WHAT A WONDERFUL TOWN

When My World Was Young 1945-56   Yellow Brick Road 1956-60   Wonderful Town 1960-61
   Wonderful Town (part II) 62-66   The Gay Sixties 1966-71    The Juicy Life 1972-76
   Juicy Life (pt. II) 1976-80    Losing Alexandria 1981-87   Losing Alexandria (pt. II) 1988 - 1990's

1960 - 1961 Early 60's NYC Gang members (photo: Edward Melcarth)

...is there really something left after the daily drubbing of the job, where whatever it is we've all produced stacks up here against the sky, looming over us in the traffic and exhaust to leave us, at best, an edgy, dangerous glamour, a hatbrim slant romance. See? You're feeling that New York way again....

Okay, let’s sing us one of the old songs: It’s a hard, tough town, too heavy to pick up and run with and way too big to move with whatever muscle life has left you with this week. Should you take up smoking Luckies? What time is it? What decade have you landed in tonight? What’s your most essential name and what’s your function here? Is it Walk or Don’t Walk, Uptown or Down, the real world or just one more astral fantasy? Some nights are so confusing it gets too hard to tell.

Rafi Zabor

(author of The Bear Comes Home)

album copy from Night and the City

Sailors in Times Square, early 60s (photo: Edward Melcarth)

I had $50.00 in my pocket and a new suit when I stepped off the Greyhound bus in New York. Both parting gifts from my parents. There's an irony in this if you're familiar with Forties gangster films: When prisoners finished their sentences and were released from the pen they got fifty bucks and a new suit of clothes from the State. I felt that was an entirely appropriate coincidence.

New York wasn't popularly the Big Apple in June1960, though it had been called "the Apple" as early as 1907. Sometimes it was Gotham, but that was sounding as dated as Damon Runyon. Sometimes it was the Big Town, but usually it was just "the city," but like The City, and even native New Yorkers meant Manhattan when they said it. But New York hadn't quite become the picture that sticks in my mind now, when I arrived it was still an old black and white movie in many ways.

A 1963 Miss Subways

The Yankees were playing ball in their stadium in the Bronx, even if the Dodgers and the Giants had skipped town. Ever since 1941 you could "Meet Miss Subways" each month as a new young female subway rider was selected to have her photo and a bio on a poster in the trains, publicity shots at the turnstiles - maybe hiking her skirt to show her "gams" - and thirty days of fame and glory as the First Lady of the republic of the IRT/BMT and IND..."Change at Times Square/42nd Street for the Shuttle."

"My beer is Rheingold - the dry beer" was the New York beer drinkers anthem, and it was cheaper than the national brands (...except that a six-pack of Kreuger's on sale always undercut it.) And each year, beginning in 1939, a beautiful and busty new Miss Rheingold was selected - probably more New Yorkers recognized her than knew the current Miss America.

Jinx Falkenburg, the first Miss Rheingold

Both Miss Subways and Miss Rheingold disappeared from city life in the 70's.

My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer
Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer
It’s refreshing, not sweet
It’s the extra dry treat
Won’t you try extra dry Rheingold beer?

But Lever House, the glass-walled skyscraper that housed the Lever Brothers Corporation had gone up on Park Avenue in the early Fifties and knocked the socks off of just about everyone. All of the "els," the elevated subway lines, south of Harlem had been torn down. Third Avenue was open to the sky at last: goodbye to the atmosphere of Lost Weekend; hello, high rent Silk Stocking District. By '60 the let's-knock-it-all-to-the-ground-and-start-over juggernaut was getting up a good head of steam. The new Seagram Building was the glory of Park Avenue, and it's restaurants - the Brasserie and the Four Seasons - became in places to go. The Guggenheim Museum, looking like a snail shell disguised as a funnel, had opened and caused as much of a buzz as its collection. For those not of Four Seasons' caliber Top of the Sixes at the new 666 Fifth Avenue was the place to dine while looking down on Central Park. And the west Village was being studded with expensive high rise apartment buildings that were killing the old bohemian neighborhood.

Lever House, the mother of all glass box skyscrapers

However, block after block of midtown avenues on both the East and West sides were still lined with late 19th and very early 20th century buildings; much of the housing in Manhattan was the old brownstones and tenements. West of Hudson Street in the Village was nowhere, and no one went into Central Park after dark except for a risky blow job. The Beaux Arts beauty of Grand Central Terminal straddled Park Avenue at 42nd Street uncontested splendor, and what will always be "the old Penn Station," a huge classical building derived from the Baths of Caracalla, stood just south of West 34th Street. And the "best people" still stayed at the Plaza Hotel or the Pierre at the southeast corner of Central Park. The Metropolitan Opera House was on West 39th Street, (Lincoln Center was a neighborhood of slum tenements made famous in West Side Story); Madison Square Garden was on 8th Ave. and 50th Street.

Eating at the Automat

The nearest thing to "fast food" was the soon to vanish string of Automats, or Bickford's cafeterias. The Prexies chain offered the "Hamburger with a college education." Delicious! Lower on the price scale the White Castles cooked up fast - and square-shaped - burgers. Also delicious! The Nedicks chain was for franks (hot dogs.) Orange Julius stands featured a concoction of orange juice and milk that gave the places their name, or for fifteen cents you could have a tropical drink at Grey's Papaya or one of its rivals. Ladies patronized the decorous Schrafts establishments, which seemed to hire their staffs "right off the boat from Ireland" as people often observed. "Meet me at Original Joe's"...meant a straight inexpensive Italian joint on Third Ave. in midtown which was a gay favorite. It became "Original Joe's" when another restaurant opened only a few doors away, using the name Joe's in attempt to get a free ride on their reputation. Pam-Pam, a little burger restaurant on Sheridan Square was a gay institution, though the Riker's across the street was packed with gay guys in the early morning hours.

At night the Great White Way was bright, but certainly not white. New York street lights gave off a dirty yellowish light which lit a fairly small area. On major arteries store windows, bars and restaurants and advertising signs, as well as the headlights of motor traffic, increased this to a kind of splotchy brightness. Otherwise the streets could be heavily shadowed, and dark enough in many places to make walking hazardous - or dangerous. Long stretches of the streets looked worn and tired and gusts of wind blew gritty dust through them so bad that many New Yorkers wore sunglasses as a defense not an affectation. The crumbling West Side Highway, elevated several stories above ground on decaying girders and dropping pieces of itself along the way, was a broad path of gloom and noise that wound down the entire length of the island along the Hudson shore.

Big comfortable Checker cabs plied the streets, and were the preferred taxi. But buses were old and falling apart inside and out, and the bus stops were farther apart then.

(left) Early 60s bus

(right) Interior of IND line subway car, early 60s

Subway stations were grimy, stunk of piss and were furnished with wooden benches. If the buses were old the trains were ancient. (But for 15 cents....who's complaining?) The subway cars were an appropriate olive drab or battleship grey, the seats were often covered in woven cane varnished to a fare-thee-well or in plastic "leatherette," in either case usually worn, torn or slashed, and small fans circulated the air spasmodically, at least those that worked did. The doors between cars were often left open for ventilation, sending pages from discarded newspapers flying through the air while bottles rolled back and forth on the floor. Derelict drunks sacked out on the trains for the night.

Gypsy and Westside Story were the established Broadway musical hits. Bye Bye, Birdie had just opened. Jason Robards was in The Ice Man Cometh. (JFK would be elected president in November, and the musical Camelot would open in the fall and become the nickname for the era.) Old glamour spots like El Morocco and the Blue Angel were there for the upper crust. The less affluent could still go to the Roseland ballroom, and much farther down on the scale was the Tango Palace on Broadway, where men could buy tickets to dance with a staff of "taxi dancers." (Yes, the world of Ten Cents a Dance and Private Dancer was still doing business. And here's a ticket from '61 or '62.)

