CONTINUATION_WONDERFUL

Larry found out about a place some gay men knew as the "House of Flowers," which had single rooms for as little as $7.00 and $8.50/week. It was located at 327 West 56th Street (between 8th and 9th Aves.) In leaving the downtown neighborhood that had once been the Old Tenderloin, we were following the historical track of "Satan's Circus" ourselves, whose center had moved to the west midtown area by the early 20th century, which then became the New Tenderloin. In the fall of 1961 it was a badly deteriorated section whose tenements were home to a variety of ethnic groups, though by this time Hispanics may have already been the largest. It was also home to factories, warehouses and the docks. The unions and the racketeering associated with the dock area were largely in the hands of the Irish, and one of their gangs, the Westies, was infamous for the sadism of its "enforcement" methods and executions. The House of Flowers stood on the northern edge of this neighborhood, now notorious as Hell's Kitchen. (Later Hell's Kitchen was renamed Clinton - no, not after Bill - sometime in the closing decades of the 20th century in an effort to disassociate the gentrifying area from its violent past.)

Teenage gangs roamed the streets - the infamous "Capeman" teenage gang slaughter took place here in 1959 - and prostitution and drug peddling were invading the streets at night. Fortunately, for someone more influenced by cowardice than virtue, the House of Flowers was located close enough to the decayed respectability of West 57th Street and the Columbus Circle/Broadway business area so that it was much safer than most of Hell's Kitchen.

The first third of the powerful 1996 film Sleepers, starring Jason Patric and Matt Damon, is set in Hell's Kitchen in the Sixties, and though the period setting looks familiar, the antiseptic cleanliness of the streets and buildings certainly doesn't.

The "House of Flowers" actually had no name. It appeared that it might have been a little hotel for commercial travelers at one time, as there was a tiny room with a Dutch door just inside the entrance with a counter across the lower half of it. In the back of the building there was a line of small one-bedroom apartments with miniscule kitchen space and the luxury of a private toilet. All the rest of the building was divided into veeeeeery small single rooms with one shared bathroom/toilet on each side of every floor. There was no lounge or public space in the place, just rows of doors on every floor. In '61 it was a shabby place, falling apart at the seams, but kept surprisingly clean for a dump.

"Falling apart" is a totally accurate description, and not a hyperbole. One day when I was showering I heard a peculiar noise somewhere above and behind me. I took a step forward in order to turn around and look up, and something scrapped down my back and crashed into the tub. A brick had fallen out of the wall near the ceiling.

The denizens were almost evenly divided between penurious old straight men and young gay guys who were marginally employed or down on their luck. The gay guys were completely open about their sexuality, but the two groups seemed to co-exist with few problems. Sometimes when I came home there would be a mixed group of old men and young gay guys drinking beer together on the stoop.

My room, like the rest, was furnished with an old iron cot and a rackety chest of drawers, a sink and herds of roaches that swarmed across the walls in Rorschach-like formations. Larry had a similar room two flights up, on the floor where the pay phone was located.

The place was run (but not owned) by Helen, an elderly Irish-American woman, who was raising three young granddaughters there. She was a decent person, and willing to hold off on collecting the rent for a few weeks for guys she trusted, and she and her granddaughters, who were just entering their teenage years, took the gay atmosphere in stride.

The House of Flowers nickname referred to a popular mid-50's musical based on a short story by Truman Capote. It had starred Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll and a mostly black cast. "Two Ladies in the Shade of a Banana Tree" and "Sleeping Bee" were popular songs from it. The story concerns the lives and loves of the women in a Caribbean brothel during a Mardi Gras holiday. If the musical romanticized life in a whorehouse, the nickname did the same for the house on West 56th, and I suspect that very few left it for significantly better lives. The old straight men left for the hospital or the gutter, where they died, or like the man across the hall from me, died in their rooms and were discovered by the smell. The most noticeable gay guys were drop-outs or waiters in cheap eateries, heavy drinkers, many of whom had had dreams of theatre careers, although two did depart for a stint as drag queens in the by then somewhat worn Jewel Box Revue. The far fewer more private guys came and went on their personal rounds, and then at some point you realized that they had left. I lived there from November '61 until early '63.

Someone told me that the place had been used in a scene or two of the film The Hustler, released in 1961 and starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. I have never seen it, so I don't know whether it's true or not.

Larry had introduced me to writers, books and ideas I 'd never been exposed to. He also introduced me to Bea Aronstein, my first contact with that particularly voracious species, the New York bohemian culture vulture—well-intentioned in her enthusiastic sharing of every piece of crap produced in a basement or a loft, but it and she were overwhelming oftentimes. In return I took Larry to a small orgy at Tony Montoya’s place, just to show that I didn’t hold any grudges.

After we had been living in the House of Flowers awhile Larry got a chance to go to Europe gratis, bid me adieu and managed on the strength of his wits and charm to stretch it out for two years. It was after he left that I saw Fellini's 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, a movie Larry had urged me to see. Because he had a one-way ticket to Rome, I projected the film onto his adventure, but in its circus-like and picaresque aspects, at least, it was a reflection of my life in New York.

Larry's companionship, aside from being a pleasure, had filled a large social void in my life. With such a tiny amount of cash to live on I was in no position to join people for a night out at a bar, and even when there were get-togethers in Aaron’s apartment or someone else’s I had felt uncomfortable showing up with a single can of beer. And though friends were nice about treating me or inviting me to dinner, there was no way that I could continue to have the normal social life I’d just started at the end of my stint at the Times.

My room was $7.00 or $7.50 per week, which left $19.50 a week for food, laundry, transportation to employment agencies or interviews (when it was too far to walk) and stuff like soap, razor blades, toothpaste, etc. So, one night when I wanted “company” and couldn’t spare even enough to buy one beer at a bar, I walked down to 42^nd Street. While it was hustler central, it was not all sex-for-cash, I knew.

I was uneasy with the scene, but I did it a couple of times and picked up someone. However, several older guys had approached me looking to buy and I fobbed them off. Not that I had moral objections to selling, rather it was a matter of zero confidence in being able to put out for people I might not be attracted to, as well as fear of getting a weirdo or cop.

However.......even five dollars a week more would mean that I could finance a night out with friends…or have a little more for food…or deal with unexpected things like getting a rumpled suit pressed. And I did have a single room with a bed....near Times Square...and in a place where nobody asked questions.
Times Square 60's (detail from photo by Lehnartz)

My hustling venture was brief and - fortunately - undramatic. One married guy from the suburbs I took back to the House of Flowers kept gassing on and on about how he wanted to come back to have me model for some sketches. Maybe he'd seen La Boheme one too many times, or maybe this fantasy was just his way of romanticizing an otherwise unsavory indiscretion. Another guy "happened to have" a camera with him and snapped a few shots of me, and although none of them were completely naked I wouldn't be surprised to see them turn up on a vintage gay photos site someday. All in all, it was pretty tame stuff. Having zero idea of what flesh on the hoof was worth, it was a matter of very small bills. However, it accomplished what I had hoped: I had a few bucks in my pocket to go out with friends on a weekend without talking poor-mouth, and if I was careful I didn’t have to decide on whether to eat, but just what. I got a job fairly soon, which should have meant a quick exit from the flesh trade. However, at this time the fee charged by the employment agency was normally paid by the successful applicant, and you signed a contract with the agency which set the payment terms and installments. Thus, a pretty decent chunk of your first few checks was owned to them. The solution was obvious -- until the fee was paid off I continued to seek out "the kindness of strangers."

