Some Queens: David B. Feinberg

"Some Queens"
from David B. Feinberg's book, Eighty-Sixed:

"Drag queens, size queens, shrimp queens (toe-sucking), rice queens (Orientals), Potato queens (Occidentals), Fire Island Queens, circuit queens (Fire Island/gym/disco circuit), cha-cha queens (Latinos), rice-and-bean queens (Mexicans), Queens for a Day (married men from New Jersey who go to the baths), face-sitting queens, fist queens, dish queens, Astoria Queens, dinge queens, beanie-boy queens (Orthodox Jews), salami queens (Italians), salami-casing queens (uncut Italians), leather queens, opera queens, tearoom queens, smoke queens, popper queens, enema queens, personals queens (likes long walks on beaches), glory hole queens, tattoo queens, butthole queens, studio queens (Studio 54 similarly, Disco Dollies), snow queens (cocaine, or blacks who like whites), fag hag queens, hyphenate queens (actor-model-dancer-waiter), stress queens, roller derby queens (wheelchairs, etc.), alfalfa queens (macrobiotic), diesel queens (men who dress up like dykes), chicken queens, diva queens, screen queens, seafood queens (sailors), Souvlaki queens (Greek action), crepe Suzette queens (French action), Perils-of-Pauline queens (thrill seekers), blue jean queens (Calvin Klien, Gloria Vanderbilt), teddy bear queens, cherry queens (deflowering virgins), Crisco queen, smut queens, ice queens (diamond stud earrings), banana queens (curved dicks), Jimmy Dean queens (Levi's, Elizabeth Taylor and Rebels without a Cause), Lean Cuisine queens (perpetual dieters), mean queens (S & M), twisted queens (deranged), pee queens (watersports), team queens, unweaned queens (sucking on tits - - also known as dairy queens), magazine queens (addicted to glossies and press releases), railroad queens, locker room queens, mile high club queens (making it airplane johns), rubber queens, dildo queens, beet queens (future farmers of America back in High School - - see also: "yam queens"), dream queens (GQ types), scream queens ("faaabulous!!!!"), palace queens (Leona Helmsley), tuna queens (male lesbians), pesto queens (into garlic), egg cream queens, fashion victim/style-police queens (beyond therapy), hostage queens (fantasies of being taken hostage in a foreign American embassy and being brutalized by idealistic young university-student revolutionaries), vanilla queens (into vanilla sex: basic sucking and fucking, no fantasies allowed), matzoh meal queens (reformed Jews), Wuthering Heights queens (hopeless romantics), skin queens (uncircumcised), peeled queens (cut), designer queens, steroid queens, beach queens, smack queens, Ma Bell queens (phone sex), Tom Thumb queens (small dicks), Uniform queens, piano bar queens, salad queens (rimming), bottle queens (alcoholics), flea queens (sex in run down hotels), bull horn queens (politicos), flab queens (AKA chubby chasers), evil queens (approximately ninety percent of the above), therapy queens (electro shock queens, Bellvue queens, couch queens, Valium queens, etc...) condo and co-op queens (the landed gentry in Manhattan), and closet queens."

Israel: Saturday August 1st 2009

Israel: August 1st 2009

"Once a year, spokespersons on behalf of the gay community are requested to explain why we insist on the pride parade; so here is the answer. There are those who fan the flames of hatred and homophobia, and the outcome may lead to gunfire. Here is your answer, this is the reason: Because they shoot at us. At times they use words, and other times they use bullets."

Sex in an Epidemic

Sex in an Epidemic, a documentary by ACT UP'er Jean Carlomusto, was shot years ago and it's now finally making a release on youtube.

Unbuckling Straps: An undoing of the NYC Leather Community

Past or present?

A week ago the decades-old organization of Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA) of New York put the kibosh on their twice a month meetings and community. Over the years numbers of attendees dwindled from hundreds to just a handful and as the letter below states, "there are simply not enough men who are willing and able to step forward to lead the organization."

The letter below was dropped in my inbox a few days ago.

I recently attended the final Wednesday night meeting of Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA). That’s right, I said “final.” Finished. Done. It’s over. The organization’s annual meeting on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, was billed as a “celebration of GMSMA." What’s happening is that after decades of being a vibrant, thriving organization of gay men interested in learning about safe, sane and consensual s/m, GMSMA is now “transitioning” into a non-profit foundation. There will be no more Wednesday night programs.

During its heyday, GMSMA had hundreds of members from not only New York City but from across the country and even from overseas. Regular meetings were held twice a month, and it was not uncommon for the third floor meeting room of the gay community center on West 13th Street to be jam packed with dozens or even 100 or more men eager to learn and to socialize. One night the topic might be how to tie up your boyfriend in really good rope bondage, another time you could learn all about flogging and whipping, or how to put together a really kick-ass cop or firefighter uniform....

