Read Online City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edmund White
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walked home with the minimum of small talk, sometimes in total silence. Everyone knew that you could lose a trick if you were too mouthy; a sibilant s could make an erection wilt in a second. Only once you had him back home behind closed doors and curtains did you servehim a drink and then begin to kiss. If you had to say something, you’d keep your monosyllables in the baritone register. You could tell his intentions pretty quickly by whether he felt for your ass or your cock—but even that wasn’t done instantly. A slight pretense of romance was still required, some closed-eyed necking and French-kissing before his hand would drift down into the exciting zone. With any luck he’d claw your clothes off and shed his own in one quick shrug (“My dear, you could hear the Velcro ripping!”). If he folded his trousers neatly and looked around for a hanger, you knew he’d be a bore (“She turned out to be an accountant, of course. I could see that by the way she fussed over that pleated skirt of hers. Betty Bookkeeper…”).
From the time of the World’s Fair in 1964 to the beginning of gay liberation, the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the city was repeatedly being cleaned up. Subway toilets were always being locked shut. Bars were constantly raided. I remember one, the Blue Bunny, up in the Times Square area near the bar where they first danced the twist. There was a tiny dance floor at the back. If a suspicious-looking plainclothesman came in (supposedly you could tell them by their big, clunky shoes), the doorman would turn on little white Christmas lights strung along the ceiling in back, and we’d break apart and stop dancing while the music roared on. I can remember a two-story bar over near the Hudson on a side street south of Christopher that was only open a week or two. When the cops rushed in, we all jumped out the second-story window onto a low, adjoining graveled roof and then down a flight of stairs and onto the street. I used to go to the Everard Baths at 28 West Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway. It was filthy and everyone said it was owned by the police. It didn’t have the proper exits or fire extinguishers, just a deep, foul-smelling pool in the basement that looked infected. When the building caught fire in 1977, several customers died. There was no sprinkler system. It was a summer weekend.
On Fire Island it was scarcely better in those days. Of course the Suffolk County police couldn’t control what went on in the dunes or along the shore at night, but in discos in both Cherry Grove and the Pines, every group of dancing men had to include at least one woman. A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren’t observing the rule. At a dance club over in the Hamptons, I recall, the men line-danced and did the hully-gully, but always with at least one woman in the line.
Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the “A-trainers”), and who were jumpy because of the extreme heat and who’d imagined the police persecutions of the preceding years had finally wound down. The new attacks made them feel angry and betrayed. They were also worked up because Judy Garland had just died of an overdose and was lying in state at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home. At the end of Christopher Street, just two blocks away, rose the imposing bulk of the Jefferson Market women’s prison (now demolished to make way for a park). At that time, tough women would stand on the sidewalk down below and call up to their girlfriends, “I love you, baby. If you give it up to that big black bitch Shareefa, I cut you up, I’m telling you, baby, I cut you good.” Inside the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by the long-legged, fierce-eyed
From the time of the World’s Fair in 1964 to the beginning of gay liberation, the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the city was repeatedly being cleaned up. Subway toilets were always being locked shut. Bars were constantly raided. I remember one, the Blue Bunny, up in the Times Square area near the bar where they first danced the twist. There was a tiny dance floor at the back. If a suspicious-looking plainclothesman came in (supposedly you could tell them by their big, clunky shoes), the doorman would turn on little white Christmas lights strung along the ceiling in back, and we’d break apart and stop dancing while the music roared on. I can remember a two-story bar over near the Hudson on a side street south of Christopher that was only open a week or two. When the cops rushed in, we all jumped out the second-story window onto a low, adjoining graveled roof and then down a flight of stairs and onto the street. I used to go to the Everard Baths at 28 West Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway. It was filthy and everyone said it was owned by the police. It didn’t have the proper exits or fire extinguishers, just a deep, foul-smelling pool in the basement that looked infected. When the building caught fire in 1977, several customers died. There was no sprinkler system. It was a summer weekend.
On Fire Island it was scarcely better in those days. Of course the Suffolk County police couldn’t control what went on in the dunes or along the shore at night, but in discos in both Cherry Grove and the Pines, every group of dancing men had to include at least one woman. A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren’t observing the rule. At a dance club over in the Hamptons, I recall, the men line-danced and did the hully-gully, but always with at least one woman in the line.
Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the “A-trainers”), and who were jumpy because of the extreme heat and who’d imagined the police persecutions of the preceding years had finally wound down. The new attacks made them feel angry and betrayed. They were also worked up because Judy Garland had just died of an overdose and was lying in state at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home. At the end of Christopher Street, just two blocks away, rose the imposing bulk of the Jefferson Market women’s prison (now demolished to make way for a park). At that time, tough women would stand on the sidewalk down below and call up to their girlfriends, “I love you, baby. If you give it up to that big black bitch Shareefa, I cut you up, I’m telling you, baby, I cut you good.” Inside the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by the long-legged, fierce-eyed
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