Amato Opera, 107 seats Sammy's Bowery Follies (photo: Weegee)

Sammy's Bowery Follies with its cast of Skid Row performers was still in business too. And the plebes could see scaled down grand opera sung by unknowns in the tiny Amato Opera in the same tenderloin neighborhood. "The Crossroads of America": Times Square and West 42nd Street ("the Deuce")? It was a combination carnival and trash barrel, but heading straight for hell.

Regardless of what I knew from newspapers, magazines and television, those night-long rides on the Greyhound bus in the spring of my Junior year had been taking me to a New York made up of images my imagination had clipped from those great musicals On the Town and Wonderful Town. It was going to be a rambunctious, music-filled, vividly colored Hollywood spectacle - and with the initial sightseeing and gawking during the day, and the rushing from bar to bar in taxis at night it had seemed like that for awhile. Living in the city with Rob the summer of '59 toned the picture down considerably. But after I returned to college for my senior year, sometimes - especially while listening to a couple of current Broadway show albums - I had still slid into fantasies with a vaguely confectionary flavor.

But pavement level reality when I stepped off the bus in June 1960 had nothing in common with the Big Rock Candy Mountain. One of the most popular shows on television in these years was the Naked City series (1958 - 63) set in New York. It was based on Jules Dassin's 1948 award-winning movie of the same name, and the film's noir style had been inspired by New York photographer Weegee, who had published a book of photos of New York life called Naked City in 1945. That atmosphere was successfully carried over into the TV series, and though the city was changing, on the whole the gay life I would experience my first few years in New York was colored with its black and white underworld tone: A brittle and threatening world, where glancing over your shoulder became a reflex.

THE PURGE

This era, began with the Lee Mortimer crusade in the Mirror in late 1959, and ran on with little respite to the end of the administration of Mayor Wagner, whose last term in office ended in 1965. It was a bleak and paranoid period of gay life in the city. (My own romantic view of these years is that they were also the prolonged death throes of the 50's.) Several influences contributed to the official campaign, most of them having to do more with the vagaries of local politics, in my estimation, than with any general moral outcry.

Mayor Robert Wagner

Perhaps this is demonstrated to some degree by remembering that these same repressive years also encompassed the period of the great civil rights campaigns of the 60s, the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1960 - 63), whose style and programs brought an excitement and glamour into national life after the staid Eisenhower era (1952 - 1960), and the emergence of the Hippies.

New York like a number of other cities in the United States had been controlled by a party machine, many of these had their origins in the post Civil-War era. The northeast of the U.S. had become a stronghold of the new Republican party under Lincoln. The only way the Democratic party was able to lose its party-of-the-Rebellion stigma and regain political influence was to woo the successive waves of European immigrants who were arriving here. Over the decades these machines evolved as powerful forces in the life of many major cities, becoming sources of patronage, a place for grievance and redress and avenues to power for the new arrivals. In NYC the Democratic party machine was known as Tammany Hall.

Though its influence had waned in the late Thirties and the Forties, it had been revived under the leadership of Carmine DeSapio in the Fifties, a departure from its history of Irish bosses. Tammany was again a potent power able to control and deliver many thousands of votes, but it was marked by dubious dealings and connections as well. Opposed to Tammany Hall were the emerging Reform Democrats who espoused more liberal social policies and party politics free from the manipulation and corruption of the Tammany machine. Any Democrat who wanted to be mayor in New York City in this era had to keep and eye on both of these camps if he wanted to ensure his election. There were shadowy connections involving Tammy Hall; racketeers from the various crime syndicates ("families") -- Italian; the waterfront racketeers - often Irish; and the police force - heavily Irish and Italian in makeup. Mayor Wagner had eased himself away from Boss DeSapio, and escaped being dragged down with DeSapio and Tammany Hall in the Sixties. What this meant in practical terms was that Wagner had balanced reform and the appearance of clean government, which appeased Jewish and WASP Reformers, with a day-to-day system of government that did not alienate the Tammany Hall faithful, largely working class and Catholic.

One easy scapegoat in any red herring "cleanup" campaign was the gay population. (The other was prostitutes.) Raids on gay bars and meat racks could be purveyed to the press and voting public as part of a campaign against crime and vice with no fear of alienating anyone. It also spotlighted the police as guardians of the moral order, and helped deflect the frequent charges of corruption and bribery which were leveled at them. It was a diversionary tactic that helped the Wagner administration (and the police force) to present itself as the enemy of crime and corruption in a very handy manner without in fact doing anything very substantive about either.

Most gay bars and restaurants were operated by the Mafia, or under their "protection." (Rumor was that the profits from this activity helped finance the emerging heroin trade.) Bribes were paid to the police, which kept harassment essentially directed onto the patrons and not the establishments themselves. Wagner's cleanup campaign disturbed this lucrative arrangement. However, it was better to have this action in the hands of the police than those of some special commission, which might do permanent or long-term damage to the status quo and expose scandalous ties between government and crime into the bargain. The currently running Broadway musical Tenderloin was based on one such period of moral reform - and its failure, and the musical Fiorello dealt with political corruption in pre-WW II New York. The more things change...etc.

Thus, for the Mafia and the police it was a matter of playing a waiting game until the politicians - and the press and public - lost interest. In the meantime, gay social life was ground to pieces by these forces -- none of which would have seen this as of the slightest consequence whatsoever. While the atmosphere of illegality and the threat of punishment hung over gay life in the normal course of things, at this juncture the threat of force was actualized in an ongoing repression of gay life that to some degree affected almost everyone gay. It was not a matter of a couple of "tea room queens" being entrapped by a plainsclothesman, or a few bar patrons being hassled in a raid, this time the clear intent was to close down public gay life across the board. Gay life for the next few years was to be an oftentimes dreary game of hide and seek. There would be moments when Syracuse would almost seem like a paradise lost in comparison.

BACK TO THE KID WITH A SUITCASE

My first stop was the West Side Y (West 63rd & Central Park West), which was notorious as a place to cruise, and was virtually a gay hotel - though the management quietly did everything they could to put the clamps on both. I'd been warned by Rob to be very careful about what I did there. Consequently, I was very aloof, and my impression in any case was that gay guys were being extremely cautious about any "action." The main draw for me though was that it was cheap and clean, and in a nice neighborhood on the edge of Midtown. After a week I moved to the Sloan House (YMCA) on West 34th Street and 9th Ave, which was slightly cheaper, though in a somewhat sleazy neighborhood. It had the same reputation as having been a wild place for pickups until very recently.

On my first day there I was taking a shower alone when someone came in and used the sinks around the corner. Before he left he peeked into the showers. A minute later a dark-haired guy with a gym-built body (these were not a dime a dozen in 1960) came in to take a shower. He was extremely chatty and in less than a minute invited me to his room - though with the proviso that I go get dressed first and then come to his room. (This I learned later was so you didn't get caught in someone's room without your street clothes.) When I got there I found that the first guy, who had checked out the shower, was there too. They were lovers, and the hunk was often used as bait to get a threesome - although in this case it didn't work as I said I "haven't done that yet" (though I have no doubt I would have if the first guy had appealed to me.) Nevertheless, the three of us went out that night to the Cherry Lane bar on Commerce Street (in the Village), and then to what was clearly a new venture as a gay bar, the Coral Lounge, just down the street from the Sloan House Y. These guys had been staying at the Sloan House for a couple of weeks, and warned me that employees patrolled the hallways wearing sneakers and listened at the doors if they thought guys were having sex.

