They weren't "real," in many senses of the word. The Village and Fire Island in the 1970s sound like enchanted places I'd time-travel back to (temporarily) in a minute, but in 1978, they were among precious few places where gay men could be themselves without fear of violence, firing or other repercussions.
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On one hand, could he not appreciate the celebration, the joy, the liberation and ecstasy that was gay life in 1978 NYC? AIDS probably made him feel grimly vindicated!, I thought bitterly.Īnd yet at the same time-it's hard not to love him for wanting more for his people, for wanting our full personhood within society.
But seriously-I had such violently mixed feelings about Larry's words here (whose harshness is tempered somewhat by his own admitting that even he can't seem to sustain a long-term relationship).
I definitely want that last line on a T-shirt. You got what you deserve.How can you feel good about yourself as a person after you've been pissed on in a bathtub?" I think ghettoes are a dead-end for any group-gays, Jews, Blacks.I don't see what fucking in the back room of the Anvil gets you.People can't wake up at 60 and say, 'Oh, poor me'. You have to like yourself.Why do we fuck in the bushes at night?. "Stop making excuses and look at yourselves. "We've done everything to ourselves," he says. It's absolutely haunting: Here is Kramer, at the height of the gay sexual revolution and at least three years before more than a handful of people understood that a health crisis was brewing, lacerating his fellow gay men for their sexual wildness and saying that homophobia is basically their own fault for retreating into ghettoes and centering their lives around sex instead of fighting 24-7 for full rights and societal inclusion. gay community into its biggest surge of pre-AIDS activism… As Katz says on the show of his own coming out, it was a process of transforming his own self-image "from a psychological freak to a member of an oppressed minority group." I've always heard how the Florida antigay initiatives of "Orange Juice queen" Anita Bryant galvanized the U.S. What's most thrilling to me about ECTV is watching a community, not even a decade after the Stonewall uprising, come into its self-confidence and its cultural power-this self-conscious sense that to be gay was to be cool, to be free, to be part of the zeitgeist.Īnd also to be political. The people you knew were the people you saw when you actually left the house, and on an island as small as Manhattan, in a community as ghettoized as the downtown gay world at that time, you really could come to feel like you knew everyone after a few years.
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It's Emerald City TV (this links to all the episodes available online), which was a weekly gay newsmagazine that ran on Manhattan's cable station "J" from late 1976 to 1978.īorough-specific variations of that good old-fashioned Noo Yawk accent abound, so reminiscent of a time when the city was still made up of more natives and Long Island and Jersey types than it seems to be today.Īs Steven Bie, 66, said in our chat (below), "New York felt like a smaller town then, where everyone eventually knew everyone else." Perhaps that was because there was no Internet, no social media. This month, however, I will deviate slightly from my usual all-Q&A-all-the-time format to rave about something that, to my great shock, I only just stumbled upon online a few weeks ago.
I've put a lot of time recently into lining up future interviews, and I am very excited about a certain gay literary lion I have lined up for the June interview. Meanwhile, one can always look back, which I guess is the whole point of The Caftan Chronicles. ( Here is a link, via Congresswoman AOC, where you can donate to vetted groups addressing the Ukrainian refugee humanitarian crisis. I'll admit that my enjoyment of a recent spate of very balmy New York City days has been shadowed by the constant thought of what is going on in Ukraine, and what it might mean for that whole region and the world in the months and years ahead. I hope this finds you all well as we head into spring amid what seems unrelentingly dark times in the world.