Not every contact was for money, some guys who were hanging out there were also ready sometimes for plain old "recreational" sex. There was a very short bodybuilder who used to hustle the street, but around dawn he'd invite you back to his place, and you could screw him silly while he looked at the female pinups pasted on the walls around his bed.

The Fifties have been called the Golden Age of Trade, and the early Sixties were still part of that era. A member of a Yahoo vintage physique photos group described the scene thusly: "The denizens of the old time hustler bars in the area might compare to the magnificent studs who posed for Bob Mizer of AMG [Physique Pictorial], Bruce, Milo et al. in the 50s & 60s. In later years there would be pathetic drug addicts and ex-cons working as rough trade, and brutal gangs of kids from Hell's Kitchen on the street. But in the late Fifties and early Sixties it was a world where you could imagine running into a Jack Deal outside the USO or a Monte Hanson in the Haymarket or a Don Hawksley getting off a bus at Port Authority or a Fred Frandac playing pinball in the arcade next to Nathan's."
Don Hawksley

Lo, how the mighty have fallen, and He exalteth them of low degree.... Or something like that. What a world it was.

Once I got down to it the job search didn’t really take that long – eight weeks or so. And after I had the agency fee paid off all I ever saw of 42nd St. was from the window of a bus. However, the job hunting prior to that kiss-off was an unpleasant eye-opener in a couple of respects.

First, while I realized that one year as a copy boy and clerk at the Times would cut no ice, I was not prepared for the fact that a major in Journalism would get the same reception as a fart during sex. I was looking for an entry-level position with a periodical or in publishing, but no one failed to comment that a major in Journalism had been a waste of my time and majoring in English is what I should have done. A couple of interviewers dismissed the very idea of a major in Journalism as an academic bogusity—a view I had run into at the Times.

[At least two of my classmates in the S.U. School of Journalism might have bridled at these assertions: Ted Koppel and Joyce Carol Oates. Oates and I came from the same area of New York State, and some of her fiction is set in that part of the country. I enjoyed her earlier books With Shuddering Fall, A Garden of Earthly Delights, and Them very much and also a later one, What I Lived For. A 1996 Times review said of her: "Joyce Carol Oates's novels and stories seem to appear with the regularity of long-distance buses, often bound for depressed areas of western New York State . . . much of Oates Country can't quite be found on the map; but its all-American mix of biblical and Indian place names, its terrain and vegetation and its rooted but lost inhabitants make it equally persuasive."]

These objections were easily dealt with by rewriting my resume so that my other major, Anthropology became my major – renamed Sociology, though, to sound less like I had spent four years in a pith helmet interviewing chatty cannibal informants – and demoting Journalism to a minor. I also decided I had better follow up any reasonable openings and not be too picky. Later I learned that most companies did not check your academic credentials, and I probably could have quite safely put down most anything I was prepared to bluff my way through – leaving aside the obvious mismatches, e.g. – football, theology, brain surgery, etc. But I didn’t know that.

The other problem was not as easily dealt with: my draft status. My previous 1Y classification had indicated prime draft bait. My new 4F status signaled a serious physical or mental disability or homosexuality. If I lied and claimed that I had served in the army, I could find myself in the position of being asked questions about my military service that I might easily stumble over, or worse be asked to produce my official discharge papers from the armed forces. So, I stuck with the truth and put down 4F.

That almost never failed to stop traffic. There were those perfunctory interviews where it was simply noted out loud in passing. But those interviewers who saw me as a possible candidate, presumably, were more probative about the health problem that had resulted in this status. Some would then pursue a follow-up line of questioning focused on dating, girlfriends, plans for marriage, etc. Trying to balance the drama of my sufferings from a “trick knee” against titillating tales of a heterosexuality that bordered on priapism would have challenged an Actors Studio graduate.

The upshot of these performances was that I received as many job offers as Emmy nominations.

The first “promising” appointment was something of a fluke. From the agency’s description it had sounded like a job doing credit checks. It was not anything I wanted, however, I went because it would plump up my list of job seeking efforts which the Unemployment Office required that you to keep. The interview started out with a presentation to about a dozen applicants, and it became clear then that this firm was used by businesses to investigate the private lives of candidates or internal promotions to important position in their corporations. Snoops for hire, basically. I was not interested and in the private interview that followed displayed all the charm of a toxic clam: When the interviewer asked if my 4F status was due to a health condition, I gave a laconic, “Yes,” and seeing that I wasn’t moved to enlighten him further he moved on. Something – not again! – about a girlfriend or marriage plans. “No.” So much for that…but the agency called to say that I was wanted for a second interview!

Again, I went simply to chalk up brownie points for the Unemployment folks. This time there were only three of us, I think, and the same guy gave us an informal down and dirty on what we’d be doing. Essentially they looked for any personal problems or habits in the people they investigated that might reflect badly on their employers or incline the employee to embezzle from the firm, etc. They questioned neighbors, stores, former co-workers, and so on, looking for evidence of gambling, too great a fondness for wine, women and song, adultery and—of course—(surprise, surprise) homosexuality. He regaled us with anecdotes about their work -- a depressing narration of human frailty, conclusions often drawn from third-hand gossip and circumstantial evidence, and the joy of another life ruined. The other lucky applicants I checked off as straight, but from the interviewer’s smiles and eye contact with me when he would launch into a tale of hidden homodom, I got the message: he saw the logic of “set a thief to catch a thief.” No thank you.

What I desperately needed was to find any reasonably responsible job and put in a couple of years at it. This would give me a better employment base on my resume than “copy boy”, but more important, I hoped that enough creditable work experience and time would make my draft status irrelevant. It was an eminently sensible conclusion, and it propelled me to make a decision located somewhere between folly and masochism.

I had been an A student in grade school arithmetic, but when long division was sprung on us in the fifth grade I had been completely undone. I could barely scrape through arithmetic after that, and when arithmetic became math it was worse. If gym classes were my Scylla, math was my Charybdis. Thus, when very soon after the snoops-for-hire episode I was offered a job, however, the fact that it was as a “media analyst” crunching numbers on an electric calculator all day did take the shine off it more than a little.

The God of Math
Nevertheless, in January of '62 I began a two-year stint working for Kelly-Smith a firm that represented newspaper clients from around the country and sold their display advertising space to Madison Ave. ad agencies. Though my income increased, I continued to live in my room at the House of Flowers for more than a year afterwards.

The meat racks along various dark streets such as Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street in the Village, the west side of Washington Square and Central Park West (uptown) were regularly patrolled by police cars. The one along Washington Square was virtually driven out of existence, and the long blocks of cruising along Third Avenue followed suit over the next few years. Central Park West was regularly cruised by police cars and the famous Rambles within the Park were subject to raids. (The latter was a place where people actually had sex and not a place just for picking up as were the meat racks.) Nevertheless, an appointment book that I used from late April 1962 until the end of that year to keep track of my erotic peregrinations indicates that in the Village I picked up one guy on Seventh Ave., five on Christopher Street and five on Greenwich Ave., while on Third Ave. I met yet another five and on Central Park West, four.