I lucked out with a job. And I had to. As a college graduate I would be called up for a physical soon and be reclassified 1-A, prime draft bait; therefore, my chances of finding a job - especially as I needed one immediately - bordered on zero. Through a straight woman friend of Rob's that I'd met the past summer I managed to get a temp job at the New York Times News Service as a clerk/gofer for the summer.

Within a week or so, in a desperate effort to eke out a miniscule salary, I moved to Jamaica, a remote neighborhood in the outer borough of Queens. I got a room in the Jamaica Y on Parsons Blvd., at what for me was significantly less money than I'd been paying in Manhattan. Out there the gay life situation was even worse. There was one very small, dingy gay bar, the Bull's Head, which operated in an atmosphere of palpable tension on the part of both customers and management. Queens, even before the crackdown, had not been even remotely as open as Manhattan. Moreover, this bar wasn't in the Jackson Heights or Forest Hills neighborhoods, which at least had small gay populations -- it couldn't have hoped to be more than a quick-profit venture before getting padlocked.

My salary was very small, even for this era. I could go to a bar and nurse a couple of beers for the evening, but after paying for rent, meals, transportation and miscellaneous living expenses it wasn't often that I got to do more expensive things. I do remember, though, that one of the first things I did was buy a two-fer (half-price ticket) for a matinee performance of Gypsy. I went by myself, so I got totally taken up in the performance like probably never happened again. Later on this year I did get to see Leave It To Jane at the Sheridan Square Theater, Off Broadway tickets were considerably cheaper than Bway back then. It was a revival of a Jerome Kern 1917 musical with a very thin story and silly dialogue and humor, and it was too big a stretch for my limited experience to appreciate - except for Dorothy Greener's performance, especially her number "Cleopatterer." (Dorothy was an excellent comic actress, and she used to come to the Five Oaks often when I went there much later in the Sixties.)

When I'd arrived at the beginning of summer I found only two bars left open out of the more than two dozen from the previous year, the Cafe De Lys and the Cherry Lane, which were about a block from each other in a then very quiet part of the Village just east of Hudson Street. (Actually, west of Sixth Ave. the Village was a fairly subdued place overall, despite having many restaurants and bars.) The de Lys, was the smaller place and its crowd was more relaxed. Its juke box had such an extraordinary menu of selections that it must have reflected someone's personal taste - choice jazz ballads and only the better pop music. I especially remember Etta Jones' (no, not Etta James) recording, Don't Go To Strangers. The de Lys also had an affable bartender, Peter, who had a beautiful gym-built bod, not at all a common thing in these years.

Peter, the de Lys bartender

The Cherry Lane bar was a bigger, livelier place, and a few blacks and Hispanics were part of the regular crowd. It also allowed dancing from time to time that summer, which was courting disaster, but perhaps it was a way of trying to increase the profits while there was still time. The atmosphere was not like a dinner dance with the upper level of the upper crust, by any means.

Cherry Lane Theatre (canopy), the doorway after the bench was the bar entrance,
building with the red awning was the Blue Mill restaurant, popular with gay men.

One clique of regular patrons from the Village was inclined to exercise a kind of "ownership" of the place by being aggressively loud and campy. They are not to be imagined as posturing hot-house flowers, however, several were very husky guys. One of the latter was Hal, a big young man with a voluptuously handsome face, who delighted in throwing out bitchy put-downs and provoking confrontations even with total strangers. I remember one night he baited a new customer, and after the second or third remark the guy wasn't having any, thank you. The guy's friends tried to restrain him, but Hal was in his glory and poured out the taunts. The guy broke loose, hit Hal with a volley of punches and decked him in a matter of seconds. All hell broke loose - shouts, curses, fists flying - and for a few moments this "fairy bar" looked a waterfront dive.

And then there was the Julius Bar - Julius's - on West 10th between Seventh Ave. and Greenwich Ave. in the Village, but it resisted with all it's might to keep from becoming an openly gay bar. Though it was a battle barely won, the management was unrelenting in its efforts no matter how many gay guys might patronize the place. The bar was not exactly comfortable as a result.

A FULL-TIME JOB AND "THE BOYS" FIND AN APARTMENT

At the end of the summer I was able to get transferred into the Times newsroom as a full-time copy boy. I worked at night, which was the peak time for the Times as it is a morning paper. At 3 a.m. subway service was as bad as it got: interminable waiting for the E train to Jamaica, and then the long ride out hitting all the local stops could add an hour and a half to the day. It also made having a social life in Manhattan a major problem. A trick I met in a bar invited me to stay at his place in Manhattan, a sparsely furnished apartment above Johnnie Johnson's nightclub on Second Avenue, and then after a month or so I got an apartment on West 81st and Amsterdam Avenue, on the Upper West Side, with Milton, a longtime friend of his who'd just arrived in town to try to make a life for himself as a pianist in show business.

Milton and I were shown the apartment by a Hispanic super, who took care of a bunch of buildings on a part-time basis - the radiators were stone cold on a bitterly cold November day (a harbinger of more of the same all winter it turned out.) We then were sent to an address on West End Avenue to see Mr. Goldman, the very appropriately named landlord. It was a large, old apartment where a Scrooge-like man sitting behind a huge desk in an otherwise unfurnished room, interviewed us as we stood before him. In closing he smiled and commented that he didn't mind renting to "boys like you," and he was sure we would make good tenants. I was to learn from a landlady later on that his attitude was a not uncommon sentiment amongst many Westside landlords: Better fags than Puerto Ricans and blacks. They didn't mind if you were "that way" if you were white, though gay Hispanics and blacks did seem to have a bit of leg up over their straight compatriots.

BOYS

The use of "boys" to characterize gay males was often used with the same condescending intent as when it was applied to black adult males.

Contrary to the 90's and after, when there would be an accepted Boy image that many men (straight and gay) would aggressively seek to emulate, and when adolescence would virtually stretch into the mid-twenties, no gay males in the Sixties strove to affect a Boy look or habits. You would have been taken for a total jackass. For one thing, the youth market and culture were in a nascent stage of development, and there was little, if any, ambivalence about the desirability of leaving the hallmarks of adolescence behind. "Maturity" was the constant injunction during high school years, and maturity was accepted and yearned for by kids as the Promised Land of privilege and independence. In the Fifties and early Sixties college students very self-consciously repudiated the music and dress of teenagers and created their own stereotype, which said young adult. The goal of young people in this era was to achieve adulthood, which meant freedom, increased status, access to money and power. Being designated a "boy" as an adult meant that in some ways you hadn't made it completely - most frequently, probably, in reference to being unmarried. (The expression "the boy's night out" pointed, even if veiled as humor, to married men acting retrogressively.) Homosexuals were not only not real men, as "boys" they were not really adults either. And, of course, from there it was only a short step to "girls."

When the anti-gay columnist, Lee Mortimer, warned Allen's bar and restaurant and other ostensibly straight establishments about having gay customers, there was nothing neutral or unclear in his use of "the boys" in referring to gay men. Even when used by gay men, "gay boys," as far as I can recall was always a put down. Many years later, in the mid-Seventies, I had a landlady who habitually referred to her gay male tenants and their friends as "you boys," a term I never heard her use with straight males tenants, even the single ones.

