Monthly Archives: October 2011

Physique Magazine

31/10/2011 By in Junior/Senior High School, Musings Tags: , , Leave a comment

I often marvel at the internet’s contribution to pornography with the likes of webcam sex sites like CAM4 and Xtube.  Just because I’m a near-old-fart doesn’t mean I  still can’t enjoy looking at the exhibitionists showing off their raging manhood. My only caveat would be: why are you hot-looking, healthy, horny twenty-something/thirty-something-year-olds on-line and not out in the real world having incredible safe sex? I’m not judging, just asking. Even I take the miracle of internet sex for granted at times, but then I think back to the not so good old days, remembering what little we had in the way of porno when I was an eager young thing.

As a kid, there were no malls. If you needed to shop you went downtown (at least in Cleveland we did).  When we needed clothing, household items, gifts or anything you couldn’t buy at the local five and dime, we took a bus downtown. There were huge department stores and elegant small department stores, specialty clothing shops, bookstores, jewelry stores, candy shops, and everything-else-you-could-imagine stores. It was incredible, and only about 45 minutes away on a Cleveland Transit System bus that picked us up at the end of our street in West Buttfok, and dropped us off in front of The May Co. In summer my mom took me downtown once a week. We would spend the better part of the day. We’d get there around 10:00 am. and shop for a few hours, eat lunch at the counter of Kresge’s or Woolworth’s and shop some more. We’d get a snack and board the bus around 3:00 pm so that we could get home in time for my mother to start supper (which we ate promptly by 5:30 pm every weeknight).

A favorite stop of Mom’s was a large bookstore on Prospect Avenue, I believe, a few blocks east of May Co. It was in an old building and occupied several floors. The first floor held lots of current magazines and hobby publications. She would buy antique collecting periodicals.  The store specialized in old periodicals and out-of-print books. I remember there was a second and even a third floor. That top floor had older art books and antiques journals and we would work our way up there. At this time I couldn’t have been much older than ten, which means my younger brother was three, so I would have to keep an eye on him so that he didn’t destroy anything or wander away. There was a not so nice lady who managed and perhaps even owned the store. She was always downstairs at the cash register, making sure no one made it out the door without paying. She didn’t like any kids, so there was always much eye rolling when my mother walked through the door with the two of us in tow and she would glare at me as if to say “watch out kid I got my eye on you”. By the time you got to the upper floors you were pretty much on your own. But there was an older guy who worked on the top floor. While my mother looked at the old antiques journals, she would make us stay right next to her. At the farthest end of the store there were always a few men, usually older, who would be going through some back-dated magazines, and the upstairs guy watched them like hawks. At first I imagined he must have thought they would try to steal some of them, but the more often we went up there, and the wiser I became, I realized there was something not very kosher about what they were looking at. I figured they must be magazines with naked ladies, I’d heard about those. What else could they be?

Once I became thirteen, I negotiated with my parents to let me go downtown on the bus by myself. At first I had to have a reason, like I needed a pair of pants, or underwear or socks. My mother had a charge account at Higbee’s, so clothing purchases for any of us were made there. For you young things born in the 1970s and after, there  was no such thing as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex in the 60s. Being a clever and creative adolescent,  I would manage to find an excuse to make a trip once a month during the school year. I would window shop, people watch and just enjoy being in  a place where human beings were out and about actually doing things. Our awful ‘burb was totally devoid of anything to do and the only place to go was a small shopping center with a grocery store, laundromat, bakery, barbershop, and drugstore, hardly worthy of a curious, worldly thirteen-year-old like myself.

When summer came, my trips were more regular and frequent. Mom still came downtown but usually only monthly. I managed to make a solo shopping trip at least once or twice a month myself. One particular time she couldn’t make the trip, so she asked me to stop at the book store and pick-up a copy of her antique collecting magazine, and I thought nothing of going into the shop alone. The lady at the cash register wasn’t any nicer to me sans little brother, but she didn’t scare me anymore either. I felt and acted very cool on my own. Since I had an excuse to be there, I casually strolled around, then worked my way up to the top floor to check out what the mysterious stuff was in the magazines those men were always looking at. I had no idea what they held in store for me.

