City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [34]
Chapter 8
And then I was back in New York and the 1970s had finally begun. Stan met me at the airport, popped something fun in my mouth, and took me on a tour of all the discos and backroom bars that had opened since Stonewall and my departure. After six or seven months in Italy, starved for sex, I couldn’t believe how unleashed New York had become.
For the first time I realized how much New York gay life had gradually been changing all along. Now it seemed as if ten times more gays than ever before were on the streets. With ten times as many gay bars. After the furtiveness of feeling up married men in the Roman cinemas, here were go-go boys dancing under spotlights and hordes of attractive young men crowding into small backrooms and abandoning themselves to each other’s mouths and arms and penises. Although people still talked about quick sex as “disgusting” and “filthy,” I thought of it as romantic. The idea that I could spot a pair of broad shoulders above narrow hips and mounted below a perfect column of a strong neck crowned by black hair and follow this prodigy into a dark room and within seconds be feeling his muscular, hot arms around me and his tongue in my mouth—that I could taste him and instantaneously know him—struck me as a miraculous but strangely easy transition. The intimacy that one would before have had to work for during months of courtship was now available for a whistle and a wink and a ten-step walk into the shadows.
I kept buzzing around a couple who were obviously looking for a third man to go home with them. They weren’t interested in me till I happened to see a Roman friend and started to talk to him in Italian. The two men came up to me and asked me, respectfully and somewhat timidly, if I spoke English.
“A lee-tle beet,” I said.
They asked me to go home with them, and for the entire evening I impersonated what I thought was their idea of an Italian.
The Gay Activists Alliance held a dance every Saturday in an old firehouse they’d taken over. Here the clothes and bodies were more varied, perhaps less ideal, than in the discos, but the sense of camaraderie was stronger. Men and women danced together. The middle-aged and the pudgy dared to show their faces. People who purported to be gay farmers or gay nurses put in appearances. Blacks, who had trouble gaining entry in the usual gay venues, came to the Firehouse with their black or white lovers and friends.
Not only had the number of visible lesbians and gays increased exponentially, they were also more fearless and affectionate on the street than ever before. They were loud and flirty or grim and sex-crazed, giddy or pompous—the whole gamut. I knew that it was only on the island of Manhattan that this visibility and variety existed. When I went to my mother’s summer place in Michigan, I walked aimlessly along Lake Michigan through whole vast armies of sunbathers and not once did I see anything that resembled a gay man. Not one eye strayed toward me or gave me that shutter-click of recognition I was so eager to detect in them.
In New York I attended a meeting of the Gay Academic Union; perhaps no more than fifty women and men were in the audience, young professors for the most part, though some were independent scholars, and they were talking about gay history and gay culture and the intersection of feminism and the lesbian struggle—or they were asking, was Thoreau gay? Whitman? Melville? Just to see all those earnest faces tilted up toward the speaker, not cracking jokes, not looking around for ironic grins of confirmation, made me realize how