SEPTEMBER 1965: a half century on, it’s not easy to follow my movements with perfect accuracy, but here goes. I was staying up in Westchester County with Cheryl R., a fellow undergraduate a couple of years younger. We’d become friendly during the previous year, as part of the small huddle of Emory’s brainy misfits, a group shunned by the frat boys and sorority girls more typical of white Atlanta in the mid-60s. I was about to begin graduate studies at Columbia, expecting to get a doctorate in French literature and end up as a tweedy professor, maybe at one of the prestigious universities in the Northeast.
Having stayed in my home state for college, I chose Columbia now on the theory that living in New York would smarten me up. After all, New York was the world capital of the arts in that era, and I harbored a secret desire to become a Great Writer. Even a Westchester girl like Cheryl seemed so much more worldly than the born-and-bred Georgia boy that I was. Among my deficiencies, gay experience would have to be listed. I’d had very little of it at that point. A few fumbles during a summer spent in Europe and one romance in Atlanta. His name was Bob, an older smoothie, who worked for Knoll Associates and had the kind of social polish I was learning to associate with gay men. He gave me a few tweaks before displaying me to his friends; then, after about three months, shooed me out of his designer apartment to make room for the next waif on deck. I decided Atlanta had nothing more to offer me.
I tried to make my little room in Mrs. Smith’s apartment livable or at least personal. Since the wall plaster was crumbling, I tacked a green bedspread to the wall as a way to cover the dilapidation. To that I pinned a poster, a reproduction of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant in his Cabaret. But my life there was not a cabaret. Mrs. Smith was too old to clean, so there was nothing to be done about the populous resident roaches except brush them off the bed and step on them. My minimal meals were taken in her kitchen and consisted only of cheese and cold cuts because I couldn’t bring myself to cook in the midst of all the filth. I look back on that interlude with disbelief and disgust, but youngsters can endure a lot of discomfort, especially if they’ve never had much money in the first place. Let’s say that my experience of coming to New York was more comfortable than the awful life of immigrants depicted in Jabob Riis’ notorious photographs of the Lower East Side in the early 20th century. If you want to garner sympathy for the hardships you’ve suffered, that’s not an act easy to follow. And I did occasionally have a meal out—for example, at Lüchow’s on 14th Street, just south of Union Square. It was one of the last vestiges of German-immigrant New York, a big, noisy eatery that even had an oompah-pah band playing on a dais in the main dining room. Food was potato-and-pork-sausage heavy, lightened up a little with sauerkraut. Even more of a novelty was the Horn and Hardart automat on 56th Street, the last of its kind, I believe. You inserted 25 cents into a slot next to a little window, which you opened to take out your food. The place lasted only another couple of years, made obsolete once a quarter lost most of its purchasing power. (Hard to believe, but the subway cost only ten cents at the time. For the turnstile slots, you had to buy brass tokens with a Y-shaped hole pierced in them. Transit authorities were planning on inflation, and indeed it did arrive, even more punctually than the IRT. When the cost of a ride went up, the turnstiles could still use the same tokens without being altered.) I also remember one high-end dinner at a penthouse restaurant on Sixth Avenue (which had recently been re-styled as “The Avenue of the Americas,” though New Yorkers never stopped using the old name). When I saw the price of a main dish at the Top of the Mark was $4.50, I took a deep, shocked breath: I’d never before paid so much for a meal.
A couple of weeks after my move-in at 119th Street, a former tenant of Mrs. Smith’s dropped by to say hello, a man about thirty years old, wearing coat and tie. We immediately sized each other up as gay, and then he said he’d like to stay over. That was fine with Mrs. Smith, who said he could sleep on the sofa-bed in the living room. She didn’t hear very well and slept soundly, so we knew it would be all right if I joined him later that night. I did, and, even though unspectacular, it was my first Sex in the City: as such, a kind of baptism. He also gave me a few useful instructions to follow if I wanted to get on as a gay guy in New York, along with a few relevant addresses.
