Читать книгу Spine Intact, Some Creases - Victor J. Banis - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

THERE IS A TAVERN…

Things hadn’t gotten much better by the time the sixties rolled around either. Showing or describing the human body was still invariably illegal—murder wasn’t, at least not murdering a gay man. A gay hustler could, and did with grim frequency in those years, murder his john and in order to be acquitted had only to plead that his victim had been homosexual and had tried to molest him—usually after paying the young man for his favors. If you were assaulted, or “bashed,” you didn’t call the cops—they would be more likely to arrest you than your assailant, as my friend Ernestine had so painfully found out.

I was brutally beaten in 1960 in Louisville, Kentucky—by a cop. Nothing sexual. I was in the wrong place and opened my mouth when I should have kept it shut—a lifelong habit, I’m afraid.

In 1961 I spent most of a night with a gun at my head in a gay related robbery. It really is more frightening in retrospect than it was at the time. In all candor, when you have been to some of the gay dinner parties that I have attended, you get over your fear of death. Could it be more painful than another bad impersonation of Prissy?

It was certainly uncomfortable, however. And there were some possible complications that were worrisome. My man with the gun considered the idea of going next door and raping my female neighbor; and I had a roommate who might come home at any time and step into a volatile situation. Mostly I was thinking about how to avert either of these tragedies. He already had my entire stash of cash—twelve dollars and some change. Talk about petty thievery.

I did what I generally do at times of crisis—I talked. And talked. And talked. He was disappointed with the paltry sum of money at hand. “I could write a check,” I offered. Yes, of course, I understood that he had no bank account into which to deposit a check. Perhaps we could go out—away from neighbors and roommates though I didn’t say that—and find a place to cash the check.

As the night progressed, I am afraid the situation deteriorated into a rather sad farce. Of course no one was going to cash a check in the middle of the night in Los Angeles. I was counting on that—what was open? Filling stations. A rare convenience store. Coffee shops.

The check started at one hundred and fifty dollars. After a few stops I scratched out those numbers and changed it to one hundred. I thought it was certain that now no one would cash an altered check, though that seemed not to occur to him. I was still talking, bear in mind. By now we were friends, brothers under the skin. I can be very convincing when I talk.

Dawn came. He treated me to breakfast—with the money he had taken from me earlier. We talked. He was, I swear it, beginning to get a romantic glint in his eye by the time Sears opened their store on Saturday morning. The check had been altered yet again. It was now for fifty dollars and looking like hens had been scratching at it. Both the one hundred dollar amount and the one hundred and fifty dollar amount had been exed out. I handed this pathetic scrap of paper to a cashier at the service window at Sears where, I should add, I did not even have an account (there is, I believe, a certain threshold of taste below which one should not descend, no matter the circumstances).

The cashier studied the check. I twitched, I winked, I flung glances over my shoulder in an effort to convey to her that there was something wrong, that the man behind me had a gun, that this was not a kosher situation.

Bear in mind I had been up all night. Those of you unfortunate enough to have seen me in the wee hours know that I could not have been a pretty sight. At the least my clothes were rumpled and my hair on end. I don’t want to think of the state of my make up.

She stared at me, seeming to note my twitches, if not my dishabille. She stared at the check, with its multitude of shrinking amounts. She stared at me some more. Behind me people were shuffling impatiently. I was all too aware that one of them was armed.

“I guess it’s okay,” she sighed. She put the check into her drawer, and handed me fifty dollars through the window cage. Never before or since have I cashed a check with so much ease at a department store cashier’s window.

Well, at any rate, that ended our night’s adventure. He was apparently satisfied with the fifty dollars pay for his time, or perhaps he was just tired of my incessant chatter. He dropped me off at home, by which time we were such good buddies that he even offered to come back some other day and teach me self-defense so that no one could again take advantage of me this way.

Self-defense? Self-defense was talking. Boxing was what you did at Christmas, and wrestling was for fun. I survived, without the boxing lessons, but the point of the whole story is, I didn’t call the police.

