Good Night ...Would you agree, then, we won't find truths, or any certainties... where monsters lift soft self-conscious voices, and feed us and feed in us, and coil and uncoil in our substance, so that in that they are there we cannot know them, and that, daylit, we are the monsters of our night and somewhere the monsters of our night are... here...in daylight that our nightnothing feeds in and feeds, wandering out of the cavern, a low cry echoing -- Camacamacamac... that we need as we don't need truth... and ungulfs a Good Night, smiling. (Thomas Kinsella)

"I'm all fucked up...." (From a parody of the Elvis song "All Shook Up.")

At some point -- probably a different time and place for everyone -- it became OK to be "fucked up". How are you? Fucked up. What do you want to do? Get fucked up. You want to go home? Yeah, let's get fucked up ... and, Wow, am I fucked up! Sex and drugs had been obsessions before. Now they were occupations around which things like earning a living and managing a life were arranged. Life was always hard: hard drugs, hard cock, hard music, hard fist and hard up in you.

Leather and S/M and hints of either or both had been a standard part of gay erotic life since the mid-70s. The sexual repertoire of people and the use of "toys", i.e., dildos, tit clamps, vibrators and the like, was very wide. I think, though I have never seen it written about, one of the most pronounced changes in emphasis over the last three decades was the shift in the focus of male eroticism.

Put more plainly, it seemed to me that in that late 50s and very early 60s that cock sucking was the principal sexual activity, both the active and passive roles. Getting fucked in the ass was not something that many men in those years would speak of casually in a group of gay men, however no one demurred to talk about taking a passive role in cock sucking.

However, by the mid to late 60s anal intercourse was admitted to, being equally as popular and taking the passive role was somewhat more openly spoken about. Then, by the mid-70s it seemed that cock and ass rather than cock and mouth were focus of gay eroticism. Taking the passive role in anal sex was much more freely discussed and it even acquired a peculiar macho status (quite the opposite of former years). This may have been due to the increasing acceptance of a rather hyper-macho style of personal presentation, i.e., dressing (the "clone" style), personal affect and so on, which often implied some ritual S/M and what I might describe as "tough sex", which may have de-feminized getting fucked.

Where this finally led was to an extreme emphasis on the ass. The terms "asshole work" and "ass play" became very common, and what this encompassed was using dildos, fist-fucking rimming, and blowing cocaine into the rectum, the latter dramatically increases and changes the sensitivity inside the ass. Cock sucking was frequently regarded as foreplay-only type of sex, or quickie sex in circumstances that didn't allow for prolonged, heavy sex.

"My Man is Red Hot" (80s disco song)

By the turn of the decade the gym-built body was the ideal. And it seemed every other guy was trying to build himself one. A few gyms in NYC were predominantly gay, one was exclusively gay (the Chelsea Gym.) A few gay bodybuilders even began to use steroids. Almost "everyone" worked out. Body display was at the max, and the shift was to less clothes rather than on clothes which showed it off. Tank tops, sleeveless shirts, short shorts with wide baggy legs, slashed and ripped jeans, shirts open to the waist or (my favorite) a jacket with no shirt at all underneath (summer and winter), a jock strap or no underwear -- these were the makings of fashion at this point. The object was to show as much of the body as you felt comfortable to and that you could get away with, and in such a fashion that your appearance made the statement -- I want it, and I want it now, and if you're lucky you may get the first piece. It was like the motto of one of the car rentals companies said: If you got it, flaunt it.

The rainbow did not have enough colors to indicate the nuances to sexual conduct and preference, and bandanas of every imaginable color peeked from rear pockets -- left or right, sometimes several. A friend of mine once remarked of someone he saw in a bar, "It looks like he's carrying a goddamned parrot in his back pocket!"

While pierced ears had been somewhat popular for awhile, by the late 70s they had become more popular but so had pierced nipples. Nipples were high priority eroticism, and "tit play" -- often in bars or other public places -- was great sexual recreation.

Very aggressive physical/sexual conduct was common even in cruise bars. Some cruise bars had become so loose in what they allowed that smoking grass inside the bar was not only allowed but a very casual activity. Snorting cocaine discretely (or doing it in the loo) was tolerated in some bars. In the late 60s marijuana had sold for about $35/ounce for good stuff, cocaine had been going for $125/gr. -- though at that time the latter was very uncommonly used. In the late 70s good grass could be had for $75/ounce; cocaine was in wide use and though a single gram purchase could go for $100, anyone who was buying would buy enough to get the price down to $90 a gram.