When not bleakly lonely, I felt something like ecstasy being in the city and didn’t leave the “Isle of Joy” for two years, unless round trips on the Staten Island Ferry count as a departure. The array of glass-and-steel skyscrapers had an almost visionary quality when sunlight glinted off of them. No other world city (except maybe Chicago) had them at the time, and the Empire State Building was still the highest manmade structure anywhere, its viewing platform a frequent location for meeting scenes in movies like The Moon Is Blue. The teeming masses, the noise, the subways—all of it was new and exciting to a provincial like myself. Speaking of movies, I went every week either to the Thalia on West 95th or to the Bleecker Street Cinema to catch reruns of all the art films I’d missed by growing up in the provinces. It was the decade of the French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol) and new Italian directors like Fellini and Antonioni, figures whose careers I began to follow almost religiously. In that era, I think film became more important to me than literature. I didn’t want merely to see movies, I wanted my life to be one. And that made all the difference.
I won’t describe the whole process of getting started in grad studies, partly because many of the details now escape me. I met a few other first-year students, one a brilliant but depressed and detached Harvard grad, another black and friendly, a scholarship student, like me short of cash. We fairly soon came out to each other as gay and jumped in the sack, but only once. Meanwhile, word somehow got out about all the scholarships I’d won, and a few of the women students flirted, but soon enough became discouraged. I can’t remember where we met but fairly soon I hooked up with a grad student in psychology named Geoffrey C. He was Jewish, dark, cheerful, lean, hairy-chested, and to my mind sophisticated. I would have been happy to settle down with him for the duration, but he had other ideas. We stayed in touch—as friends. A couple of months later he announced he was leaving his graduate studies program. Why? Because the course plan included a weekly group therapy session with the other students, and fairly soon he had come out as gay there, with the result that the other students ostracized him on the unshakable assumption that he was too sick ever to succeed as a psychotherapist. (In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed gay orientation from its list of mental illnesses, but this was 1965.) I thought Geoffrey was courageous and was tempted to follow his lead and come out! It’s just that I didn’t quite have the guts to do it.
Another symptom of the homophobic atmosphere of that time was the bar situation. Of course there were gay hangouts in New York at that time—indeed, there had been since the 19th century. But they were, at least officially, secret. Gay sex was a felony, and any customer in a bar deemed “degenerate” could be run in. Bars that remained open probably paid police protection, owned as they all were by the Mob, and there were pro forma raids every now and then. In fact, I remember beating a hasty retreat from a fairly tame place in the Village one weekend when the police barged in and yelled, “Everybody out!” I guess the owner had fallen behind in his protection money. Luckily, no one was arrested that night. We were all sent away with a warning.
There were probably a half-dozen well-known gay watering holes in the Village, though I recall the names of only a few: the Snake Pit, for example, and Marie’s Crisis Café, so named because it was thought that Thomas Paine had written The Crisis in that building or somewhere close to it. Nobody seemed to know who Marie was. Anyway, her café was a piano bar, where dozens of guys gathered on Friday and Saturday night to sing Broadway standards around a baby grand. I went once, but it wasn’t my kind of place, and I never returned. There were no gay discos because, believe it or not, a city ordinance forbade man-on-man boogying. The best-known gay bar in New York was Greenwich Village’s Julius’, and it is still there. I’m not sure what its formula for success was or is, but practically every gay New Yorker has spent happy hours in that unprepossessing interior. I remember being cruised by an elegant Asian man there and following him through dark Village streets to his chic apartment. He had come to New York from Tokyo several years before and opened a shop for unusual paper and party items on Greenwich Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. Our affair lasted less than a month. And there were others. I kept hoping for a real-life rom-com leading to True Love and a lasting relationship, but the fact is that not so many people coupled up in those years. The lone wolf ruled, his philosophy, “Why should you settle for just one person when there are thousands of possibilities out there?” Inarguable, unless you were, like me, a hardened naïf, unwilling to go to a twelve-step program for love-and-romance addiction, from which I would in theory emerge as cheerfully appetitive and ready for bear in the form of one-night stands.