GMSMA was also an activist organization. Its leaders were instrumental in securing a place at the table for the leather community in groundbreaking gay civil rights marches in our nation’s capital. It was also the first s/m organization to include “S/M” in its title. That may not sound like much of a big deal today, but when GMSMA was founded back in 1981 those who engaged in s/m activities were often looked upon as freaks or deviants — even by those in the larger gay community. Believe it or not, GMSMA had to fight to be allowed to meet at the gay community center. In later years it became one of the center’s biggest financial donor organizations.

There were about 45 men in attendance at the last meeting in June, including a leather top who brought a very sexy and shirtless tattooed slave on a leash, who greeted the men he was introduced to by getting down on his hands and knees and licking their boots. Most who showed up were old-timers — one came in on the train from northeastern Connecticut. A few who came were newer members. At least half — including me — were former board members of the organization who had put in years or in some cases even decades of service to the community. But when the official business of the meeting got under way and the remaining officers announced the sad plans to effectively shut down the organization, only one man in attendance raised an objection.

It was painful for many others as well, but the unfortunate fact, what everybody knew — and what ultimately led to the end for GMSMA — is that there are simply not enough men who are willing and able to step forward to lead the organization anymore. The current board was down to just three members (a fourth signed on to help in the coming months with the transition). They were over-worked and under-appreciated. The harsh reality is that the organization simply could not continue to exist in its current form without more manpower.

It's unfortunate when an organization such as this, where gay men can come together and learn "safe, sane and consensual" ways to broaden their sexual horizons comes to a close.

I'm not a leather guy and I suppose that's just the problem. Very few men hovering around my age range and younger seem to be interested or know or know-to-care or care-to-know anything about the leather community or the meaning and history behind it. Sure some of us have our Sam Brownes and harnesses for events like The Black Party and Folsom Street East, when leather is acceptable and down-right dress code but by no means is there a trend going toward the leather lifestyle. Older friends tell stories of what leather truly means. That it is much more than fashion, accessories, more than "Masc and solid," more than butch and mean. Leather is a means to discovering the deeper connections two men can have between one another. A bonding experience. An exposure and measure of trust and vulnerability. Still, maybe for those of us whose closet doors were left ajar rather than bolted shut there isn't that search for sexual comprehension or need for fetish-based sexual fulfillment. Sex is here. It's now. It's out, it's open. It may not be talked about as much as it's happening but it is happening. The analogy of leather, no longer, necessarily applies? Maybe if play spaces and dungeons were more widely available, established or more culturally/socially accepted leather would be more current or stand a greater chance? Yet even though I'm one of those casual street event, Folsom-based leather guys it strikes me as a loss, a changing of landscapes, a shifting of wavelength when communities such as these meet an end.

Is it all be too far gone? The men of true leather are either dead or significantly older and the few still proudly fastening chaps and strapping harnesses, outside of commercial scenes, are seeing their beloved, sought out organizations closing. I suppose it's all fitting. What place does leather have these days? Here in NYC. New.York.City. We have only The Eagle, which is rather leather-light and The Lure and Spike are long gone, gone, gone. If International Mr. Leather and Mid Atlantic Leather are major events, then where are the pockets of that in other urban/rural areas? Have we become lazy or casually unconcerned?

Will we see a resurgence in leather and this community? Will men step up and lead or will this be yet another relic of our past?

40 Year Old Table

'69/'09

On Saturday The Ali Forney Center hosted a panel discussion on the involvement of queer youth during the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The panel consisted of two actual Stonewall Riot participants, Martin Boyce and Tommy Lanigan Schmidt as well as Ali Forney Center Executive Director Carl Siciliano and four of today's LGBT youth, all in their early twenties, answering questions relating to the ever changing now vs. then Queer spectrum.

The youth, two of whom were transwomen came across as confident and sturdily self possessed when discussing topics like being gay in today's world, coming out and how history serves as a backdrop for today's sense pride and personal identity. As a whole the four seemed ambitious and spoke to their current lives and potential futures as though their identity and diversity serve only as an asset to who they are and who they hope to become.

40 years down the table Thomas Lanigan Schmidt and Martin Boyce, who were both twenty somethings during the summer of 1969 spoke of gay life during that time, their experience, struggles and triumphs and being the first in history to step out. Lanigan Schmidt talked about realizing his attraction to men when a best friend protected him from a local bully and Boyce described a New York where gay bashing was a city sport and electro-shock treatment a consequence. Yet still there was much talk of celebration, of life. A jukebox at the Stonewall, the rage in a queen's eye.

Below Martin Boyce sets the stage for life as a queen living in NYC in 1969 and at the 4:30 mark describes being at the Stonewall Inn the nights of the historic riots.

Today's Yesterday, Today

Left out of textbooks and any sense of educational history, I often feel as though Bookstore literature is the only window gay people have into our actual, cultural, factual history. It's also remarkably uncanny how certain threads of yesteryear's struggles are still so boldly woven within today's fabric.