I lived on the Upper West Side, and from 1979 on I never left it for the purposes of cruising or sex. It had become totally unnecessary to go to the Village or to any other part of the city for pleasure. The Pig Circuit was over. The Piccadilly had closed, a new bar called Wildwood had opened a block away, and a twink bar called The Works a few blocks north. The Candlelight Lounge renamed itself The Candle -- covered its huge window with barn siding, painted itself black inside, installed a pool table, opened a back room for sex and pumped out high-decibel disco music on speakers placed throughout the bar -- no one would have known, once inside, that they were not at the junction of Christopher and West Streets. But the best action was at The Boot Hill, which had been the dreariest of the old bars.

Boot Hill was a small bar, paneled in rough barn siding, with wide plank floors and two small windows. It had a few bar stools, a few high built-in benches along the wall for seating and two pillars in the center of the floor with small shelves for drinks which people clustered around. From almost anyplace in the room the entire space -- and its customers -- were visible, so the entire place was available for cruising with very little movement and the cruising of multiple potential tricks was usual. On the other hand, it was a place where many groups of friends met and it had a very friendly atmosphere. (As well as a very "incestuous" one :-) Smoking grass was wide open and the taped music was usually superb. It was perhaps a bit unusual in that it was both a neighborhood local and a great cruising bar.

"Come on I want your sex Come on, I want your sex That's right, all night Oh, I want your sex I want your...sex." (I Want Your Sex, George Michael)

I recall being in The Boot one night, dressed in running shoes, a pair of short, wide-legged shorts (a la someone's army I'm sure) with just a jock under them and a bomber jacket with no shirt. I had been talking with my friends but cruising a couple of guys, one of whom was rather spectacular: fairly tall and with a slightly run-down, once-great body. Probably in his late thirties, with a slightly incongruous baby face. He was dressed in a leather jacket and leather pants. On his left epaulet was an enormous cock ring His jacket was open to the waist showing a pair of rather nice pecs, if a somewhat slack body. His left thigh swelled with a basket which appeared to contain an anaconda and two cantaloupes, an unusual picnic but generous to a fault.

One of those slightly over-the-hill and over-ripe type of guys who have done it all and are absolutely wonderful at doing it all again with a steady dedicated perfection which comes from lots of practice.

He went to the john, and I moved to lean against a narrow shelf which connected two small posts in the front of the room, and in front of which he would have to pass again. As he came out he saw me as soon as he started toward his previous place. When he was in front of me we gave each other a nuclear meltdown look eyeball to eyeball at a distance of fifteen inches. I used to find it enormously relieving to get an initial indication that we were beginning at the level of lust and would hopefully descend from there without any perfunctory chit-chat.

I can remember that the initial verbal interchange was a couple of heavy-breathed, and stagely resonant, "Hi's". Beyond that it was a couple of double entendre exchanges and mutual preening. Then we moved toward a wall away from the bar. In The Boot, if you were familiar with the routine, this was to allow for some semi-private untrammeled groping if it came to that, or at least some pretty blunt cock-teasing. So, he leaned against a wall with his right leg on a bench and his right arm draped over it. This rather cleverly left his crotch wide open and his basket even more tautly on display. Not to be out maneuvered, I stood with one foot on either side of his extended left leg. He was up for toking a joint, so I lit one and held it out toward him. When he took it, this was the opportunity to lower my hand onto one of his pecs and stoke it. Which gesture he reciprocated when I took a toke. After a bit of back and forth with the joints and progressively more pec-appreciation and nipple attention it was time to turn the heat up.

When I handed him the joint at this point, I lowered my hand so that it rested very lightly on the end of his basket and left it that way. It's a cheap tease -- if you can resist beginning to stroke -- because the other guy usually gets excited anticipating your stoking, and finally begins to press his basket into your hand out of frustration. If you only gently caress what's offered and don't go exploring, the other guy will keep moving to back and forth so that he's rubbing his basket back and forth into your hand. It can be a pretty hot game and is a moderately artful way of raising the temperature considerably while appearing to remain somewhat laid back.

By the time he had maneuvered so that my hand covered the lower half of his basket, he was as hard as a billy club and it was no longer possible to keep from ardently stroking his cock. He dropped his hand down off of his upraised right leg and slipped it under one leg of my shorts and began to massage my ass and run his fingers up and down the crack. Clearly it was time to bring it on home.

Such had making out in a bar become. (Not unhappily from my point of view, I might add.)

