Читать книгу Disasterama! - Alvin Orloff - Страница 10

A DENSE AND CLAMMY MORNING FOG was burning off to reveal a sky of purest azure. This Gay Freedom Day, like all those before it and all those ever after, would be one of sundrenched gorgeousness. Bleary-eyed but brimming with enthusiasm, I glanced up and down Spear Street. The cavernous block of the financial district was filled with contingents and party revelers waiting for the parade to begin, with its gaudily dressed marching bands, floats covered with crepe paper or tinsel, drag queens on roller-skates, leather dykes, photographers, and nearly nude men. The year before, at my first parade, I’d been a mere spectator. This time I’d arrived with my own contingent: Go-Gos for Gays.

It wasn’t a large contingent—just me and my pals Jennifer Blowdryer, Gwyn, Blackie O., Alexis à Go-Go, and a half-dozen more. We were all outfitted in flashy mid-60s drag: narrow lapelled sports coats and skinny ties for the boys, girls in miniskirts and pointy pumps. For a banner I’d written Go-Gos for Gays in magic marker on a white bed sheet next to which someone had drawn Archie’s pals Betty and Veronica dancing in Mod outfits. When our turn to march down Market Street came, I held aloft my tiny portable cassette deck and played a mix-tape of my favorite Go-Go hits: the Zombies, the Troggs, Petula Clark. Unfortunately the crowd couldn’t hear this because directly behind us a gigantic motorized float from some bar was blasting Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” on an endless loop while bodybuilders in sequined short-shorts did that little stepping-flexing dance guys do when they can’t move much because their muscles are so huge. My group, by contrast, danced down the street like kids in a Beach Party movie doing the Twist, Swim, and Watusi. When the crowd—guestimated at 200,000—noticed us at all, they looked confused, so we began chanting, “Twist! And shout! And shout it on out! We’re Go-Gos! For Gays! Go-Gos! For Gays!”

At the corner of Market and Powell a mystified reporter shoved a mic in my face. “Go-Gos for Gays? What’s this all about?”

“We’re promoting awareness of Go-Go music from the 1960s!” I chirped. “The Beau Brummels! Lesley Gore! The Searchers! The Shangri-Las!”

“Where does the gay come in?”

I tried to think. “Uh . . . We like gays!”

The reporter nodded and wandered off wearing an Oh, brother look.

We reached the parade’s terminus at Civic Center around noon. My compatriots went home to nap (none of us were morning people), but I stuck around to mingle with the mob in the hopes of finding romance. Alas, my fellow gays were already in boozey-cruisey mode, shedding shirts and inhibitions faster than you can say voulez-vous coucher avec moi? I wandered about for hours, but this was a festival of the flesh—my Beatle Boots and polka-dot tie impressed no one. Eventually I gave up and went home.

* * *

MY FIXATION WITH GO-GO HAD BEGUN a couple years previously when I started shopping for vintage clothing at thrift stores. There, in addition to the usual bargain hunters, I encountered Retro Queens. Unlike Antique Queens, who collected tasteful, high-quality objets to shield their delicate sensibilities from the vulgarity of the modern world, Retro Queens collected démodé kitsch to shield their indelicate sensibilities from the tedium of Good Taste. They were high priests of camp, enthusiastically venerating the sort of pop culture debris that could be bought for next-to-nothing because affluent, well-educated people found it repulsively vulgar. “My God, it’s faaabulous!” they’d shriek on finding a boomerang ashtray, Tiki-themed cocktail set, Flying Nun lunch box, black velvet clown painting, or a set of pink plastic Melmac dinnerware.

It impressed me to no end that everything the Retro Queens did came with a heapin’ helpin’ of sparkle. Ask an average person how your second-hand Daffy Duck tee shirt looks and he’ll shrug and say, “OK.” Ask a Retro Queen, and he’ll arch his eyebrow and tilt his head appraisingly before gushing, “Oh, Dollface, that shirt is faaabulous! It lifts and hugs and supports in all the right places. Don’t you dare even think about not buying it.” The implications of such extravagant behavior were clear: all clothing is costume because life is theater and it’s your job to steal every scene so you can become a STAR . . . or at least a good character actress.