WEST SIDE STORY

...Moreover, this entire region [the Upper West Side] combines in its general aspect all that is magnificent in the leading capitals of Europe...in our grand Boulevard [Broadway] the rival of the finest avenues of the gay capital of France, in our Riverside Avenue the equivalent of the Chiara of Naples and the Corso of Rome, while the Beautiful 'Unter den Linden' of Berlin and the finest portions of the West End of London are reproduced again and again.

Egbert L. Viele, 1879

NYC tenements, 20th century

The Upper West Side runs from Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park north to the vicinity of Columbia University, and is bounded by Central Park on the east and the Hudson River (and Riverside Park) on the west.

Today its gentrification is complete, but in 1960 it was just beginning. Generally speaking, its avenues were lined with large and often architecturally impressive apartment buildings, or shabby old commercial buildings and/or crumbling tenements - depending on which avenue; while the streets were mostly filled with New York's famous brownstone buildings, once private homes, but converted to small apartment buildings and rooming houses. (Note: In most of Manhattan the broad "Avenues" run north/south, whereas, the narrower "Streets" run east/west.) Other neighborhoods to the south on Manhattan's Upper West Side had their own names, e.g. Hell's Kitchen (in midtown), Chelsea (West 20's), Greenwich Village (below West 14th), etc. With the general exception of the bohemian Village, most of the rest of the West Side was very definitely not the place to live. The newly gentrified, up and coming Upper East Side was the desirable address - and had the desirable telephone numbers. In 1960 New York City telephone exchanges were still named, and exchanges were specific to neighborhoods. Thus, a Templeton 8 number indicated that you had an Upper East Side residence, so did Butterfield 8 (as in John O'Hara's novel of the same name.)

The tenements on the west side of Broadway just above Columbus Circle in the lower Sixties (i.e., streets numbered West 60th through West 69th), the area where West Side Story was set, were being razed to make way for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Passing by on the #11 bus, those gutted blocks reminded me of the newsreels I had seen as a child of bombed out London or Hamburg or Berlin. The idea that whole streets could be knocked down and all traces of their former appearance vanish, or in this case even the actual streets themselves disappear from the map, was still new to me.

Central Park West was the eastern boundary of the Upper West Side. It was lined with opulent old apartment buildings, and for much of its length was still a desirable and moneyed address. The avenue has buildings on its west side only, which means they have an unobstructed view across the Central Park. The east side of the street has just a sidewalk, and many trees and benches, and runs along the stone boundary wall of Central Park. This side of CPW was also one of the city's busiest meat racks and cruising areas at night from the mid-Sixties up to the entrances to the park (and the area of the Rambles) at West 78th and 81st streets.

The western boundary of the Upper West Side, Riverside Drive, faced a lovely park and overlooked the Hudson River, and though it had seen better days it was still considered a fairly decent, if deteriorating neighborhood. Parts of Riverside Park were also used as meat racks and pick-up areas at night. The Soldiers and Sailors monument in the upper 80's was notorious, but somewhat dangerous as young muggers sometimes descended on the place and picked off victims. West End Avenue, one block west of Riverside, was lined with large apartment buildings, much plainer looking than the grand ones on CPW, once fashionable but now faded and progressively more tired the further north you went.

(left) Upper West Side houses
(right) Soldiers and Sailors Monument

While its east and west perimeters housed middle class and wealthy white people - many of them Jews - and the offices of doctors and dentists, the broad central section of the Upper West Side was inhabited by a mixture of far less affluent folks. Between these outer avenues were Broadway, Amsterdam Ave. and Columbus Ave. They and the streets which crossed them were an area that ran a negative gamut from dingy to slum. Some of these were representative of the white ethnic families that had moved into the neighborhood as it began its decline (Irish, German and Jews seemed to predominate), but it had also attracted a newer population of non-ethnic whites who earned small or precarious incomes, and last - in many respects - was the large minority of Hispanics and a smaller number of blacks, who as groups were certainly very poor.

And even in its glory days the Upper West Side had attracted actors, and the Lucerne Hotel on the corner of Amsterdam and 79th St. was where the famous actor, James O'Neil and his wife had lived for awhile, and where their son, Eugene O'Neil, later to become one of America's greatest playwrights, was born. The Lucerne was still there when Milton and I moved in two blocks away, but it had become a seedy dump with torn curtains and window shades flapping in the open windows, and tough looking men boozing on its front steps. (It has been refurbished and is once again a fine hotel.)
Hotel Lucerne, W. 79th & Amsterdam

Verdi Square, 72nd & Broadway

Actors and dancers were part of the newer white population that had been attracted to the neighborhood because of its low rents, as well in their case its closeness to the theatre district just west of Times Square. However, the Upper West Side itself had been part of the theatre neighborhood of the 1920's. Shuffle Along, a black musical, opened on West 63rd Street and introduced the hit song, "I'm Just Wild About Harry." Langston Hughes credited the show with inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance. The Charleston, a dance craze of that era, was first seen in a musical at the Colonial Theater at 63rd & Broadway The famous Jazz Age madam Polly Adler moved into the apartment of a showgirl on Riverside Drive and began running the first of her many classy bordellos. Crime lords Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello each lived in the Majestic Apartments at 72nd and Central Park West for a time, and Costello was shot down in the lobby in a failed gangland assassination in 1957.

Later, author Ira Levin would set Rosemary's Baby (1967) in the neighborhood, and Roman Polanski would film the movie at the Dakota apartment building on W. 72nd St. & Central Park West.

Possibly the presence of gay theatre people (plus the low rents, of course) was what attracted other gay men to the neighborhood. As I was to learn over time, the Upper West Side seemed to have had a gay population whose history went back to the beginning of the Fifties and perhaps the Forties. The popular Cork Club bar had been located there in the early Fifties as well as the Verdi, both near Verdi Square at 72nd and Broadway; and in the late Fifties two popular dance bars, the 415 on Amsterdam in the low 80's and the Mais Oui in the 60's near Broadway. The Central Park West cruising scene had been going on for years and was largely made up of local residents.

Alan Helms, "Young Man from the Provinces" cover. Lou Degni (Mark Forrest) by Lon of NY.

The 50's/60's Golden Boy of New York gay life, Alan Helms, began his saga in the city on the Upper West Side. In 1957 the physique photographer Alonzo Hannigan, known as Lon of New York, moved his studio to an apartment on West End Avenue once occupied by Mae West, and after it was raided by the police in 1961 he moved over to West 72nd Street.

The fall of '60 was very cold, and the winter was worse, and the streets often virtually empty. I still worked nights and slept days, my days off never included Friday or Saturday nights. I would run over to the 8th Ave. IND (subway) on Central Park West in the late afternoon, or catch a bus on Columbus for downtown if it wasn't too cold to wait in the open. In the early hours of the morning I hustled back from the subway as fast as I could, and the street lighting was so bad that it was pitch black in some places. As far as I knew there were no gay bars on the West Side, so I went to whatever part of town where I heard one had opened.

At one point that winter a powerful blizzard choked the city with drifts that brought traffic to a complete standstill and buried cars and sidewalks for days. The silence was eerie. I walked down the middle of Columbus Avenue to work as even the subways weren't running.

One evening on my way to work I was almost alone on the IND platform, only two or three other people waiting at a distance from me. I saw a train coming down the tunnel, and the draft from it began to suck up trash and dust. I heard footsteps on the stairs as someone raced down from the token booth to be sure they didn't miss it. A man dashed onto the platform forty or fifty feet from me and looked up the tunnel. The train had almost reached the station. He jumped down onto the tracks, curled up on his side between the rails and put his head on a rail, resting it on this folded hands. For just a few seconds he looked like a child going to sleep. The trainman slammed on the brakes, but it was useless. It was a short train that came to a stop farther down the tracks. The man's body was almost in front of me, his head smashed like a melon fallen off a truck.

