City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [106]
Norm was turning himself into someone new. Bruce Mailman, who owned our building in the Colonnades, hired Norm to design and build the St. Marks Baths on St. Marks Place. I had gone to these baths years before when they’d been dirty and Ukrainian with a masseur in the basement rumored to be the cannibalistic original from Tennessee Williams’s story “Desire and the Black Masseur.” Norm put in lots of “wet areas” and solid primary colors and spotlights and warm terra-cotta tiles. He who’d been scared of his own shadow was now wearing a hard hat and climbing on steel beams several stories high and pulling girders into place and making hundreds of small decisions every day—and they all worked. Then Bruce asked him to build the ultimate disco—what I called “the Hindenburg of discos,” little realizing that it would indeed be the biggest and one of the last giant gay dance halls. The Saint opened in 1980 in the old Fillmore East, a rock-concert hall on Second Avenue. A mesh-enclosed ramp led up and up to the immense dance floor of nearly five thousand square feet inserted under a dome in the building with robotic arms shuffling and pinpointing whole phalanxes of lights. In the center was a stage where Madonna or Whitney Houston would perform. Late, late at night (in reality toward noon the following day) the dome would turn into a planetarium and thousands of stars would slowly drift through space. Above and outside the dome on one side were the remaining seats of what had once been the top balcony. There stoned young men would sit in confused isolation in the dark and look down at the illuminated antics of the dancers. If you were properly stoned, they would look like miniature Santa’s helpers manufacturing mountains of invisible toys. Since I lived just five blocks away, I’d sometimes set the alarm and show up at five in the morning and head right to the balcony, where many of those lonely men were ready for sex.
Norm turned himself into a big man among men. He and Louis built the Chelsea Gym, which epitomized gay Chelsea for nearly a decade. I’d see Norm marching down the street with four other young men all in their thirties, wearing jeans and leather jackets, their hair cropped short, their voices loud. They weren’t bullies or pigs. They read books. They listened to classical music. They fell in love. Their politics were progressive. They talked about ideas. But Norm could command a team of straight workingmen on a building site and hide his emotions under a gruff exterior. He was the New Gay Man. A straight journalist would devote a chapter to him in a book on contemporary men.
At Norm and Lewis’s apartment a lot of these big, hearty sensitive men would sit around and eat good food buffet-style and drink white wine and talk about their feelings or their wider interests. I can remember marching in a gay pride parade with all of them, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We were with the leather boys, all of them smelling of hide and beer.
One of the stars of that group was Thom Gunn, the great English poet who’d lived most of his life in San Francisco. Thom was tall, bearded, lean, a serious leather guy and a decade older than all of us (though he looked our age). He was fascinated by Norm and maybe was just a bit in love, even if his “type” was younger and frailer. But when Norm died early on of AIDS, Thom wrote a beautiful elegy to him, “Courtesies of the Interregnum.” If you google Norm you’ll find nothing about the astonishing buildings he designed. You’ll find him only as a link to Gunn’s elegy.
I visited Thom two or three times in San Francisco, and once in a great while I’d phone him from New York out of the blue. He lived in a small commune of gay men and with a lifelong lover, Mike Kitay, an American he’d met at Trinity when he was a student. Each of the five or six men in the commune had his cooking