They weren’t naked ladies, they were naked MEN. The upstairs guy was at the opposite end of the floor, so I was pretty much alone and I thumbed through years of PHYSIQUE magazine. The men weren’t totally naked, of course. They wore “posing straps”, but their asses were totally bare. I couldn’t believe something like this even existed. PHYSIQUE was promoted as a sort of guide, displaying health conscious “trained athletes” who were displaying their well-sculpted bodies. They weren’t bulky body builders, they were good-looking men showing off their package in a neat little pouch for other guys to see. I couldn’t imagine any women buying or looking at these magazines. It was another one of those nasty, underground things for “those kind of men”.  After several minutes of me studying many of the issues, the upstairs guy worked his way towards me, so cleverly I moved over to the next bin which held back issues of an oversized art journal magazine. He didn’t seem to notice me, but I didn’t want to take any chances, and left the store soon after. I’d be back, I knew in my gut. I liked what I saw, even though it gave me terrible guilt just thinking about those magazines. And I thought and thought about them, until my libido led me back to the store alone again.

On my next visit, I tried not to bee-line for the third floor treasures immediately, but it was all I could do to stay downstairs for more than five minutes. My heart had been racing the moment I stepped through the door. My barely adolescent boner was throbbing in my pocket in anticipation of what the pages of PHYSIQUE held in store for me. It nearly stabbed my thigh as I walked up the two tall staircases, I was so worked-up at the thought of those bare-assed big boys. When I got upstairs there were several men around the bins of my magazines. “Shit”, I whispered under my breath, now what do I do? Well, I wouldn’t be embarrassed, because for sure these guys were mesmerized as much if not more than I was, and they didn’t give a damn, so neither would I. There weren’t any signs that said adults only, but just to be on the safe side, I grabbed one of the large-scale art journals, and slipped the small PHYSIQUE mag inside. (Pretty crafty thinking on my part, huh?) It was heaven. I was relaxed as I pored over my copy, memorizing features, wishing I had X-ray vision to see exactly what was inside those pesky pouches held up by tiny strings. And the men perusing their copies paid little or no attention to me.

I was up there for what seemed like hours. I probably probed three magazines, digesting each picture on every single page. The upstairs guy called over to our general area, announcing something to the effect of “OK gentlemen, this isn’t a library. Take out your wallets, or put the magazines away”. It kind of frightened me. Suddenly I understood this guy knew exactly what we all were doing, and I certainly wasn’t fooling anyone using the art journal as my cover. A few of the men chose some to take downstairs to purchase, the others put theirs back and left. Dammit, I think they cost maybe a quarter each used, but A) what would I do with them when I got them home and B) would they even sell them to a snot-nosed sissy kid? I put mine back and left quickly. I returned several times that summer. It was always the same scenario as above. Once the man chased me away before I even got a peek. And another time I came into the store and he was at the cash register, so I raced upstairs, thinking it was smooth sailing ahead. WRONG. Obviously he had changed places with the not so nice lady who hovered around anyone who was upstairs like a Gestapo agent in a ghetto. I went over to get a copy of my art journal “beard” and she shouted “You get out of here. This floor is no place for a kid”. I nearly crapped my pants. I didn’t go back there for months, and feared she would tell my mother the next time we came in together. She never did.

I think I outgrew the bookstore by the time I turned fifteen. It made me horny, which I had sort of figured out the first time I saw that magic magazine cover. More than horny, it made me feel too guilty, knowing that the images of naked men made me hard, and I didn’t want to admit this mania to anyone, especially to myself. It wasn’t Catholic guilt. It was way beyond that. It was something I had to stifle in myself, because I didn’t want to be a queer. It was something I prayed for at night, as a little kid, long before I even knew there was a word for what it was. I prayed for two things each night, silently to God. The first was “that I will never have to fight in a war”. The second “that I won’t be that way when I grow up”. HE saved me from the first, and blessed me with the second. Thank God!

Coming out party

17/10/2011 By in NYC 1972-1983 Tags: , , , Leave a comment

By the spring of 1976 I had signed the lease for my first apartment on my own. This was a big thing for me. No, it was huge. I felt like I had finally grown up. The building was just off the corner of 17th Street and Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. At this time the West Village had grown too expensive for the starving artist types, so many were scrambling to find new digs elsewhere. Chelsea was ripe for the picking and quickly becoming a new gay sanctuary. The building had five or six studio apartments on each of its six floors and an elevator so things were looking up for me. It was said that the building had originally been built as a transient hotel in the 1920s (I never knew that to be a fact) and as a real bonus, each studio had a functioning wood burning fireplace. This apartment was truly a find and I was as happy as a clam-a place of my very own in MY city.