The Everard Baths stayed open during these years, for the entire time as far as I know, but then it was rumored among gay men that the reason they were never bothered was that they were operated for the benefit of the Police Athletic League (a charity run by police officers.) This was probably a myth, but it was believed by many, many people, and it does seem quite remarkable that the Everard survived during this repressive era. If you have read Dancer From the Dance, Andrew Holleran's novel of NYC in the 70s, these are the baths he describes. Though I don't remember my first visit there it was probably sometime in my first two years in the city. The Everard was funky, not like music can be funky, but more like an old pair of gym shoes is funky. Some other baths closed -- like the PENN-POST -- though in this era the baths, like leather and S&M were regarded ambivalently by many gay men.

The 19th Street Cafe disappeared quickly, though the Coronet lasted until June at least. The most popular bar was an unlikely place on the east side of Third Avenue just above 57th. Jack and Nats was excruciatingly bright with overhead fluorescent lighting and until about early May had been just another one of dozens and dozens of leftover working class bars in a rapidly changing neighborhood. But in early May it turned into a gay bar that lasted for most of the year. Early in June an old Village landmark with 1940's murals by Franz Kline, the Bleecker Street Tavern -- serving steins of draft beer -- turned gay; however, it lasted only a short while before closing as a gay place. I discovered in June that the New Colony on Greenwich Ave. was open. I'd never been there - it had gotten a big thumbs down during the summer I'd lived in the Village as a place nobody went to - a "wrinkle room." While the De Lys and the Cherry Lane closed not long after I had arrived in the city, the New Colony, perhaps because of its relative unpopularity, must have lasted comparatively longer (unbeknownst to me), or else had closed to protect its license and then reopened later for a brief stint - which is more likely, I think. In any case, it was quite popular until it closed a some months later. I used to meet up with Tony Montoya there, and like him a noticeable number of guys were in jeans and leather jackets. Playwright, Edward Albee was one of the customers. Of course, Julius's was open -- the bar with gay customers that didn't want to be a gay bar -- but as always during these years it was a place of unpredictable hospitality and anti-gay policies. Late in the year two other bars, the Fo'c's'le and Dirty Dick's opened but died a quick death (one or both may have been in the place that later became Badlands at the end of Christopher St.) The same tattletale appointment book says that I met twenty-three guys in these places.

And to round out the picture: I went to Fire Island for the first time in August of 1962 and met two guys there, another at Riis Park and four more at parties.

The bottom line is forty-nine guys, however, these were not by any means all one-night stands, so the number of times I had sex that year is a rather larger number.

I would come back from my Saturday night revels and drop into bed just before dawn every Sunday a.m. A few hours later there would be an insistent rapping on the door! And each Sunday I would get up -- hoping to find that Dialing for Dollars was calling for me on the single pay phone in the hall two flights up -- only to be confronted by two Jehovah Witnesses. Sunday after Sunday the same man and woman; Sunday after Sunday I was nice and polite and said, "No thanks."

Then came the Sunday they awoke me from a hangover so painful that it could have been an abortive suicide attempt. I ripped off my shorts, flung open the door, leaned butt naked in the doorway and said, "YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT JESUS!"

I still have great memories of one of these many fly-by-night bars, the Hat Box near Herald Square (circa 1963). One of the bartenders was a older, pug-faced man who later in the decade worked at the Stonewall Inn. Some of the Hat Box's stand-out customers were a couple of chorus boys from Westside Story in muscle t-shirts, as well as an often drunk and very nasty Paul Lynde, however most of the crowd was not theatre people but a mix of just plain ol' guys. And I remember that it was Edith Piaf's rowdy Milord that played over and over - not Judy Garland's Trolley Song - so it seemed to me that part of the world of the old Lenny's Hideaway had been entombed behind its padlocked door.

The unstable bar scene made for a fragmented public gay life, because that life was a repeated search for the next new gay bar. Because there were so few opportunities for meeting people in a safe environment, parties were fairly frequent, and impromptu after-bar-closing parties were very popular. Bars closed then at 4 a.m. or 3 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Shortly before last call someone might tap you on the shoulder and ask you if you wanted to go to a party, and oftentimes you knew neither the inviter nor the person giving the party. There was always a rush to find an all-night grocery or delicatessen where you could buy beer, and groups of people piling into cabs and ending up at some stranger's apartment. There was no standard party, of course, and you could wind up in some very unexpected circumstances. But, usually it was a gang of ordinary guys and a chance to meet people and have a good time, and find a trick maybe.

There were no widespread problems with theft or bad behavior that I can recall - except for someone getting too drunk - which is surprising when you consider that many of the guests weren't known to the host or even to each other at these spur of the moment parties that began at 3 a.m.

One evening during this period I was at a large party of gay men (this one was not an early a.m. after-closing party), when three guys came in with two girls. There were no women at the party, so it was this that made me pay attention to their entrance. Then I realized that one of the guys was familiar, and in a moment he looked across the room and seemed to recognize me. It was Andy, the one brother back in my freshman year at Syracuse who had remained pleasant after I had dropped out of the fraternity. The group left almost immediately - perhaps because there were no other women, perhaps....perhaps what, who knows? An odd moment after four or five years.

About this time a low-keyed, affable guy, named Harmon Cranston, arrived in New York from the South or Midwest. He had two equally pleasant and easy-going "boy-from-the-provinces" types for roommates when I met them. Their quarters were cramped, but they then lucked out and found an affordable duplex in an old house in the Murray Hill neighborhood, which gave the three more living space. It also gave them a great place for parties. The apartment occupied the

front of the building on the ground and first floors, which meant having lots of people arriving for a party wasn't noticeable to everyone in the building, and as the apartment was not over another one, the noise was far less likely to annoy the neighbors. One of the problems with giving late night parties of gay men was possible complaints to the police about the noise. While straight people giving similar parties could also find themselves facing two cops at the door as the result of a phone call to the police, they had far less to worry about - after all, they were straight, which meant their only offense was disturbing their neighbors. But if the cops arrived and discovered a party of gay men, they might decide to do more than give a lecture. To be honest, usually they just gave a friendly warning to "keep it down" and left it at that. However, if they had it in for gay guys then they might insist that everyone leave - or threaten to notify the landlord about the host's unwanted activities, or threaten to issue a summons to the host or even the guests as well. If you did get off with just a warning, a second visit from the cops was serious business, and if the cops didn't order everyone to leave, it would usually cause most guests to quickly depart anyway, happy to have avoided a worse confrontation. A party of gay men was just what the vague offense of "running a disorderly house" was tailor-made for, and it did not refer to the state of your housekeeping. (Fortunately under these circumstances, at this time the use of marijuana, much less other harder drugs, was extremely rare, and no one I knew of in these years used it or would have allowed it at a gathering in their apartment. Anyone who had had the balls to light up a joint would have been thrown out of most parties probably.)

At first Harmon and his roommates would call up a few guys for a Saturday night party, but in a month or two the problem was not inviting guests, but finding room for all the guys they hardly knew, or didn't know, who showed up at the door with a six pack. By midnight or one a.m. the place would be packed like the proverbial can of sardines -- downstairs and upstairs, and guys just continued to reach for the beers even after their original bring-your-own was gone -- which meant that there were sometimes party-wide collections to replenish the beer supply. There was the usual predominance of slow dance music, and I can remember Johnny Mathis songs for sure, but Chubby Checker's twist music and its spin-offs got played too.

For a brief time in this repressive era, Harmon, with his "Corn Belt" looks and manner, was sometimes jokingly called "the gay Pearl Mesta," a reference to the legendary Washington party-giver who was the basis for the musical Call Me Madam. However, his parties were totally informal, something on the order of college mixers, I suppose, and by the end of the evening in the early hours the apartment looked like a shambles.