In the middle of the night. When the time is right Sexily right. I'm gonna do the right thing Gonna move you slow. Much harder though Sexily so. I'm gonna do the right thing Feelin' hot. I ain't never gonna stop To get what you got. You better take what I bring Feel it now. Much harder now More than any old how. Say you feel the pain Feel I'm getting harder now. Get off your back four Get on the top more         owww! Feeel I'm sinking farther down. Get off your back four Get on the top more. I'm gonna do the right thing. (Do the Right Thing, Simply Red)

The "Fuck Buddy" had become something of an institution by this time, though such arrangements are probably as old as time. A fuck buddy was a guy (or guys) whom you regularly had sex with and whose company you enjoyed for an evening of rutting, but with whom you had little other prearranged contact, other than for sex. These casual, but ongoing sexual relationships were fairly common. (I enjoyed these relationships and usually had several going at the same time. I had one fuck buddy, Howard, whom I saw once a month to six weeks for over twelve years! Longer than I have ever gone with someone whom I characterized as a lover.) In many respects I think that fuck buddies became something of the ideal relationship during the 70s and early 80s. The nuances of physical pleasure were maximized through many evenings and the level of unembarrassed intimacy was probably unparalleled. This may have been due to the fact that these relationships couldn't founder on extra-sexual matters which can so often destroy more complex relationships. Also, very frequently the "tricks" I picked up were really people I had slept with many times before as well.

Silently, unknown and unsensed, this "incestuous" behavior in what was a relatively small enclave of gay men was building up an explosion which would wipe out the Upper West Side as a gay neighborhood.

The videos of film maker Christopher Rage had a large following. Rage eschewed the ultra hot Colt model type or the California surfer pretty boys. He recruited his subjects from the bars and the streets and the backrooms. The videos were shot in a loft with a minimum of stage setting and a maximum of searing unrelieved sexuality. "Raunch" and "Sleaze" were two of his earliest efforts and the no-frills settings and the unglamorous participants left no doubt that these were real hard core sex scenes first and porn film sessions second. Rage made a long series of "specialty" videos, hour-long films catering scene after scene to one particular sexual activity: fisting, dildos, golden shower, scat, S&M, etc.

It was about the turn of decade that I first saw what I would call anti-disco/anti-gay grafitti -- "fuck disco", or "disco fags" -- scrawled on the bus stop shelters.

Sometime in 1979, a therapist I knew commented to a therapy group of gay alcoholics and addicts he was facilitating, that if they were looking for meaningful ways to reintegrate into gay environments that there was soon going to be a burgeoning health crisis among gay men which would offer plenty of opportunities for contacts with other gay men in non-drinking and drugging situations. He indicated that he had heard of this impending health crisis in a few conferences he had attended during the year. There were obscure references buried in out-of-the-way places to something called "the gay bowel syndrome."

The Saint - "Never Like this Again" (Grafitto scrawled on the wall of The Saint after it closed in 1989)

September of 1980 saw the opening of the climactic institution of the era: The Saint. This was a disco built to cater to the crowd which had patronized Flamingo and went to Fire Island for summer weekends, and it was colossal in every respect. Flamingo had burned its energy and image out and folded.

Fillmore East had been a dilapidated Depression-era movie palace, which in the 60s had been the East Coast venue for Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Jefferson Airplane and every other major star and group of that decade. With the collapse of the Flower Power/Hippie culture, the place was used less and less and finally closed completely (I believe). It was a very tangible signal that the 60s were defunct in every respect. Now, a decade later, it was gutted and fitted out as an enormous dance club, with membership costing several hundred dollars a year plus an admission charge for each time you attended.

Inside the former Fillmore East had totally vanished and turned into a three-level dance and sex palace ... all it lacked was baths. The first floor contained the lobby which opened up onto the coat rooms, on either side were the old marble stairways which went upstairs to the dance floor, while straight ahead was a bar and lounge. You could also go upstairs via two industrial type mesh-enclosed spiral stairways from the front of the lounge.

The bar was a four-sided one in the center of a raised area and was surrounded by stair-like "bleacher" type seating in banks about 10 feet high covered in carpeting, and at the rear of this area was the entrance to the locker rooms (three floors -- rented by the season to members only.) Also at the rear were two cantilevered stairways which went up to the other end of the dance floor.

The decor of the lounge area was redone at the end of every summer for the beginning of a new season ... and was window-display spectacular. One of its last incarnations being a faux-marble extravaganza that would have blown the mind of a Roman emperor.

Once upstairs you were actually outside the dance floor, in the rear area you were on large balconies which overlooked the first floor, and in the front you were in at the back of the former mezzanine with some lounging space ,and the johns were located here. In neither case were you able to see the dance floor, though the roar was like thunder over surf.

The dance area itself was covered in a gigantic mesh dome 80 feet high ("the dome") which came all the way down to the floor and was entered through one of four entrances which came up under it. You walked up about five stairs and found yourself inside of what appeared to be an enormous colander. In the center was a tall mirrored pedestal on top of which was mounted the same type of projection equipment as is used in planetariums. The interior rim of the circular dance floor was surrounded by three steps of carpeted bleacher seats, except where it was overlooked by the DJ's raised booth, which also housed the lighting engineer.