The apartment was on the sixth floor and my windows faced the building next door. There wasn’t much space between them, so there was no way to get the air to circulate and on warm nights it could be difficult to sleep. The closer we got to summer, the worse my nights were and even a window fan could do no good once the room heated up. I would never go to bed before midnight, but on those bad nights I would wake up in a sweat at two or three am and have trouble falling back to sleep. Rather than tossing and turning, I took to getting up, throwing on a pair of cut-offs and tank top and going for a walk in the neighborhood. The streets were very safe and this was Manhattan, remember, so people would be out and about at all hours. I’d usually walk to 23rd Street, which is a major cross street, and buy a cold soda, or a frozen treat to enjoy as I tried to walk myself back to sleep.

On this one, particular, hot June evening, I was having difficulty falling asleep. I had been in NYC since December of 1972, and still didn’t own a tv set, so I didn’t even have that to possibly lull me to sleep. It was probably close to 1:00 am when I knew I needed a walk, because this sleeping thing looked absolutely futile tonight. I dressed in my usual costume and was out the door. I walked up 17th Street towards Seventh Avenue, figuring I could spend some time looking in BARNEY’S windows. I wasn’t half way up my block, when I saw a guy walking towards me in jeans and a white tee-shirt. He had dark, curly hair and a black beard. So did I at the time, as did probably one out of every five gay guys in the city. It was the look at the time. I remember thinking I’d wished I had brushed my teeth before leaving for my walk. I slowed my pace and it seemed he did the same. The closer he got, the better he looked. My hormones began racing in rhythm with my heart, but on the outside I was continuing my nonchalant stroll.

There is a dance which could be done in a situation such as this. It had taken me most of my time in New York up to this point to learn it, and I was getting good at it, but this dance depended on the other partner. If he wasn’t at the same level of interest, the dance would never begin. If he was, then I certainly knew my choreography. We were both still pretending we had not really noticed each other-that we were not interested in anything but our individual night walks. We got to within about ten feet of one another and he moved a foot or so out towards the street, and I countered his move in towards the buildings. Now as we passed on the sidewalk, I turned my head slightly towards him and smiled a bit, more with my eyes than my mouth. As I did, he parted his lips and showed his teeth, returning a grin. Without even a hesitation, I continued to walk a few feet ahead. I stopped and turned in his direction, just with my neck, shoulders and my waist, my feet still planted in their original path. This was the crucial point in the dance. Had he done the same, or would I be staring at his back as he continued on his way, not interested in curly-haired, bearded, insomniac me?

And in one of those magic moments in a life, I saw that he had turned his entire body fully around and as we finally made eye to eye contact he said “well good evening, guy”, and smiled as he walked towards me. He extended a hand and shook mine as he introduced himself as though we were meeting at some sort of social function. I immediately detected a drawl. I had never really met a southerner in the city, and he acted like nothing but a gentleman and not street trash as one might expect at that hour of the night/morning cruising the streets of my gayborhood. He had been to a late showing of a film, he told me, and was walking home. He lived some blocks away on the Eastside and I explained my sleepless plight to him. I invited him up to my place (in great hopes of the two of us enjoying something that would really tire me out and help me sleep), but he had to be at work early the next morning. He was a psychologist and worked for some City office for social work. Neither of us had anything to write on or with, but he had a very distinctive three-part name and he said he was the only one in the Manhattan phone book. He went by his second name, which was Curtis. I called him the next day, well actually later that same day, and he became my boyfriend by the end of the following week.

Ours was an odd relationship; well at least for me it was. For Curtis, I think it was like any other he might have ever had. We saw each other regularly, getting together a few nights a week to eat and have sex. He was a foody and enjoyed an eclectic range of cuisines, as did I. He would cook one night on the weekend at his place and I would do the same at my apartment on the alternate night. We both enjoyed classical music. I liked opera more than him but couldn’t afford tickets very often and he favored piano and orchestral music, so we would attend recitals or smaller concerts at colleges and smaller venues that were more affordable. Curtis had no friends, at least he never talked about them. I had many friends who I was quite close to, but he seemed neither interested in meeting them nor in joining us when we got together. In the beginning, I was so infatuated with him and the incredible sex life we were enjoying and so much in love with the idea of our relationship, that none of this bothered me. I was having it all for the very first time in my life, plus it was the Bicentennial summer and the city was celebrating in a big way. At times, it seemed like everything the city was doing was also in celebration of my wonderful relationship with Curtis.