Though this is the long gone Islip station on the LIRR, the one at Sayville looked just like it in the early 60's.

If there was anyplace where freedom existed, it was in the never-ending folly that was Fire Island. I first went there in August of '62. Our arrival was to be an appropriately spectacular introduction.

We took an express train from Penn Station,and then changed at Babylon for the local which took us to Sayville, where the ferries left from. My host and I and one or two other guys then squeezed into a normal size taxi for the ride to the ferry (the large rank of more commodious vans and taxis waiting at the train station was off in the future.) Storm clouds were gathering, and at the dock we found that we faced a long wait for the next scheduled ferry departure. So, along with two or three other people in the waiting crowd, my hosts decided to take a "special," i.e. - a very small open boat that could be hired take eight or ten people across. It was getting darker and darker as the storm barreled our way. By the time we were a mile or so into Great South Bay the boat was bouncing up and down on white-capped waves, and with the spray and the wind we were getting pretty wet sitting on a bench that wrapped around the open back of the boat. The rain started, and lightening too, visibility was heading toward zero - as far as I was concerned we could have been in the middle of the North Atlantic, and the other seasoned passengers looked anything but confident. The pilot and a companion were housed under a slight roof, and the passengers now crowded in under it and stood behind him - not a great idea I would think, but I guess he had all he could do

to handle the boat. We were all trying to find something to hold onto in order not to fall down, and our view was out the stern at a cauldron of black water pitching with waves. Suddenly the rain stopped, and thoroughly soaked anyway we passengers sat out in the open deck space again. Angry clouds still filled the sky, but a spot of grey light was trying to cut through them, and I could make out the dark line of the Island emerging across the horizon; then, suddenly a shaft of sunlight broke through spotlighting a huge white, Baroque wedding cake of a house rising above the trees -- Belvedere, the prima donna of Cherry Grove houses!

The Island has gone through many changes since then. Again, as in the case of having seen the last of the Bird Circuit bars, I really saw the very last gasp of a Fifties - and maybe, Forties - lifestyle in Cherry Grove.

Fire Island is one of the northernmost of the long string of barrier beaches which stretch from the Carolinas along the eastern seaboard to Long Island. For the most part they are simply enormous sandbars that have piled up to the proportions of narrow but extremely long islands with scrub forests and fields of sea grass with deer and other wild life. They

protect the low-lying coasts from storm erosion and provide a protected waterway between themselves and the mainland coast. In actuality the Fire Island barrier starts right in New York City, at Riis Park and the Rockaways - though it is not called Fire Island at this point; it extends northward - where Jones Beach is part of it; and then becomes Fire Island proper along the ocean side of Long Island. It is less than a mile at its widest point, though it must be around 35 miles long (I think). There were no roads and houses were built on platforms raised up on pilings as were the wooden boardwalks. No private passenger vehicles were allowed, but service vehicles and beach taxis (four-wheel drive jeeps) drove on the beach or within the settlements on "roads" through the sand. Only one of the communities, Ocean Beach, had more than one or two permanent, year-round residents.

In the 1930s gay people in the theatre began going to Ocean Beach (a bit farther west on the Island.) When their presence drew unwelcome attention, I've been told by several old timers, some of them rented in the next settlement up the beach, which was a handful of summer houses then called Cedar Grove. In the early 60s a few people still called a small part Cherry Grove's far west end Cedar Grove, so perhaps it's a fact. However, Cedar Grove and this story don't figure in any of the standard histories of Fire Island and Cherry Grove, so maybe it's not. Whatever the truth, in the post WW II years Cherry Grove had attracted more and more gay vacationers and property owners.

By the time of my first visit in 1962 it had become all but completely gay. Only about four or so houses in the Grove were were pointed out to me as being occupied by straight people then. Cherry Grove was reached by a ferry from Long Island, a twenty minute boat ride and few miles across the water, but a world away. In 1962 some of the houses -

like the one I stayed in - still lacked electricity and were lit by kerosene lamps, and the stoves and refrigerators ran on bottled gas. The boardwalks were very dark and trees and bushes often obscured the infrequent "street" lights. Almost everyone carried a flashlight as the public lighting was so poor that falling off the boardwalk was a real, and not always minor, danger. During summer weekends the population would reach several thousand people, and it was a gay community, despite the usual police harassment... ....and it was publicly and defiantly and outrageously gay. There was one large hotel having perhaps one hundred fifty to two hundred small twin bedded rooms (I'm guessing) each with a shared bathroom, and a much smaller establishment, the Cherry Grove Inn (I think that was its name.) Rooms in both were "furnished" on the level of a summer camp - though the large hotel, owed by Jimmy Merry, had a bar, a large dining room and a recently installed pool between the two wings of the U-shaped structure. Then there were guest rooms for rent at the unbelievable Belvedere, but most of the Grove was private homes which were rented out to groups for the summer or occupied by their gay owners.
Johnny Kemper

An unexpected sighting was that of a drop-dead handsome, competition-level bodybuilder, whom I was told was the young Nineteen-Fifties beefcake model, Johnny Kemper. He was being photographed at one end of the hotel pool, and attracting plenty of spectators, though he had such a scowling face and staring-into-space attitude, not to mention a bikini-clad bimbo fluttering around him constantly, that he gave off vibes of not being very happy with where he was. This was a bit difficult to reconcile with his earlier posing as a frisky ephebe for Lon of New York and others. Nevertheless, drop-dead gorgeous, he was.

The houses were a very eclectic mix from well-worn pre-WW II bungalows, to conventional East Coast beach houses to the wedding cake fantasy and couple of other adventurous creations....all built of wood on wooden pilings. As you approached on a small ferry or a speed boat the first house you saw was Belvedere -- an enormous Italianate extravaganza of a house, whose interior boasted a marble fountain, multiple marble fixtured bathrooms, and chandeliers, all retrieved from Long Island mansions which were being demolished for tract housing. It also had a large pool surrounded by arches and classical nude statuary (I have no idea how the pilings support/ed all these stone accessories!).

Most of the houses were named: MGM, Les Girls, Les Boys, Bangkok, Xanadu, Tara, Rififi, Brigadoon, Tir n-an Óg -- many of them a bit tongue in cheek, but memory fails. The parties were what Cherry Grove was most famous for. (On second thought, it was probably the sex.) They were extravagant beyond belief, and considering the times - it is amazing that they occurred. Only two words are appropriate to the Cherry Grove parties of this era: Lavish and Outrageous. Those houses that were owner-occupied or rented by the same group year after year were tremendously competitive about these parties and spent a good bit of money trying to out-do each other. There was a community award at the end of the year for the best party and it was highly coveted. The big parties always had a theme.

In the early Sixties Jimmy Merry, a short, tough-talking New York Mick and former waiter, was the king of Cherry Grove. He owned the large hotel, which had a bar, and the popular (very small) restaurant/cruise bar, the Shack. There were two other bars near the Shack, but neither was as popular as Merry's two places. The bill of fare at the Shack consisted of simple entrees, such as meat loaf, spaghetti, pork chops and fresh fish, but it was always very good . Later, after the restaurant expanded, its menu and wine list became as lavish as that of the best gay places in the city. The bars in the hotel and the Shack, which turned into cruise bars after the dinner hour, were the places to hang out and drink in the early 60's. The Shack was built into the side of an ocean-front dune and had a raised deck in the rear on top of the dune overlooking the ocean. Unless it was pouring rain most guys stood out on the rear deck to socialize and cruise....though it could be freezing ass cold and windy even in the summer.