For a first-time visitor, or someone blitzed on drugs, your entrance could be mind-warping. After you ascended the short flight of stairs, you were suddenly on the dance floor, surrounded by 360 degrees of music and light show and perhaps 1,000 or more sweating, half naked male bodies on a Saturday night (the count could go up to 2,000 and more). Quite suddenly, you were thrust right into the middle of thousands of volts of energy. And, God help you, if you were given to claustrophobia or paranoia.

On a level above this was a "lounge area", supposedly for just sitting around talking -- more or less removed from the incredible intensity of the music. However, it was openly used for sex -- mostly fucking and sucking, but some people reported seeing guys getting fist-fucked there too.

I don't think that it is a misuse of the term to say that The Saint was built for "Industrial Strength" sensation.

"...baby come and get it, baby come and get it, baby come and get it hot" (mid-1980s disco song sung by the Pointer Sisters)

In August of 1981 the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) of the U.S. government announced the existence of a fatal disease whose cause was unknown which had infected slightly over 100 gay men in the U.S., most in in San Francisco and New York. In early July the New York Times had published a short story about a rare cancer, Kaposi's Sarcoma, which had struck down a number of gay men. The victims showed severe immuno-suppression. This was the cancer that my friend from the Island died of the previous winter.

WBLS had slipped from being the first place radio station, and it continued to lose its share of the market. It was unable to find a format which blended the diverging tastes of its black and gay audiences, and black popular music itself seemed to have no dominant trend.

"She works hard for the money so you better treat her right" (She Works Hard for the Money, Donna Summer)

It was around this time that Tom, a friend of mine, who had been a kindergarten teacher when I met him in 1973/74 and then quit teaching in 1978 to become night manager of a new gay disco, Les Mouches, decided to throw his lot with Liana, a Filipino woman, the silent partner in the now straight and failing disco. Liana was an incredibly fidgety little troll of a woman whose principal source of income for some years had been a (heterosexual) members-only whorehouse, which catered to well-heeled businessmen for the most part.

Tom, who five years earlier had been been almost totally inexperienced sexually and had never used drugs, was at this point getting into S&M and other "kinky" things and was a regular several-times-a-day smoker of grass and a steady user of designer drugs on weekends by now.

During the fall of 1981 Bob, a friend who lived a few houses away and with whom I spent a great deal of time, began to feel "peculiar" and several times when we were out had fainting spells in The Boot. The diagnosis was GRID (Gay-Related Immunosuppression Disease). The diagnosis was presumptive based on something new called T-cell counts and related symptoms. He had the new "gay disease."

Early in the next year Bob went to the apartment of the writer Larry Kramer (Academy Award for the script of Women in Love; Faggots -- a horrible novel). Many of the guys there had been diagnosed with GRID or were concerned that its impact threatened to be felt by gay men only. This was the beginning of GMHC (the Gay Men's Health Crisis) the first and largest AIDS volunteer group in the United States and the world.

GMHC took a couple of rooms for offices in a sleazy rooming house in Chelsea. A few months later I accompanied Bob to a meeting of GMHC's one and only therapy/support group for people with GRID. There may have been twenty men in the group. (Bob died in January of 1991, he had survived the rest of the group by many years.)

Grass had escalated in price to $85.00 an ounce. Cocaine was becoming extremely popular and quite easily available.

The Upper West Side had acquired its own "bookstore", Les Hommes. This place sold gay magazines and videos, all manner of toys, lubricants and dildos and had a backroom for on-the-premises sex. The Village was now in many respects duplicated at a reduced scale in this neighborhood. Five gay bars were to be found within a five block radius, three of them within a block of each other. Grass use was open in two of the bars and tolerated in the backroom of a third. Coke use was ignored, as long as it was reasonably discrete in The Boot and The Candle. Several clothing boutiques and other small businesses were opened in the neighborhood by gay men and had a heavy gay clientele. The Loft was the most popular, a high tech clothing store which also sold sexual paraphernalia, gay greeting cards -- cruising the other customers or the help was a local sport. The Loft occupied the space between The Boot and The Candle, for which reason it stayed open late on weekend nights. On the next block up the avenue was the gay-owned Golden Ass, a mini-coffee house (which played tapes of obscure classical music made by Yours Truly); Nishi, owned by a gay Japanese and staffed by gay waiters -- who attended The Saint as a group on Sunday nights; Vinylmania, a store which sold the latest "club mixes" of dance music (the long extended 10 minute or more versions played in discos) and had a huge stock of used records - which made it a goldmine for DJ's and tape makers.

