These objections to the Journalism major were easily dealt with by turning my academic background inside out.  I rewrote my resume so that my other major, Anthropology became my major – renamed Sociology, though, to sound less like I had spent four years in a pith helmet interviewing chatty cannibal informants – and demoting Journalism to a minor.  And I faced the fact I had better follow up any reasonable openings, and drop the publishing pipe dream –  unless I wanted to be one of the House of Flowers losers.  Later I learned that many companies did not check your academic credentials, and I probably could have quite safely put down most anything I was prepared to bluff my way through – leaving aside the obvious mismatches, e.g. – football, theology, brain surgery, etc.  But I didn’t know that, and lacked the chutzpah to pull it off in any case.

Again, I went simply to chalk up brownie points for the Unemployment folks. This time there were only three of us, as I recall, and the same guy gave us an informal down and dirty on what we’d be doing.  Essentially they looked for any personal problems or habits in the people they investigated that might reflect badly on their employers or incline the employee to embezzle from the firm, etc.  They questioned neighbors, stores, former co-workers, and so on, looking for evidence of gambling, too great a fondness for wine, women and song, adultery and—of course—(surprise, surprise) homosexuality.  He regaled us with anecdotes about their work — a depressing narration of human frailty, conclusions often drawn from third-hand gossip and circumstantial evidence, and the joy of another life ruined.  The other lucky applicants I checked off as straight, but from the interviewer’s smiles and eye contact with me when he would launch into a tale of hidden homodom, I got the message: he saw the logic of  “set a thief to catch a thief.”   No thank you.

What I desperately needed was to find any reasonably responsible job and put in a couple of years at it.  This would give me a better employment base on my resume than “copy boy”, but more important, I hoped that enough creditable work experience and time would make my draft status irrelevant.  It was an eminently sensible conclusion, and it propelled me to make a decision located somewhere between folly and masochism.

  The God of Math

I had been an A student in grade school arithmetic, but when long division was sprung on us in the fifth grade I had been completely undone.  I could barely scrape through arithmetic after that, and when arithmetic became math it was worse.  If gym classes were my Scylla, math was my Charybdis.  Thus, when very soon after the snoops-for-hire episode I was offered a job, the fact that it was as a “media analyst” crunching numbers on an electric calculator all day did take the shine off it more than a little.

The meat racks along various dark streets such as Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street in the Village, the west side of Washington Square and Central Park West (uptown) were regularly patrolled by police cars. The one along Washington Square was virtually driven out of existence, and the long blocks of cruising along Third Avenue followed suit over the next few years.

  (right) The lower part of the Rambles area in Central Park

The previous year I had been the guest of a friend for a couple of weekends, but this year I had the use of a room in the Cherry Grove Hotel every weekend in return for working at a friend's shop in the village a few days a week.  In most of the years that followed I spent a week or two on the Island, and my last year out there I was one of a group of guys that rented a house in the Pines for the season.  Whether for a week or a season, it was a stretch of golden summers in a beautiful and special place. 

(I would enthusiastically recommend Esther Newton's book Cherry Grove as a terrific history and sociological study of Cherry Grove.) 
 

MISS ELLEN AND HER SISTERS AND DAUGHTERS

It had been a set-up from the get-go. This letter was probably intended to get Serafina to call off the cops if she'd gone to the law.

I don't remember if we ever discussed this incident, but by the mid-Sixties Dick's visits with me dwelled on his days with Serafina and Miss Kervajian, and times and people not in New York. By then I was no longer part of the crowd of people through whom I'd met Dick, but it was clear that he no longer saw much of them either. In the latter half of the Sixties and early Seventies we were like ships passing in the night: He left New York to move to Akron, Ohio where he had a "daughter" from years back, he returned after a year or so, I had a job where I traveled a great deal; he then moved to Fresno, California where there was yet another "daughter" or "sister."  I did exchange letters with him once or twice a year. Only one or two people we had known together ever wrote to him.

Sometime shortly after this he moved once more.  New Orleans, perhaps. I hope so. I moved to a new apartment. We lost touch completely, and I never heard another word about him. 

Miss Ellen/Dick was one of the funniest people I ever met, more than that he was an essentially kind and good person. And his "mothering" was his own style of mentoring. To think of how his life in the city withered away is very sad. His shtick could seem relentless and become annoying without a doubt. Times changed, and he didn't; and during these years he became middle-aged, if indeed he wasn't already middle-aged when I met him. He wasn't at all a drinker or bar person, so not even the exile of a "wrinkle room" could have been in his cards. How much slack should his younger friends (including myself) have cut him, and, on the other hand, at what point would we have become patent phonies, enduring duty visits to someone we saw as a living fossil?

What place was there for men of a "certain age," especially when much of the gay lifestyle was changing?

