Robert Burke Warren thinks about the SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality, and thinks about how it takes a village to raise a boy into a man. In his case, an East Village.
“I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints / I am frightened by the devil, and I’m drawn to those that ain’t afraid.” A Case Of You Joni Mitchell
The SCOTUS ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states got me thinking about the so-called “queer” people who shaped my 80s youth. To my amazement, the memories posses an unexpected clarity, and I find myself welling up with happiness for people I have not seen in two decades, friends whose faces dance as if on a shimmery VHS tape whirring in my mind.
Many who shepherded me through some crucial years were – and are – what we now call LGBTQ, but that term was only just being concocted back then. In any case, more than anyone else, they showed me how to recognize family, love, forgiveness, grace, and courage. Both literally and figuratively, they taught me how to dance.
It took a village, indeed. An East Village.
~
Like most people recall their college years, I recall my time with queer folk, and I’m glad. While my friends were enrolling in BFA programs, I threw myself into the wind, traveling with hope, heading north with a bass and an amp, landing in Manhattan to couch surf in the winter of ’85. The folks who caught me, cut me a break or two, had my back, and directed me toward my various destinies, were what we would now call the LGBTQ community. I learned more essential, useful life lessons from them, usually in a bar thick with beer-and-cigarette stank, than I ever learned in any classroom.
While none of my “scenes” had labels, distinctions can be helpful. To that end: my roots are in the New Wave Queer Underground of Atlanta, and the mid/late 80s post-punk/pre-Giuliani East Village scene. In each of these, it’s important to note, nobody delineated between “gay community” and “straight community.”
In my Atlanta years, bands, plays, art exhibits, and late-night hangouts teemed with all manner of sexual persuasions, and for the most part, it was all fine, our own brand of same-old same-old. I knew some disapproving parents, but notyrannical parents. (Quite a few “old hippie” parents.) I also knew some kids who harbored secret nonhetero tendencies, but they weren’t tortured by the furtiveness in which they couched their desires; they actually kind of dug it.
These days, when I see modern, troubled kids who must be talked off the ledge with the “it gets better” movement, I realize how odd my scenes were, and how charmed. I wish with all my might that one of those shamed, disaffected kids could get a postcard from the Rocky Horror crew, circa 1981. It would make them brave and it would make them fight back.
Of course I see now that we were in a bubble, but at the time, it didn’t seem so, partly because, being kids, we were self-centered, and anything beyond our sphere did not warrant our attention. And the alphas among us were some of the most willful people I’ve ever known, to the point where the heteronormative standard (as we now say) was, quite frankly, effectively branded as insane. Being pretty heteronormative myself, I sometimes felt a little out of place, but not so much that I wanted to flee. On the contrary. I wanted to belong, I wanted to be brave like them.
~
Later, in Manhattan, at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, a bar on the corner of Avenue A and East 7th Street, a new set of offbeat characters welcomed me into another arty oasis. Together, in a lovingly tangled skein, we hung out, worked our money gigs, turned each other on to music, played in bands, and could not have cared less if he/she was intimate with their own sex, or whether he/she liked to wear, say, heels, or, say, combat boots, or dye their hair, or experiment. People uptight at our lack of concern – and of course, many of my peers had fled such folks – were the butts of our jokes, and we laughed our asses off at them.
Maggie and Doug, co-owners of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, hired me a few months after I turned 20. I’d been working midnight to 8 AM at the Village Copier for $5 an hour, and washing glasses at 8BC (bar-club on East 8th between Avenues B and C). King Tut’s needed a non-heroin-using glass washer/bar back. and my brand new bandmates Mark and Keiko, who I’d met through impresario-activist Jim Fouratt, introduced me to Maggie and Doug, who hired me on the spot. I soon graduated to bartending and bar managing. (Not being a junkie came in handy.) From that connection, from Maggie and Doug taking me on, I can now trace every major event of my life.
I’d come to New York a few months previously, reeling from some heavy girlfriend drama and family issues, and even though I didn’t consciously realize it then, I see now I was eager to find a way to be alone and to enjoy a community. I’d bounced around apartments, was unhealthy and depressed, and very close to heading back to Atlanta, but with the kindness of a few strangers, I found my way.
With my East Village scene, I found that balance of aloneness and community for a couple years, especially when the aforementioned Mark and Keiko let me (illegally) sub-lease their Ave B. railroad apartment. Tisch School of the Arts actor-in-training Peter McCabe become my great friend and roommate, and I was set. I paid my bills from cash I kept in a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee can, and on occasion, I was happier than a pig in shit.