The passage below is from Alan Helm's Young Man from the Provinces:

"...The summer after my junior year in 1958, I remained in New York doing test shots and putting together a modeling portfolio; otherwise, I spent my time exploring the gay world. It was such a different world, and now such a vanished one, that it's not easy to explain. Intensely secretive and hidden, it went on mostly at night behind the unmarked doors of the bars and in apartments where the shades were always drawn. The 415 Bar on Amsterdam Avenue was typical: you walked in, saw a few locals talking with the bartender, and figured you'd made a mistake. But through an unmarked door and in the back and down a flight of stairs, you entered a cavernous basement teeming with hundreds of gay men who were dancing and laughing and cruising and kissing and drinking and passing out in the johns. No wonder that during my two years with Dick I'd not had the slightest suspicion such a world existed. It was determined to remain as hidden as possible.

The men were too. Everyone I knew was more or less closeted and spent a lot of time in the workaday world passing for straight. Save for a few artists and hairdressers and decorators and dancers, we were all terrified of being found out. Gay men regularly married for the sake of appearances or inheritances and just as regularly committed suicide. If you heard that a gay man was seeing a shrink , it only meant one thing: he was trying desperately to "go straight," which sounded more like a road sign than a way of life. Parents routinely disowned and disinherited their gay sons or had them committed to mental hospitals where they were subjected to shock treatments and lobotomies and a popular therapy of the day called "aversion therapy": "by means of hypnotic suggestion and conditioning, the author has been able... to create deep aversions in the male homosexual to the male body." How do you do that? "Suggestions of filth associated with the male genitalia of their partners were implanted in their subconscious and reinforced periodically during the hypnotic trance." Psychiatrists published abominations like that with pride and impunity. In their view, which was mainstream America's view made professional and scientifically unassailable, homosexuality was an abnormality to be corrected at all costs; the most barbarous treatments were justified in the name of destroying such pernicious tendencies. There were gay men walking the streets of Manhattan in those days who had been rendered incapable of sex or had their memories obliterated by electricity. For some, it would take years to put their minds back together again; for others, the effort was hopeless. Of all the enemies we had, psychiatrists were among the most dangerous. And our parents, of course. I never met anyone who was out to his parents; you had to be crazy to do such a thing.

There was no place in public where it felt safe to be gay. Even inside the gay world you weren't secure, since bars and parties were raided all the time. You'd be having a beer and a chat with someone in a bar when suddenly the police would appear at the door screaming "Stay where you are, this is a raid!" Fear would sweep over the place, followed by a stampede for the back door, people falling over each other and jamming the exit in their panic to get out. During one of my own terrified escapes, I was fleeing out the back when I saw a fat man I knew wedged in the bathroom window leading to the alley. The next day, his name appeared in the papers along with the names of the other men arrested in the raid- a couple of dozen all told, an average take. He was fired of course and evicted from his apartment, and there was nothing he could do about it. There were no legal aid societies or political action groups for gays in those days, no gay weeklies or bimonthlies to publish his plight and raise money for his defense. What defense? Firings, evictions, arrests, entrapments, blackmail, muggings, murders- they happened all the time, they came with the territory.

At parties, you knew the instant the police had arrived. The room would fall silent and without even turning to look, you knew a couple of New York's finest were at the front door, "Fuckin' Faggots" scrawled all over their faces. Sometimes they told us to keep it down and they went away; other times they told us to break it up and then stood at the door as we filed out between them like guilty things caught in a shameful act. I never once heard anyone protest or ask why we had to break it up. We just did as we were told.

Except for the drag queens, bless their sassy, revolutionary hearts. But they always got beaten up and arrested and thrown in jail, over and over again. "Such masochists," we said. "They're really sick."

Whenever our world came into conflict with the straight world, group loyalties crumbled. Threatened with arrest or blackmail, thrown out of a party, chased down a midnight street by a gang of fagbashers, it was each gay man for himself, running for fear, lost in panic to save his own skin. We didn't have much political awareness, partly no doubt because our enemies were so often invisible: cultural opinion, legal precedent, psychiatric theory, social convention, religious stricture- nothing you could insult or demean or punch in the face in return. The most pernicious enemy of all, and the most invisible, was our own self-hatred.

Almost all of us bought into the straight notion that there was really something wrong with us, something abnormal and perverted and ultimately pathetic. It still astounds me to think how many derogatory names the straight world has invented to designate gay men: fags, faggots, pansies, perverts, inverts, aunties, flits, queers queens, cocksuckers, nellies, sickos, homos, sodomites, pederasts, sissies, swishes, fairies, fruits, and the list goes on. The reverberations of that lexicon sounded even in our dreams, inducing a kind of concentration camp mentality. We were disposable, the scum of the earth, living crimes against nature (thank you, Thomas Aquinas), and we knew that socially, religiously, legally, psychoanalytically, and in every other way that mattered, we were beyond the pale of what was considered acceptably human. I don't remember that we talked about the sense of shame the straight world bred in us, but it was pervasive in our lives, and I don't know anyone of my gay generation who's ever been able to shake it. I certainly haven't. You can still see it in the timid gestures toward self-exposure of a John Ashberry or Jasper Johns, and in the furtive, guilty cruising of gay men in their fifties and sixties.