I remember another gay bar (though not the name) on West 4th Street, a few doors down from the Red Onion, which back then was famous for folk music. Peter, Paul, and Mary had performed there, as well as the boy wonder Bob Dylan, still riding the first crest of his fame. My bar had no live music, only a jukebox where the clientele kept playing Chris Montez’ cover of “The More I See You, the More I Want You,” a hit that year among the gay set. You might also hear Aretha Franklin’s soaring rendition of “Skylark,” which lesbians favored, even though her greatest fame wouldn’t arrive until a couple of years later with “Respect.” Of course there was plenty of Streisand on the airwaves at the time in the wake of her hit performance in Funny Girl. The Bon Soir, a basement café-bar on 8th Street, plumed itself on the fact that Babs had gotten her start by performing there a few years earlier. But after Funny Girl, there was no question of her returning to a rung that low. It’s a career path by now familiar and would be duplicated in the next decade by Bette Midler, who won her first camp-follower fans by singing at the Continental Baths on the Upper West Side, before graduating to a record contract and performing first on Broadway and then in film. (In 1973, I was her tutor in French language for about six weeks, but that’s another story.)
As long as we’re on the topic of music, I’ll mention The Fantasticks, which had been going strong in the boutique Sullivan Street Theater for a number of years and would continue for another decade or so. Any mention of that show immediately brings to mind the lyric “Try to remember the kind of September,” its rhymes reminiscent of Poe’s The Raven, but with a more mellow mood, and I suppose more entertaining, though the “callow fellow” that I was dismissed it as sentimental drivel. Still, as a responsible grad student in French lit, I had read my Proust and knew the importance of memory. I still do, which explains the effort now underway to rediscover my own temps perdu.
The one promising encounter of a romantic kind I had during those first months in New York was with a guy from home. Harry D., about eight years older than I, had grown up in my hometown but then moved to Atlanta. We had run into each other at a party given by the Atlanta boyfriend mentioned earlier. Neither of us had known the other was gay and both were pleased to hear the news. When I told him I was going to Columbia, he mentioned he had a trip to New York planned and would look me up when he came to visit. That turned out to be on a fateful day in mid-October. Just after we caught sight of each other on Amsterdam Avenue (I’d arranged to meet him out on the street rather than in Mrs. Smith’s filthy apartment), every light in the city went out. It was the first blackout I’d experienced and also, I believe, the first for New York. We assumed that every restaurant and theater would be closed very soon, so Harry came up with this plan: we would catch a bus at Port Authority and go back to New Jersey where he was staying with a friend. As it happened, we caught the last one out that night. Lincoln Tunnel had to be shut down once its ventilator fans stopped working. Luckily, Jersey had electricity, and so did our hours together between the sheets. Next morning power was restored in New York, and I had classes to attend. But we agreed to stay in touch and keep future options open.
Going back to the summer after my junior year in college, I had won a scholarship for French language students and spent the summer in Avignon, where I became friendly with another student, one year younger, named Ann J. A free spirit, unconventional in behavior and in dress, she was among the brightest of our study group and as pretty as any twenty-year-old can be. Girls were only just beginning to wear their hair long and hers was honey blond, well below shoulder length. She had brown eyes, expressive features, and a nuanced voice; spoke French much better than I did; and had a silvery laugh for any bit of nonsense she noticed. During her first two years at NYU, she had become involved with a fellow undergraduate who was a motorcycle buff, but the relationship was on the downturn. I think fairly soon she began sizing me up. I didn’t, for the usual reasons, mention my orientation. It was only after the summer was over that I confided in her. We had decided to keep in touch by letters. (Back in the Dark Ages, there was no email and long-distance telephone rates were high.) She had enrolled at Berkeley for her final two years, and I had one year at Emory to finish up. Knowing all that was going on over in California and on her campus, I felt it would be safe to tell her the truth. When I did so, she answered in a relaxed way. She had gay friends and had even gone to bed with one. My being gay was fine with her, just that, well, she’d had a secret fantasy that we two might some day change friendship into something more compelling, more physical. This response struck me as refreshing. So I wrote back saying I was glad she wasn’t put off by my revelation and, sure, next time we were together, we could attempt a trial balance and see what happened.