The Boot, despite its obvious function as a local bar, acquired something of the reputation of a cruising bar in other parts of the city and this brought in a steady trickle of curious non-neighborhood people -- who were eagerly snapped up and as a consequence enhanced the rumor. The streets in the mid-70s between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue had a steady traffic of guys going to and from bars or bringing their tricks home. And dance music was the sound from store to store to bar to boutique and on weekends there was a large exodus to the East Village, where The Saint was located.

"Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" (Aretha Franklin & The Eurhythmics)

In the Fall of '84 I investigated Sunday nights at The Saint: "You won't like it!," I was warned.

It turned out that Sunday night what was referred to as "serious dancing" went on, and the hanging out and posing just to be seen, which set the tone for Saturday nights, was pretty much absent. However, it was replaced with a more peculiar form of snobbery. One unusual aspect of Sunday nights was that there was a small core of people who came and danced without partners. These solo dancers in awe or derision, depending upon how easily impressed you were, were quite simply referred to as "Serious Dancers." And on Sunday nights, the DJs took their cues and set the tone and pace of the evening based on the reaction of the "Serious Dancers."

One Sunday night I was shuffling around impatiently waiting for my friends to leave the lounge and go upstairs to the dance floor -- always a boring part of the evening for me as I don't drink. In exasperation I went upstairs to watch other people dancing and to growl my dissatisfaction. Finally, I gathered up both my left feet and in a dramatic loss of good sense ventured out on the dance floor -- alone.

A monster was born! I turned out to be an extraordinarily good solo dancer -- and no one could have been more surprised than myself. For the next few years I spent every other Sunday night there, from midnight to eight a.m., being one of those people called "Serious Dancers" and taking my annual leave days one at a time the following Mondays to recover.

A cross-section of this crowd could include one of New York's most successful madams, a group of Japanese women who performed as night club entertainers dressed in tuxes and top hats, several famous Mafia hangers-on and cocaine dealers, a sprinkling of exclusive call girls and a horde of considerably less exotic gay men like Yours Truly.

"Down the long road Down the long road Down the long road of life we go We all go Down the long road Down the long road Down the long road we go..." (Title of a painting by Jack Yeats)

In the next couple of years Miguel M, a shy, handsome bodybuilder reappeared in the neighborhood after a brief absence. He had GRID, now called AIDS. He sublet an apartment in Bob's building, seemed more puzzled than anything by his disease and used to like to show curious friends the "spots" which were blooming with increased profusion all over his diminishing body. They spread onto his face, and he shrunk and died. Tom's ex-lover Robert became sick, struggled on angrily. Tom had gotten into cocaine at this point and his use increased as he tried to deal with Robert. Skip and Tom K., two lovers in the neighborhood disappeared. They were "sick". Bob W. in the next block was "sick".

All sorts of folklore began to grow concerning the causes and cures of what was now AIDS. Poppers were the cause. Various peculiar nostrums were going to be the cure. Ribaviran was the answer. Go to Mexico. Bootleg it into the U.S. I read Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year. It was actually comforting. Nothing had changed in the intervening four centuries. It was strangely reassuring, people were quite the same. When no one knows anything, then everyone knows everything. When there are no answers, there are no end of solutions.

"...and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying moments, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration; -- diurnity is a dream and folly of expectation." (Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial)

Robin, a sly, harmlessly sarcastic acquaintance from The Boot disappeared for awhile. Was he sick. He came back. Looked fine. No questions asked. No information given. He was gone again, and his tall sleek all-leather presence was an obvious blank space, and his sometime "boyfriend" a huge, over-endowed leather number with a chronic snarl also vanished. Robin had gone into a coma. His best friend Aaron told me. Aaron visited him every night for fifteen weeks until Robin died. One evening, shortly before Robin's death, the "boyfriend" appeared. Not in leather but in the brown robes of a Franciscan priest (!), gave Robin the last rites of the Catholic church and left and was never seen uptown by anyone again.

Robin was cremated and Aaron was to spread his ashes. Aaron decided on a site in Riverside Park which overlooks the Hudson River on the West Side. He couldn't bear to keep the ashes in his apartment, so I kept them for him. A few weeks before the tentative date of the scattering I decided to see what a cremated person looked like and opened the container. It contained, along with ash and heavy grit, fairly large chunks of recognizable bone. (A sloppy job of grinding I was to learn from experience later.) No open-air, bare ground scattering for our Robin!

"So Little Time, So Many Men" (mid-1980s disco song)

In this year the number of new AIDS cases reached 2,885; there were 1,432 deaths from AIDS that year. More than a quarter of that number were in NYC, most in the borough of Manhattan.