There was no Community Center, of course, nor any other place for older gay men. There were gay men in their late forties and fifties I saw in Cherry Grove over the same period who fought back the years with a flood of booze and ill will toward all, but they had the money to preserve their own private Fifties. I remember  back in '59 when one of Bob Manahan's younger friends, Steve, had asked quite earnestly when we were in Lenny's, "But where do all the gay men go to in their forties?"  Someone said that there was the equivalent of an elephant's graveyard, and someone else had suggested that it was the New Colony bar, which got a laugh. Steve's question may well have been provoked by anxiety: Though just twenty-five he was almost totally bald, and this with his thin, sharp-featured face and slight frame suggested he was much older. For my part, I had never so much as touched the door of the New Colony until 1963, grimly imagining that it opened onto a ramp which lead down to something like an enormous dark pit full of bones.

DELIVERED FROM HELL'S KITCHEN

In the Spring of '63 – after about a year and a half in the House of Flowers – I moved back to the Upper West Side, sharing an apartment with a series of roommates, on West 81st Street, almost across from the building where Milton and I had lived before.  It was the ground floor rear apartment in a brownstone, which meant that it was the "garden" apartment.  Like many other so-called gardens in shabby neighborhoods it was a rather desolate space, although it did have a small, geriatric peach tree which managed to put out a small number of blossoms for a few days each spring.  Of course, being on the ground floor, it had metal grills on all the windows and the door to the "garden," and more than once I looked out and saw guys climbing the fences and prowling up the street through the back yards.  The "garden" boasted a view of the rear of the Endicott Hotel up on Columbus Avenue, one of New York's early welfare hells.  Sitting in the backyard on broiling summer nights the fire escapes of the hotel at the end of the block looked like a scene from Calcutta  – scores of desperate people out on them trying to get some relief from the heat – drinking and fighting, yelling and screaming and prostitutes roaming up and down the metal stairways selling themselves. 

"Those people.  They'll blackmail you."    He went on, and it became clear he meant other gay people, it seemed not to occur to him that this blackmailing was usually an activity of his fellow straights.  Hard upon the heels of this came another joyful event.

From December ’64 through March ’65 my job put me in the Chicago suburbs, or within striking distance of the city for weekend trips.  This was the first time I’d gotten to see gay life in any place other than Syracuse or New York.

My first assignment was at a church affiliated college in the suburbs, and it was a real eye-opener.  Two of the upper echelon college officials, both married, were gay, but were successfully passing – though at least one of them did drop in at the Dome Room of the Sherman Hotel once in awhile, it had a jacket and tie ambiance.  Two younger, single administrators were also gay, and both seemed to be identified as queer by at least some of the students.  However, the shocker was that the president of the student body was not only gay, but God and everybody knew it!  He didn’t wear a placard, nor would he have been in my estimation particularly identifiable as gay, but he evidently had made no effort to conceal his sexual orientation.  He was a very nice-looking, intelligent, affable guy who was obviously well-liked – though a few male students made their hostility very public (jocks, of course), I was told.  But most of the students ignored his sexual orientation or seemed a bit bewildered by it as far as I could see.  I believe that he had even invited a boyfriend to one of the major college social events.  And this is 1964.

Chet, one of the young gay administrators took me to some of the bars.  One was called the Annex (if I remember correctly) and was on North Clark Street, or near it somewhere, another was the Century near a movie house of the same name.  They mentioned another place, which they didn't go because it was a leather bar...maybe it was the Gold Coast. 

In the Century I was surprised to run into David B., the nicest member of the clique I had fallen in with my Junior year at Syracuse University.  He was living in Chicago.  Stranger still, the very next night I ran into Tom R., from the same clique, who was also living in Chicago – and he hadn’t a clue that David lived there too!  Tom was the Philadelphia Main Line shithead who had made the observation after we slept together that I would always be queer, whereas he was going to get married, etc.   Revenge is sweet: I asked after the wife and kids, but he was embarrassingly bereft of news on the topic. 

These places were cruise bars that could have been in New York, but Chet took me to another just across the way and down the street from the Century, the Red Parrot (or maybe just the Parrot), which featured drag acts.  While I’d seen drag queens at parties in the Grove, I don’t recall them doing anything other than vamping around and posing, though there was an end-of-the-season stage show with drag acts which I’d never seen.

The Red Parrot was my introduction to drag queens as stage performers.  While the local audience received them with enthusiasm, I thought the first two were so effing awful that I would have been entertained only if they had vaporized before our very eyes.  But then Robbie, a buxom, black queen came out and put on a show that could have made a dead man cum.  I think he may have lip-synched to an Etta James' song, but it doesn’t matter whose it might have been, for he did the number with a style and wit that was completely his own, a performance so unique that lip-synching was the least of it.  

Chet and I also went to Hugo’s, a place near Chicago’s Old Town.  I was surprised to see that the place allowed dancing, at least in the form of a group dance called the Madison.  It had already had trouble with the cops, and was closed not long afterward, Chet told me.