I didn’t know how soon the opportunity would materialize. Ann had decided to apply for graduate studies in Comp Lit at Columbia and wanted to come to New York to investigate the program. She would do that during the term break and hoped I would be in New York then. On the very night of her arrival, we made the experiment, and surprisingly enough it worked. By the time she left two weeks later we were saying we were in love. I made it clear that I was still gay, a cautionary word she took in stride. An early feminist and, as I said, unconventional, she said she didn’t plan to rule out other affairs during her last term at Berkeley, nor did she expect me to be “faithful.” It wasn’t a typical student courtship, but we’d made a firm decision to move in together when she returned in the fall. During the following months, letters flew back and forth every week, but that didn’t stop either of us from hooking up with other people. Still, none of those other encounters turned into romance. We were true to each other in our fashion. Harry D. telephoned from Atlanta to chat, and when I told him what had happened, he graciously bowed out of my life.
In late February I got tickets for my first Broadway opening night, a double bill of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams called Slapstick Tragedy (The Mutilated and The Gnädiges Fräulein). Neither of them made much of an impression on me (or on the critics), and the show closed a few days later. After the audience dispersed, I stood outside the Longacre Theatre, hoping to catch a glimpse of my favorite American playwright; he never appeared. Disappointing, but, still, this was my initiation into Broadway theater, an enthusiasm that remained with me for several decades, until the Great White Way got inundated by musicals and revivals of musicals.
One thing I should mention is that the Johnson Administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War had already created a reaction in the big cities. That meant beefing up our armed forces, and the draft was a scary reality for all young males. In fact, I’d been called up for a pre-induction examination. I answered all questions truthfully and was disqualified on the basis of being “homosexual.” Part of me was relieved and another part angry at the discrimination. Still, if I had passed muster, I wouldn’t have reported for service. I knew I would never be able to aim an M-16 at a living human being and shoot. To participate in combat would have been a death sentence for me. Nor did I think other young men should be subjected to the risk, even if a war had been declared for more defensible reasons than those cited for Vietnam. Early that spring I was urged by acquaintances to participate in a march down Fifth Avenue to protest, and join it I did. I don’t think the organizers had bothered to get a permit, so arrests were made in a rather random sweep that just missed me. It was the first of many political marches I participated in since, the number too large to recall. Large enough, I guess, to qualify me as an “activist” in several causes—anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental, and civil rights for African-Americans, women, and gay people.
I hadn’t been prepared for how hot the city would be during the summer months. Subways hadn’t been air-conditioned yet and during rush hour could be infernal. Some of the lines still had the old rattan covering on the seats, which prevented the metal from blistering exposed skin, but the more beat-up examples scratched uncomfortably and (I was told by women) made a hash of pantyhose. I spent several evenings in a given week drinking at the Gold Rail Tavern on Upper Broadway. One corner of the bar was discreetly gay, a lively crowd congregating there every Happy Hour, a group including women who enjoyed the repartee of gay men or their alertness to fashion. Polka dots in stinging colors were the in thing that summer, inspired perhaps by Larry Poons’ voguish Op Art paintings. Everyone wearing them looked like brightly colored dice ready to roll. Indeed, pick-up sex was a crapshoot: you never knew what you were getting or what pill you’d have to take to deal with it afterward. But then, risks of all kinds were everywhere, and street mugging was so common that no one was at all shocked when it happened.