Unintentional Nostalgia

A quite beautiful, but strangely anachronistic album of dance music came out in 1984/85. It was called Born to Love and was entirely duets by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson. Every song on the album got played in dance clubs -- quite an accomplishment. The songs were joyful, upbeat rhapsodies to love -- not sex -- lyrical and bursting with happiness, and reminiscent of some of the earliest music in the disco era. (It remains a wonderful album and is out on CD now.) It was almost exotic in a time when relentlessly intense vocals and a poundingly insistent beat made hits.

"Party lights, I see the party lights" (The Shirelles, 1960s)

From its opening night The Saint began a tradition of "parties". Parties in this case meant a flashy full-sized poster in the mail, buying tickets in advance if you wanted to save an extraordinary wait in line, increased admission prices and famous guest performers and perhaps -- as in the case of the Black Party -- that something more which was the "too much" that everyone wanted.

The guest stars were any of the most famous recording artists of the day -- maybe only Aretha Franklin didn't appear there, and she may have and I have just forgotten. The Saint was a major place to promote a new artist or a new record. The actual appearances were sometimes electric, if the star caught the energy of the place; if not it could be anticlimactic. The act would usually begin at 2 a.m. or later, and it was usually brief. Ten or twenty minutes. If it got longer, the crowd would resent the prolonged interruption to the dancing (not to mention the break in any drug-induced fantasies and energy.) The smart folks got on, got hot and got off. Most singers sang accompanied by the music tracks of their records, a few lipsynced the lyrics too. The stage was above a section of the seats and the wall opened to expose it, so everyone had a great view from the floor. (I was not crazy about these acts, I was one of those who came to dance, and only to dance and didn't want to be "bothered" by anything else.)

Some of the parties centered on the holidays, e.g., New Years, Valentine's Day, etc., especially the ones with three-day weekends, which maximized attendance both nights. However, some were quite special -- The White Party and the Black Party.

For the White Party everyone was encouraged to wear white (and silver), perhaps a throwback to the singing group LaBelle (Patti LaBelle, Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx) who used to dress in incredibly outlandish costumes of silver and white for their concerts and encouraged their audiences to "wear something white."

The Black Party, however, was the special Saint party, and the one on which all the lesser parties of the year hitchhiked. The dress was black, plus leather, studs, chains -- the whole S&M paraphernalia look. And the atmosphere and music were calculated to drive the patrons over the edge. The "acts" -- in this case not referring to the guest celebrity appearance -- were something else again. At various points around the lounge and in a serving bar behind it, small platforms would be erected or part of the seating used for a stage area. The "acts" were various S&M exhibitions, musclemen posing, fucking acts, sucking acts, dildos, fisting and a foray into bestiality, the last being two lovers and their pet snake, (visualize: large, thick pet snake) one of whom induced the snake to retract deep into the ass of the other. You just can't tell if snakes are having a good time, but the ensnaked gentleman was beyond ecstasy. The amount of raw sexual energy loose in the crowd exceeded measurement.

"Stuck on You" (Sung by Jeffrey Osborne (1984))

I took Robin's ashes to Fire Island and walked a mile up the beach to where Aaron was waiting. He carried them the rest of the way to a less trafficked section and held them for awhile and cried. Then I took them and we walked to the edge of the sea. The day was gloriously sunny and warm, but the sea was rough and the large waves had pulled away the beach at the shoreline. We walked into the water and almost immediately it was chest high, but in a few moments the waves fell back and the water dropped to knee level. I held the container above my head and began to pour Robin out into the sea, when suddenly the water withdrew and the wind flung his ashes back onto my wet body, filling my eyes and coating me from head to knees in his remains. There was no hope of a graceful, decorous parting so I submerged under the next wave, overturned the container and let him wash off of me. It never occurred to me that this was in the nature of an omen of how intimate a part of my life AIDS was becoming.

Ashford and Simpson, who had sung so joyfully at the beginning of the disco era, had another in a string of hits in '84. One a breathy, frantic song, "The Jungle ... if you do or if you don't, if you will or if you won't, don't matter now ... somehow you're caught ... it's a jungle."

Sam Harris was a very cute young white boy with a raw, gutsy voice that sounded like a angry woman on the mean edge of hard times. He sang Hearts on Fire: "I'm out of control, my heart's on fire," and left no doubt that he was.

DJ's used special turntables with variable pitch, which meant that they could make a 33 rpm recording spin several rpms faster without altering the sound appreciably. This was called "pumping it up", and it added several more beats per minute to the music.

Between 1984 and 1985 the number of new cases of AIDS doubled in that single year; the deaths did too.