In 1961, Illinois had become the first state in the nation to adopt the recommendations of the American Law Institute and pass a comprehensive revision of its criminal code.  One of  the revisions – as it was described by gay guys I knew – "made sodomy legal."  Exactly what this meant was not clear.  However, given that New York City was in the grips of a major campaign of gay repression at the time, my recollection is that this news passed from view quickly and ignited no flame of optimism.  When I ended up in Chicago in the fall of '64, what I saw and heard indicated that while gay sexual relations may have been decriminalized the harassment remained.

this became an excuse for renewed vigilance against gay people and places. The heat was on again.  Gay bars were closed, and according to Frank O'Hara's biographer, Brad Gooch, so were some coffee houses that held non-profit poetry readings and movie houses showing unlicensed films, including Genet's Chant d'amour.        

More and more it seemed that this would be the way of life in the city, and not just a temporary dislocation.  My work travels left me out of touch with the bar closings, and when I came back to town I had to check up with someone before I went out.  There was always Julius's, of course.  But by this time the appeal of its cobwebbed beams and nostalgia decor had paled; and more to the point, I had no patience with the place's anti-gay atmosphere.  For my New York money I wanted a real gay bar, I could find plenty of tight-assed places on my journeys around the country.  Somewhere just before mid-decade I ceased dropping into Julius's at all.  After all, if I wanted homophobia up close and personal, I could stay home, sit in comfortable chair and call my parents.

There was a series of short-lived dance crazes  too, e.g. – the Mashed Potatoes,  the Watusi, the Loco-motion, etc. Each was named for a hit single of the same name and usually lasted only a little longer than the hit. An exception was the Twist, which wiggled itself out over a few records to became a national craze, and even underwent a revival a few years later. While the dance itself would seem ludicrous today, it was danceable by everyone - requiring no leading of your partner and no intricate footwork. It made dancing to upbeat music more popular, and it varied the tempo of gay parties, where formerly romantic ballads had been virtually the exclusive fare. The twist was a harbinger, and led straight to free-style disco dancing. However, gay dance bars didn't stand a chance in the current ultra-repressive climate.

It was in 1965 that the FCC changed the regulations under which AM/FM radio operated, and FM radio, as a result, was launched as a truly separate listening band of vibrant stations with more specialized formats.  Later several essentially black-oriented stations would draw large audiences of gay white men.

Thus spake – or rather, sang – Bob Dylan.  And it is axiomatic that the Sixties was a decade tumultuous social and political changes in the United States.  Perhaps the most startling one was the willingness of an ever increasing number of Americans to resort to massive demonstrations and widespread civil disobedience – as well as prolonged rioting and arson and even acts of terrorism to express their anger and demands.  As disturbing as the majority of Americans may have found the earliest symptoms of this new turn, it took only a few years before the level of unrest and violence, and the deep contempt so often manifested against police, government and various social institutions, had turned into a nationwide atmosphere of uncertainty and fear.  

It was only at the mid-point of the decade that an increasingly liberal atmosphere began to affect gay people in New York, and not until the end of the decade that gay rights issues began to have a high profile.  A virtual handful of gay activists with Mattachine connections presented themselves publicly.  As for the New Left, the SDS, and the Yippies - none of these groups – really gave a shit about gay people.  The leaders of the Black Panthers and the Yippies were as homophobic as mainstream American society. 

  (right)  1965 gay civil rights marchers  

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that authors and publishers were more adventurous about homosexuality than even "radical" politics. One of the first best selling works to include major gay characters was Lawrence Durrell's four volume Alexandria Quartet. This series had been published in the late Fifties to great acclaim, and their appearance in paperback in the early Sixties widened their popularity.  One of the most sympathetic and wisest of the major characters in these books, Balthazar, is a gay male doctor, and a prominent secondary comic character is a gay cross-dressing policeman, who literally becomes a saint.  Other minor characters are gay or lesbian, and throughout the Quartet homosexuality is presented as unremarkable.  A constant touchstone throughout is the poetry and tutelary presence of Alexandria's gay poet, Constantine Cavafy. 

I mentioned in an earlier section that I had two majors in college, and only the basic English 101 course in those four years...and almost no time for leisure reading.  My catching up started with Durrell's Quartet and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata in 1960 when I was copy boy at the Times.

While there was no tidal wave of books focused on gay people, there was certainly a marked increase, and they received plenty of mainstream advertising and review space.  The first half of the decade saw Sam (1960) by best-seller author, Lonnie Coleman - among gays his book was referred to as "the gay novel with a happy ending", City of Night (1963) by John Rechy, A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood, Totem Pole (1965) by Sandford Friedman - a superb book, and Ned Rorem's Paris Diary (1966).  [Rorem's New York Diary appeared in 1967.]   The works of gay French writer, Jean Genêt, achieved widespread prominence in this period in the U.S., and a translation from French of Violette LeDuc's lesbian memoir, La Batarde came out in '65.  Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1964 novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, received critical acclaim but was denounced as obscene.  It was a raw and violent look at lower class Brooklyn life, and one major section of the book was about a transvestite and another about a married man having a gay affair.  There were other books, but these are the ones that I can specifically recall myself or gay friends reading. 