When I was gang raped by a trio of uniformed police officers—men who had sworn a sacred oath to protect and defend—I could hardly have called the police. To have lodged a complaint would have been to invite almost certain reprisals from their fellow officers. My lesbian friend, Joy, whose rapists called her “dyke bitch” and other endearments while they raped and beat her, didn’t call the cops either. Nor did my friend Don, after a nightmare night of multiple rapes combined with physical abuse that left him covered in blood and looking like so much raw meat.

Women today decry—and rightly so—the judgmental attitudes they sometimes get when reporting rape to the police. Multiply that a hundred-fold and you’ll have an inkling of what it is sometimes like for the gay male even today, outside of the gay capitols like San Francisco and New York City.

And that’s an improvement. In the fifties and sixties, they would have laughed us out of the station without even bothering to take a report—perhaps, as sometimes happened, after taking a turn of their own. To whom would we complain? Gays didn’t enjoy police protection in those days. We solaced and succoured one another. We were all we had.

Well, we had our bars, of course. Much has been written about the incidence of alcoholism among gays, but that is hardly surprising when the focus of our social life for so many years was the gay bar. In Los Angeles the biggest concentration of them was in L.A. 69—West Hollywood or, as we called it, Boy’s Town. The Hollywood Hills were the Swish Alps and Robertson Boulevard was Suckleberry Lane. I don’t know why we bothered with postal codes.

Although West Hollywood was not then its own city, it was outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department—county territory, in other words, and patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who for whatever reason tended to be more tolerant of gays and gay bars.

Which is not to say that the West Hollywood bars weren’t occasionally subject to raids, though less often. You always ran the risk of picking up a vice officer, and no dancing or untoward behavior was allowed.

Still, in general, the atmosphere here was more relaxed. Sometimes one saw a celebrity or quasi celebrity. Dorothy Parker and on-again-off-again husband Alan Campbell lived around the corner from The Four Star and he was frequently wont to linger at the bar of an afternoon, occasionally with, and more often without, wifey.

In the seventies comedian Michael Greer and actor Don Johnson, then appearing at the Coronet Theater in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, were a regular twosome at the West Hollywood watering holes. Lovers? Friends? I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty. Mr. Johnson invited me to go with them as they were leaving one night, but neither our destination nor our intentions were made entirely clear. I declined. Of course, had I know then what I know now…but of course he may just have wanted my already legendary recipe for cheese balls.

In those days Don Johnson was pretty nearly an unknown and Michael Greer had established himself as a coming star, at least in the gay community, and ‘star” is our game. Nobody does it better.

My first exposure to Greer was on a rainy weeknight in (I believe) 1965, at the Academy, a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. I stopped on a whim and found a talent competition in progress. The crowd, a dozen or so besides myself, took to a drag trio lip-synching none too successfully to a Supremes number but I—and I alone—applauded long and loud for the tall, gangly comic on stage.

It was a year later when I saw Michael Greer again. By this time he was starring at a near-downtown bar called the Redwood Room, as lead in a group called Jack and the Giants. The Giants included a then unknown Jim Bailey, who did an eerie impression of Barbra Streisand among others (“Do you like my nose? I had it fixed. It used to be here.”)

The main events of the evening, however, were Greer’s monologues, as the Mona Lisa (“I knew Toulouse Lautrec when he was this high”) or as Tallulah Bankhead hosting a kiddies” television show (“he hid under a toadstool, and toads being such nasty creatures, you can just imagine what their stools are like.”)

I chatted with him afterward and when I reminded him of that earlier talent show he dubbed me his “original fan,” by which title he often introduced me afterward. We had another fact in common as well; we both of us admitted to serious crushes on an SAS airline steward named Anders—a crush we shared, we both understood, with vast numbers of men in several countries. Anders was, shall we say, generous of spirit.

Michael became an habitué of the West Hollywood scene and by this time I lived just off Santa Monica Boulevard, so we met often. As time went by he appeared more and more in the company of Don Johnson.

The Redwood Room show played to packed houses for the better part of two years. Greer did some appearances on Laugh In (not altogether successfully; he really needed more than the few seconds they allotted him to build up momentum). He appeared in an early gay movie, The Gay Deceivers (1969), which is available these days on video, and I think is funny despite the fact that, yes, it does play to gay stereotypes. In 1970, along with Sal Mineo and Don Johnson, he appeared on stage as Queenie in the prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, with a then infamous gay rape scene.

