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By Root 1136 0

to condescend to our landlocked relatives and not permit them to look down on us. We didn’t see why our tax money had to support their wars. We wanted to raise the drawbridges and lower the portcullises isolating our island from the horrid mainland. Americans looked at a movie like Taxi Driver (1976) as a portrait of lawless New York, but we knew that aside from the ambulatory psychotics there were artists and lovers and beats, hippies and bohemians—in fact, La Bohème struck us as a greater likeness, and years later Rent, our own New York AIDS version of the opera, predictably became a hit musical. We were radicals politically, and radical causes packed our streets with demonstrators, whose hair was too long, whose tempers were too short, whose speeches were wild-eyed. The rest of America didn’t know whether to laugh in derision or channel-surf away from our images out of fear. From 1970 on, the Christopher Street parades, celebrating gay liberation, got longer and longer and more and more freakish, with drag queens and motorcycle lesbians (Dykes on Bikes) and leather boys leading the human tidal wave, which invariably stopped for a special anti-Catholic moment outside St. Patrick’s. When I look at old newsreels of those parades and many others, I am always surprised that these hordes of stoned, starved, shaggy kids with their long sideburns were marching in 1980 and not 1965. The sixties had cast a long shadow.

Chapter 15

In the fall of 1977 Jasper Johns had a retrospective show at the Whitney Museum and I was sent by Horizon one afternoon out to Stony Point, New York. The house had the sort of simplicity that only money can buy—a large living room with high windows looking out on woods and a narrow river. I was fascinated by Johns—and disconcerted. He had read my books or at least Forgetting Elena and he treated me with respect. But he had a Noh mask for a face and seldom smiled and spoke even less often. As Vivian Raynor had said in Artnews, “He has a remoteness that, while very amiable, makes all questions sound vaguely coarse and irrelevant.”

I had my list of prepared questions and we worked through them. If the question was too invasive or stupid, his eyes would just bug and he’d say, “I’m not sure what to say,” and laugh his gallery-of-horrors laugh. He told me that his favorite television show was The Gong Show, and I could just imagine Johns laughing with that mad roar as the shamed contestants were hauled off the stage. Raynor had noted that Johns had laughed uproariously after he’d said, “The problem with influences is that the thing or person you say is an influence has to accept some of the blame for what you’ve done.” He was quick to see the absurdities and futilities of life, and even its minor moments of quirkiness could make him guffaw.

We were drinking whiskey on the rocks and I felt like putting my head down on my desk (yes, it seemed like being in school) and napping. Or possibly on his lap—I found him sexy in a daunting way. I could get him to make only one remark about Robert Rauschenberg, who was said to have been his lover in the 1950s, and that remark was slighting. Or rather he was quick to distance himself from Rauschenberg and to say that he was happy that I detected no resemblance in their work. And in fact they no longer saw each other. Nor did Johns ever discuss being gay, if indeed he really was. Years later I spent a night at a new house he’d just bought and he went out late and picked up a woman; at the very least he was bisexual. I thought a bit resentfully that all these “blue-chip” artists—Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson—never came out. We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us—”Of course since I’m not gay myself your work seems so exotic to me”—while the Blue Chips sailed serenely on, universal and eternal. It paid to stay in the closet, obviously. Of course they’d all eventually be outed after their death, but that would only add to their posthumous reputations and generate