With so much fear and danger hedging our lives it's no wonder we were a wildly romantic bunch. Mainstream America was too, of course. My parents had grown up in a world fed by Hollywood fantasies of romantic love, and the lyrics of popular songs urged a desperate, eternal monogamy: "Once you have found him/Never let him go," and then the repeat in case you weren't paying attention the first time. In 1957, 96 percent of adult Americans were married, if you can imagine such a statistic. Heterosexual marriage was the only model of adult life that existed at the time, so gay America was busy coupling in the imitation of its masters.

Since romance thrives on obstacles (Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Cupid and Psyche, Antony and Cleopatra), there was no more fertile ground for romance in those days than the gay world. I don't think I ever made love with a man without first convincing myself he was a potential long term lover, and if the first date went well, which invariably meant the first night of sex, I was ready next morning to shop for monogrammed towels. All the frenetic cruising and partying and sexing had as its goal the paragon lover, a gay knight on a charger who would sweep us off our feet and make everything all right, compensate us for the oppression we had to put up with and for the pervasive sense there was something lacking in us that only the right man could supply. We fell in love a lot and conducted our mostly brief affairs with operatic drama-passionate avowals of eternal devotion, fits of jealous rage, wrenching breakups replete with nervous breakdowns and threats of suicide. The few of us of sustained affection managed successful relationships, but most of us got "married" and settled down for a brief while, then broke up and broke down, then grieved and cruised until we met the next candidate for our troubled affections, and thus the same round all over again."

Farewell Oscar Wilde, What Becomes of Stonewall?

Farewell indeed. Another piece of gay history bites the dust.
From NY Magazine

One of the subtler pleasures of the movie Milk is its vivid portrayal of those small rooms where the conspirators of the gay liberation movement first came together. Sadly, one of those sanctums, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, announced it was closing last week, after 42 years.

As it happens, the place has a direct link to the film: Its founder, Craig Rodwell, was an early boyfriend of Harvey Milk, at the time a closeted actuary in Brooks Brothers drag. They met cruising on Central Park West and parted after Rodwell, uninterested in monogamy, passed along a case of the clap. By far the more militant of the two, Rodwell had arrived as a teenager, from Chicago, to study ballet, but was distracted by sex and the dawn of “the homophile movement” in the early sixties. In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots, when most gay activists still used fake names to avoid arrest, he took his savings from cleaning Fire Island hotel rooms and opened the nation’s first gay bookstore.

Not that there were many gay books then. The real action was in the cramped back room, where Craig and his staff—he hired men and women in equal numbers—plotted a better future. The city’s first gay-pride march was planned there. Strategies for getting the Mafia out of gay bars or confronting police brutality were discussed. When I found my way out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1979, as a teenager, I longed to be in that conversation and one day found the courage to ask Craig for a job. He let me run the register one Saturday a month. My sense of arrival was complete.

But my awe for the place never dimmed. I remember how it felt a few years later when copies of my first book lay in a pile on the floor there and Craig handed me a pen to sign them. Craig died in 1993 (cancer, of all things), a few months after selling the shop. It has gone through four owners since. Kim Brinster, the manager since 1996, bought it three years ago. Shoppers, who for years have consisted more of tourists than locals, disappeared in August. Last week, she told her staff, “I’ve never been the owner, I’m the caretaker. And unfortunately there’s nothing we can do now.” Oscar Wilde himself might have been more sanguine. As Lord Henry told Dorian Gray (in a slightly different context), “They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever

I suppose this is a good opportunity to bring up a certain idea: Every year, whether rumor or fact, I hear that the famous and historic Stonewall Inn on Christopher St. faces an imminent closure at some point in the near future. My friend suggested that we should start rallying around wealthy gay people and gay organizations to raise money so when that time comes, we can buy out the building which the Stonewall Inn is located, clear it out and turn the space into the Official Gay and Lesbian Liberation Museum. This way, the West Village and more specifically, Christopher St., can go through as many changes and gentrifications as it will yet the gay community will always have that space on that street to call our own.

Thoughts?

Checking In / Three Shelves

Hi!

I'm not gone. I just took a new job and I'm busy busy busy. I'll have to figure out some sort of new blog-work balance but until then hang in there and enjoy the story below.

I just caught wind that The Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher St. is closing its doors. The story below was inspired by my visit there last year. This was originally posted on: Feb 7th 2008.

Three Shelves

I got out of work earlier than expected and Wayne wasn't available for another hour and a half. I headed out of my office, got on the subway and eventually jumped off at West 4th St. figuring I'll slum around the West Village for awhile. The weather was unusually warm and a light drizzle came and went as if Mother Nature could not decide upon her mood. The city is out. People are getting home, going to dinner and music plays from the restaurants out onto the streets. I sucked the city in deeply through my nostrils and headed in an aimless direction toward the West Village.

Call it instinct or a natural gravitational pull but I always find myself at some end of Christopher St. The street is narrow and the boutiques are hip and artistic. Rainbow flags fly and neon signs blip and buzz. As Manhattan changes again and again it always seems as though this one part of the city, is and always will be, quaint and unique. The streets are narrow and tree lined with old and gorgeous brownstones and a feeling of vibrant history rattling beneath the pavement.