My parents usually visited every other year since I’d moved and they were due this summer, but because of the celebrations and huge crowds, they wanted to wait until fall. I didn’t know how I would pull it off, but I did want them to meet Curtis, because he had become important in my life. Up to this point, my parents knew nothing of my sex life nor the direction my sexuality was leaning in. One of the reasons I moved five hundred-plus miles away from home was so that I could live, what I was sure my family would have viewed as my depraved life, without them knowing about it. I had no plans to come out to them, but I wanted them to see maybe a tiny glimpse of the life I had hidden from them. If they wondered how this handsome southern gentleman fit into my world, all the better. I just wasn’t about to have my private life become fodder for an ugly family confrontation.

As uninterested as Curtis was in my friends, he was extremely excited about meeting my parents. He wanted to wait until the last day of their stay, and planned a Sunday morning walk in Central Park, and brunch in an Eastside restaurant. The weather was perfect and brunch was a lot of fun. My mother melted every time he called her Ma’am, even though she insisted each time that he call her Anne. My dad didn’t seem moved one way or another, but then he seldom was. We had some extra time before heading back to the apartment to pick up their suitcases and take them to the airport, so Curtis suggested stopping at The Plaza to show them how the other half enjoyed vacationing in New York. Both of my parents walked through the hotel with open mouths awed at the lobby, the Palm Court and the clientele. Curtis suggested we had time to enjoy a drink at the bar in The Oak Room. Suddenly Curtis became number one in Dad’s book. He loved nothing more than bellying up to a bar and parking his ass on a bar stool.

Curtis sat at one end, my father next to him, my mother and then me on the opposite end. We had already enjoyed cocktails with brunch, so my mother’s Southern Comfort Manhattan “up” quickly went to her head. It was her drink of choice and the only drink she knew to order other than a highball. She started talking quietly to me and her usually animated face looked as though she was struggling with something difficult that she needed to get out. She said that she was worried about me. It was obvious that I showed I could be responsible, and that I was living on my own in a very difficult place, yet I had made a nice home for myself. But she was worried that I didn’t have anyone in my life, that I wasn’t dating and never talked about any women in my life. She said something to the effect that a sex life was very important too. I smiled and told her not to worry about my sex life, I was doing fine. It might have been my second cocktail kicking in too, because seemingly out of nowhere I said “You see that guy at the other end of the bar”, pointing to Curtis, “he’s my boyfriend. I’m gay”. It was that simple. It just sort of fell out of my mouth and I couldn’t have said it better if it had been scripted by Neil Simon. She paused, looked me in the eyes and countered “I knew it. I knew it since you were five”. (I never did ask her what it was at five that made her think I was gay.) Then she ended the conversation with “Don’t say anything to your father. I’ll tell him myself when we get home”.

I told Curtis, the minute my parents were on the plane, what had transpired while he politely listened to my father regale him with stories of his local watering hole back home. He couldn’t believe it. He thought I was brave, because he said he could never be that real with his own mother (and this man was a psychologist, remember). We got back to my apartment, and made love, where I had the most intense orgasm  I’d ever experienced before. It had nothing to do with anything Curtis might have done. I never felt so free before. I really was on top of the world in every possible way.

P.D.A. in N.Y.C.

12/10/2011 By in NYC 1972-1983 Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

My first trip to New York City was a theatre tour I took through our university drama department my senior year, in the spring of 1972. It had been a dream going back to childhood, since the time of my first black and white 1940s movie that I watched on tv, to see the city for myself, and once I did I fell instantly head-over-heels in love. So much so that I cried inconsolably the first two hours on the bus back to school because I couldn’t bear to leave-especially to go back to life in awful Ohio. We saw something like seven plays in five days, and the whole experience totally blew me away. On that visit I don’t think I went further uptown than Lincoln Center, and didn’t make it much further downtown than Macy’s and Gimbel’s. We did blow through the Village in less than an hour early on Sunday morning but it was nearly empty because even street people aren’t up and moving that early. Once back in school, I decided I would move to the city before the end of the year and announced my plans to the family.