To me this looked like jolly good fun and, as an added bonus, it felt deliciously forbidden. Thanks to my lefty egghead family, I’d grown up believing Americans were brain washed automatons obsessed with getting ahead in the rat race so they could keep up with the Joneses and pave over paradise while bombing this or that country back to the Stone Age. All entirely true, of course, but now I saw that Americans could also be appealingly weird. After all, their much-lamented obsessions with technology, artifice, and Pollyanna optimism had respectively produced the Moog Synthesizer, Jayne Mansfield, and the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland. Americans weren’t completely bad! People afflicted with good taste—it seemed to me—lived in a defensive cringe, while campy queens were free to embrace the flawed and farcical world around them with open arms.

Retro Queens tended to specialize in something particular: Rockabilly, Beatniks, Film Noir, Mid-Century Modernism, the Rat Pack, creepy dolls, or what have you. I never had to consider my choice. I was magnetically attracted to Go-Go, an amalgam of 1960s fads, styles, and happenings with special focus on Warhol’s Factory, Swinging London, and the preposterous simulacrums of youth culture found on TV (The Monkees, say, or Cousin Serena from Bewitched). I read Jackie Susann’s overwrought novel of showbiz pill-poppers, Valley of the Dolls, collected Margaret Keane prints of bathetically big-eyed children, perused old magazines to gape at Space Age fashions or early rumblings of the sexual revolution, and spent endless hours watching giddily madcap films like Barbarella or Wild in The Streets.

At first this was all done ironically, with an eye to the giggle, but irony is an unstable compound. Over time, it breaks down into a complex mixture of facetiousness and sincerity, allowing for all sorts of nuance. It becomes, in a word, fascination. This was especially true with me and Go-Go because it aligned (in my mind, if nowhere else) with secular humanism, left-utopian politics, artistic iconoclasm, and the sort of militant flippancy favored by high-spirited youngsters who really know how to have a good time. Thus, although I was a moody teen, I always tried to act super-perky and behave as if crashing a wild party—one of those groovy “Now Generation” Happenings full of far-out fashions, wisecracking, bikinis, martinis, and strobe lights.

I don’t know if people always become what they pretend to be, but I certainly did. And, as an unanticipated result, my baseline emotional state reset from Glum to Chipper. This transformation felt nothing short of miraculous, and Go-Go became my de facto religion, the mystico-philosophical framework I relied on to provide life-guidance and console me in times of trouble. When overwhelmed by romantic loneliness, I listened to Girl Groups whose hilariously over-the-top lamentations made the very concept of heartbreak seem amusingly kitsch. When mocked or beaten up for being “a fucking faggot” by my peers, I found solace in the adoration of David Bowie, who was clearly some sort of saint or deity who’d fallen to Earth in order to repeal all gender norms. And when the sheer dullness of life got me down, I’d frug and twist around my room till I felt nothing but up, up, up.

My Go-Go worldview faced its first severe test in November 1978 when Dan White shot Harvey Milk, the most visible face of the Gay Rights movement. The assassination left me utterly gobsmacked. For months I read every story in every paper trying to comprehend the horror. After White got off with a wrist slap seven-year sentence, I heard a lady on the bus defending him because “the gays have gone too far.” I’d known most straight people didn’t like homosexuals. I hadn’t realized so many wanted us dead. This was scary and annoying, sure, but also thrilling. Being disliked is a wishy-washy experience compared to being homicidally detested.

Thrilling or not, I had to fit the reality of belonging to a despised minority into my flippant worldview. I did this by developing the conceit that I was Glamorously Doomed. My life was a comedy, but a black comedy. My enemies, a category I perceived as consisting of, but not restricted to, right-wingers, sports enthusiasts, and the religiously inclined, were the antagonists required of any good drama. Likewise, my troubles and travails were simply necessary plot complications. Me? I was the hilariously ill-fated protagonist: broke, homely, and afflicted with an artistic temperament, but not endowed with any discernable talent. I was born to lose. And yet by losing glamorously—dressed to the nines with a quip on my lip—I would actually win. Like the debris Retro Queens snapped up in thrift stores to repurpose as vintage collectables, the magic of camp would transform me into something of value. Being Glamorously Doomed meant I could revel in my own disgrace, laugh in the face of failure, and wear society’s scorn like a feather boa. I might be destined for disaster, but my disasters would be faaabulous!