Although the beefcake photo magazines, their minimal text and captions studded with gay innuendoes and coded language, flourished, and One, the serious political voice, was still being published, I believe, there was a new gay mag on the block.  Drum, which I remember as being a definitely non-glossy production, came into my hands in 1965.  It was mix of news items, comments and opinions - giving the finger not only at the oppressive straight world, but to gay targets as well, plus cartoons and photos, all done up in an irreverent manner.      

Joe Cino had opened the Caffe Cino in the late Fifties at 31 Cornelia St. in the Village.  A good looking gay guy of Sicilian descent, he had come to New York from Buffalo at age fifteen to be a dancer, but ended as one of the originators of Off-Off Broadway theater.  According to a friend, his landlady at the Caffe Cino was a Sicilian and rented the store to a paisan for $125 a month, which allowed him to operate with very little ready cash.  He was open only at night and served regular coffee - 25 cents, espresso a little more, grenadine – 75 cents, pastry – 45 cents, no wine or liquor, and no charge for the show.  The cast passed the hat after the performance.

And then there was that damned war, still being referred to sometimes as the "Vietnam conflict."  It had begun with Eisenhower sending "advisors" to southern Vietnam, and then more under Kennedy – until Johnson had inherited a major military commitment – 385,000+ U.S. troops were in 'Nam by the end of 1966.  Americans were confused about the war, Johnson was being badly advised, the regimes we were supporting were weak, corrupt and disliked by their own people - and the death toll of American young men was creeping up.  And for what?  Public protests had begun against the war.  In February I went to see Sartre's play The Condemned of Altona with a friend from Fairfield Reading.  It was an abstruse and awkward play given a stiff production, but still interesting; however, it wasn't until afterward it occurred to us both that it could have been produced as a comment on the war.  And on August 16, 1966 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC, again!) began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the enemy. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting and 50 were arrested.

Many of the other books that show up in my life in the mid-Sixties reflect the intellectual interests and enthusiasms of those years, especially on college campuses.  Magazines and newspapers from the scholarly to supermarket rags eventually weighed in with their articles on these topics.  Most people probably got their information from publications such as Time and Newsweek, articles suitably brief and already into the news-must-be-amusing mode, which allowed a great part of the American public to decide in ten minutes that they were well enough informed to arrive at a negative opinion about almost anything.  Eventually topics would filter down to provide fodder for TV comedians and one-liners on sit coms, further reassuring many Americans that they had certainly been right to be dismissive. 

Psychotherapy East and West, by Alan Watts, who became the national popularizer of Zen, was the first in a string of books I read on Zen, I believe; another was Phillip Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen.

William Barrett's Irrational Man (1958) introduced Americans to existentialism, and I had picked up a copy sometime after the paperback came out in '62. 

   (right) Irrational Man, '62 paperback cover

Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus were a sort of esthetic high ground, from which eminence I dived into The Story of O, a wildly popular bit of literary pornography (by Pauline Reage and from France, of course), The Wheel of Fortune (a pot-boiler memoir by Piaf – I would have read her grocery list) and Witches' Sabbath by Maurice Sachs, a despicable gay petty swindler and sponger who was involved in French artistic circles at the advent of WWII and spied for the Gestapo.

In 1966 I had a very brief affair with a sweet guy named Jerry, one of hundreds of young gay men who had a role in The Fantasticks before plunging into the obscurity of permanent waiterdom. I took him to see the Bunraku – the wondrous Japanese puppet theater.  And he took me to see the very funny and lively musical, Superman, which I was crazy about – and still am.  Soon we had to part, most likely never to bed again, I for a teaching assignment in Florida and he for the promise of stardom somewhere in the Trans-Hudson Outback.  A couple of days before I left we met for a quick drink in the early evening in a Village bar.  As a parting gift I gave him a copy of the Rubayait of Omar Khayyam. (My spellchecker suggests that I might consider the Rubbermaid of Omar Kayak, and perhaps I should have.) Besotted with lust, I embellished the book with a florid inscription, which in a crisis of over-confidence and with a desire to impress, I translated into French – a language my college teachers had implored me to drop before I single-handedly brought it to the verge of extinction.  The translation was not just wrong, it was grotesquely wrong:  Instead of asking rhetorically, must we say it wasn't love because it couldn't last, I mangled this into something closer to, must we say it wasn't love because it couldn't stay hard.  Poor Jerry must have been very puzzled, as he never had a problem in the hardness department.  

Really, what a jackass!  I cringe when I think that book may still be in existence somewhere, and thank the gods that at least it wasn't The Prophet. 

THE "RED MAYOR" OF FUN CITY

I was often out of the city for several months at a stretch during these years.  I'm not sure how much I missed though.  It had looked for a brief while that the anti-bar campaign might be lightening up when along came the damned World's Fair, which was heralded by announcements of  a new clean up campaign.  However,  the World's Fair was Mayor Wagner's swan song.  By this time the Democratic party in New York City was in a shambles as Tammany Hall finally collapsed, and the Reform Democrats raised hell for the Old Faces and the old ways of the party.  Thus, "Handsome John" Lindsay, a rich, sophisticated Republican with movie star looks swept into office as the candidate on the Republican and Liberal tickets, and was supported by disenchanted Democrats and independents too. And, rather rapidly the city atmosphere that I tend to think of as a black and white Fifties movie began to change in many ways.