I was the only witness. I was interviewed by the police at the scene...my boss was pissed because I was late for work, never mind that I 'd seen some poor wretch destroy himself; then later I was visited twice by officers from different branches of the police department - my supervisor was steaming. One of the late editions of the Times had a brief paragraph about the incident buried in the back pages. He had lived in a rooming house not far from me: middle aged, no job, a name and an address- but no other personal information was found on his body or in his room. I finished on the last shift and got home after four a.m., about an hour later the phone wakes me: it's a guy from the Transit Police! Could he stop by to interview me. And it wasn't just the same list of questions yet again, but - sorry - I would have to go down to the subway station and describe what happened at the scene...so, about five a.m or five-thirty the two of us walked back in the freezing ass cold to where my night, and nightmare had started. The horrible scene, the guy's anonymity have remained with me.

Oshun, a Santeria orixa in her Christian guise.

In this place where the sound of sirens never ceases

and people move like a ghostly traffic from home to work

and home,

and the poor in their tenements speak to their gods....

Mark Strand

from Night Piece (after Dickens)

Except for ducking into a bodega (small Hispanic grocery) to buy something for breakfast, or maybe stopping at the all-night greasy spoon on the corner of Amsterdam & 81st to pick up a couple of burgers on the way home - and being aware that the customers were mostly Hispanic and black - I had seen almost nothing of the neighborhood I had moved into.

Then came a warm spring day. There were dozens of people on the stoops of the tenements next door and across the street, people hanging out the windows too and radios blasting salsa music (though I had no idea what it was called.) I turned the corner onto Amsterdam Avenue and stopped dead in my tracks. Here it was, just like the lyrics in Westside Story, "Puerto Rico in America!" And the Dominican Republic and Cuba and Haiti too. It was if someone had given the neighborhood a shot of adrenalin: hundreds and hundreds of people...music, noise and talking, yelling and fighting in Spanish and Creole...racks of clothes displayed in front of stores and piles of merchandise on the sidewalk...signs in Spanish advertising the services of lawyers, translators, diviners...little Hispanic eateries...comidas chinas y criollas and botanicas, which sold the paraphernalia of Santeria, the Afro-Latin religion. It wasn't entirely a pretty Caribbean travelogue for a callow recent college grad, however.

Burglary was endemic. Many apartment doors, like ours, were fitted with "police locks" in addition to one or more regular locks. These were thick iron bars that fitted into a metal slot in the floor while the upper end leaned against the door and slid into a metal box in the middle of the door about a third of the way up from the floor. They were opened with a key that caused the bar to slip aside, letting you push the door open. Without a key, kicking the door down and knocking it off its hinges was the only way to gain entry. Windows often had security gates on them. There was a darker side too: the incredible squalor and violence of the Endicott Hotel (now a classy condo), the dealers who melted into the doorways when the cop cars cruised slowly down the streets, the gangs of brawling young drunks that hung out on certain corners at night...narcotics and prostitution. Coming home from work in the early morning hours became scary now the weather was warm.

I'd never known any Hispanic people and had only a fleeting academic knowledge of their cultures from sociology courses I'd taken. But in the next few years Latino popular culture would become a familiar, if secondary, note in my life - and until the mid-Seventies salsa and merengue were part of the background music of the neighborhood - and in both my personal life and at various jobs I would have Hispanic friends and acquaintances, as well as sexual partners. However, at this point I was encountering "Puerto Ricans" almost for the first time, and these were the people that many (perhaps, most) whites considered the source of everything that made the West Side a bad place. (White New Yorkers often lumped all Hispanics together as "Puerto Ricans" at this time, those with more contempt called them "Spicks" - from Hispanics I'm assuming.)

"What do they know about love uptown!?" from Greenwich Village, U.S.A, which played at 1 Sheridan Square in 1960

THE BARS

The De Lys and the Cherry Lane closed late in the year. (Julius's remained open and attracted a persistent gay clientele, however, it was an avowed straight bar whose temperature ran from unwelcoming to aggressively anti-gay.) The gay Finale restaurant - which may have actually been called the Grand Finale - managed to remain open throughout the years of harassment, perhaps because it attracted a very small and quiet bar crowd. (Anyway, it was too rich for my blood.) The gay bar scene remained furtive and unstable for years, marked by a series of short-lived places numbering in the dozens, without a doubt, if I could remember them all - Glennon's, 14th Street Cafe, 19th Street Cafe, Coronet, Bleecker St. Tavern, the Hat Box, the Campus, Jack & Nats and on and on. Usually no more than three were operating at the same time, often just two as far as I knew, and their life spans were sometimes counted in weeks - months if they were lucky. It went on like this for several years. Open/close, open/close, now here/now there. Though these places might be pretty crowded on a Friday or a Saturday night, considering that there were so very few open at the same time, most guys couldn't have been patronizing them. Socializing with friends and giving and going to parties played a much larger part in gay life than in later decades.

The first new bars I remember being open for a short time at this point (late '60/early '61) were, Glennon's on 14th St. and Second Ave. and the 14th Street Cafe on 14th about a block before Glennons. The walk from the subway station in Union Square over to the bars was extremely dark along that stretch of 14th Street, which added to the sense of furtiveness and illegality - plus the knowledge that this area had a reputation for being another not-so-great place at night. My exposure to Manhattan and its neighborhoods had been largely limited to western Greenwich Village, Midtown and Third Avenue above 42nd St during 1959. Now, however, finding my way to the latest gay bar, and going home with tricks would provide a crash course in Manhattan geography and the three subway lines, the IND, IRT and BMT.

I was struck by the mix of guys in Glennon’s the first time I walked in. My impression up until then had been that bars in the city could easily be categorized by the type of customer they appealed to, and that certainly had been the way they had been described and regarded by Rob and the other people I'd first met in '59. However, in Glennon's there was no discernable physical type, no predominant style of dress, and a somewhat wider age range than I'd noticed before -- and, as I found out, a far greater mix of classes/occupations. And that brittle tone of campy bitchiness was missing. I liked the difference right away.

(My guess is that had I had the opportunity to go to more bars more often in '59 that I would have found that variations of the Ivy League uniform or the alternative "faggy" clothes from the likes of the Village Squire were not the entire gamut of gay male dress either. I 'm guessing from a couple of quick trips into the Tic-Toc, Annex and Big Dollar in '59, that jeans, tee shirts and a range of sport shirts were a regular part of the scene there - as well as in the hustler bars. And even flannel shirts. Gasp! Proto-clones maybe.)

Over the following years many of the bars which opened were like Glennon’s in terms of clientele. I suppose this was pretty much dictated by the fact that the heat was on so intensely that there were few bars to go to; therefore, everyone pretty much had to go to the same places. I've often thought in retrospect that this prolonged anti-gay bar campaign may have helped to break down some of the affectation and bitchiness that was part of the gay New York I was first introduced to. However, despite what seemed to me to be a wider variety of guys, there might be only one or two black guys in a bar, and a few Hispanics. (My judgment of who might be Hispanic was off during my early years in the city. I had grown up in a town whose white population contained a large Sicilian minority, many of whom could have easily been taken for Hispanics. And it was really two or three years before I was aware that many of the people that I saw as Italian or Sicilian were actually Hispanics.)