Although it seemed as if Jimmy rubbed some gay people the wrong way - he did have a rather tough affect, and he had a reputation as being a demanding boss as well as a no-nonsense businessman - he was well-liked by the ferry operators and some other business owners on the mainland. This probably accounts for the fact that he almost always knew when the police were on their way across, and he would quietly put the word out. I can remember more than one occasion when he stopped by our table to do the usual, "How are things?" - and then bent over and quietly told us that the cops would be visiting that night. Another side of Merry was that he was legendarily loyal and generous to hardworking employees. There was dancing at the bar in his hotel, but it was iffy in the early part of the Sixties, sometimes it wasn't happening and other times it was. The solution to avoiding trouble with the police was to have line dancing, such as the Madison, with at least one female in the group. Sometimes two or three guys in drag would make an entrance, and this made many guys uncomfortable. A gay bar was a police magnet to begin with, the dancing made it more likely there might be a problem, but the addition of men in drag really upped the odds. And, no doubt, some men were turned off by drag in any case. At the end of the decade the hotel bar (under a new owner) would claim to be the birthplace of the disco. And Jimmy Merry is credited with inventing that gay institution, "tea."

The population of Cherry Grove was overwhelmingly male, however you would see women having dinner at the Shack, and a few would come into the bar of the hotel. I don't remember seeing lesbians hanging out at the Shack after dinner hour, but across Ocean Walk from the Shack was another place - Peggy's may have been its name, or perhaps it was just the owner's name - and at least in the first couple of years I went to the Grove that seemed to be the place where the women went.

But the bottom line is that Cherry Grove was probably closer to being a ghetto, in the classical sense that Medieval Jewish communities were, than places like the West Village or the Castro, which are often labeled "gay ghettoes." However unique and highly developed the life and lifestyles of the Grove were, it was a place with definite boundaries, beyond which the rules of straight society were in full force, and in any event life in Cherry Grove itself - no matter how unique or "free" - was as contained by and contingent upon the power of a hostile authority as life in the old Jewish ghettoes of Eastern Europe had been. The very isolation of the Grove from the mainland emphasized its ghetto status - the trip across into a haven of temporary liberation and freedom to be ourselves, the trip back into the regime of overtly oppressive society. It was a transition as definitive as passing through a ghetto gate.

While the uniformed police from the mainland township did turn up and roam through the Grove, they really did not actively harass the two bars nor the parties like thugs, but then their mere appearance was threatening enough to put a damper on the fun. I am guessing that the amount of tax revenue that this three-month community supplied, coupled with the not inconsiderable revenue it generated for some Sayville businesses, and the fact that it was on the Island and not on the mainland near their communities made for a conflict of interests where trying to eliminate the Grove as a gay Mecca might have been concerned. Certainly the Grove managed to flout the usual realities of gay oppression. However, a friend remembers guys being warned to always carry their draft card on the beach as a common form of police harassment was to be asked to show it - it was illegal not to have it with you at all times.

There was a meat track at one end of the Grove, and it operated through most of the night. And it was the principal target of the cops. At least once a year the police would manage to carefully close in on it and then pounce, catching as many people as possible. The prisoners would be dragged off to the courts on Long Island and charged with indecent exposure, etc. Pleading "not guilty"? -- it would have been futile with all those cops willing to testify against you. So almost everyone pleaded guilty to some charge. The Long Island papers published the names and addresses, and often one of the New York tabloids would reprint them, usually the Mirror, the paper that Lee Mortimer was a columnist for. This would mean lost jobs and family disgrace if your family lived in the metropolitan area. These raids would be staged by police arriving in their boats and early in the morning, and this may have accounted for the fact that there was no advance warning.

Beyond Cherry Grove was the Fire Island Pines, or just the Pines, a community with quite a bit of undeveloped property in 1962. Since to go to the Grove, and let it be known or to

be seen there, was to be immediately branded as gay, some of the more careful gay men had begun to rent or build houses in the Pines. And, someone, seeing the potential of the community, had built a group of beachfront coops there recently. When I had been working for the Times in 60/61 I hadn't yet been to the Island, but the paper had printed a story about how there was much resentment on the part of some straight residents of the Pines over the gay men moving in. Handmade signs had even been posted telling the queers to clear out. Finally, the story said, this little beach community had had to hold a town meeting to put the issue to rest as they were afraid of toughs from the mainland taking advantage of the discord to come over and make trouble -- as they did in the Grove from time to time. At this time public gay life in the Pines, as far as I know, was limited to quiet nights around the piano at the bar that was later to become the Blue Whale. Night life for most gay men meant entertaining friends for dinner, and perhaps a trip to the bars in the Grove.

Roads between the communities had never been developed on Fire Island, but until the mid-Sixties Jeeps were allowed to operate up and down the beach between them as a taxi service. They were almost like amusement park rides as they went at what seemed like breakneck speed and were barely under control as they swerved and slid through the loose sand. During the day they drove close to the edge of the water and exercised some care, however at night they drove higher up on the beach and with a great deal less care. Walking on the beach at night, we kept a sharp eye on them as they approached as pedestrians were difficult to see in the pitch dark until a taxi was almost upon them. There were often near accidents, and in July 1966 the famous (gay) poet Frank O'Hara - an early contributor to the Evergreen Review - was hit by a beach taxi at night and killed.

One of O'Hara's loveliest and most accessible poems describes waking up at sunrise in the Pines.

The beach taxis were banned not long after his death, and transportation between communities was provided by motor boat "water taxis" or "laterals" which traveled up and down the bay side of the island. Nowadays most people walk between the communities.

One of the first parties I went to (1963) had the movies as its theme, and the invitation stated that you had to come as someone film-related. The hosts' house was perched on an ocean side dune and a huge parachute or tent had been anchored to the roof and draped over part of the property as the house could not possible hold all the guests. The place was floodlit for the occasion and the boardwalk entrance, which wound steeply up to the front door, was lit with klieg lights. At the foot of this "ramp" was a "director" with a bullhorn sitting in a directors chair raised about six feet off of the ground. He announced the guests as whomever they were dressed to represent. There was a lineup of people waiting to ascend the ramp, and it takes no special imagination to picture how long it took some drag queens to make their entrance under these conditions. I mean, we are talking Academy Award time as far as they were concerned.

The party music in these years was mostly slow dance music - but in the Grove it was often punctuated with long stretches from current and past Broadway show albums. There were no tapes or multiple turntables of course, and unless someone sat there to play single records or cuts from LPs you heard generous servings of each album - a rather primitive technology amidst the grandness of Cherry Grove parties. At this particular party the obligatory Judy Garland turned into a marathon when a drunk commandeered the phonograph. Some of the younger guys - at least those who weren't into drag numbers and celebrity worship - groused among themselves about the lack of popular music. "Hasn't anybody here heard of the Marvelettes!?" one guy complained in loud disgust. The Fifties (and even the Forties) were slower to die in Cherry Grove than in the city. But Motown and other waves of black music would wash over the Grove fairly soon - and before too many years passed the Grove could make a plausible claim to being the birthplace of the American disco ambience.

