• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1215 0

Open Theater, as the troupe was called, was an actor who in those days had a caveman virility and a brooding, almost scary presence—Gerome Ragni. He had been a member of the Open Theater since its founding in 1962 and starred in its production of Megan Terry’s 1966 play, Viet Rock, perhaps the first theater event to protest the war in Vietnam. Ragni then went on to write the words and lyrics for Hair, which also used Chaikin’s stage techniques. Later, after the success of Hair, Ragni lost his manly good looks and became a sort of clown, with a white man’s Afro and gaudy, flowing tie-dyed clothes. He was always stoned and talking and baring his teeth. His script for his next musical, the short-lived Dude, was originally two thousand pages long. His apartment had a narrow, plush birth canal as its entryway. Everyone laughed at him.

Joe, too, was swept up in the Vietnam protest movement. He told me that he’d never do anything ever again in the theater that wasn’t in opposition to the war. I didn’t care about the war. During my army physical I’d checked the box saying I had homosexual tendencies, which got me out of having to serve. Some people frowned on me, as if I were deliberately avoiding my patriotic duty, but I argued that to have lied in answering the questionnaire would have been illegal. I was being honest—and honesty in this case saved my life. Of course most of the men I knew personally never went to Vietnam; they stayed in grad school for years and years getting academic deferments. Or they fled the country to Canada. Or they checked the box.

Not that concepts like “patriotism” meant anything to me. As a gay man I didn’t think that I was American or that I belonged to a society worth defending. Of course I wouldn’t have said such a thing out loud; I didn’t want to sound disgruntled. But truthfully I felt powerless to affect national policy, and I also knew that any policy that might be devised by any government present or future would contain a clause condemning me as a homosexual. There was no “gay pride” back then—there was only gay fear and gay isolation and gay distrust and gay self-hatred.

I didn’t even feel part of “homosexual society”—we didn’t think like that back then. The term would have made us laugh: “Homosexual society? My dear, I’m not even a queer deb.” I didn’t follow politics nor did I ever vote in elections. Kennedy’s death saddened me but less so than Marilyn Monroe’s. Stan went to Washington and marched with Martin Luther King, but I didn’t. I can still picture Stan in his short-sleeved white shirt, carefully pressed, and his pegged black pants as he headed off for Washington in a bus. I never gave a penny to any political cause—or wrote a word on behalf of any movement.

If I’d thought about it, I might have said I was too “radical” to vote or that “revolutionaries” like me saw no need to reinforce the “system” by participating in it. I’d learned to talk that way at the University of Michigan, where my friends and classmates Tom Hayden (later married to Jane Fonda) and Carl Oglesby had written the Port Huron Statement and had been among the first members of the Students for a Democratic Society. This was the beginning of the New Left. In the Port Huron Statement, which was completed on June 15, 1962, the Vietnam War was still so minor that it rated only a brief mention. The rights of Negroes were the primary concern. No thought was given to women. “Man” and his future were endlessly discussed. Nevertheless, it was a sensible and inspirational document, though of course from the perspective of the early twenty-first century it appears naïve. For instance, it calls for the United States to help third-world countries to industrialize; ecological worries are never voiced. Competition in the economy must be replaced by cooperation. The Cold War must give way to nuclear disarmament; the Bomb weighed on everyone’s mind.

Though I knew how to talk the Leftist talk, those high-flown demurrals would have been dishonest. I wasn’t a dissenter; no, I was disaffected. When I was fourteen, a plainclothes