It wasn’t until several years later that I heard about an awful event that occurred that July. Out on Fire Island the poet Frank O’Hara was hit by a dune buggy late one night and died a few days later, not having quite reached age forty. It’s hard to believe now, but at the time he was known only to a small coterie of downtown poets and painters. If I’d worked at it, I probably could have met him, but only a few contemporary poets’ names were familiar to me, his not among them. I had heard of Auden and was aware that he lived in New York, but the idea that I might possibly introduce myself to a world-famous writer never crossed my mind. Marilyn Hacker and Samuel Delany, friends I got to know many years later, did meet him around that time, but they were both native New Yorkers and had the confidence to seek him out. Anyway, I was pretty busy that summer. I’d gotten a job with the Urban Corps, a government-funded job program for students (pork-barrel welfare, it would now be considered). I was assigned to New York City’s Department of Records on Chambers Street, where the appointed task was to catalogue all of the historical city maps stored there. Rather dull work, but it did bring home to me the fact the New York was a city more than three centuries old. No doubt my work there contributed to a long poetic sequence about the city that I published as a book in 1978, a long poem incorporating historical documents into the body of the text and given the title A Call in the Midst of the Crowd.
In early September Ann came back to New York a few days before her graduate program was to begin, just enough time for us to find an apartment on the Upper West Side. The joint lease we signed substituted for a marriage license. It was still considered a little offbeat for unmarried couples to live together, and the fact that one of us was gay added yet another bohemian extravagance to the arrangement. Meanwhile, our personal contract was simple: Ann didn’t object to an occasional night out with the boys, but I was not to hook up with any other women. Common courtesy would cover the rest, at least in theory. If it sounds bizarre, try to imagine an era in which young people were testing every convention and institution of a society we had learned to call “bourgeois,” a term that guaranteed contempt and defiance.
In November, my friend Geoffrey C., who’d launched a new life as a furniture designer after abandoning Columbia, invited us to a party at his place on Christopher Street. Just to make sure, I asked if it would be all right to bring Ann. He told me there was no problem, and that other women would be in attendance. There were, as we soon saw. Also, one drag performer, who went by the name of Brandy Alexander. I believe she worked at Club 88 over on the Lower East Side, though I never saw her there (or ever again). But the most interesting person at the party was a guy about two years older, dark-haired, handsome, ingratiating, and, as he mentioned, an aspiring fiction writer. He hadn’t published yet but was working on a novel about a young gay man who comes to New York from the Midwest and gets a job at Time-Life Books. That being his own place of employment, I gathered the nearly completed draft was an autobiographical work. I said I’d really be interested to read it and was assured I’d be allowed to. He was very admiring of Ann, who did look very stylish that evening, wearing a sleeveless, mini-length gray sheath with silver piping around the neck and armholes. Feather boas were a humorous fashion that season, and she had tossed a white and black example over her shoulders with casual and effective panache. Ed (that was his name) expressed admiration, remarking she looked like “the Queen of the Night,” which could be taken as a compliment, provided you ignored negative aspects of the coloratura character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. I think he was fascinated that I was gay yet in a love relationship with a woman—and such a pretty and interesting one at that.
This is as much as I can remember about the inaugural evening of a friendship that has lasted for a half-century now. It’s one that deserves its own memoir, which I may in fact write some day. Our new friend’s name was Edmund White. As I look back and consider that I never did become a tenured professor of French literature, but instead a writer, it’s as though the pivotal event of my first year in New York was that meeting. Grad school didn’t stick, even if the substance of the work I did there has stayed with me, Proust and all. A couple of years later, I abandoned my program of study, and the following year Ann and I parted company, recasting our relationship as friendly rather than romantic. Meanwhile, the decades-long conversation with Ed has continued, and in the years following that first meeting we both published many books, among the few authors in the 1970s willing to be known as gay. Because he read drafts to us chapter by chapter, Ed’s first novel Forgetting Elena is dedicated to Ann and myself. I’m going to sidestep clichés to the effect that fifty years can pass very quickly and still “seem like yesterday.” I try to remember the kind of September it was back then, despite blank spots and erasures. Deep in December, this is the best I can do. For at least one person, it is a sufficiently fantastic episode in the “movie” of my life—if you follow.
Alfred Corn’s second novel, Miranda’s Book, came out last year, as did his latest book of poetry, Unions (reviewed in this issue).
