How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [1]
Growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (or, actually, right over the river in New Jersey, in Hunterdon County), was wonderful because intrepid gay pioneers had come before us, blazing a trail filled with all the important things in life. They had settled this rural area right after World War II, and made it civilized.
As a young girl, I couldn’t put my finger on what made the area around New Hope, Pennsylvania, so fabulous, so different from other rural or suburban environs. Now I know that it was this steady presence of gay men that set it apart. The labels “homosexual,” “faggot,” and “queer” were never mentioned in my household. Instead, my family displayed a quiet appreciation for what at that time was a closeted culture.
In the small river town where my parents had started a company, we all admired the local florists, two well-dressed men who created the most elegant arrangements for miles around. They shared “bachelor” living quarters and kept two standard poodles in their shop. Our family went to the Lam bertville Music Circus, an outdoor tent theater owned by St. John Terrell, who brought in Dorothy Lamour, Donald O’Connor, and other campy old-time stars to perform in Broadway musicals.
Before he retired to the country to stage plays in a tent, St. John Terrell had made a splash in 1933 as the original “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy” on radio. Now I see his early role as ironic. Outside the soundstage, Jack Armstrong was probably doing things considered to be very un-American at the time. As a kid in the sixties and seventies, I saw the flamboyant Terrell nearly every Christmas morning in the reen actment of George Washington crossing the Delaware. He took the role very seriously, standing at the bow of the boat in the exact same position George assumes in the famous painting. After reaching shore, the bewigged and rouged Terrell made a speech and swirled his navy blue cape. Then he made his exit, complete with colonial drummers, flags, and a long, slow march into the distance. It was very campy, although my child-mind didn’t see it that way. Apparently others had caught on, though, since some time in the early seventies a bunch of college students rented a speedboat, plastered it with British flags, and sped around George ’s boat, trying to get St. John Terrell to fall into the water. I’ve since learned that Terrell identified himself as heterosexual, so I guess I have to put him in the ever-expanding “gay-seeming” category of theater types.
Campy sites and activities were everywhere around me. You only had to go one town over to Stockton, New Jersey, to find the original “small hotel with a wishing well” described by Rodgers and Hart in their famous song. Lorenz Hart, who wrote some of the best lyrics in the world, was a tortured, closeted gay man. Playwright Moss Hart (also allegedly a closeted gay man) and his wife, Kitty Carlisle, had a house nearby. Dorothy Parker had lived with her allegedly gay (bisexual?) husband, Alan Campbell, only a few miles from our house. I wasn’t surprised recently to find that Andy Warhol had discovered Charles Rydell, the star of his movie Blow Job, in a performance of Lady in the Dark with Kitty Carlisle at the Bucks County Playhouse.
My family dined at Chez Odette on the canal in New Hope, which was owned by Odette Mytril Logan, the original Bloody Mary on Broadway in South Pacific. She had a piano bar where handsome young homosexuals sang catchy tunes well into the night. (And, okay, I hate to bring it up again, but there were standard poodles running around the place, too.) I didn’t know that many of the handsome men with good voices were gay—it was never discussed, but it was there. The gayness in the room was like the infamous elephant in the drawing room, which made an enormous impact on the environment, even if no one would admit it.
At a town north of where we lived, I auditioned to be in the chorus of a summer stock theater, where I met my first gay boyfriend. Of course I didn’t exactly know that Wesley was queer (my gaydar was as yet undeveloped),