 Times Square in '66 was no soft-focus art film of love-among-the-lowly, even if your idea of a Valentine was a big basket in a pair of sprayed-on Levis.  By this time "the Deuce," as 42nd Street was known, in addition to the usual hustlers, and prostitutes (drag and female) was attracting more thuggish individuals (male and female) who were looking to set up customers for assault and robbery rather than a roll in sack; drunks were pissing and panhandling all over the place and passed out on the pavement; dope selling was going hot and heavy (and it wasn't just a little MJ), etc.....and, of course, the owners of the Broadway theaters, and the restaurants that depended on middle and upper class theatre-going clientele, were up in arms.  The Great White Way, the Street of Broken Dreams.......and all the other clichés, for which the area was famous – was looking more and more tarnished and rather scary as the Deuce's activities spread up 8th Avenue and its crowd drifted into the streets of the theatre district. 

Readers of Martin Duberman's book Stonewall may remember that his major drag queen informant, Sylvia Rivera, told Duberman she used to carry a gun  for protection when she worked the Times Square area, but she also admitted operating in tandem with a female prostitute to set up tricks and rob them.

      Washington Square, 60's (Klaus Lehnartz photo)

The answer in both Times Square and Washington Square was the usual recipe of more policemen, hassling and threats of arrest, plus a sweep and carting people off in the paddy wagon to give things some real muscle.  Later the Hippie gatherings around Bethesda Fountain in Central Park looked like they were going cause a downward spiral to the park (whose image and ambiance had improved considerably), but by this time the Lindsay administration had found its own – and a different – style

If the "Kennedy Years" conjure up a Camelot nostalgia across the U.S., then the "Lindsay Years" (1966 - 1974) would provide a similar magic for many gay New Yorkers who lived them.  By accident John Lindsay was to get caught up in the burgeoning gay public presence and the beginning of gay rights, and to his credit he was willing to move forward with both. 

IS THIS BULLSHIT WORTH IT?

Fairfield Reading turned out to be a great place to work.  While I always looked forward to returning to New York, the traveling part of the job was an unexpected plus. All I'd seen of America was eighteen years in a small town in upstate NY, four years in Syracuse and three in New York City - and a few of vacations in Florida and Canada with my parents.  Now I got to meet people and live briefly in various parts of the South, Midwest and New England, and oftentimes not the major cities, which especially during the increasingly restless mid-Sixties could be very interesting.  These years saw the emergence of  Zen Buddhism and Existential philosophy and literature as topics of interest and controversy – and just plain fad.  And while you could get a reportorial analysis of them from reading magazines and newspapers, working with college students in these years meant getting involved at the level of reading and talking with bright, lively people in an environment that was more intellectually exciting.  The Hippy movement was also coming into prominence, and the view from the campus was more interesting than the one from the pages of  Time magazine.  (An impression I formed in these years, and it remains with me, is that while undergraduate students had a variety of views regarding the Hippies, Zen and Existentialism that it was grad students and older faculty members who embraced these things with a naive fervor.)   Another plus was that as I was often on assignment alone in unfamiliar, and sometimes boring, locations which pushed me to do a lot of reading.  I checked the students' books and went through the college book stores like a vacuum cleaner, so to a certain extent it was like getting to do college all over again in a Sixties mode. 

[Looking back, I think it was the years at Fairfield Reading, especially the extended stays on college campuses, that caused me to have more of the attitudes and values of the Sixties in my makeup than many of my contemporaries do.  I have found that the majority of the straight people in my generation stayed firmly anchored in the Fifties, and even though they were very young in the Sixties they seem to have not bothered by and large to investigate what was going on.  Gay men of the same generation seem more of a mixed bag.]

When I was back at the company's offices in the suburbs there was a lot of informal socializing with the other staff members, at lunch and now and then in the city and the owner/ director of the company encouraged an informal atmosphere and gave several parties a year in his home.

There was one gay guy on the staff, Tom, a Southerner, who was pleasant and easy-going with a dry sense of humor.  His sexual orientation was not something he hid, but neither did he talk about his private life at all.  He and I became friends, and he introduced me to two wonderful things – the cast album of the short-lived 1956  Broadway show Candide, and the poems of the gay Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, the genius loci of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  Both of these have remained favorites of mine for forty years.  After a year or so Tom resigned to find work in the city.

My own modus operandi was to continue to play it straight, by editing out anything in my personal life that might suggest otherwise.  There was another gay staff member, Richard – at least, I judged that he was gay.  He was a heavy-set, exuberant guy, who rather aggressively played the role of company comedian, as well as mentor to newbies.  I quickly became a focus of his attention, and though I liked him, I always steered away from any conversational tangents that seemed ready to swerve into an admission of our shared sexual orientation.  I thought this had been a wise strategy when over the next year or so I saw him get gushingly obvious crushes on a couple of new male staff members.  