Another party in '63 had mythology and fairy tales as its theme. I had run into Arne, one of the first people I'd met in New York, and he was staying with John Parker, and his wife, Brigid. In a few years she would become famous as Brigid Polk, one of Andy Warhol's "superstars" at his famous - or was it, notorious - Factory. Saturday was cold and dreary, and John played different music than the usual Cherry Grove fare while we sat around the house. This is where I first heard Netania Davrath's recording of Songs of the Auvergne, which while not Judy Garland, had a hallowed niche in the classical part of the gay music Hall of Fame. Arne's costume character had started out being Romeo, however, by the time it was pulled together, the predominance of hunter green and Arne's husky build dictated that he was a better Robin Hood. John was a wizard in display work, and his masterpiece that afternoon was a costume for a very tall and muscular Aussie, who was one of the summer celebrities in the Grove that year. John created an ornately fashioned papier-mâché lion's head and matching tail, both of which he sprayed brilliant gold. The rest of the lion was the magnificent Aussie in a bikini, sprayed in the same gold from head to foot. The incredible costume and his terrific body, all shining gold, was a knockout.

I had gone dressed as some unidentifiable Greek character in sandals and a bikini and draped in a classical Greek riding cloak, a chlamys I think it is called. It is a short rectangle which is draped about the body and then clipped together on one shoulder, and ends up falling as a triangle in front and back with one side closed and the other open. At that time I had short-cropped hair, and I wore a wreath of gold leaves.......it was literally a creation of the five-and-ten-cent store level, but it worked. It was an incredibly cold night, not entirely mitigated by the host's endless supply of Black Russians and other cocktails for over a hundred guests. At one point a very handsome Cuban bodybuilder dressed in a bikini just this side of a posing strap - an obvious generic god - was shivering beside me, so I grinned (or maybe I leered, or quite possibly, drooled) and opened my cloak. To my surprise, he stepped inside it, and we both stayed considerably warmer.

The house was on the bay side of the Island, and this may have been the party when a group of people costumed as Neptune and his court of tritons arrived on a decorated boat. However, the high point of this festivity was supposed to be when a very heavy drag with a perpetual five o'clock shadow entered as the fairy Tinker Bell - dressed in ruffled tutu, wig and tiara (of course) and carrying a sparkling wand. For the full effect a cable had been strung from the roof of the neighboring house to the deck of the host's house. At what was intended to be the culminating grand arrival Tinker Bell hooked onto the cable, a spotlight caught her as she began her ascent......and then the cable snagged. This left a very hefty Tinker Bell twisting in a stiff wind over the party while her wand burned out. She struggled but couldn't get going again and finally was ignored by the multitude below, and someone went to hunt for an extension ladder. I never did see the landing.

(I would enthusiastically recommend Esther Newton's book Cherry Grove as a terrific history and sociological study of Cherry Grove.)

Miss Ellen was the flower of ante-bellum matronhood, even though she sported a heavy five-o’clock shadow. According to her oral autobiography Miss Ellen was born Raymond O’Hara in Bayou Thibodeaux, Louisiana. Her Southern accent seemed more imitation than life, but that may have been because Cruel Fate transported her at some young age to live with a maternal aunt and her husband in the Bronx.

Miss Ellen & Daughter Scarlett, from GWTW

I never saw Miss Ellen in drag or even pictures of her in drag, however, she lived her life as a never-ending spin-off of Gone With the Wind, and her name was taken from the character of Scarlet O'Hara's mother. And so was her persona. Despite the lack of visible hoop skirts, Miss Ellen lived in what I would characterize as verbal drag and this costuming she rarely abandoned. Though Miss Ellen always had to announce that she was about to "pick up mah hoop skirts and flee the Yankees," (which meant going back to the Bronx), her social life was in Manhattan centered on a wide network of friends, who were either "sisters" or "daughters." The former title was casually conferred, but Miss Ellen's "daughters" were all guys she had befriended in their early twenties and for whom she gushed a fountain of maternal solicitude. And much of it, from what I saw, was often intelligent guidance and advice. She did her best to steer one of her daughters out of the clutches of a doctor who had gotten the young guy hooked on drugs, and then began demanding sex for the drugs. She was unsuccessful and Terry ended up in a rehab, and reappeared in the city a couple of years later looking far older than his twenty-two years and with dead eyes. But he was alive and able to make another start.

After a brief getting acquainted period Miss Ellen decided I was going to be a daughter. However, having just turned twenty-five and with a lot of experience packed into my three years in New York City, I wasn't having any. Daunted for only one unhappy moment, Miss Ellen then scooped me into her family as a sister. Thus, Miss Ellen (or Ray as I just as often called her on non-family occasions) and I began a friendship that lasted years.

As far as I remember Miss Ellen always worked jobs as an assistant bookkeeper, though he almost never even mentioned work. He was living with his "mother" and "father" (actually the aunt and her husband who raised him) in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium and from his tales they totally accepted his being gay - though I don't know what they thought of Miss Ellen. He had no romantic relationship in the entire time I knew him. It never occurred to me at the time that the persona and the world according to Miss Ellen may have been the brightest part of his life. In retrospect this seems a profoundly stupid oversight.

Ms. Ellen's age was located somewhere in the mid-thirties, as I recall; however, treacherous family speculation agreed that it probably could have more likely been found in the lower forties. Some of her stories unintentionally seemed to support that evil thought. And stories she had: Miss Ellen had daughters and sisters everywhere the white man had cut down the trees and set up housekeeping in America, and it sounded as if she had visited each of them at one time or another; then there was the extensive New York branch of her family with roots going back forever and their doings; finally there was her life as an active tearoom queen. She spun out stories with relentless enthusiasm, and except for the occasional tragedy - such as the downfall of her sister, Serafina - they were rollicking, ribald and side-splittingly funny. Though Miss Ellen was camp incarnate, she had almost none of the nastiness and negativity that often went along with it. She had been blessed with wonderfully upbeat sense of humor, a quick wit and an incredible gift for spinning a story and turning a phrase. Once she ran into a sister she hadn't seen in a long time, and found this former "lady" turned out in full leather gear. After itemizing the articles of leather apparel in a cadenza of increasing amazement, she ended by proclaiming: "My dear, she looked like a purse!"

Poor Serafina, though. She was a one of Miss Ellen's dearest and earliest sisters, and along with Miss Kervajian (a successful Armenian-American businessman by this point) they had been what sounded like an inseparable trio in their younger days. Serafina, was a very overweight Italian-American who lived with her mama in Brooklyn, and whose "love life" consisted of giving quickies in tea rooms.

Magically, however, one of her numbers became smitten with her, pursued her out of a tearoom and courted her. Serfina was caught in the net of love at last. Her adored Oscar was a British merchant seaman who had jumped ship, and to the dismay of Serafina's friends she set up housekeeping with him and lavished presents on him as well. Oscar had no money, no job and no legal status and worse he was in his late forties and hardly a looker by any stretch of the imagination, I gathered. Miss Ellen and Miss Kervajian scathingly referred to him privately as the alte kaker (Yiddish for Old Fart.) Despite having a not very well paying job, according to Miss Ellen, Serafina was spending what Miss Ellen always referred to as "the Yankee dollar" like they were going to stop printing them tomorrow

Miss Ellen and Miss Kervajian did not see this relationship as "a flight to the moon on gossamer wings," but an elevator in free fall. Serafma was hearing none of it. Even moon shots return to earth, of course, but unfortunately this did turn out to be the free-falling elevator.

Serafina returned to the conjugal nest after work one day to find the hi-fi and other expensive gadgets missing, her credit cards were missing, and ditto the balance of her checking account. Ditto Oscar.