I went to Glennon's far more often as the 14th Street Cafe spooked me because quite a few of the guys wore leather jackets, caps and boots, and not being nearly as crowded as Glennon's the atmosphere felt too intense for me. On the other hand, I remember that I did go home with guys from there on two occasions. One them, Tony Montoya, was a well-built, swarthy guy of Mexican-Italian background, who talked out of the side of his mouth like a movie gangster. He had an apartment in a tenement in a still Italian section of the south Village, a neighborhood I'd never been in. While we never became close friends, Tony was someone I'd hang out with if I saw him in the bars or at the beach. Oh, he was also an "older" guy, thirty-five, maybe a bit older.
The 14th Street Cafe was the first place I was ever in that could have been called a leather bar. Judging from the fact that a fair number of the guys, as I recall, were fitted out with boots, wide belts, jackets and caps of leather, and that they seemed to be familiar with each other, I would guess there had to have been other bars like this one before that I simply hadn't heard about. Quite likely, as the people I had met in '59 would definitely not have been interested. (The Big Dollar, based on one brief visit, would have been a likely candidate.) About 1963 a bar opened in the West Twenties or maybe it was the Thirties, called the Exchange - from its proximity to a major telephone building - and it certainly attracted a leather crowd.

These were the years when you might come upon your most recent "favorite" bar (out of 2 or 3 open) and find a large sign in the window saying RAIDED PREMISES BY ORDER OF THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT. What to do? At one time the answer would have been to go somewhere else, but when there only were one or maybe two others, and they were not necessarily anywhere nearby it wasn't that simple any more -- particularly if you were literally counting your nickels and dimes like I was then. I can remember the first time I screwed up my courage to go in anyway, but that was because I saw a few other customers through the window. It was about this same time, and was a place around Sixth Ave. and 57th St. A bored cop sat inside and there were a dozen or so customers. There was a lot of forced humor and not much fun, and early home or to one of the meat racks to cruise. In a few days or maybe weeks (if they were luckier) that bar would be padlocked and that was the end of it. Then you would hear of another one.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

As much as my work schedule interfered with a normal social life, the kid-in-a-candy-store mentality of a young male in New York certainly contributed to making some of my contacts one-off tricks too. If I didn’t meet anyone from the scads of incognito movie stars and celebrities the college clique had told me populated the gay subculture, I did learn in a latter-day expression that “we are everywhere.” I can recall being a bit surprised by this, which maybe is an indication that I had accepted the stereotype that gay men were mainly to be found only in certain occupations, i.e. – hairdresser, interior decorator, dancer and so on.

Deke was a young English exec, who passed through the city several times on his way between the UK and Brazil. Eddie was a free-lance accountant, who introduced me to the film and soundtrack of Black Orpheus – and, thus, to Brazilian music, which eventually became a passion of mine. Bill, was a Greyhound Bus dispatcher, Stan a fireman and Paul a policeman – who picked me up on Central Park West as he was going home after his tour of duty. Sid, a cute man - in his late 30´s it turned out (gasp!) - was a merchant seaman; a Mohawk-white mixed blooded guy, George, was an airline steward (no flight attendants then) from Canada. The incredibly built, Merle, designed sets for television and the theatre, and was a kind of 60’s NYC gay muscle celebrity - and as I found out later when I went to Fire Island, he was king-of-the-roost in a house bodybuilder roommates in Cherry Grove, and guys would make up a reason to take the walk their house was on to see if they were exercising out on the deck.

I met a couple of guys who were very nice and had their own odd schedules which dovetailed with mine, and I saw each of them for awhile.

Bob Luger lived in the village in a very old one and quirkily laid out building, on Cornelia Street. It was tiniest studio apartment I have ever seen. After getting off at the Times early in the morning, I would take the subway downtown, get a couple of greasy burgers with onions and two Cokes at Riker's on Sheridan Square and then go over to his place. He’d put on some Billy Holiday LP’s and we'd have sex. His place was so small we had to sit on the bed and use the window sill for a table while we ate our post-screw burgers. The garret-like room, with a candle burning on the dresser, and old fashion casement windows overlooking a paved courtyard made me feel like I was in Paris not New York. Whenever I hear Billy Holiday singing If the Moon Turns Green, I think of Bob, so perhaps it was a favorite of his.

He and I went to see A Death in the Family. (While the ticket was a bit of a stretch for me, theatre was still affordable for most people in these years. Broadway was thriving, new dramas and musicals as well as established hits were abundant.) Once he came up to my apartment and played Blue Prelude (or was it Prelude in Blue) on Milton's piano. Ten years later on a Sunday afternoon, Santo, a guy we knew from the local bar took a gang of us on a tour of downtown gay bars in his Caddy convertible. We hit some spots around West & Christopher, one was Peter Rabbits - right around tea dance, the music was top-notch and there were two or three drag queens who were a lot of fun. Last stop on the way uptown was the Eagle. Bob was a bartender, or at least working there. He was slightly huskier, but otherwise looked much the same, and he still had his beautiful head of soft blond hair that looked like a mane of silk thread.

A little later, or perhaps even a year or two later, I met Eddie LeMons. On first take he was rather odd looking, a slender fellow with a head that was quite definitely too large for his frame. The fact that he had lost most of his thin blond hair from the front of his head further accentuated his bulging forehead. However, any impression of unattractiveness vanished when he smiled. Eddie hardly ever just plain ol’ smiled. His usual smile was a beaming grin, and matched with his big, pale blue eyes, which always looked a bit lost in dreamy melancholy, meant that he was as irresistible as a puppy. And he was a gentle guy, seemingly without a mean bent in his disposition.

He played the trumpet for a living. It was a rather catch-as-catch-can existence, as I recall, though he did play a loose circuit of bars and clubs with varying combinations of other musicians. I never saw him on a gig, but I did hear him play anyway.

Eddie lived in a walkup apartment on Sullivan Street. You entered a large kitchen, where the fixtures were bunched into one corner to make room for the bathtub, and there was an old table and two wooden chairs. A window opened onto a large air shaft or perhaps it was an alley. In the front, street-facing, room there was a mattress on the floor.

Sullivan Street

That summer it was hot and steamy as a crotch. I’d wake up in the morning soaking wet, the air already yellowish-grey with humidity and pollution, and Eddie would have left a tired old electric fan aimed so it was blowing hopelessly across the mattress. Each morning, for the first few moments, I was immediately miserable, and primed to be pissed at the world; then I would hear Eddie playing very softly in kitchen, and I’d lie there and listen.

How good a trumpet player he was, I don’t know. The names of the clubs he played in meant nothing to me, but perhaps they were not totally insignificant in the world of jazz aficionados. His playing was light and clear, always just a bit sad – I thought – and a little “sweet” too, or sentimental, maybe. He liked Chet Baker’s playing, could be it influenced his own. A long time latter I got interested in jazz and picked up on Baker myself; so much time had passed it seemed just like Eddie again to me.

1963 smog pollution (AP photo)

When I got up and went out in the kitchen, Eddie would be sitting at the window in his undershorts, usually playing with a mute on his trumpet. He would make coffee, always instant, always ghastly. We’d take the cover off the tub and have a bath together. It was sweet and romantic, but it was almost a necessity. The water pressure was so terribly low that it took forever to fill the tub a few inches, but with two of us in it the water rose to a level that promised the possibility of a real bath.

Seemed like when we left the building everyone on the street knew Eddie and said hello, and the neighbors evidently didn’t mind his playing. One beastly hot morning a woman was sitting on a folding chair in front of the building next door, sweating and fanning herself with the Daily News. As we passed she said something like, “That was nice today, Eddie. Real pretty.”