In the distance I notice The Oscar Wilde Bookshop. Actually, I don't notice the little independent bookstore as much as I notice the giant rainbow flag waving outside. Having been there before I know that's the calling card of the bookstore, letting everyone know that despite it's size, it's there. Colorful, loud and proud. It's the only queer focused bookstore in the city and one of the only few surviving independent bookstores that has yet to be gobbled up by the corporate book and music malls.

The inside is quiet and clean and one can expect to hear some nostalgic acoustic music playing. Dylan, Cat Stevens, Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco... A smooth green carpet matches well to the light brown bookshelves filled with paper back and hard cover books. Posted on many of the shelves are yellow tags alerting customers to "staff picks" and critic's choices. There are never more than 5 customers in the store at any time. Today there is only one. I'm happy I saw the store in the distance, it reminded me to pick up a copy of James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" for the first meeting of a book club I recently joined.

I wasn't able to grab the book right away because the section of fiction I needed to pull it from was being occupied by a seemingly frantic and excited young lady pulling out books left and right, top shelf, bottom shelf, flipping through the pages, reading backs, studying the price, compiling piles. I didn't mind waiting and looking at the new arrivals but I couldn't help but wonder what this girl needed or why her interest in so many books. I watched her for awhile. She was nearly out of breath. She would take a pick from the pile she created, study the cover, flip to the back and judge whether or not to put it back on the shelf. "What is she doing," I thought to myself. Judging from her level of stress I could only suppose that whatever it was she needed carried a great importance. "A research paper? A thesis?" I shrugged and continued to browse the selections.

Holding a book in the air and showing it to the cashier the young woman asked in a hard accent and broken English, "What about dis vone? Will I like dis vone?" The store clerk advised her there are others she would like better and left the counter to assist her search. As the store clerk approached the young woman said, "There's just so much! Where I am from there are only three shelves...Just three..."

Upon hearing this my breath caught itself in my throat and my arm goosebumped. "Just three shelves," I repeated to myself. I understood immediately the girl's frantic search and how important it was to her. I waited until the store clerk escorted the girl to another section and grabbed my book off the wall of fiction. I looked around the room. This whole book store: for me. Everything from fiction to non-fiction, biography to auto-biography, gay to lesbian, bisexual to trans, fantasy and reality, porn to prude- everything is here and it's an entire store. Maybe it is just one store with this specific focus but any store in this city has more than just three shelves!

I hung around the bookstore checking out other sections keeping an eye and ear on the girl and the store clerk. I wanted to know where she was from, what country or place she was visiting from that only allowed her three shelves. I wasn't granted any of that information but hearing what I already heard was enough for me to wish her the best of possible searches. She stood in front of me paying for her books. Almost 100 dollars in total. A pile that would keep her busy for months, if not a year, and will be with her for a lifetime. Having a few extra dollars left over she asked the store clerk, "What rainbow things you have else?" "Well," the store clerk responded, "we don't have too much this time of year, more in the summer, but here take this bracelet." The young girl took a rainbow colored bracelet and slipped it over her hand, securing it on her wrist. "Oh tank you," she said overjoyed, placing her hand over the bracelet and smiling.

After she left I said to the store clerk, "Wow. Only three shelves, and here we have this entire bookstore. It just goes to show- despite the amount of work we still have have ahead of us, how much we already take for granted." "Yes," the store clerk responded, frowning, "And I'm not even sure you can find more than three shelves in other places in this very country. I'm not sure if Montana, Idaho, Kansas or North Dakota offers much of a difference..."I shook my head, realizing the impact of what the store clerk was saying. I thanked her for the books and headed out of the store onto Christopher St., the very same street where 39 years ago a group of people demanded they weren't going to take it any more and have allowed the rainbow flags to fly, without apology, ever since.

Look Familiar?

Past to Present:

Guest Post: Nick Rice

I met Nick Rice after a Reading for Filth at the now deceased Rapture Cafe sometime last winter. Nick, who is in his early twenties, introduced himself to me that he had found my blog and liked what he saw. Since then we've become friends, shared dance floors together and seen one another out at rallies and meetings. As I'm out of town for work I offered him a guest post here on KnuckleCrack. Here is what Nick Rice has to say:

I was a queer boy in middle school in the late 90's. Fearful of my classmate's judgment and ridicule, I was a loner only able to open up with a few close friends. I insulated myself from other kids with standoffishness and silence. Without invitations to the movies or to backyard pools, I cloistered myself between the dusty and quiet stacks of the local library. I found my escape, my hideaway. Being fortunate enough to grow up in a town with a massive and well stocked library, I spent years reading my way through the art and architecture shelves. Eventually, just like millions of queer kids before me, body shaking and tingling with adrenaline, I made my first furtive trips to the HQ 75-76.8 section, Homosexuality and Lesbianism. Somehow I was convinced the H stood for Homosexual and that anyone passing by would know exactly why I was there. If someone walked down the aisle, Now That You Know would be right back on the shelf and I'd be intensely scanning HQ755.7-759.92, Parents, Parenthood. Of course, no one ever gave me a second glance, it was all just my expansive paranoia.