Serafina went into a decline so severe that for the first time since Miss Ellen had known her she was losing weight. Between bouts of depression she would have manic bursts of hope that sounded straight out of Madama Butterfly. Finally, a note from Oscar posted in Australia: He was a sailor after all, he had to go back to the sea ...blah, blah, blah. He had used the money to buy forged seaman's papers so he could get a place on a ship. He would pay Serafina back, of course. She had been a good old pal and he'd never forget her. And some day....

It had been a set-up from the get-go. The note was probably intended to get Serafina to call off the cops if she'd gone to the law.

Serafina turned on the gas and put her head in the oven. And she wasn't checking the lasagna.

The sad tale of Serafina was not one of Miss Ellen's cutting room floor episodes from GWTW, of course. It was from another cycle of stories about her life, the New York chronicles - the tales of her days as an Irish step dancer were priceless, and ribald enough to risk being knee-capped by the IRA, while her adventures in the tea rooms were funnier than any French bedroom farce.

Still, Miss Ellen's act could be overwhelming. In a group she wasn't very often Ray instead of her Miss Ellen invention, mostly she narrated and lived in a reality transformed into a world of shes.

Sometimes one of the friends she called sisters would grow tired of it all, and make an exasperated remark - and then everyone would be uncomfortable for awhile. Over a few years we developed a private relationship that had less of Miss Ellen in it and more of Raymond O'Hara, but it was slow going. I didn't know anyone else who did it. In a couple of years the tone of a lot of gay life was becoming obviously different, and even Miss Ellen's daughters as they became more confident didn't want a gay "mother." The times they were a-changing, and Miss Ellen was not - and it seemed to me could not. Many of her stories by now were in endless rerun. There was one painful incident that highlighted this for me. Miss Ellen was with Aaron's crowd of friends one day and carrying on full tilt in her usual mode, totally unaware that she was short circuiting any conversation. Suddenly Chris Stone, one of her "daughters", interrupted her angrily, "For crissake, Raymond, cut the 'she' shit!" Aaron immediately said, "Yeah, Ray..." and added something to the effect of, "why don't you just let it go once in awhile and relax." Several other people grunted agreement or said, "Yeah." Miss Ellen was stunned. Aaron and his friends turned the camp off and on again, however, Miss Ellen, could rarely switch from camp mode to just plain everyday mode.

I don't remember if we ever discussed this incident, but by the mid-Sixties Ray's visits with me dwelled on his days with Serafina and Miss Kervajian, and times and people not in New York. By then I was no longer part of the crowd of people through whom I'd met Ray, but it was clear that he no longer saw much of them either. In the latter half of the Sixties and early Seventies we were like ships passing in the night: He left New York to move to Akron, Ohio where he had a "daughter" from years back, he returned after a year or so, I had a job where I traveled a great deal; he then moved to Fresno, California where there was yet another "daughter" or "sister." I did exchange letters with him once or twice a year. Only one or two people we had known together ever wrote to him.

I remember two visits from Ray in the early Seventies sometime. During the first, after he referred to me as his "sister" several times, and I asked him not to call me that. He said something like: But you are my sister. My response I clearly remember was, "No, I'm not, Ray. I'm your friend. And I'm not a she." I couldn't read his look, whether it was confusion or what. However, I knew right then that it had been the wrong thing to say. Even if I hadn't shouted at him as Chris Stone had done, I had yanked the rug out from underneath him. "Friend" just didn't do it, I don't think. He needed a "sister," probably. And maybe he still needed to be Miss Ellen though I had been calling him Ray for years.

The last time I remember seeing him he had just returned from New Orleans, the place that had played such a big role in his Miss Ellen history, and I think that was where he was considering leaving New York for next. In the mid-Sixties we had both known a very pleasant guy, Will Nilsson, from Iowa. Will was a bit reserved, and when he left New York to go back to Iowa and finish college I thought he'd stay there. We'd exchanged letters once, maybe twice and then we lost touch. It turned out that Ray had discovered him in New Orleans, tending bar in a gay place. I would never have imagined this for Will in my wildest dreams. And Ray went on and on filling me in on how Will was still nice, but so outgoing now, and handsome, and all the guys loved him, etc., etc. And as he talked Ray began to sound the Southern matron: proud as could be, waxing ecstatic over the social success of one of her daughters or sisters. And so caught up in spinning out the story that he looked quite Miss Ellen again.

Sometime shortly after this he moved once more. New Orleans, perhaps. I hope so. I moved to a new apartment. We lost touch completely, and I never heard another word about him.

Miss Ellen/Ray was one of the funniest people I ever met, more than that he was an essentially kind and good person. And his "mothering" was his own style of mentoring. To think of how his life in the city withered away is very sad. His shtick could seem relentless and become annoying without a doubt. Times changed, and he didn't; and during these years he became middle-aged, if indeed he wasn't already middle-aged when I met him. He wasn't at all a drinker or bar person, so not even the exile of a "wrinkle room" could have been in his cards. How much slack should his younger friends (including myself) have cut him, and, on the other hand, at what point would we have become patent phonies, enduring duty visits to someone we saw as a living fossil?

What place was there for men of a "certain age," especially when much of the gay lifestyle was changing?

There was no Community Center, of course, nor any other place for older gay men. There were gay men in their late forties and fifties I saw in Cherry Grove over the same period who fought back the years with a flood of booze and ill will toward all, but they had the money to preserve their own private Fifties. I remember back in '59 when one of Rob Manahan's younger friends, Steve, had asked quite earnestly when we were in Lenny's, "But where do all the gay men go to in their forties?" Someone said that there was the equivalent of an elephant's graveyard, and someone else had suggested that it was the New Colony bar, which got a laugh. Steve's question may well have been provoked by anxiety: Though just twenty-five he was almost totally bald, and this with his thin, sharp-featured face and slight frame suggested he was much older. For my part, I had never so much as touched the door of the New Colony until 1963, grimly imagining that it opened onto a ramp which lead down to something like an enormous dark pit full of bones.

In the Spring of '63 -- after about a year and a half in the House of Flowers -- I moved back to the Upper West Side, sharing an apartment with a series of roommates, on West 81st Street, almost across from the building where Milton and I had lived before. It was the ground floor rear apartment in a brownstone, which meant that it was the "garden" apartment. Like many other so-called gardens in shabby neighborhoods it was a rather desolate space, although it did have a small, geriatric peach tree which managed to put out a small number of blossoms for a few days each spring. Of course, being on the ground floor, it had metal grills on all the windows and the door to the "garden," and more than once I looked out and saw guys climbing the fences and prowling up the street through the back yards. The "garden" boasted a view of the rear of the Endicott Hotel up on Columbus Avenue, one of New York's early welfare hells. Sitting in the backyard on broiling summer nights the fire escapes of the hotel at the end of the block looked like a scene from Calcutta -- scores of desperate people out on them trying to get some relief from the heat -- drinking and fighting, yelling and screaming and prostitutes roaming up and down the metal stairways selling themselves.

One rather macabre cause for celebration arose for gay men during this period. On March 1, 1963 - oh, day of blessed memory - Lee Mortimer, the infamous homophobe gossip columnist for the Daily Mirror, was taken from us. The following night there were some spontaneous parties to celebrate the occasion, two of which I was happy to attend.