So my second trip was in September that same year. I continued working my summer job to build a nest egg before I left The Land of Cleves (aka Cleveland). This trip would be different, because I was traveling alone and I was meeting (for the first time) a guy with whom I shared a mutual friend. “Matty” was from the Youngstown area and had moved to NYC the year before. Our friend knew I needed to find a place after my move, at least for a few months, and she thought Matty might be interested in sharing his apartment as he was working two jobs and still finding it difficult to pay the bills. So it would be a unique experience for me, since I had never gone anywhere on my own and this visit would be to get a real feel for my future new home. Even though I hoped to see a few shows during my four night stay, my focus would be to get a taste of what social life and life in general was like in this exciting new world.

I was staying at the same hotel as on the theatre tour, the Piccadilly on 45th Street in the theatre district. It was cheap, clean, safe and already familiar to me so it made me comfortable knowing I could get my bearings and navigate the subway from there. I brought very few clothes with me, as I planned a shopping trip on the first day. I wanted to look like a New Yorker; I didn’t want people to see me as a hayseed from the Buckeye State!

Upon checking in, I called the phone number I had for Matty. It turned out the number was for his answering service. As an actor-wannabe, you needed to be able to get messages at any time, day or night (private answering machines were not yet common at this time) and he didn’t have a phone in his apartment. Can you imagine that a person could have an apartment in New York City and actually not have a telephone? Hard to imagine since now, forty years later, people seem to be born with cell phones attached to their right ears. I left him a message to call my hotel so we could make plans to meet and I was off to shop. Even though I didn’t know the area at all, I headed for the Village, since Matty lived and worked there, so I figured it would be the place to shop for a genuine New-York-hip-gay-guy look and my instincts were correct. I shopped for a pair of boots in a couple of neat small shoe stores on Sixth Avenue, and found several men’s stores were I got slacks (jeans were good, but when you dressed to go out at night, you still wore slacks) and…my prize purchase. It was a navy blue, double-breasted, very fitted, long trench coat with wide lapels. What a great look on five-foot-eleven, one-hundred-thirty-five-pound, twenty-nine-inch-waisted me. But I digress.

Once I got back to the hotel I found a message from Matty saying he couldn’t meet me that night, but that I should come to the bar where he would be working the following night (Saturday). So I was free on my first night ALONE in the big city. I went to the theatre, and afterward took a cab downtown to the Village and got out on Bleeker Street. I spent the better part of three hours meandering the winding small streets looking at shops, peering into small restaurant’s windows, and of course doing some first-class people watching. I was amazed at how many people still were out enjoying the night, when people in Ohio and everywhere else in the America that I knew, were most probably asleep in their beds, or at best passed out on their sofas in front of a tv set. In fact, it seemed the later it got, the busier the places became and the more crowded the small streets and alleys were. “What a friggin’ great place to be” I grinned to myself. Amazingly, a huge percentage of these people were gay couples: young, middle-aged, even some old, enjoying a romantic meal or drinking together, walking maybe arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand, but obviously together out in the open, publicly for all the world to see. You could never do that in Ohio. Even though I was alone, I was having a ball and loving this city more than I thought possible.

I cannot remember what I did the next morning. Probably breakfast in the Piccadilly Coffee Shop where they served “strictly fresh eggs imported from New Jersey”, which I thought was a real hoot to advertise. All I remember was getting ready to go out that night, putting on my semi-broken-in New York outfit, and heading down to Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a small bar near Sheridan Square, where Matty worked as a waiter from 11:00pm until closing. He told me it was a theatre bar, which I didn’t quite understand, but I would never have admitted my ignorance to him. I realized, once I got out of the cab, that I had walked past this area once or twice the night before, but hadn’t seen the bar.

As I walked to the door I heard a piano playing a song from CABARET and a chorus of male voices of various vocal ranges and qualities belting out the tune. I entered and asked the bartender to point me towards Matty. The minute I saw him I was relieved. He looked kind with friendly eyes and a nice smile and I doubted that he could be an ax murderer (my mother was concerned “well you NEVER know”). We compared notes about our mutual friend back in Ohio and laughed at her many antics. We clicked almost immediately. It was hard to talk a lot though, while he was working, so he introduced me to some of the regulars and I settled in at a table and took it all in. It was comfortable, non-threatening and a very fun group of all types of guys. Two of the boys joined me at my table. One was a tall guy who seemed just a bit too drunk but not slobbery. He was tall and handsome and maybe a little too touchy-feely but for the life of me I cannot remember even his first name. The other was a quiet guy, but not shy. His name was Richard (and I still remember his last name) and there was something about him that I found very attractive. He sat with me all night and was amazed that I wanted to come to the city and try pursuing an acting career . The hours flew by and I even helped close the place up. Matty asked if I wanted to get something to eat, “but is there anything still open after 4:00 am” I asked? They reminded me that this was New York City.