After I left Eddie in the morning I'd hang around the Village and browse in a branch of the Marboro chain of book stores on Eighth St., or in the Eighth Street Bookshop on the corner of MacDougal, where I saw Allen Ginsberg once. (The latter place was a regular shopping magnet for many literary celebrities of the day, though I wouldn't have recognized most of them.) The Village Squire, the "faggy" clothing store that had advertised on the back pages of Esquire (and whose catalog mailing list I joined in college, mainly for the drawings) was still on the north side of the block, though the string of gay bars - the Old Colony, Main Street and Mary's- was closed. Then I'd catch the IND 8th Ave. uptown at 8th St. and Sixth Avenue, which was - like Sheridan Square further west - a Village crossroads. The Women's House of Detention was on one corner (where a garden is now), the churchy-looking Jefferson Market was next to it, and around behind them the old Village "plague alleys," Patchin Pl. and Milligan Pl. Across from the prison was Sutter's bakery (my introduction to the French cruller) with the Village Voice offices above it.

One other encounter was surprising. I was at Glennon's bar and as I was leaving around closing time, a stranger handed me a card and said something like, "Stop by." It was for a place called the "Coat of Arms" with an address on upper Broadway somewhere, and it was open after bar hours. As far as I can recall, this was the first illegal after-hours place that I'd heard of. When I got back uptown to my apartment I looked at the card again and realized that it was very close by. I walked down Broadway, checking the numbers, and was surprised to find that the address was the grand old Ansonia apartment building! This made me a bit nervous. (What I didn't know then was that the Ansonia was far less classy than it's appearance suggested.) The lobby was empty and I went up to the floor indicated and found the door - the same card was thumb-tacked next to the buzzer. I paid a small fee to get in. The bar was the kitchen counter. There was a bed room in the back, which was being used for sex I saw when I went to the bathroom later, and a handful of guys were sitting around in the living room.

The Ansonia Apartments

One of them was someone I'd gone to school with! Ned had left not long after he reached the legal age of sixteen, and I had never seen him since. That was five or six years ago, but he looked pretty much the same. He was a mixture of white and American Indian, with a slightly ruddy complexion and reddish blond hair. He still had a hard, muscular body, which people said came from the fact that his father was a mean bastard who beat his kids and worked them like they were animals on their farm. Ted had been a terrible student, and very much of a brooding loner that most kids walked around. It was obvious in gym class that he was immensely strong, and if he was antagonized he was a maniacally ferocious fighter, so even the biggest bullies stayed clear of him. I discovered one day while we were standing around in the dark watching a movie in shop class that the kid who had first seduced me was up to something. I reached over and discovered that he had unbuttoned Ned's fly, and was playing with Ned's rock hard dick.

It was five or six years since we'd last seen each other in our little hometown, and we were both surprised - and the other guys were curious. He was friendly enough for Ned, though clearly ill at ease, but neither was I as the guys sitting around didn't disguise the fact they were listening. I called him a couple of times at the fleabag hotel in our neighborhood where he'd told me he was staying. But he clearly had zero interest in meeting again. I wasn't yet very savvy about anything that wasn't pretty much white bread gay life. But after I thought about the evening, a few things sunk in. The two guys who were running this "club" were both wearing a little leather, and I'd noticed a couple of leather jackets slung on the backs of chairs. The guy who'd handed me the card in Glennon's could have come over from the 14th Street Cafe, which got a leather clientele. Ned's interaction with one of the guys who lived in the apartment, I'd noticed at the time, had been peculiarly subservient for someone with Ned's temperament. Maybe he'd found a kind of ritual replacement for his father in a leather crowd.

I never ran into Ned again.

Probably the most important guy I met was Aaron, a Jewish guy who worked in his family's business in the garment district -- "the most important" because it was through Aaron that I began to have a circle of friends and a regular social life. Aaron and I met and tricked one time, but we hit it off as friends. He lived on West End Avenue, in a better part of the neighborhood. He took to calling me whenever his friends were coming over or going out as a group, and it was a contact that lasted even though I wasn't working normal hours yet. Aaron was a native New Yorker, and his circle of friends -- with the exception of his best friend, Greg Stone -- were Jewish, and born and raised in the city or its suburbs. Listening to them talk about growing up and their family life was an intensive course in Jewish New York. New York City had the second largest Jewish population of any city in the world, and though it had at one time been considered an "Irish city" (even when the Italians had come to form a large part of its Catholic population), this had been changing for decades and was to climax in the late Sixties. Much of what was pervasively and distinctly New York in the way of food, slang, humor and spirit was derived from the Jewish -- and more specifically perhaps, Yiddish -- background of people like the grandparents and parents of Aaron and his friends. And the slang and humor found a place in the gay subculture of the city.

THE TIMES AND TIMES SQUARE

While the copy boy/clerk job consisted of nothing more demanding nor interesting than running pieces of copy to the various news desks, with occasional jaunts to other parts of the building or outside, I didn’t find it boring at all. We were usually very busy, and the surroundings and the people were interesting. My peers were almost all grad students at the Columbia journalism school or recent college grads. They were a brainy, friendly bunch of guys, most of whom always brought a book to work. There was a lot of discussion about what guys were reading, and I’m sure this pushed me to fill in the many gaps in my education. I plunged into French literature with André Gide, Anatole France and François Mauriac - and the latter suggested a long detour through Graham Greene – usually reading three or more books by each author before moving on.

Times Square IRT station mosaic sign

I came to work late in the afternoon or early in the evening, and I usually ate something at one of the cafeterias or cheapo hamburger stands on or near 42^nd St. My earliest daytime impressions of the area were simply that it was terribly grubby and obviously a center for sleazy businesses. However, my lunch hour was late at night when the area was thronged. Also, one of our jobs was to pick up the latest edition of the other New York papers (there were seven back then), plus the Wall Street Journal, the Sporting News, and other specialty publications. First stop was a newsstand on the corner of Seventh and Forty-First in front of a theatre that showed “girlie movies,” then around the corner and downstairs to one in the Times Square station of the IRT subway – and that place looked liked Hell’s waiting room after sundown! These night time trips outside introduced me to a Times Square/42^nd St. that was garishly lit, noisy and even dirtier than in the daytime, and thronged with people leaning against the store fronts, hanging out around the all-night movie houses or sauntering up and down as if it were the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade.

Times Square dining, 2 for 25 cents burgers and franks (photo: Klaus Lehnartz)

To get off the street on my late night lunch hours I often went into some of the many stores that sold back-dated magazines, old paperbacks and racks of mostly grade Z current paperbacks. The array and amount of old magazines was fascinating, and there were always many beefcake mags going back to the early Fifties to entertain me – if another copy boy wasn’t with me. One night, having forgotten to bring a book to work, I was doubtfully browsing and lingered over a paperback with only a mildly erotic cover. After skimming, I decided that it was probably going to be the best of a not terrific selection, and I would take a break from culture. The author had a Japanese name. While I had taken a very short survey course at Syracuse on Japanese culture and history, I’d never read any Japanese literature. I read the book at work and enthused over it as one of the greatest things I had ever read. No one had ever heard of it, no one would read it because of the silly cover, etc. Eight years later the author won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was Yasunari Kawabata and the book was Snow Country. (Unfortunately I had not kept in touch with any of these guys, and was not able to thumb my nose and say, nyah-nyah!) I went back to the same store and after a lot of searching came across another paperback by a different Japanese author, Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki. These finds were the beginning of a fascination with Japanese culture (especially literature) that was to be a major interest for the rest of my life.