On Friday, November 22, 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated, the office closed at the announcement of his death. As the staff of K-S was leaving, my boss called me into his office. He informed me that I had given incorrect data to one of the higher ups in the firm, and as it was obvious after two years that my heart wasn't exactly dedicated to media research and analysis, he had been told to fire me. Under the circumstances I was too numb for this bit of news to matter, but after the days of national shock and mourning passed, I was little short of delighted. Hallelujah!!! Two years in a monkey suit doing toad work was enough, and in their kindness and mercy the gods had lit a stick of dynamite under my ass.

My parents unexpectedly announced they were descending at Thanksgiving with a small group of friends to see a Syracuse football game that was being played in Yankee Stadium. Alumnus or not, I had less than zero interest - on the appointed day my lack of enthusiasm was punished by an afternoon of snow squalls. Spending the long holiday weekend with my parents had been an even less appealing prospect than the football game, but the presence of the other couples and the boozy party atmosphere made it look like the visit would go off without incident. (I had not, of course, told them that I would be out of work in two weeks, as I knew that would become the pretext for a barrage of oh-you'll-have-to-come-home-then. And thank god I hadn't!)) The night before they were leaving as I was saying goodbye to everyone, my father called me in their room. "Go up to that place and get your stuff, and come back with us," he demanded as soon as we got inside. That place? Oh right, my apartment. I said, no, it's where I live, my home. If looks could kill, I would have been dog food. He stared at me without saying anything for awhile, then reached in his pocket and peeled off a ten or twenty dollar bill. "I can't leave you any money when I die, you know," he said as he handed it to me. I mumbled that it was okay, it was his money. "They'll just get it away from you." Who? "Those people. They'll blackmail you." He went on, and it became clear he meant other gay people, it seemed not to occur to him that this blackmailing was usually an activity of his fellow straights. Hard upon the heels of this came another joyful event.

In mid-December the New York Times printed a jolly article on its front page: "Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern." Although it appeared as a news story on page one, pinned to recent attempts to close down gay bars, etc., it contained much material that would be characterized as op-ed today. The Times article ruminated on with anxious fretting and a tone of hand-wringing bewilderment, finally finding hope in the fact that as homosexuality had been recognized by the medical profession as a disease that cures could be effected. One should remember that voluntary psychotherapy was not all that was on the cure menu, among the "cures" authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. embraced at this time were commitment to insane asylums and aversion therapy using nausea-inducing drugs and electric shocks, as well. This article - on top of four years of focused and aggressive harassment by the police - was the last thing I wanted to see, the leading newspaper in the city and the nation publicly worrying about the prevalence of homosexuals and looking favorably at "cures!"

Many years later some gay writers pondering the quaint events of gay yesteryear from the relative safety of the late twentieth century have characterized this article as a welcomed breakthrough for press coverage about gays. And some at least have entirely missed the fact this article was seen by gay men as a very threatening event. I was very afraid it would fan the flames of a new era of McCarthyite witch-hunting of gays, and I can remember only fearful comments about this article. Somehow I and the people I knew then were too benighted, I guess, to grasp how a plainly homophobic article on the front page of the New York Times was not a boon of journalistic coverage we should have been devoutly wishing for.

The holiday season is down time for job hunting, but in the new year I began looking -- this go-round I took my time, and I was picky. In late May 1964 I found a job with Rockhill Educational Services, a small, family-owned education-related company with headquarters about an hour train ride north of the city. (My two years of penal servitude as a media analyst paid off. I now had three years of post-college job history and was in my mid-twenties -- my draft classification had, as I hoped, become a non-issue.) While the job would require me to be out of town for intervals totaling about six months of the year, which I wasn't sure I'd like, the company was an informally run place and the employees were mostly young people on their first or second job. It was on this job that I was forced to face the question of whether passing, or at least presenting myself as straight, might cost more than it was worth.

From December ’64 through March ’65 my job put me in the Chicago suburbs, or within striking distance of the city for weekend trips. This was the first time I’d gotten to see gay life in any place other than Syracuse or New York.

My first assignment was at a church affiliated college in the suburbs, and it was a real eye-opener. Two of the upper echelon college officials, both married, were gay, but were successfully passing – though at least one of them did drop in at the Dome Room of the Sherman Hotel once in awhile, it had a jacket and tie ambiance. Two younger, single administrators were also gay, and both seemed to be identified as queer by at least some of the students. However, the shocker was that the president of the student body was not only gay, but God and everybody knew it! He didn’t wear a placard, nor would he have been in my estimation particularly identifiable as gay, but he evidently had made no effort to conceal his sexual orientation. He was a very nice-looking, intelligent, affable guy who was obviously well-liked – though a few male students made their hostility very public (jocks, of course), I understood. But most of the students ignored his sexual orientation or seemed a bit bewildered by it as far as I could see. I believe that he had even invited a boyfriend to one of the major college social events. And this is 1964.

Chet, one of the young gay administrators took me to some of the bars. One was called the Annex (if I remember correctly) and was on North Clark Street, or near it somewhere, another was the Century near a movie house of the same name. They mentioned another place, which they didn't go because it was a leather bar...maybe it was the Gold Coast.

In the Century I was surprised to run into David, the nicer member of the clique I had fallen in with my Junior year at Syracuse University. He was living in Chicago. Stranger still, the very next night I ran into Tom, from the same clique, who was also living in Chicago and hadn’t a clue that David lived there too. Tom was the Philadelphia Main Line shithead who had made the observation after we slept together that I would always be queer, whereas he was going to get married, etc. – I asked after the wife and kids, but he seemed bereft of news on that topic.

These places were cruise bars that could have been in New York, but Chet took me to another just across the way and down the street from the Century, the Red Parrot (or maybe just the Parrot), which featured drag acts. While I’d seen drag queens at parties in the Grove, I don’t recall them doing anything other than vamping around and posing, though there was an end-of-the-season stage show with drag acts which I’d never seen.

The Red Parrot was my introduction to drag queens as stage performers. While the local audience received them with enthusiasm, I thought the first two were so f*cking awful that I would have been entertained only if they had been machine-gunned before my very eyes. But then Robbie, a buxom, black queen came out and put on a show that could have made a dead man cum. I think he may have lip-synched to an Etta James' song, but it doesn’t matter whose it might have been, for he did the number with a style and wit that was completely his own, a performance so unique that lip-synching was the least of it.

Unfortunately over the next few decades most gay drag acts I saw rivaled the later phenomenon of straight karaoke performances as a magnet for the massively untalented. Female impersonation rarely saw talent like Robbie, and comedy drag was done best by straight performers such as Milton Berle, Flip Wilson and Jonathon Winters. Gay drag performers, even of the caliber of Charles Pierce for example, seemed very limited - trapped in a repertoire from the camp traditions of gay life and by performing for easily satisfied gay audiences. Gay drag acts were rarely anything other than the same ol' same ol'. On the other hand, the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and the Cockettes (at least on their home ground, I hear) were great entertainment, and the Hot Peaches and other acts could be top class.

"A lack of talent is not enough," remarked Gore Vidal as he walked out of the theatre at the midpoint of the Cockette's

1971 New York opening, as did dedicated fan John Lennon and a large part of the audience.

Chet and I also went to Hugo’s, a place near Chicago’s Old Town. I was surprised to see that the place allowed dancing, at least in the form of a group dance called the Madison. It had already had trouble with the cops, and was closed not long afterward, Chet told me.

In 1961, Illinois had become the first state in the nation to adopt the recommendations of the American Law Institute and pass a com