We all four of us walked around the block to David’s Pot Belly which never closed. Mr. Touchy-Feely had sobered-up a bit and Matty proved to be a real charmer with a great sense of humor. I hoped he would suggest sharing his apartment, because we hit it off really well, and I could tell he would be a very easy person to live with. Out of the dark of Marie’s and into the light of The Pot Belly, Richard looked even more attractive. He was not too tall, blondish, an early thirties All-American Boy type. I subtly made eyes at him every chance I got and he was getting my message, I could tell. I was having such a good time at my Village Baptism, I didn’t want to ruin the magic that had been happening all night, even though now it was after 6:00 am. Richard announced he had to be leaving to get home to the East Village (until that moment I didn’t know there was a West and East). I told him I would keep in touch with Matty and let him know before my move  as I wanted to get together again at Marie’s. He went to shake my hand, and I remember I boldly reached around and gave him a warm hug. I watched him walk out the door, knowing full-well I would be seeing him again. Matty had invited me to a Sunday matinée later that day at the theatre where he worked as assistant stage manager. He picked up the bill and I knew it was time for me to head back uptown to my hotel. Mr. Touchy-Feely said he would walk me to Sheridan Square where it would be easier to catch a cab at this hour.

Matty walked the other direction towards Seventh Avenue. Touchy-Feely draped his arm over my shoulder as we walked up the street and it felt good. It made me feel as though I was beginning to belong to Manhattan. The sun had just begun to light up the night sky. There were some delivery trucks unloading at an all-night deli and newspaper stand people were arranging the TIMES and other Sunday papers getting ready for morning readers. We got to the cigar store on the corner and he pointed out which direction was Uptown. He stuck out his hand to hail a cab coming our way. It stopped and I opened the cab door and announced “Piccadilly Hotel, 45th Street”. As I turned back towards him to say goodbye, in a millisecond he wrapped an arm around my waist, pushed me up against the cab and planted a huge, wet movie kiss that I swear lasted a minute and a half. It took me totally by surprise and I immediately thought “what is this cabbie gonna’ think”? That was the Ohio in me. This cabbie didn’t give a shit if another gay guy got kissed on Sheridan Square. It happened everyday-many times a day. God, what a great town.

An early sense of style

10/10/2011 By in Childhood Tags: , 2 Comments

Certainly, at this point in my life, I would have to admit that I am not a slave to fashion anymore. I suppose I never was a true slave, but let’s just say I had an acute sense of it whether I could afford it or not. There is nothing more disgusting to me than seeing a person of a certain age trying to dress au courant. This past summer in Provincetown I enjoyed the parade of young twenty-somethings in their tight, tight summer tees and cute butt-hugging shorts on their way to and from Tea Dance every afternoon. I can fully appreciate the look, but there is no way I would ever insult the masses by accentuating my quasi drooping man tits and five months pregnant belly bump by trying to wear the same outfit, no matter how damn fashionable it might be. But I’m not walking around in grandfatherly polyester trousers and fuchsia Crocs either. I think I am able to dress in a current mode adapted to my age and more importantly my body type. I just wish more of my peers and the American populace in general would follow suit. As delightful a sight it is to watch sweet young men dressed to thrill, I wretch inside seeing some older dude like myself  (old enough to know better) attempting to don the same gay apparel. Worse yet, is when you see these same guys inappropriately clothed in leather chaps and vest, exposing their sagging, wrinkled chest and oft times matching ass cheeks, parading as though they are a hot property, ripe for the picking. Do these people have access to mirrors, I ask myself? What aren’t they thinking?