In the summer of '65 I was teaching in an Upward Bound program at a black university in the South.  (Upward Bound was one of President Johnson's Great Society programs to help blacks enter into mainstream American society.   Upward Bound provided intensive preparation for youngsters to succeed in pre-college performance and ultimately in higher education pursuits. The goal of Upward Bound was to increase the rates at which black high school students enrolled in and graduated from college by giving them intensive instruction in reading, writing, study skills, and other subjects necessary for success in education beyond high school.)

 The campus facilities were rather rundown and it was brutally hot and humid – with no a/c or even fans.  Richard drove down one weekend from where he was working a hundred miles or so away, and we rented a room (with twin beds) at an air conditioned motel with a swimming pool.  It was clear after a couple of hours that Richard hoped this would be a tryst.  He became very verbally romantic at dinner, and when it was time for bed he made his move – but fortunately, just verbally.  I declined, and he pushed a little more, and I declined again.  That, I thought, was that.  When the next day he was still pleasant, if a bit quiet, and did not bring the subject up again as he drove me back to campus, I was relieved as I thought that we'd now passed beyond any possible problems.  I was to find out soon that I had my head firmly inserted where the sun don't shine.

I did not return to New York until late in the summer.  Shortly after I got back, L. and D., Richard's two closest female friends in the company called me up and invited me to Jones Beach with them and a couple of other people.  At one point L. asked me to take a walk with her along the surf.  With a great deal of discomfort, she told me that after our weekend together, Richard had driven up to see her.  He was wildly upset and told a confused and confusing story:  I had physically tried to put the make on him in the motel room, I had been using him for years against another guy, and there were even hints of blackmail.  When we would both be back at work in the fall he intended to report all this to the assistant director, our supervisor.  I couldn't have been more shocked if she'd pull out a gun.  L. didn't know what to make of it, but had felt that I should know.  Later D. confirmed that he had also come to visit her with the same story. 

I expected that what would happen is that once this big steaming turd was dropped in front of the company, we would both be told to take a hike.  And there would go a job I really liked, and probably even any chance of ever getting a good reference out of it.  

When we had all returned to work, and I was expecting the bomb to explode.   Rudy, another staff member drove me back to the city in a company car one day. He suggested we have a drink at Dorian's or Rory's, two bars where Fairfield people sometimes stopped off uptown on the East Side.  After a couple of drinks Rudy asked me bluntly did I know that Richard had gone around telling everyone that I was gay and had put the make on him!  Now I didn't know whether to shit or go blind.  And then Rudy began a litany of you-can-tell-me-it's-okay….over and over again, desperately over and over again, until his hand was on mine and his face was so close it must have looked like we were joined at the nose. Suddenly I snapped out of my shock, and realized – ye gawds – of course, Rudy is gay too!  And Rudy is on the make.   

I decided then and there that I was going to go to the Assistant Director, and I would be the one to make sure all this got thrashed out – enough was enough. 

However, the shit did not hit the fan as I expected, and very soon Richard gave notice that he was taking a job in the city.  He bid me farewell with all the sweetness of Little Mary Sunshine with a strawberry shortcake wedged up her asshole.  Nothing had been said to anyone in the administration, as far as I knew – out of common sense or decency, who knows?  Or just as likely it was because Richard had found his new job at one of Fairfield's clients – in effect costing the company future income – and decided it would be stupid to rock the boat too much and jeopardize a positive job recommendation. 

At first, I thoroughly hated Richard for having put me through this anxiety.  But rather quickly that feeling changed to one of anger with myself for not having taken pains to avoid a gay man on the work scene who had a crush on me.  So, next I erred in the other direction.  My desire to present an image which would pass scrutiny went into overdrive after the incident with Richard.

At Kelly-Smith one of the young secretaries had gotten very infatuated with me on the basis of me sort of "partnering" her at boozy staff lunches.  When I realized what was happening I was at a loss how to squelch her interest without hurting her, and as a result I made a sloppy mess of it.  Unfortunately, the same thing happened again at Fairfield – and twice!  As we all traveled that meant that our contacts in the city got a bit thin, and we socialized more with each other, I think, than most employees of a company do.  I chummed around a bit – at least that's how I saw it – at group get-togethers with Sarah, and was baffled when despite what I'd thought were loads of signals that it was just a pal relationship, she became romantic.  Again, getting disengaged involved hurt feelings. 

Sarah left, but later on Polly, a new and somewhat older female, began to actively pursue me, and to the point where she was a royal pain in the ass.  Finally – Tom was still working there – we three went to lunch, and I disavowed my presumed heterosexuality to her; Tom kindly affirmed it – but she smiled sweetly, and said, "Oh, that's not true."   And she continued in aggressive denial mode so that my hands used to tremble when the commuter train approached, so strong was my desire to shove her onto the tracks.  

