How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [20]
My best friend threw herself a fortieth birthday party and hired a mutual friend, a gay man. He decided it should have a Moroccan theme, and when my friend said she had no Moroccan decorations, he blithely replied, “Hey, no problem, we’ll tent the place!” And that’s what he did, in her tiny apartment. He erected poles and draped Middle Eastern fabric everywhere. By the time he got finished, it looked like a seventeenth-century harem. The party was an enormous success, and a very gay touch was the fez her pet cat wore for the occasion.
In this celebrity-crazed world, party planners themselves have become famous, and so many of them are gay. When Oprah was planning her fiftieth birthday party at a mansion in Montecito, California, the television show Extra interviewed Colin Cowie, “gay party guru,” as the interviewer called him. “To give a good party,” said Cowie, “there are three great rules: great food, fabulous music, and tasty, snappy cocktails.” If we didn’t know it already, we’d catch on that Cowie is gay by the appearance of “fabulous” and “snappy” in the same sentence.
When columnist Michelangelo Signorile outed the recently deceased Malcolm Forbes in a cover story in Outweek in 1990, I was as surprised as most people. But then I thought, Hey, but what about that seventieth birthday party Malcolm threw for himself under the desert stars in Morocco? What about those balloon rides over the French countryside with Fran Leibowitz? How about his deep and abiding friendship with Elizabeth Taylor? All gay, gay, gay.
Gay men invented the party that people would travel for. Cole Porter was famous for the bashes he gave at his rented palace in Venice. Truman Capote spent a year planning his 1966 Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York for his guest of honor, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. Capote was more hands-on than most party queens—he obsessed over everything, from invitations to color schemes, and spent a lot of his time coquettishly trying to prevent guest-list leaks. By the time his party was ready to go, the fun part was gone. As the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen told George Plimpton in an oral history of Capote, “[The Black and White Ball] was like the Super Bowl. There was such a buildup that by the time the game was played, it didn’t amount to much.”
Another writer, Peter Mathiessen, said that Truman Capote had always remained angry that he skipped the Black and White Ball because of a deadline. “When I asked if I was forgiven, he burst out, ‘Cecil Beaton came all the way from London for my party, and you wouldn’t even come in from Sagaponack!’ ”
According to many accounts, Capote’s Black and White Ball was a turning point in American party history. Said Norman Podhoretz, “[T]he confluence of the fashionable social world, and the literary world and the world of political power was embodied in that guest list.” In Capote, we see a gay man with a vision: He wanted to arrange famous people, and have them dance and sway to his own music. A highlight of the party was when Lauren Bacall danced with Jerome Robbins, the gay choreographer of West Side Story fame. Those who attended the Black and White Ball almost forty years ago are still talking about it.
Flash-forward ten years. Steve Rubell, the not-quite-out gay man who owned the infamous Studio 54 in New York with Ian Schrager, would also change the way Americans perceived a party. Opening in 1977, Studio 54 was instantly the most popular place to be seen with artists, authors, rock stars, models, and actors partying the night away underneath a big moon emblem featuring a moving cocaine spoon. Much has been written about the cultural effect of the disco world of the 1970s, and especially the gay sensibility that created the supermodel and the super-celebrity. In 1998, a pre-Austin Powers Mike Myers starred as Rubell in a flop of a movie, 54.
Although Rubell was the co-owner of Studio 54 and presumably could have delegated doorman duties, he insisted that his presence at the entrance was the key to a good