Oh, and I think back to my days when I planned outfits to go to breakfast with friends at diners! And my dancing days going to a place like Le Jardin in NYC in the early 70s in an expensive Quiana shirt and low-slung, hip-hugging dress slacks. An outfit like that was not complete without a pair of towering platform shoes, and I had several pairs of those  (which were lovingly referred to at that time as joan-crawford-come-fuck-me-pumps). How I wish I had a color snapshot of one of those outfits. Err, on second thought…

So, when did I first become aware of fashion and style? We have to step into the Way-way Back Machine for that one. I was the second boy in the family and my brother was seven years older than me. We weren’t poor, but every dime certainly counted and absolutely nothing was ever wasted. My parents were raised during the Depression, and they never let us forget about it. I sometimes think they were trying to relive it by their frugality as a sort of reverse “Good Old Days” thing. My mother had kept a series of large cardboard boxes in our attic, each marked with my older brother’s age in one year increments. Every fall I remember going up into the unfinished space to open the next box in the sequence. She did this until my older brother turned thirteen. This would have been age four when I remember opening box 4, my first box and started trying on the contents for a sort of runway show for my mom. Fashion didn’t change very drastically in the 50s, especially for children, but seven years is a helluva’ long time, and to make matters worse, I had an uncle who was only three years older than my brother and some of his hand-me-downs were mixed into the boxes.

The pivotal outfit responsible for my awareness happened to be a brown woolen snowsuit: buttoned, fitted coat, snow pants with suspenders and a matching skull-cap complete with neck strap. It was constructed of the hardest, stiffest brown wool you could ever imagine. I still remember the collar rubbing my tender little four-year-old neck, the trousers instantly chafing my inner thighs and the hat that fit like a metal helmet because this wool was made to last and had no natural “give” at all.  AND it was my uncle’s, so this awful thing was new during the Second World War and it certainly looked it. “It fits perfectly”, my mother beamed. I stared into the big mirror on the attic wall and realized that it looked even worse than it felt. It was hate at first wearing. I reminded myself of the pictures in LIFE magazine  of the war orphans still wandering around eastern European cities that I was told to feel sorry for. “Somebody should feel sorry for me having to wear this shit-brown outfit”, I reflected to my four-year-old self.

But as mom had remarked, it fit perfectly, which meant it was mine for at least this season, and if I didn’t grow, possibly next winter as well.  Of course at age four, where did I think I would have to go? Didn’t matter. I resented having to wear it; not so much for how it looked or felt, but because it wasn’t new. Clothes should be new when you get them and you should have a say-so in choosing them. How or where I learned this, I don’t know, but I know I felt it strongly and I had to find a way to get a new snowsuit of my very own and soon. I just had no idea how I would pull this off.

It got cold early that year. Cleveland winter weather can be brutal due to the lake effect (everything bad comes down from Canada), so I was forced to begin wearing the atrocious thing before Thanksgiving, because I remember going to Grandma’s house for the family dinner and she grinned from ear to ear when seeing me become occupant number three of the snowsuit from hell. We got an early snowstorm soon after, which is when the photo of me was taken. How fortunate to have captured it on film. Then there came a freak thaw and everything melted so it was cold but a brief reprieve from winter. We had a huge dog at the time that used the area behind our garage as his toilet. All that was back there were our garbage cans and lots and lots of big piles of doggy-do. In the weeks before they had been frozen poop piles, but now with the thaw, they were once again nearly as mushy as they day they had plopped out of the dog. I was playing back there in the residue of what a week before had been tall mounds of snow and accidentally stepped on a pile of dung. Suddenly, the answer to my problem came to me as I attempted to clean the mess from my rubber boot.

How easy it would be to slip and fall into this back yard melange of slush and shit. I knew I couldn’t get just a little soiled. I had to make sure I became covered in the stuff. Even the cap had to be made unsalvageable. I actually remember thinking that! Can you imagine the deviousness of me at this young age? But I knew if done right, I could be on my way to Robert Halls for a new snowsuit after supper that night. And so I did that which needed to be done. I first looked around, knowing full well no one could see me behind the garage, (but guilt already had me in its clutches). I threw myself into the nastiest most densely doggy-dunged area I could find, and rolled myself into the mess, making sure to get as much as I possibly could onto the coat, trousers and cap. The only thing I protected was my face. Making sure I was totally disgusting, I ran screaming and crying to the back door where I banged to alert my mother.