I ended up really angry with myself for not at least having at least the good sense to remain aloof in work environments.  I would have saved myself a lot of grief.  This pretend bullshit wasn't worth it, I decided. 

At the beginning of this summer I had met a guy at Riis Park, Ken.  And just as this situation at work came to a head, I had moved from the apartment on 81st Street, where I was living alone, and in with him on West 72nd and Riverside Drive.  This provided a perfect opportunity to start eliminating the heterosexual pretence.  I worked for Fairfield for five and a half more years, most of it in two administrative positions - but from this time on, I made sure to be matter-of-fact about  a personal life that focused on a male roommate and all-male socializing.  It was clear to me that most of the people I supervised were savvy to what this meant – questions and references to "girl/girls" withered away and were replaced by phrases references to "you/you and your friend(s)."   I never actually risked the statement, "I'm gay," but the absence of the label, as I recall it now, was only perfunctory and the staff seemed to have gotten the message.         

In August 1963 there had been the March on Washington by a quarter of a million people to demonstrate support for Civil Rights legislation, and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his now famous "I have a dream" speech.  But his leadership of the Black civil rights movement and his advocacy of non-violence were being challenged by other leaders and organizations with different views.  CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) were prominent among them, but there were smaller, more radical groups as well.  The century of injustice and poverty since Emancipation could not be redressed in just a decade of civil rights crusading, and America was now pouring enormous sums of money into the war in Vietnam - a war being fought by an army relying heavily on black soldiers.  Many blacks were feeling frustration and anger, rather than hope.    

The mid-Sixties saw the beginning of an eruption of rioting, looting and arson in black neighborhoods across the nation that within four years would become a terrifying specter of anarchy and insurrection.  The string of "long, hot summers" had begun.  In July 1964 demonstrators in Harlem gathered to protest the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer.  The demonstration was sponsored by CORE and began peacefully, but some protesters clashed with the police and general mayhem and looting broke out.  The rioting lasted for two days and spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.  I was out of the city traveling for six weeks and was shocked by the news on the radio.  I learned from my roommate that there there had even been some minor trouble in our neighborhood at the Endicott Hotel on the corner.    

The black neighborhood of Watts in L.A. was the scene six days of large-scale civil unrest in August 1965.  Many hundreds of buildings were destroyed by uncontrolled fires, and during the rioting and looting thirty-four people died and more than a thousand were injured.  Damage to Watts was estimated at $100 million.  In the same year there were outbreaks of disorder in black neighborhoods in Chicago and Springfield, MA.  

In June '66, after a bitter day of demonstrations and police provocation, Stokley Carmichael of the recently radicalized Student Nonviolenct Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rose and gave a fiery speech inviting violence against white rule.  "We want Black Power!" he shouted, and the crowd shouted the slogan back.  This speech and the events of the recent summers signaled a cleaving in the black civil rights movement away from the non-violent rhetoric and strategy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the following year riots broke out in the black Hough neighborhood of east Cleveland in July.  The violence lasted for several days and the police were unable to regain control, and in the end more than 2,000 National Guard troops were called into reestablish order.  Again, arson and looting destroyed blocks of homes and businesses.  That same summer of '66 more riots broke out in Dayton, Milwaukee and San Francisco.

"In the world's most exciting city dreams become rights with a bang."
                                                                                                                                        William Trevor

The first stop – and the only expected one – was the Ukrainian-American Village Bar on St. Mark's Place.  This bar had a posted notice: "If you are gay, please stay away."  A politer warning, but reminiscent of the old racist jingle: "If you're black stay back, if you're brown keep down, if you're white - you're alright."   Unexpectedly it was not open for business that day.  The assumption was that the management had been forewarned by the publicity and knew that their posted policy made them a most enticing target.

The Mattachine group and the reporters then went to Howard Johnson's at Sixth Ave. and 8th St., which had a policy of not serving gays.  When the Mattachine group made their statement and requested service, the manager genially refused to become engaged in the set up.  He bought drinks for everyone and sat down to have a chat with the group.

They then departed for the Waikiki Bar on Sixth Ave. between 9th and 10th streets. (This had been a gay bar under another name not too long before.)  The bartender refused to become involved and allowed that he would serve them.   By now everyone was getting a glow, but the Mattachine trio was discombobulated that homosexuals - with an entourage of reporters, at least – were magically proving to be acceptable customers that day.

Next stop for the entourage was the Julius' Bar on West 10th St., a village landmark known to New Yorkers and tourists.  The bar had an unhappy relationship with gay customers, and since the Wagner purge of gay bars it had found itself trying to fight off a much larger than usual gay clientele.  Gay entrapments had occurred there recently.  One of the three Mattachine members, Craig Rodwell, had been ejected for wearing button that said "Equality for Homosexuals.