Sal, by the way, lived right around the corner from me, on Holloway Drive and we chatted often in a neighborly way. Interestingly enough, only a few weeks before he was murdered in the garage of his apartment building, he mentioned surprising an intruder in that very garage, apparently trying to break into a car.

“It’s made me a little nervous,” he confessed. I recommended that he keep his eyes open and exercise extra caution coming in and out at night, but I wish now that I had made my advice a bit more forceful.

At the time Sal was already a star but Michael appeared marked for real stardom as well. Then everything seemed to come to a halt. Part of the problem was no doubt an appearance he made at a fundraising party in a Valley bar, where he made some remarks that were taken as patronizing and were booed by the audience. I must admit I was startled when he announced that, despite what anyone might have heard, he himself was not gay (luckily our sas steward was not there at the time); but if the gay men present would allow him to climb to stardom on their shoulders he would do all he could to pull us up after him.

This was not, by the by, an auspicious night for celebrities. The other “star” in attendance, Barbara Nichols, got so drunk that she literally had to be carried out of the bar horizontally. Her career was short-lived.

Michael appeared at Ciro’s as lead singer to a rather dreadful rock band, and faded from sight. The last I saw him was in the movie, The Rose (1979), where he appears briefly as Baby Jane in the drag-bar scene. Michael died in 2002. Still, I expect audiences somewhere are still laughing at La Gioconda.

Gay bars in L.A. weren’t limited to West Hollywood, however. There was scarcely a neighborhood that didn’t have its bar, some of them nothing more than a hole in the wall selling beer only, some of them quite posh. Spago, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, was St. Genesius before it changed hands and names. I might have sipped my cocktails in the exact same spot as the most famous of stars. I might have even, in the very same spot…oh, never mind, I’m sure nothing racy went on at Spago.

The leather crowd tended more toward Hollywood or the Silverlake district, another gay-popular neighborhood. Lee Majors was said to frequent one of the Silverlake bars. I never saw him, but a friend, whose word I never had reason to doubt, insists they got to be very close friends on one occasion and that he was, in my friend’s words, “built like a beer can.” That strikes me as what authors call “a telling detail.” I can’t imagine my friend would have described the actor’s torso in those words if he had not seen it.

Victor Buono liked the bar at the Gallery Inn, on Santa Monica Boulevard, and was about as pleasant a drinking companion as you could ask for, smart, funny, and unpretentious. We passed many a rainy afternoon sipping the grape and discussing old movies and stars. Victor’s talent was huge, but so was his size, and that was a handicap to stardom, though he did a lot of theater work in Los Angeles, including a sparkling Falstaff at the Ahmanson.

Joanne Worley and Ruth Buzzi, both of Laugh In fame, could sometimes be spotted around town—not together, I hasten to add. Later I heard of John Travolta sightings (à deux) at the bars far out in the Valley, which is to say, off the beaten track. He was also spotted in Big Sur, at the Highland Inn, which of course is not a gay hangout, but he was said to be making goo-goo eyes at an attractive male companion. I wasn’t there, mind you, and can only repeat what I was told—by not one but two generally reliable sources.

“You can tell,” one of my friends put it, “when two guys are looking at one another that way.…”

There were lesbian bars as well, though they were fewer—the income gap which still exists between men and women was horrific in those days and the obvious (or even suspected) lesbian usually was lucky to earn enough to pay for her daily bread, let alone a night out with “the boys.” Still, most large cities had at least one. Elaine’s, in San Francisco, was legendary. In Los Angeles, the If Café on Vermont was ground zero. They did not welcome men, and these dykes could be ferocious. It was a rare Saturday night that didn’t see at least one physical brawl, sometimes punctuated with broken beer bottles.

If you were clearly gay, however, you could get away with accompanying some of the “guys.” I went occasionally with friends, and I made it a point to be as obviously gay as I could. I didn’t use either restroom, since you never knew who might be in one, and ridiculous though it might seem, I wanted no one to suspect I was there to hit on lesbians. I sipped my beer and sat, if necessary, with legs tightly crossed, until time to go home.