I discovered Alfred Kinsey, Edmund White, Paul Monette and yards upon yards of gay fiction. I ate it up. It was my indulgence and my refuge. Soon after, I came upon this book: I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody. It is the memoir of two men in the 1970's, living as a couple together in the bloom of an open, ground-breaking and unapologetic queer social world. Having no contact with any queer people, 13 year old me was shocked and amazed to learn that a decade before my birth, gay men were already out in society, going about their lives like anyone else. I was fascinated (and a little bit scandalized) by the honest discussions of the sexual culture of that era and determined to learn as much as I could about queer society, past and present. With these books as my sole connection to anything queer, I also read as a way to feel connected to other queer people and to internalize positive explanations of all the feelings that were welling within me. I continued this reading in high school, past my coming out at 16 and on through college in rural Maine (where I discovered a whole new college library with an ample HQ section and numerous documentaries like "Word is Out" and "The Times of Harvey Milk" (Sally M. Gearhart!)) .

By college, my insecurity had given way to pride and an overwhelming sense of good fortune at having turned out queer. My daily reading led me to John Rechy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vito Russo, Larry Kramer, Randy Shilts, Harry Hay, Fred Halstead, Andrew Holleran and George Chauncey. Because I was learning about queer culture through books, as opposed to experiencing it myself (again, I was in rural Maine), I was most often learning about queer social worlds from past decades that no longer existed. I was reaching back into the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's for the queer positive messages I needed in order to overcome all the shame and fear I absorbed as a child. Through this process I gained an enormous measure of respect and admiration for the queer people of earlier generations who had been fighting for my rights ever since I was an infant and even before my parents were born.

After I graduated from college, I unexpectedly landed in New York, the setting for so much of what I'd read about for a decade. Walking through the streets of the Village, slowly down Christopher, and out onto the piers was and continues to be an electric experience for. Passing the teenagers in Hudson River Park, vogueing and reading their competitors, I can't help but think back to the images of the piers as they were in "Gay Sex in the 70's". After reading "Dancer from the Dance" , "And the Band Played on" and "Faggots" I wandered neighborhoods filled with fashionably dressed young, straight people to find the Mineshaft, the Paradise Garage, Keller's, the Ramrod, the International Stud, the Anvil, Flamingo, the 10^th Floor, Badlands. I searched online for addresses decades out of date and bought old gay travel guides on eBay. To stand in storied spaces that for so many years previous I could only imagine was both thrilling and bittersweet. I felt awed to be in a place that was the site of so much change and exuberance in the 70's, and then in the 80's comprised an epicenter of grief and activism in the first era of the AIDS crisis. These spaces once contained the vibrating, pulsing, ever-innovative culture of the generations to which I owe what freedom I enjoy. I was searching for a vanished world, and simultaneously felt so much connection and distance as I walked alone through its shell. For me, the Village is suffused with a nostalgia for things I never saw and people I'll never know, but which continue to impact my life today.

The internet has supplemented much of the information that I couldn't find on paper or in the physical landscape of the Village. It serves as a repository for so many memories which are not my own but which help me to understand the world that paved the way for my generation of queer people. However, offline I am pained to find the remnants of this past so few and scattered. In New York I have been privileged to get to know many queer people who belong to those generations I feel so fascinated by and indebted to, but their ranks are sparse. As time progresses there will be less of them to pass on the knowledge of what queer life was like in their youth. How is their cultural memory being preserved? Who is out there with stories to relate that my generation might learn from? What material pieces of that world remain hidden, in boxes and closets, waiting to be dusted off for us to appreciate? I feel so fortunate to be in a city where I can find so much queer history, but I am sure there is so much more out there, untapped. I would be very happy if other people felt the same. Do you have words or images with which to illuminate a queer reality, distant in time?

Guest Post: Nathanial Siegel's 2,117 Days of Silence

First up with a guest post is Nathanal Siegel - writer, poet, AIDS activist. Currently Nathanial has an installation at the Leslie Lohman Art Gallery entitled "2, 117 Days of Silence." Go ahead and check it out. The exhibit runs through this Saturday.

From Nathanial:

November 19 - December 20, 2008
2,117 Days of Silence An Installation by Nathaniel Siegel Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation
26 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013
Phone 1 212 -431-2609
www.leslielohman.org

The artist Nathaniel Siegel has created an installation at the Leslie/Lohman Gallery: “2,117 days of silence: a visual presentation.”

To mark the 20th anniversary of ACT-UP New York City, the artist has gathered documentary evidence of the first mention of AIDS in the New York Times (July 3, 1981) “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS” by Lawrence K. Altman; And a transcript of President Ronald Reagan’s first public statement of the word “AIDS” on April 1, 1987 at a Luncheon for Members of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Reagan’s inaction inspired the original poster of SILENCE = DEATH in 1986. A copy of that original poster is also on view.

