City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [44]
We were worried that we were missing out on something by not being back in our own dirty, impossible, exciting city. As editors we complained that all the good stories originated in New York and that all the good journalists lived there. Although we tried to honor the notion of reorienting the magazine to the West Coast, we couldn’t find much to write about in San Francisco. David Bourdon, our art critic, did one story (my suggestion) on Richard Diebenkorn, a genuine San Francisco artist and one respected in New York. Bourdon also wrote about the quirky, humorous ceramist Robert Arneson, who was recognized by the international art market. If we had to do something on weaving, it shouldn’t be about local looms but rather about the great fiber-artist innovators, Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler. But the idea that we could single-handedly elevate San Francisco novelists (well, there was Herbert Gold…) or composers or painters (there’d been the Bay Region figurative painters of the 1950s, but who since?)—all that seemed impossible. Of course some poets of importance were in Bolinas, but our bosses weren’t too keen on devoting much space to them.
We worried about our own careers. What would happen to us if and when the magazine folded, as seemed inevitable? Would we just be forgotten? Were we in danger of falling off the edge of the world? We noticed with anxiety that even natives in San Francisco referred to their city as being “out here.” I’d struggled to get to New York from Illinois and Michigan and now it seemed as if I were going backward. My novel Forgetting Elena was about to come out, but of course I wouldn’t be in New York to “promote” it, whatever that consisted of. The cover art arrived in the mail for my “approval.” I disapproved of it—a color drawing of a seashell weeping a single tacky tear—but that made no difference. If I’d been in New York, would they have paid more attention to me? Probably not.
One night we walked to the foot of Russian Hill and attended a midnight performance of gender-fucking bearded drag queens, the Cockettes. The audience was in makeup and glitter and bits of finery as well. Everyone was high on LSD except us, who were sullen and drunk. They were all weeping and laughing uncontrollably and singing along and responding to tiny, nearly invisible gestures, or to inaudible words as if they were listening to the bizarrely eloquent but perfectly banal peepings of Kafka’s mouse-diva, Josephine. The public devoured with delight the terrible silent-movie overacting. At certain points various actors straggled purposelessly across the stage in dirty organdy skirts and torn stockings, their eyes more mascaraed than a Kabuki actor’s. The unpatterned traffic jam of personnel onstage no longer suggested coherent pictures for the audience. As at the Kabuki, a cult of personality surrounded several transvestites, in this case long-legged, terminally skinny black or white speed freaks. “Oh, Marsha!” someone would cry from the audience. “Betty, girl, we love you!” We were totally puzzled. We weren’t on acid. We didn’t know these people. “Amateur hour,” someone in our cynical group muttered. I suppose we felt vindicated when the Cockettes bombed in New York soon afterward, though the New York critics’ agreement with us, a New York audience, was merely tautological. If the Cockettes had truly been Japanese dancers and we’d had to wear interpreter’s headphones and read a monograph on them, they might have had better luck and might have been just as foreign to our Broadway-trained sensibilities.
Also, it seemed to us as if everyone in San Francisco were doing yoga and reading Krishnamurti, gardening and obsessing about the presentation of his or her macrobiotic diet on an artfully misshapen,