Almost every city of any size had at least one gay bar—usually, the owner made payoffs, to mayors, police chiefs, judges—and often to the mob, in the cities they ran. Dayton, Ohio was, I was told, one of the mob-protected cities. There were always one or two secondary bars to visit, but for many years, Dayton’s chief watering hole for the gay set was the Latin Lounge. Oddly, unlike many gay bars, which tended to be hidden away on back streets or industrial neighborhoods, the Latin Lounge was smack dab in the middle of downtown Dayton—cities all had downtowns in those days.

A long narrow bar with a tiny dance floor in the rear, the Lounge was packed on Friday and Saturday nights, a mixed crowd of guys and girls—the two mingled then and there as a matter of discretion. A mixed group going in and out of a bar was likely to attract less attention. Usually, about midnight, one of the regulars would go around the bar collecting money and in a little while, a mountain of pizzas would be delivered, to be shared by all and sundry. I can’t imagine that happening in a gay bar today.

For the most part these bars were safe so long as behavior remained discreet, though election years usually brought raids as candidates vied to show that they were “tough on crime.” We were usually the crime they were tough on. Everyone knew how dangerous we could be.

Sometimes the physical set-up of the bar was a bit strange. In Cincinnati one neighborhood bar divided itself down the middle. The students from the nearby university went to the right as they entered, the gay patrons to the left, and ne’er the twain did meet—except, perforce, in the restrooms. And no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. Unless, of course, one peeks, but I personally have always adhered to the rules of etiquette in such places.

I ran across a similarly odd set-up once on a first time visit to Philadelphia during an Army-Navy game weekend, when I visited a bar recommended by a friend—the Pirate’s Cove, if memory serves me. I wondered at the recommendation. The place was near empty and achingly dull, until I got ready to leave.

“You should stop at the gent’s,” the bartender suggested, “before you head out into the rain.”

It seemed an odd suggestion, but I took it. To my surprise, the restroom itself and the long corridor leading to it were crowded with handsome young men, many of them actively involved with one another. It took me a while to discover that just around the corner from the entrance to the bar I had visited was the entrance to another bar, this one a straight bar and popular with the cadets. It seemed the two establishments shared the same facilities. The cadets, of course, could not be seen going in and out of a known gay bar, which was off limits to them—but their M.P.s apparently hadn’t checked on the toilets, an oversight that clearly delighted many of the cadets. I might add that I was pleased as well, for several good reasons.

Larger cities had multiple bars. The major ones each had at least one bar of a particular sort—ostensibly heterosexual but frequented by young, straight acting gay men (if you were the “swish” or obvious type and happened into the establishment, you would almost certainly be refused service and asked to leave) and the older, well-to-do gentlemen (many of them married) who wished discreet introductions—as a rule arranged by an accommodating bartender.

These were often hotel bars, for a good reason. Conventional bars were more likely to be frequented by friends meeting for drinks, or opposite sex couples, but single men were commonplace in hotel bars and no one was likely to raise an eyebrow if a friendly conversation was struck.

Many gay gentleman of a certain age will remember New York’s Astor Bar with fondness. In San Francisco, it was the bar at the St. Francis Hotel. (Indeed, the corner outside the St. Francis was a common working ground for hustlers of both sexes until the seventies, when a fifteen-year-old girl prostitute was found murdered in a hotel room and the vice squad started cleaning things up.)

This was long before anyone would have dared to publish a gay guide, but an underground network of gay intelligence kept one surprisingly well informed. Long before I left behind the divorce courts of Ohio for the lights of Los Angeles, I knew of the “bird circuit” in New York City and the Four Star Saloon in West Hollywood, even Les Trois Cloches in far off Cannes, France, which so far as I know is still setting them up.

And of the once infamous standing room at the old Metropolitan Opera in New York City, or “Kiss me Quick, I’m Carmen” as we used to call it. Some of the regular standees allegedly wore special trousers, with zippers in the rear for convenient access. It was largely because of the blatant sexual activity that Rudolf Bing, when he became general manager of the Met in the mid-fifties, tried to eliminate standing room, but the chorus of objections was too great, and he relented. Time and the advent of friendlier places for get-togethers has eliminated the problem—so far as I know. I was never comfortable singing if I couldn’t see the baton.