Using calendars of the years 1981 to 1989, the artist visually presents those days of silence. The calendar’s presented are from the artist’s collection and are representative of images that would be available to gay men in the ‘80’s.

ACT-UP New York city notes on their website that in 1987 the year Reagan first said AIDS: 41,027 persons are dead and 71,176 persons diagnosed with AIDS in the U.S.

Today, in New York City, there is no public school education of ways to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases including the proper use of condom’s and their effectiveness in preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS. Today, the current administration’s abstinence programs regarding discussions of sexual activity among teenagers and young adults amounts to the same SILENCE=DEATH scenario for our Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans-gendered and Straight Youth: 27 years after we first learned about AIDS and effective ways to prevent infection with the proper use of condoms.

The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation is located at 26 Wooster Street between Canal and Grand Streets in SOHO New York. Gallery Hours: (for the balance of the show)
Wed. Dec 17th 12noon to 6pm
Thurs. Dec 18th 12noon to 6pm.
Fri. Dec 19th 12noon to 6pm.
Sat. Dec 20th 12noon to 6pm.

World AIDS Day: David Wojnarowicz

Writer, activist and performer David Worjnarowicz
(1954-1992)

One of my favorite pieces of writing from the 1980's AIDS crisis is entitled "Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-inch Politician" and can be found in David Worjnarowicz's book: Close to Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration.

"Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-inch Politician"

“If I had a dollar for health care I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS” says the health-care official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour-long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what this official looked like because I reached in through the tv screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country. “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers...” says a politician in Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the politician was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for reelection anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blow darts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government health-care officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples’ lips; the religious types outside st. patrick’s cathedral shouting to the men and women in the gay parade, “You won’t be here next year-you’ll get AIDS and die ha ha...” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an antiviolence bill that includes “sexual orientation” as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into nonviolent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america america america seems to understand and accept murder as a self-defense against those who would murder other people and it’s been murder on a daily basis for nine count then nine long years and we’re expected to pay taxes to support this public and social murder and we’re expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and health-care officials that had better get bigger fucking dogs and higher fucking fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment I’m a thirty-seven-foot-tall one-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-two-pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

David Wojnarowicz DO NOT DOUBT THE DANGEROUSNESS OF THE 12-INCHPOLITICIAN, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, pp. 160-162, excerpt from. (The full essay was derived from talks delivered at Illinois State University at Normal, Illinois, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1990.)

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz, copyright 1991 Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, ISBN 0-679-73227-6.

All rights reserved.

While We're at it...

Man, there's this pulse in the air. Something is happening and I feel very proud and inspired by the gays. I thought this might be a nice opportunity to share some Gay history while allowing those who were active during that time the chance to walk down memory lane.

Take a look at the Outweek Magazine archives: All 105 issues of OutWeek Magazine from 1989-1991 are available online. Definitely check it out. Feel the pulse, embrace it and let it surge.

THE MAGAZINE

OutWeek Magazine was the seminal lesbian and gay publication during the peak era of AIDS activism in the late 80s and early 90s.

Founded by Gabriel Rotello and Kendall Morrison, it employed a staff of about 30 people in Manhattan during its tumultuous two-year existence.

OutWeek redefined the role of the activist gay press, not only by reporting the news but also by frequently making news itself. Its aggressive coverage, incisive commentary and in-depth investigative articles on gay rights, politics, AIDS, the arts and popular culture made it a must-read publication far beyond the usual scope of gay magazines.

Several of the most contentious controversies of that era were sparked by OutWeek. The magazine pioneered the use of the word ‘queer,’ which was highly controversial at the time. It was closely associated with the AIDS activist group ACT UP, and several of its staffers and contributors helped to co-found the group Queer Nation.

Many of OutWeek’s editors were committed to sharply challenging the then-pervasive culture of the closet, and a sideline of that commitment - the advocacy of ‘outing’ prominent gay and lesbian celebrities – began in Michelangelo Signorile’s “Gossip Watch” column and was one of many things that made OutWeek a household name and a lightning rod.

OutWeek was committed to an inclusive vision of queer life, and was the first major national publication to bill itself as a ‘lesbian and gay’ magazine.

OutHistory.Org

After centuries of being left out of American and world history the LGBT Community now has a key to our community's past. OutHistory.Org, the new website of LGBT history launches October 21st 2008.

OutHistory.org, Innovative LGBT History Website to Launch October 21st

OutHistory.org, the new website on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and, yes, heterosexual history, will make its official debut on Tuesday, October 21. The public is invited to celebrate OutHistory's launch that evening, from 6 to 8 pm, in the second-floor Cyber Center of the LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13 Street, New York City.

The catered event is free and all are invited to attend OutHistory Director Jonathan Ned Katz’s inaugural remarks and to explore the site on the Center's computers.

Pioneering historian Katz describes OutHistory.org as "a dynamic developing website that makes the history of sexuality accessible to a diverse audience. It has the potential to reach a wide new group who never before had access to reliable work on LGBTQ history." In its early stages the site will focus on the United States, but OutHistory is working to expand its geographic scope.