In the very late mornings George Michael (as 1/2 of WHAM) would be singing Careless Whispers. The last of the "sweet" George Michael.

"He opened my noooose for me!" (Tina Turner, ad lib on a concert album)

Tom's boss, Gloria, who ran the sex club had decided late in 1983 that she had to have a house in The Pines (along with her several others). And, as with any of Gloria's enthusiasms, it soon became an obsession to which she harnessed all of her energies and all of her people she could. The piece of property she purchased was a choice lot at the mouth of the harbor with an unobstructed view of the bay, and within a minutes walk of the dock, disco, restaurants, etc. She essentially demolished the house already built on the lot, and erected on its platform an architectural fantasy worthy of Cannes or Malibu.....the entire floor was done in one-foot square ceramic tiles (alternating off-white and pale magenta), an all white interior with a two-story living room, an "entrance balcony" which swept from her bedroom across one side of the living wall to a grand stairway. Much of the furniture was Neo Art Moderne imported from Italy, lacquered bright red or silver, a giant-size reproduction of a Noh mask hung over the fireplace and there were more arrangements of cut flowers in giant vases than graced the funerals of Rudolph Valentino and Judy Garland combined.... nothing ostentatious. A friend of mine, who worked for Woody Allen, commented when I took him to her house, "No one can really _live_ here, this is just a stage set." If it was, it could only have been for a production of Imelda Marcos Meets Darth Vader.

But strangely, it was Tom rather than Gloria who got the most use out of the house. Gloria was a restless, frequently irascible woman -- who almost as soon as she would arrive by sea plane -- was on the phone to elsewhere, and making plans about when she would leave. Tom, however, she began to have in almost constant residence, busy supervising repairs, installing enhancements, and rushing the cleaning and massive flower arrangements for a chatelaine who vanished almost as soon as she arrived. Gloria (always very sensitive and secretive about the source of her fortune) was an outrageously and expensively dressed woman in the most frightful costumes that trendy designers could conjure up. A mystery in The Pines, the object of incredible amounts of ridicule and gossip, the dispenser of longed-after invitations and the giver of one huge lavishly costly party a season, and a single smaller one. Essentially a freak. Tom, quite cleverly took advantage of his position, wrapped himself in her mysterious notoriety, lived in her unwinterized, half a million dollar palace and drifted in and out of the social and commercial life of The Pines as the real-life dispenser of Gloria's patronage and proof that she was not after all a mirage.

Her lot was surrounded by a high solid wooden fence, which kept the lower floor of her house hidden from view of the boardwalk. You approached the house through a entrance that was a simple inward curve of the fence with plain double doors made of the same fencing. Once through the doors, you were on a small walk hanging above a beautifully manicured shade garden about ten feet below (rhododendrons, azaleas, etc.), and walked across this a short distance to a two-story glass wall with double sliding doors. Through these you looked down a long entrance-way, which descended to the living area, but across which you looked - even from this distance - through the two-story glass wall at the other end of the house, across the deck and pool, and miles across the bay to the pale line of the shore of Long Island. Neat theatre!

The captains of the ferries which brought people from Sayville to the harbor at The Pines told Gloria that they now used her house as their navigational guide to enter the harbor on all but the foggiest nights, as it was more visible than the nautical lights. With a two-story high facade of glass, metallic siding and mirrored panels jutting into the bay -- no doubt about it.

"If Looks Could Kill" (mid-80s disco song by Heart)

A group called the AIDS Resource Center -- supported by many leathermen, for some reason -- collected money on street corners in an attempt to provide housing facilities for persons with AIDS who became homeless.

Lou Katz, an aging gay entrepreneur, had bought and renovated a welfare hotel on Christopher Street complete with roof garden and restaurant as a mecca for gay tourists. Lou had his own rather showy lifestyle, and a notoriety that came in part from the coke-related bloody suicide of a former kept boy/employee of his. He and Gloria became friends on the Island after she began work on her house in The Pines.

Not very long after the splashy opening of his hotel, Lou slashed to death the new boyfriend of a young guy he had been wooing, evidently having plotted it for months. (And he almost succeeded in killing the boyfriend's roommate as well, who had the misfortune to be home.) There was a trial, Lou was convicted. As he awaited sentencing on bail, he fled the country. People claim he is living openly in Rio, supported by a regular shipment of cash from a popular bar he owns in the Village. The hotel was finally purchased by the guys from the AIDS Resource Center organization and became a home for persons with AIDS, Bailey House.