Over the years I dropped in there on an on-again-off-again basis.  It was the only "gay" bar in the Village that remained open throughout the Wagner years, though this had to be because it maintained determined hostility to gay patrons and had a lot of straight customers.  The management stuck to an aggressive anti-gay policy, and in the face of losing their license for what was a famous landmark bar and a commercial gold mine that's hardly surprising.  You usually had to be guarded about your conduct and service often ran a narrow gamut from aloof to hostile; there were times when the bartenders actively forbid men to move from table to table or to stand with their backs to the bar.  Nevertheless, when the bar was not packed with customers (and perhaps when the owners or managers were not around) the atmosphere sometimes improved, and a couple of the bartenders were cordial to Village gay men who were regular customers. 

When the Mattachine entourage arrived they recognized other gay customers at the bar.  "We're homosexuals and we would like a drink," Dick Leitsch said to the bartender.   After a curt exchange, the bartender said the magic words the law required of him: "I can't serve you."  Leitsch immediately announced that Mattachine would file a complaint with the SLA against the Julius' Bar for discriminating against gay people in violation of the First and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. constitution.  But also, he said it would pay the bar's court costs.

It must have been the next day that I read a small article in the back pages of the Times about the "deviates" and their sip-in.  While I was used to black civil rights protesters using these tactics to challenge segregation, I was bowled over that these gay guys had taken it upon themselves to do the same.  I was also very happy that Julius's had been their successful target.

     (right) NY Times April 26, 1966, story of "deviates" sip-in on inside page.

At this point a deus ex machina appeared in the form of William H. Booth, the black chairmen of the Commission on Human rights.  He responded to the SLA announcement by saying that the Human Rights Commission had jurisdiction over discrimination complaints based on sex, and if a complaint were made by Mattachine to the Commission he would seek to put an end to the SLA regulation.  Mattachine filed that complaint pronto!  If there had been doubt before about whether the SLA would quietly keep its anti-gay rule in reserve, it was now clear that option was headed for a quick death.

Newspapers and prominent citizens spoke out against the SLA's regulation, and after some confusing maneuvering as to who would press the case, the following year the Appellate Division found in favor of the Mattachine position.   This was the redress of the verdict – a quarter of a century later –  in the courageous lawsuit brought by the owners of Gloria's bar back in 1940.  And there ought to be a plaque on the wall of Julius's commemorating these events!   

When Mattachine complained to the city's Human Rights Commission about anti-gay discrimination in city hiring policies, the City applications were changed and questions about sexual orientation were not admissible.  However, there was a glitch here as both the fire and police departments refused to comply, just as they staunchly resisted Lindsay's attempt to get them to hire more blacks and Hispanics into their overwhelmingly white ranks.  Both of these departments were deeply conservative, at least at the level of their longtime members and supervisors.   They loathed Lindsay and resented and obstructed his liberalizing policies.  In an era of rapid and dramatic social change they were very unhappy (and worried about the negative impact that poorer non-white minority members would have on future union contract negotiations), and Mayor Lindsay soon became emblematic of everything they saw as going wrong in the world as they would have it.

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Under the Mink - slide show of male and female drag in the Village, 40's and 50's 

Weegee - famous photographer of NYC 

Take the A Train - NY Times article on 75th anniversary of the A Train subway line

Dick Leitsch/Mattachine NY - a well-deserved tribute by Jack Nichols a 60's gay activist    

The Raided Premises - NYCPD site with story of raided gay bars in the 60's

Times Square/Samuel Delaney - review of Delany's book on Times Square

 Jack Robinson Archives - excellent site with many example's of Jack's work by the people who have preserved Jack's work

Jack Robinson bio  - Biography of Jack Robinson

 Belvedere Guest House, - Cherry Grove, Fire Island - great photos, reservation information

 As the Grove Turns - a news site about present-day Cherry Grove created by longtime resident Richard LaFrance.  This site has not been updated in awhile: however, the past sections are worth looking through as they usually contained a history/nostalgia article.

Tiny Tim     

Tom of Finland - master of gay erotica and macho porn 

Old Reliable - photographer of rough trade (scroll down about halfway)

Jack Spicer, gay poet

Like the Sun Rushing - novel set in the NYC gay life of the 60's - 80's

Cherry Grove, by Esther Newton - a history/sociological study of the Grove that rang true to me. 

GENERAL INTEREST LINKS - checked 29 January 2020

Eighth Street Book Store  - famous Village landmark of the era   

Rafi Zabor - interview with author of Pen-Faulkner prizewinner of The Bear Comes Home.  The book is great.

Night and the City - album Kenny Barron and Charlie Hayden, cover text by Rafi Zabor.  Two jazz artists who are at their peak, great performance!

Forgotten New York - one of the top sites on anyone's list of NYC web sites, surviving artifacts of bygone years, terrific site with many original photos

ExploreNYC - again, a top web site for anyone interested in NYC  

Dawn Hampton - great summary of Dawn's career

New York in the Sixties - Klaus Lehnartz (photos), Dover Publications

Recordings available from Amazon.com and other sources

Netania Davrath, Songs of the Auvergne - the absolute classic recording of these songs.