Within a month of our meeting, Michael and I were best buddies. We never slept together again after that first night (to my great disappointment). I was not, apparently, Michael’s type. What his type was I didn’t know, as he kept his love life shrouded in mystery. With Michael’s coaching I managed to date a couple guys but couldn’t get serious about either of them because I found men who weren’t Michael deadly boring. I thought that since we were obviously soulmates we should be lovers too, but whenever I brought it up (probably twice a week at least), Michael laughingly poo-poohed the idea. By my reckoning, that didn’t really matter. We were a pair of merry malcontents, a dynamic duo, a conspiracy of two, and I was certain we’d never, ever part.
Then, one pale, gray February afternoon a year-and-a-half after we’d met, Michael phoned with some news. “I’m moving to New York.”
“What?”
“My plane leaves tomorrow.”
Vertigo. Dizziness. Terror. “But why?”
“I’m bored.”
Chapter 5: New York, New York
A FEW LONELY MONTHS AFTER MICHAEL departed, I dropped out of school, quit my messenger job, and said goodbye to friends and family so I could join him in Manhattan. Arriving in the June of 1981, I settled into town with plenty of gusto, but no savoir-faire. Utterly lacking in experience, skills, or stick-to-itiveness, I got—then lost or quit—a series of menial jobs in record time: mail room clerk, bicycle messenger, bathhouse attendant. You couldn’t sink any lower. As for living quarters, Michael and I shared a studio on West 14th Street, a gang and graffiti-ridden boulevard of broken dreams. Our building was in some sort of renovation limbo and not strictly supposed to be inhabited so there was no heat, but it did have a loft bed, which I thought terribly chic.
Most every evening Michael and I popped pills—black beauties, Christmas trees, white crosses—then hit the bars for booze and chatter. New Yorkers have always been a garrulous lot, and even in the lowest dives people held forth on art, politics, and their homespun philosophies, along with the perennial gay topics of which famous people were secretly gay and where all the hot boys were. When, thanks to the pills, we started feeling tingly and superhuman we’d head off to Danceteria where we’d dance to the likes of Soft Cell, O.M.D., Heaven 17, Altered Images, Taco, Fad Gadget, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Scritti Polliti, Pigbag, and Yaz.
Michael, always looking for social significance, ascribed world-historical importance to our nightlife. “Nightclubbing is recreation, and recreation allows us to re-create ourselves and society,” he proclaimed. “It’s easy to tune out the disadvantaged when they’re chanting slogans and waving protest signs. But at nightclubs, everyone’s guard is down and they’ll listen to strangers who’ve led lives different from their own and learn to see them as human. You can change people’s opinions faster with stories than debates. For example, Gilded Age plutocrats only socialized with their own kind so they didn’t see the working class as human. Then, in the Roaring Twenties with Café Society, it became hip to socialize with writers, gangsters, flappers, artists, actors, and musicians. The rich learned to see their social inferiors as fun, interesting characters and consequently developed sympathy for them. That breakdown in snobbery helped make the New Deal possible when the depression hit. And after interracial socializing became popular with Beats and on the jazz scene in the 1950s, it became de rigueur for whites to support civil rights. Now that straight people socialize with gays at discos and new wave clubs it won’t be long before supporting gay rights becomes so hip only total bumpkins will dare be homophobes.”
In 1981, gay male sleaze reached an all-time apex. Gay New York was a non-stop erotic cabaret, a raunchy netherworld of bathhouses and bars with back rooms, streets full of cruisers, and parks full of perverts. Plenty of guys were monogamous, sure, but the prevailing mood celebrated promiscuity and sexual specialization. There were guys obsessed with black leather, orgy rooms, hustlers, muscles, the piers, bondage, transvestites, glory holes, exhibitionism, “chicken,” you name it and the more the merrier. In San Francisco, Michael had been nearly asexual, but in New York, he became a dedicated horndog. Since I accompanied him everywhere, I suddenly found myself in all sorts of sexy places and quickly discovered that something was seriously different. In switching coasts I’d gone from invisible to irresistible! Men ogled me, introduced themselves, bought me beers, and invited me home. These men, I understood, were not interested in me as a person. They barely listened to a word I said, undressed me with their eyes, and invaded my space with octopus arms. For them I was a trophy or a boytoy, a mere object existing solely for their own lurid, sexual gratification.
Finally!
I gleefully went home with man after man and frequented back rooms where I enjoyed a smorgasbord of fleshly delights. In this slutty milieu every sexual encounter was infinitely casual, an act without an echo. And yet, for me, these acts never resembled the soulless athleticism of porn. While surrendering to physical pleasure my babbling brain shut up and my sense of self dissolved. I felt—don’t laugh—a profound sense of mystical communion with the soul of humanity and a transcendent love for the cosmos.
Well, that, and the cheap ego gratification of being found attractive. Cheap or not, such gratification changed me. Growing up as a sexually-frustrated youth I’d regarded my body as a shameful and disappointing nuisance, a thing to be managed and hidden under clothing. Once I’d joined the ranks of the doable, I saw my body as man-bait, something to be displayed and wielded—a thing, albeit one I was happy to own. Then, slowly, over the course of a thousand kisses and caresses, my psyche conjoined with my flesh. My body became me and I became a boy animal, someone who might just climb a tree for fun, walk atop a fence balancing like a cat, or run about half naked enjoying the feel of sun and wind on my skin.
While romping about New York I discovered two facets of gay life that became leitmotifs of my young adulthood: genderbending and hustling. First contact with both came via another pair of inseparable friends, Vinny and Jade. Vinny, who worked with Michael at a dirty movie theater on West Street, was a tough, wiry kid with a scrunchy little face, but cute. He spoke in the profanity-laden patois favored by New York’s outer-borough underclass. “So fuckin’ hot out dere ya could fry a egg on a bald man’s head!” Around him I felt like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Vinny’s employment at the theater was temporary as his preferred occupation was hustling. He was renowned for his ability to pick up tricks anywhere—in line at the bank, riding the subway—and told dramatic stories that imbued him with Wild Boy Outlaw allure. He’d had to quit hustling when an over-enthusiastic customer accidentally damaged his nether-regions, but as soon as he saved up enough for some unspecified operation, he planned to quit the theater and return to the big money and glamor of selling his ass.
Jade was a delicately thin queen with a long face, sharp cheekbones, and big teeth—like a horse crossed with a supermodel. I say queen, but Jade’s gender was blurry. If pressed, I’d say she was 20 percent effeminate gayboy, 20 percent drag queen, 20 percent transvestite, and 40 percent transsexual. Jade sewed her own outfits of the so-wrong-they’re-right variety which she paraded around in everywhere, even drearily dangerous West Street where truckers and men from New Jersey went for closet-case sex. After seeing her in a purple satin leotard with a short cape I wondered aloud if she weren’t tempting fate. New York, like absolutely everywhere, was full of queer-bashers who mocked, robbed, beat, bludgeoned, and occasionally killed their targets.
“She’ll be OK,” Michael assured me. “Street queens are tough. They have to be. Remember, it was queens who fought the police at Stonewall back in ‘69.”
On Tuesdays, Jade, Vinny, Michael, and I always went to the Anvil for new wave night. Located in an ancient brick building on the edge of the meatpacking district, the club was notorious for raunch. Connoisseurs