It was not wasted time. I played music, began to write, and spent many hours walking the streets of Alphabet City, often in the pre-dawn, adventuring with the Wah Wah Hut crew, breaking into the Pitt Street Pool to swim, watching many a sunrise over Tompkins Square Park, the last park in Manhattan with no curfew, where fires burned and kids a little less lucky than me camped.
Indeed I was lucky. In addition to being the recipient of the largesse of a few people, I was, unbeknownst to me, in the last wave of artists who could move to NYC and live cheaply. Within a decade, those days would be over.
As the 80s played out, AIDS ravaged my community. It still chills me to recall sick friends dying in their prime, to remember the feel of their wasting-away hands grip mine across a hospital bed. But when so many – including me – lived in fear of illness, or indeed, became ill, outsiderness remained a source of pride and power. We all hunkered down and embraced our outsiderness even more. Some of the braver ones marched on government buildings – the amazing ACT UP crew comes to mind – transforming grief and rage into action. Among other things, they shamed Burroughs-Wellcome into lowering the price of AZT by 20%. This was real, tough love. And it was a lesson.
There was so much love. In our little enclave, some of us at the Wah Wah Hut wished for stardom, but at the same time, we were loathe to leave the love we knew in our East Village obscurity. (Although one of two did achieve that stardom dream.) It was uncommon, this love, infused with, but sometimes beyond, sex; an amalgam of friendship, family, foxhole intimacy, erotic fascination, and besotted crushes, spiced with a healthy degree of disdain and pettiness, maybe a little bad behavior (OK, a lot) just to keep it lively. (We were kids, after all.) I think, in our hearts, we knew how special this all was, but we could not articulate it, and even if we could, we would not have done so because it would’ve been very uncool.
This era didn’t last, because these things never do, as this grumpy old man now knows. People eventually let go, or they fled; everyone, in their way, moved on, relinquishing apartments, turning the page on a life chapter lived with gusto and abandon. Some died, and we mourned them, and mourn them still.
When it was my time to go, I did, with my wife and son. My son was four when we left NYC for the Catskills, and he’s now seventeen and guess what? He’s finding his way among LGBTQ youths who are much less in the shadows than the queer kids I ran with when I was my boy’s age. That makes me smile. They shine, these kids, they make great art, they look after one another, and although I don’t say it aloud very much, lest I get a withering look, they take me back.
At age 50, my short term recollection is starting to go. Mostly, when I meet new people, I can’t remember their names. It is vexing. But part of my memory, apparently, is ironclad, at least for now: seems I will never forget the names of the queer and queer-friendly East Village denizens who took me in and/or steered me toward the better part of my life: Jim, Maggie, Doug, Brian, Jesse, Stacy, Kate, Richard, Byron, Byron, Luis, Itabora, Michael, Grace, Stan, Jo, Lucy, Annie, Paula, Denise, Monica, Effie, Ethyl, Wendy, Ida, Chuck, Curtis, Chris, Lady Bunny, Bob, Marleen, Baby, Mark, Keiko, Gerard, Bernard, Nick, George. They were all there as I became me. They helped. They emboldened me.
With the step forward that is the SCOTUS decision, my old friends who remain on this earthy plane who are gay, or LGBTQ, or whatever, have much to celebrate. That means anyone who loves them – that would be me – also has a lot to celebrate. And at this stage of the game, celebrating a good day is crucial. Not all days are good, that’s for damn sure, but even after everything, some definitely are.
~
(In this Nelson Sullivan video, shot in the Pyramid Club basement dressing room across from King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, I enter with my then-girlfriend Holly around 1:41. It’s 1988, and I’m twenty-two.)
I really enjoyed your article, so Thank You for that. Myself I arrived in the town of Victoria, B.C. to play with my band in 1985. Victoria is much, much smaller than New York but I can relate to a lot of what you wrote. In Victoria all the LGBQT people and the rest of us made no distinctions (just as you wrote). The Art Kids, the Punk Rockers, the Cafe Owners, aspiring poets…everyone was part of a scene that was a Great size to encourage a lot of caring. There were, of course, destructive people and a few psychos,… Read more »
Thanks so much, Nicholas. Sounds like you were lucky, too, in your own oasis. Perhaps it’s the advent of the internet, or who knows what, but that sense of “we’re all in this together ‘ doesn’t feel so strong these days. But I’m working on it. Anyway, thanks again for the comments. Much appreciated. Rock on…