Another find in the same store was a copy of Gide’s Corydon, his apologia for homosexuality. The title only caught my eye because the work had been very gingerly referred to in the prefaces and introductions to his novels that I’d just recently read, so the odd word had stuck in my mind.

So, in at least two cases even sleazy Times Square made a high-brow contribution to my remedial education.

Once in awhile it would be my job to “clean the spike” in the Times newsroom. This was a long spindle on which the PR releases, newsletters, etc. that came into the paper ended up. One night I came across a release from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board naming bars that had been closed for legal violations. This became my printed introduction to myself as I was perceived by the law. Glancing down the list, I came across a place that had been closed for “congregating homosexuals,” and it went on to indicate that their activities were “immoral” and “undesirable.” In some strange way this was more repellant and intimidating than the presence of a policeman sitting in a raided bar. This was the great, all-powerful They talking, making its supreme will known in print. This couldn’t be brushed off as the occasional crooked guy in blue on the take or a uniformed bully getting his jollies through intimidation on a whim. This was The Law. And, clearly, to be what I was put me unmistakably outside the Law. Whenever I would clean the spike after that, I would peruse this list if I found a copy, searching for notices of closed gay bars. But from that time on I was always very careful that no one saw me reading that list, so I would not run what I saw as the dangerous risk of being asked why I was interested. It was as if I would be assumed guilty of something just by reading the list, as I knew why I was reading it and I knew “what” was reading it.

The homophobia of the New York Times in this era is regularly invoked by gay commentators, as if it were something especially bad. I find it difficult to connect with this, and I wonder if their chagrin isn’t an unreasonable reaction to the fact that today’s liberal Times could have ever been a horse of another color. I did not experience the Times as a especially homophobic environment as everything was homophobic. Homophobia was thoroughly worked into the fabric of American society, to expect the Times to have not been part of that strikes me as naïve. Homophobia was the norm, and that norm was not being seriously questioned nor eroded in public life.

Judy Garland appeared at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961 and gave what was probably the best concert performance of her life. I had to work that night. With very little effort I could be pissed at the Times over this.

By spring I'd gotten over enough of my skittishness about Forty Second Street to hang out there for a little bit sometimes when I got off work in the early morning hours.

Hubert's Flea Circus was on the south side of the block between 7th & 8th - a freak show, game arcade and junk souvenir emporium. There was a strongman there who sometimes seemed to be checking out the guys in the crowd. I used to see a woman walking around the streets with her face veiled, she was, I was told, the bearded lady taking a stroll between shows. There's an interesting book, Upstairs at the Old Hotel, a collection of off-beat New York vignettes, and one of them is about her. Hubert's was quite strange, the customers more than the attractions. And then there was Moondog, the blind "Viking" street musician just north of the Square.

Up at the other end of the block was Grants, a bar lit up like -- well, Times Sq. -- and open to the street with racks and racks of hanging dispensers of rotgut booze, some it was 35 cents a shot. You could get shitfaced for a buck forty on an empty stomach. A small draft beer was fifteen cents, I think ... sometimes I got treated to drinks. Usually these guys were more lonely than hungry for sex.

And then there was the Astor Bar, if you had a suit to wear -- but my impression was that its days as a pickup bar had passed.

Working in the newsroom, even as just a copy boy or a slot clerk, was interesting and sometimes really exciting. The election night race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in November 1960 was one such event, and it still wasn't decided when I was finally let off in the early hours of the morning. Another exciting cliffhanger was the French army mutiny in Algeria in late April of the following year, when it looked at one point as if parachute troops from the rebel army in Algeria would be dropped on Paris.

IN THE GOOD OL' SUMMER TIME

Milton had a brief spell that winter as the musical director of an Off Broadway project based on an updated version of the Greek legend of Medea. Uh huh. It lasted one night at the Cherry Lane Theater - and tying together one of its ragtime numbers and the plot, the Times critic labeled it the "tiger hag." So after some coaching work, Milton got a job as a musical director on the Lenny-Debben strawhat circuit and was gone for the summer of '61. Whoopee! And I was free to cavort in our shared bedroom without having to worry about disturbing my roommate in the other bed, or else asking my trick to bang on Milton's mother's old couch in the living room like teenagers humping in the back seat of a '52 Chevy.

And I finally encountered the infamous Neisseria Gonorrhroeae. Not a dissolute movie star from the exotic East, alas, but an entity more familiarly known as the "clap."

Most men were not real happy about going to their regular GP with a case of venereal disease, much less to a public health center. There were, however, several gay doctors who were known (rather ungratefully in some respects) as "clap doctors." The two most well-known ones in the early Sixties were both Dr. Brown - Eugene and Clarence. The former was an attractive young man, occasionally seen at the baths; the latter was a balding, middle-aged man with wire rimmed glasses and a pink cherubic face.

THE DR. BROWN EXPERIENCE

Clarence Brown's office was located in the lower east Nineties on York Avenue, and took an eternity to get to as the subway and bus connections weren't great. The consolation was that after your visit you could have dinner on East 86th St. in what was called Yorkville, just a few blocks away, which was then a German and Czech neighborhood.

Clarence, I was told, had a job as a physician for an insurance company, so his office hours did not begin until three or four p.m. And he booked no appointments, nor did he have a receptionist. You just showed up at his offices and took a seat. No problem if there were only four or five people there before you – which only happened if you arrived as soon as he opened. But if you arrived and found twenty-five guys in the waiting room, you had to remember who the hell they all were as a constant stream of patients continued to show up. I found that part of the visit nerve racking, and I could never understand, under the circumstances, why the hell he just didn't have you take a number, like at a bakery. It was already an assembly line atmosphere, but perhaps a take-a-number system would have been that just a little bit too assembly line. In any case, despite my worst fears of still being there at midnight because I had forgotten who had come in after me, it worked out flawlessly.

He opened the door to his office, leaned out and scanned the room and someone popped up and went in. If there were guys there for a second or third in a series of shots, he'd reappear at the door beckon one in, usher him into a john, jab him in the butt, and then go back to the first patient.

                                                                                                                                                               There it is: clap

He always wore a long white lab coat, and conducted the entire ritual of taking a smear and giving a shot and prescription with breathtaking efficiency – not a nanosecond was wasted. (Any phone calls from patients seeking test results got a big ten seconds: What's your name? The results were negative, goodbye. The results were positive, come in for treatment, goodbye.) My recollection is that it was cash on the barrelhead, no billing. Nevertheless, I found him "pleasant" on my first visit, at least as much as his close to breakneck speed allowed for. After what could have been a wait of forty-five minutes the visit was over so quickly that it almost seemed anticlimactic - but after all, no one was going there because they thought they had a brain tumor, so how much colloquy do you need about a dripping dick.

Fortunately, after a few doses of clap I never caught it again, nor did I ever contract syphilis. I did later have a non-venereal problem that I consulted another doctor for – after all, Dr. Brown was just a "clap doctor." wasn't he? When my symptoms became worse and worse despite treatment, I went to Clarence in desperation. Though the visit was conducted at close to Grand Prix speed, he was focused and thorough, correctly diagnosed the problem and successfully treated it. After that I went to him for most of the rest of the decade, until a friend of a friend from Chicago moved to the city and set up practice.

Straight men, I should add, were not keen on going to their family docs with suspected venereal problems, and later in the decade I steered a couple to Clarence. I've heard from other gay guys that they had the same experience.

BY THE SEA, BY THE SEA, BY THE BEAUTIFUL SEA

Part of the gay section at Jones Beach, 1959 or '60. Riis Park with bath house towers in mid-distance,
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