There were the gay meccas—Fire Island has probably been gay since before the coming of the pilgrims and New Orleans has always been famed for its tolerance. Key West came to gay prominence in the late sixties but I doubt that it was ever entirely lavender free. By the seventies Saugatuck, on the shores of Lake Michigan, had quite a name for itself, though I personally never ventured into those sand dunes.

Then there was San Diego. All those military installations, all those men—and right across the border, Sin City itself, Tijuana. It’s hard to imagine these days when you stroll around in quiet, ultra conservative—oh, let’s face it, dull—San Diego that Broadway downtown was once a carnival of locker clubs, peep shows and bars (gay ones, too—one infamous one right smack where Planet Hollywood sits these days). And men, dozens of them, hundreds, lining the streets, time on their hands, fire in the blood, and nothing to do but, well, find something to do. On a Friday night, or a Sunday afternoon, you could just go shopping, and pick out whatever you wanted in the way of size, color, uniform, whatever.

I say Friday or Sunday, because the conventional wisdom was that Friday night, they had just gotten leave and were very horny and weren’t going to be picky. By Saturday night, having somewhat mollified their biological urges, they were likely to be more selective. On Saturday they wanted women. Sunday, however, leave was almost over. This was no time to be too choosy. The same boys who sneered at your offer on Saturday were often amenable to a quickie before they headed back to the base or the ship.

It wasn’t just American sailors either. San Diego saw ships from almost every country you could imagine and many of their crews were even less inhibited than our own boys in blue. I visited on one weekend with a friend and at a coffee shop we soon struck up conversation with a pair of officers from a Greek ship. For reasons we needn’t go into, they were not at the moment available to retire to our rooms for a bit of cross-cultural fraternization. They told us to wait at the coffee shop, however, and were soon back with not two but three enlisted men, to whom they introduced us before going about their own business. Now that’s what I call noblesse oblige. Yes, of course the numbers weren’t quite even, there were three of them and only two of us, which makes dancing awkward, but we overcame that difficulty. I felt the reputation of our nation’s hospitality was at stake. Sometimes you simply have to swallow your pride.

Not every city could offer the sort of smorgasbord that San Diego did in its glory days but every city had at least one hangout. In Muncie, Indiana, it was the three or four stools around the end curve of an otherwise straight bar in an otherwise straight restaurant. The knowing bartender sort of directed traffic on Saturday nights to see that everyone found his right place. It worked better than you might imagine.

Some of these bars were known on the underground network, many were not—which meant that when you came to visit you had to find them for yourself. Everyone had his favorite method of finding a bar in a strange city. A tip to a hotel bellboy was often effective; indeed, more than once I found that I needn’t go out at all, which is always convenient in inclement weather and so could be considered a boon to one’s health. Cab drivers could usually tell you where to go, though you ran the risk of finding one who was homophobic. If you were lucky you would be ordered from the cab. Once or twice I wasn’t that lucky—this was not so healthy.

Some individuals favored bookstores and antique shops for striking up a friendly local acquaintance who presumably would know the spots, and others just lingered on a street corner and followed a likely looking passerby, though there were obvious pitfalls in that method. Most cities had at least one bathhouse where not all the steam came from water pipes.

Some travelers automatically headed for the YMCA when they arrived in an unfamiliar city. You did understand, didn’t you, why the Village People chose to celebrate that institution? In those days the Y was exclusively male, often with a nude-only pool in the basement, and most were known for their, ahem, fellowship. Some of them, such as the Embarcadero Y in San Francisco and the Sloane House in Manhattan, were downright legendary. I shall always fondly remember walking into the men’s room at the Sloane House to discover a little old Jewish man naked at the urinals and masturbating energetically while singing, with gusto, Happy Days Are Here Again.… There’s something about seeing another person really enjoying himself that truly warms your heart.

I think the most unique approach I ever heard of to finding the local gay spots was that of the gentleman who, upon arriving in a new city, called the police department to explain that he was looking for his younger brother who had disappeared from home and who he thought might be found in a gay hangout—could the police suggest where he might look? I never tried this method but he swore it was infallible. Who would know better than they?

Then there was the friend who just hung around at a Lane Bryant store. Sooner or later, he insisted, a rather fey gentleman was certain to ask about dresses for his sister—who happened to be “about my size.…”