Some equally essential items came along a few years later—dancing, for one, officially launched at the Tenth Floor in the early-middle 1970s. Other essential items, however, were simply routined into place then and there. The Advocate appeared. Bars opened in revolutionarily central locations. Even the sex changed. As if to renounce the passive stance of the old trade-worshiping oral encounters, men began to insist on the more aggressive attack of all-night screwing. Staying over—especially if you had coffee the next morning and hugged at the door—became a political act.
Most important, trade virtually vanished. Not long before I came to New York, homosexuals had no partners but hustlers. There would still be hustlers; but now most gays only knew of them from books like these. Hired help had become as useful as Victrolas: occult leverage raised by the lunatic fringe. Just as most record-playing people now relied on stereos, so did gays rely on … friendship. In fact, one of the first things you absolutely had to have in New York, fall of 1969, was a best friend.
With best friends, I believe: the older, the better. Long-term relationships weather idiosyncrasies more easily than new ones; and old investments are dearer. Perhaps it’s a matter of simple arithmetic: after ten or twelve years, you’ve already fought about everything potentially available, and can settle back and just get along.
What of preferences, you ask? Who needs what kind of best friend? Boys and girls, there’s no point in having preferences—even nonsmokers can just hold their horses—because it was one of Stonewall’s first rules that you can’t choose your best friend: he chooses you. I got mine at the Met. It was that same Stonewall fall, and the opera season had begun; at the first intermission of a Tales of Hoffmann I ran into a vaguely familiar face at the bar, one of those you know well enough to start joking around with but not well enough to name. Finally I placed him. He and I had, so to say, cochaired a sit-down strike on the playing fields of—no, not Eton—the annual Valley Forge Boy Scout Jamboree. Small potatoes, you say. But how many men of your acquaintance ever led a sit-down strike during an all-American Capture the Flag? And called a scoutmaster a Nazi? (His assistant, an Eagle scout, was even worse, but he was also somewhat breathtaking, so we didn’t call him anything.) Now it was ten years later, and my fellow rebel and I were men of the world, drinking champagne between the acts of a Met Hoffmann and comparing neighborhoods. I was living on the west side in a brownstone, he in the east fifties, in a doorman building with a fancy solarium on the roof. It sounded altogether metropolitan to me, and when some creep pushed my air conditioner in and robbed my apartment, I moved into my old friend’s building. We had a lot in common and lived only two floors apart and thus became rather confidential. Also, we were the only two people we knew who had called a scoutmaster a Nazi and harbored ecstatic feelings for an Eagle scout. This will tend to draw men together. So we became best friends. His name was Dennis Savage, and still is.
Shocking to report, in those days you could live pretty much anywhere you wanted to just by moving in. Buildings were uncrowded and rents low. In such profusion, roommates were actually suspicious—except to gays. Our love lives were forming. Dennis Savage and I marveled as man after man buddied up and the crowd assembled the lists. The Five Most Colorful Couples. The Ten Most Passionate Couples. The Three Most Wonderful But Almost Certainly Temporary Couples. (There were a lot of those.) The Couple of the Month. Then I would say, “Couple of the Day would be more realistic,” and of course everyone would get mad at me.
Part of Stonewall, I eventually realized, was not letting the side down, not admitting errors. But if straights are allowed to mess up their love lives, why can’t we?
Most important, trade virtually vanished. Not long before I came to New York, homosexuals had no partners but hustlers. There would still be hustlers; but now most gays only knew of them from books like these. Hired help had become as useful as Victrolas: occult leverage raised by the lunatic fringe. Just as most record-playing people now relied on stereos, so did gays rely on … friendship. In fact, one of the first things you absolutely had to have in New York, fall of 1969, was a best friend.
With best friends, I believe: the older, the better. Long-term relationships weather idiosyncrasies more easily than new ones; and old investments are dearer. Perhaps it’s a matter of simple arithmetic: after ten or twelve years, you’ve already fought about everything potentially available, and can settle back and just get along.
What of preferences, you ask? Who needs what kind of best friend? Boys and girls, there’s no point in having preferences—even nonsmokers can just hold their horses—because it was one of Stonewall’s first rules that you can’t choose your best friend: he chooses you. I got mine at the Met. It was that same Stonewall fall, and the opera season had begun; at the first intermission of a Tales of Hoffmann I ran into a vaguely familiar face at the bar, one of those you know well enough to start joking around with but not well enough to name. Finally I placed him. He and I had, so to say, cochaired a sit-down strike on the playing fields of—no, not Eton—the annual Valley Forge Boy Scout Jamboree. Small potatoes, you say. But how many men of your acquaintance ever led a sit-down strike during an all-American Capture the Flag? And called a scoutmaster a Nazi? (His assistant, an Eagle scout, was even worse, but he was also somewhat breathtaking, so we didn’t call him anything.) Now it was ten years later, and my fellow rebel and I were men of the world, drinking champagne between the acts of a Met Hoffmann and comparing neighborhoods. I was living on the west side in a brownstone, he in the east fifties, in a doorman building with a fancy solarium on the roof. It sounded altogether metropolitan to me, and when some creep pushed my air conditioner in and robbed my apartment, I moved into my old friend’s building. We had a lot in common and lived only two floors apart and thus became rather confidential. Also, we were the only two people we knew who had called a scoutmaster a Nazi and harbored ecstatic feelings for an Eagle scout. This will tend to draw men together. So we became best friends. His name was Dennis Savage, and still is.
Shocking to report, in those days you could live pretty much anywhere you wanted to just by moving in. Buildings were uncrowded and rents low. In such profusion, roommates were actually suspicious—except to gays. Our love lives were forming. Dennis Savage and I marveled as man after man buddied up and the crowd assembled the lists. The Five Most Colorful Couples. The Ten Most Passionate Couples. The Three Most Wonderful But Almost Certainly Temporary Couples. (There were a lot of those.) The Couple of the Month. Then I would say, “Couple of the Day would be more realistic,” and of course everyone would get mad at me.
Part of Stonewall, I eventually realized, was not letting the side down, not admitting errors. But if straights are allowed to mess up their love lives, why can’t we?
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