OutHistory contains two types of articles. Entries by named authors are marked as "Protected" and may not be edited by the public. "Protected entries provide the credibility associated with the naming of a particular author," said Lauren Gutterman, the website's Coordinator.

OutHistory also contains articles marked as "Open" to additions and edits by any logged-on users with data, documents, and citations. "These collaboratively created entries," says Katz, "are an innovative experiment in history by the community."

In addition to the postcard exhibit, protected entries include Ron Schlittler’s original photographic exhibit: “Out and Elected in the USA:1974-2004,” an exhibit on some of the first homosexual rights organizations in the US curated by C. Todd White, as well as several Blogs on History by Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Several protected exhibits were jointly created by professors and their students. "Queer Youth: On Campus, in the Media, 1947-2007," was written by students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges, under the guidance of Professor of History Sharon Ullman.

“OutHistory is an ideal forum for teachers to get students involved with and excited about history," said Gutterman. Anthropologist Esther Newton also worked with her students at the University of Michigan to produce an exhibit on "Lesbians in the Twentieth Century."

A fascinating group of documents on transgender American history are republished from Jonathan Ned Katz's out-of-print books Gay American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac. "OutHistory hopes to republish lots of authors' out-of-print but still valuable historical works," says Gutterman. Documents from Martin Duberman's out of print About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, will also be added to the site.

It's Never Too Late

Standing with my brothers in Sheridan Square

This past Saturday, October 11th, was National Coming Out Day and I purposely waited to post something to make the statement that it's never too late, nor too right or too wrong to come out and say, "I'm gay!"

Oh and by the way just so everyone knows: I'm gay!

Happy coming out and having made it this far everyone!

For information on the statues I'm standing with visit this link.

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

It's almost fitting that I would discover Andrew Holleran's re-release of old short stories in a new anthology entitled Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited on a gloomy Saturday in late September.

It was an aimless day, not one plan scheduled and I found myself walking around the city, turning corners on a whim and shrugging at North and South. Therefore it was no surprise, nor plan, that I arrived at Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue, running my fingers along the titles and authors in the Gay and Lesbian Fiction section.

My fingers traced upon the bindings of smooth paperbacks until it fell upon a Holleran title I did not recognize. I have every book of his and haven't heard of any new release so I jumped into the cover like a treasure hunter discovering an accidental chest. There it was - Copyright: 2008.

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited is a re-release of Holleran's old short stories from his 1988 publication Ground Zero, repackaged with a newly written introduction, now twenty-plus years after the fact.

I bought the book without thinking twice and looked forward to, once again, being held in Holleran's poetically relentless grip, like a rib cage being crushed by the delicate fineness of a pair of silk white gloves.

Once outside I leaned against the brick and began reading this new introduction. By the time I turned the first page my soul had already drained itself of color and was left with nothing more than the gray of the pavement reflecting off the sky.

An excerpt:

"Learning a book is out of print is a blow to an author. It's not that copies in print have been destroyed, but that demand for the book is so low the publisher cannot justify printing any more. When I went looking for a copy of Ground Zero last winter, I was lucky to find one in a college library in Washington, D.C., on a shelf of other books about AIDS. The "Date Due" slip told me the book had been checked out only twelve times in twenty-four years; and not at all from 1992 to 1998 or 1998 to 2006. This had to do with a professor teaching, then dropping, a course that required the text, I thought- what else keeps these books alive? The volumes on the shelf around mine looked equally untouched, as if they all been put to sleep, like the awful time itself...

...Yet it seems incredible that people still get infected with HIV. They say it's because people think AIDS is now a "manageable" disease; and few young gay men have seen anyone die of AIDS. But I think it's the same old story: the irrational power of sex, of people's search for a physical, emotional connection. So I suppose it should be no surprise that people go on getting infected, while books about AIDS sit mostly undisturbed on the shelf of the college library where I found Ground Zero. Even now I'm not sure what one should compare the disease that swept gay New York in the eighties to- the Spanish influenza of 1918?

...Still, say what you will, we have lost a whole generation of gay men, who might otherwise have been valuable mentors to their successors. Of course, gay life has evolved without those who died. One can even argue that the very assimilation that AIDS brought about seems to have caused the disintegration of the gay community, though surely that would have resulted anyway from the inevitable change in generations, not to mention new technology like the computer. Part of Survivor's Syndrome is to live in another era, when AIDS is simply part of the past, and for many young gay men, not even that. Yet something was lost..."

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited.

Milk

53 Christopher

Riots

In the Life with Richard Kim

This was found on Bilerico and think it's a fantastic interview:

Interview Sessions: Stanley Stellar

As part of a new project I'm documenting the stories of gay men from the ages of 16 to ??:

Stanley Stellar is a well known New York photographer responsible for works such as: Stellar Men and photographs in Provocateur. He is the first of the Interview Sessions.

The Mid 1960's, Christopher Street & Cruising.

Stanley has a lot more to stay. More sessions to come.