce and anything: all George Platt Lynes. He did it first, and better, and he knew how to knock your eyes out with a kind of sweet effortlessness that took a genuine dollop of genius to create.

Who was he, and how did he do it at a time when you could not even send nude shots of the men he photographed through the mails without risking arrest?

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.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Go See “Making the Boys”

                                                                                 Original cast picture from The Boys in the Band

Last Friday night was I lucky enough to attend a special showing at the Quad Theatre on W. 13th Street in the Village, of Making the Boys, Crayton Robey’s documentary about the creation of The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley's famous play about a gay birthday party where almost everything hangs out. 

This was really Lost Gay New York, and a keyhole into a world I knew only too well. It’s a wonderful movie, very moving at times, a bit over-long (Robey tries to attach everything gay, cultural, New York, American, queerish, etc. to The Boys in the Band; sometimes it sticks and sometimes it just doesn’t.), but ultimately very rewarding whether you were a life-time fan of the play, or like me, someone for whom the play with its bitchiness and bitterness, held a lot of repulsion and embarrassment, because afterall, aren’t we embarrassed by the truth? And The Boys in the Band is the truth. It’s not the only truth by a long shot, but all of us—OK, I know who you are out there—have been to a party at some time in our lives that ends up with drinking too much, saying too much, and hurting others too much, and we’ve lived to tell the tale. Mart Crowley did live, and told us some things that have taken me a lifetime to understand.

Making the Boys does something that is really important, although it doesn’t always get the message right, at least by me. It sees the most important aspect of the play being that moment when Michael, the host of the party (and I hope I have this speaker right) makes what was, in 1968, a truly life-changing statement: “You are a homosexual, and nothing you do will change that. You were born a homosexual and you will die one.”

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Truckin’ at the Trucks

1970s picture of the trucks in the Village

I heard about the trucks my first summer in New York, in 1967. One of my older friends from Julius’s informed me that guys went to a certain street on the west side of the West Village “to suck cock. It’s sometimes called, ‘the Express,’” he informed me. So you might hear men say, “I’m taking the Express tonight.” Meaning, they were dispensing with all the folderol of going to the bars, and just getting down to business at the trucks. 

It’s kind of hard to imagine, in this age of the very yuppified West Village (we’re talking $7 mil duplex apartments on West Street) what the area was like when it was still working class, you could buy a whole building for $70,000 (the going rate in the mid-60s), and there were warehouses along the waterfront, which necessitated working loading docks for—what else?—trucks.

The interesting thing I always thought about the trucks was that they were left open at night after they were unloaded, so guys could play in them. I didn’t actually go to the trucks until somewhat later, after I had joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, when GLFers used to leaflet them. This was again another interesting aspect of “the trucks,” a generic term that specifically referred to these huge open empty Mack rigs where scores of guys went to congregate and have sex. (In other words, you had “the trucks” just like you had the “tubs,” another simple term for the baths.)

Anyway, another interesting aspect of the trucks was that lots of men went to them for social purposes as well as the obvious sexual one.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Sunday in Lost Gay New York

Perry Brass hangs out in Southhampton, 1976. Note: Mark Spitz mustache.

Sometime in the mid-60s and into the 1970s, Sunday became “the” gay day. I know, the idea sounds a bit crazy. Why would God’s day, once dedicated to church, family, bad food, and other mortifications of the flesh become queer as 3-legged goose? I think there are lots of solid reasons why. A few would be:

By the mid-60s and especially by the mid-70s, there was enough of an urban gay culture that a lot of men, myself among them, started to really resent the fact that they could not come out at work. In the 50s, your greatest hope was not only that you’d never be out at work, but that no one on American soil got a whiff of what you did in your bedroom. Or any other places. But in the next decade or so, it became apparent that work = closet was miserable. Pure shit. The weekends were for you (and many of my friends actually began their weekends on Thursday nights, knowing that they could coast through Friday if they had to) and Sunday was the last day you had to be your real self.

After that, it was indentured servitude inside the closet for most guys.

There was also the idea that Sunday was for you and your friends. It might turn romantic, especially at the bars that offered free buffets on Sundays (more about that later), but staying overnight Sunday with a new friend (or “trick,” not a word I’m crazy about if you read my book How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, but it works, too) was often not in anyone’s cards—which meant that Sunday’s trick could turn even more romantic because you might make another date with him, if you’d not had enough of him Sunday evening.

So Sunday in New York became this great gay-licious holiday, and there were so many ways to do it, depending on where you lived and at what point in the calendar you did it.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Gay Pride, 2010

Original Marchers in front of the Stonewall Inn, June 27, 2010
(l to r:) Bob Spiegel, Roberto Camp, Rick Landman, Jim Fouratt, Mark Segal, and Perry Brass.
Back right: John Knoebel with the GLF Banner.
(photo courtesy: Mark Segal) 

Yesterday was the Gay Pride Parade in New York, and I marched in a contingent known as the First Marchers. We were men and women who had marched in the first gay pride march on June 28, 1970. The contingent was organized by one of my Gay Liberation Front brothers Rick Landman, who took it upon himself to organize us in last year’s march, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and this year for the 40th Anniversary of the Gay Pride Parade, which started out as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March to remember Stonewall.

We carried two banners: one provided by John Knoebel was a replica of the first banner GLF had carried in the first march; the other banner, provided by Mark Segal, publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, said, it all: “Original Marchers June 28, 1970. Christopher Street Gay Liberation Gay. Gay Liberation Front.”

Marching with this group, and these banners was a total joy. People cheered us and thanked us, and we cheered back and smiled, and sometimes cried remembering all those years between the first march and now, and who was there and who will never be here again.

I remember that first march very well, but remember even better the Gay Liberation Front meeting, in the spring of 1970, when Bob Kohler brought up an idea that had started with Craig Rodwell, the owner of Oscar Wilde Bookstore, to have such a march and to name it for Christopher Street, a street whose associations had become as clear and evident as other New York street names, like Broadway, Wall Street, Seventh Avenue, or Madison Avenue.

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: 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.”

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!”

Gay Lost New York: Radio City Music Hall, Bed of Debauchery

The year: 1966. Bob Schwiller, my 42-year-old room mate on Central Park West, told me about New York during World War II.

“They had black-outs all the time, and the black-outs were fantastic for sex. Guys would go into Central Park and do each other behind the lake or the boat house, behind benches, behind anything they could get in back of. Including each other. We had orgies in the park, and there was nothing the cops could do about it because they weren’t a lot of them—so many guys were in the service—and there were too many other things to worry about. Like staying alive. Having a ‘roommate’ became normal because there was such an apartment shortage, and even straights would end up rooming with queens and enjoying it.”

Bob was into straight men. At a time of specialized gays, he told me that his specialty was married men.

“I like ‘em because they’re nicer than queens, and more grateful for anything you give them. Give ‘em a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and a blow job and they’re yours for life.”

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.