Of course I had managed to gross myself out in the process, so the tears were not faked or forced. I had worked myself into a hysteria that only a mother’s love could calm and I prayed it would work. She opened the back door and her face said it all. “OH MY GOD WHAT DID YOU DO? What happened!?!” I told her, between grand sobs, that I had been playing in the snow piles behind the garage and slipped into the dog mess. She immediately started ranting about my lazy older brother whose job it was to clean up after “his dog”, and I knew I was half way there. “Now”, I wondered to myself, “had I done a good enough job to make her want to chuck this shitty outfit”? She told me to stand still as she eyed me up and down and had me turn around to survey the situation. There were actually turds and pieces of turds hanging from a coat sleeve and lodged under the collar. “How did you get it all over” she kept asking? “I slipped and fell down and hurt myself” I cried even more, afraid that it might not have worked. “Take off that coat and put it in the garbage can. We can’t even take it to the dry cleaners like that. It’s ruined”. The magic words had been uttered. And I did as she told me, stuffing the trousers into the can as well. I ran back towards the door as she screamed “the cap-the cap is covered in potty, too”. I almost danced a jig as I pulled it off my head and buried it too with the rest of the ensemble.  I had to take off the boots at the back door. They got washed in the stationery tubs in the basement . I don’t think we made it to Robert Halls that night. But no more than a few days later, I chose a navy blue, modern, NEW snowsuit that I wore that winter and the following one as well. Of course, as in most future new clothing purchases, my mother bought it bigger than necessary, “so I could grow into it”. I didn’t mind that at all, for a few years, at least.

The Boys in the Band

02/10/2011 By in College 1968-1972 Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

It was my junior year of college when I finally figured out, in my head at least, who and what I really was (or who I hoped to be). I was a theatre major and had become a member of a sort of underground group of gay guys who hung out together. I say underground, because not many of us were officially out, nor had we fully come to terms with what was simmering deep inside us. We might have had sexual experiences, but most often they had to be done covertly; certainly not in the open like our straight friends. We socialized with the entire theatre department and despite what you may have heard, not all theatre people are gay. In fact, there were far, far more straight people than gay in our department.

Regardless of our sexual proclivities, we all of us enjoyed the same things: (1) doing theatre, (2) getting together to celebrate theatre that we had done and (3) smoking dope. We did a lot of all three things and some friends actually also found time to go to classes as well. At this point, I was not one who put in much classroom time, unless it was theatre class. I was having way too much fun playing onstage and off to care about mere academics. I did just enough to keep my draft deferment status, because this was 1970 and thus Vietnam, you see.

We did a lot of theatre in a school year. Besides the University main stage shows, there were several very good student theatres where we were beginning to stage productions that would sometimes draw bigger audiences than the University shows. Early this particular school year, auditions were announced for The Boys in the Band. It was still running in New York and the movie had just been released the summer before. It was difficult to get the rights, but  the student director managed and Boys was all the buzz in the halls of the theatre building. There were more guys auditioning for the nine roles than I had ever seen before, especially for a student production. It was the most grueling and drawn out audition I ever went through,  but I got the part I so badly wanted.

The play deals with thirty-something-year-old gay men struggling with aging and dealing with the futility of a homosexual lifestyle. It is a very dark and dismal take on being gay, but at the time very true to the reality of the generation before ours. Here we were, all of us boy-men, barely twenty and most of us just discovering and experimenting with our own sexualities. It was an amazing theatre experience, but more so a personal psychodrama for me and many of my fellow actors. Of the nine of us, six were gay. Of the six, three came out during the course of the production.

It was a huge success. All in all it was a damn good production with some really fine acting. Audiences were huge and receptive. We actually sold standing room tickets and had to turn people away. If memory serves, we added extra shows. We were performing in a make-shift theatre space in the Newman Center. Can you imagine the Catholic Church giving a home to a production of a gay play? But it was the 1970s, when even the Church had a heart, I guess.

It was an example where I saw, first-hand, how theatre could move people-not just an audience, but everyone and everything around it. Bringing the play to our University changed that little world for the better. It forced people who had no idea that homosexuals were a part of their world too, to sit up and take notice. It put a face on what had been, for so many, just this idea out there that they knew existed, but was not yet a reality for them. And our straight peers in the theatre department looked at us a bit differently too, even though they had always been accepting of us, even when they didn’t know exactly who/what we were either. It was as though a huge theatre curtain rose, and a gay world was exposed in all its glory to everyone all at once. Now people could begin putting two and two together and realize “Oh, that’s why my cousin….” or “Do you think Uncle Whoever never got married because…”  and “I always thought maybe Mrs. So-and-So my eighth grade English teacher…”

And the best part, selfishly for me, was that the closet door that had only been open a crack here and there, on and off for what seemed a lifetime, opened wide and blew off its goddamn hinges.

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