Larry Kramer, the author who had been instrumental in founding the Gay Men's Health Crisis, felt strongly that that organization should take a confrontational political stance against the government -- and as I understood it, that this should involve physical confrontation. By 1983/84 he was urging members of the governing board of GMHC unceasingly to turn the organization to this purpose, and he continued to make high voltage, anti-government addresses. Finally, GMHC had to face this bifurcation of viewpoints. Most members of the organization and the Board members felt that GMHC had its hands full in attempting to handle the compassionate needs of its client PWAs, and that it was already engaged on a daily basis in confronting anti-gay and anti-AIDS discrimination and hysteria. My friend Bob had founded the Ombudsman's Office of GMHC which intervened with doctors, hospitals, City bureaucracies, funeral homes, etc. on the part of clients who were denied rightful access or treated abusively. Bob, as much as anyone in New York, was responsible for the aggressive policy which the City and State took in the fight against AIDS and the social upheavals it brought in its wake.

At a stormy, meeting of the Board, Larry Kramer gave his resignation to the Board and denounced the formal organization as having betrayed gay men with AIDS. While his exit attracted a brief flurry of publicity, and left the staff and Board of GMHC unsettled, the volunteers who performed almost all of the hands-on work with PWAs cared almost not at all about his departure, nor the Board's discomfort.

In 1985 there were 10,942 new cases of AIDS, 6,423 more deaths. About a quarter of these in New York City. There was a large ruckus over whether leaving the gay baths open would lead to more infection, or if they could serve as centers for educating men about safer sex and for dispensing condoms. The debate raged. New York Governor Cuomo announces he was considering closing them. Baths closed one-by-one. In the end there was nothing to debate, there were no baths.

"Who's Zooming Who?" (Aretha Franklin, 1985)

In the summer of 1985, Jack, Tom's roommate took a house on the Island, while Tom was almost always in residence at Gloria's.

Jack was in univerisity administration, but unlike Tom had remained there even as he became more involved with the disco nightlife and drugs. He copped grass (bought at cost as a favor) for his friends from a fuck-buddy who was connected to some airline smuggling supposedly. The same source also sold bottles of liquid poppers which sold for $7.00 for a couple of ounces. Whatever the attractions of his personality or his person might have been, these bulk purchases kept Jack in good stead with the dealer, who was anxious to avoid high traffic in and out of his apartment, and with Jack's friends and acquaintances who were assured of a weekly supply of grass and poppers for which they need only place an order in advance and pick it up later ... at cost.

Thursday and Friday nights were regular pick up nights at Jack and Tom's apartment ... a handsome duplex with two bedrooms, two baths, two living rooms, two fireplaces and a miniature forest of a private garden. They lived here for less than six hundred dollars a month due to some legal shenanigans that Jack had caught the landlady at redhanded, which kept their rent fixed at this level.

By this time the Upper West Side had become the Yuppie neighborhood in New York, and one the principal avenues running through it was being renovated and turned into ultra, ultra expensive branch boutiques of famous Paris and London shops. Rents became astronomical, both commercial and residential. Jack and Tom's landlady hated them, of course for their hold on their potentially super-expensive apartment.

In 1984, or so, Jack had begun to buy cocaine from a dealer friend of Tom's. By 1985 he had started buying an ounce a week and dealing in this uncut as a quick-sell way of financing his habit and Tom's for free. Business became brisk. Tom sold fourteen grams a week in one day to the "working girls" in Gloria's sex club. Jack sold enough of the rest to two friends to leave a fair-sized remainder for him and Tom.

Jack, who had had a reputation among his friends and acquaintances as a funny intellectual gadfly, an easy fuck with tastes for off-beat sex and the provider of bargain grass and poppers -- was now wrapped in the dubious glamour of coke dealing.

The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services announced that the cause of AIDS, which had been GRID a few years ago, had been discovered. It was a sexually transmissible virus. (Oh ... shit!)

In 1985 Larry Kramer began laying plans for a new organization, Act Up, to do what he had wanted GMHC to do before.

I joined GMHC as a Crisis Intervention Worker (care partner). In a little over a year two more friends died, and as did both guys whom I took as clients for GMHC.

A female member on the governing board of one of the AIDS organizations resigned unexpectedly and without explanation. I was told by my friend Bob that she was suspected of having sat with a PWA member whom she knew personally while he committed suicide, and then let herself out of his apartment when she was sure he was dead.

"Last Dance" (Donna Summer dance hit)

George Michael and Aretha Franklin made an unexpectedly superb duet, and recorded, Knew You Were Waitin' for Me. The Pointer Sisters had abandoned their 30s and 40s retro sound and pumped out super high energy hits like Jump, I'm So Excited, Baby, Come and Get It. Tina Turner, out on her own and free of her husband, found a new career and her first LP contained an entire string of dance hits on one album, What's Love Got to Do With It, Private Dancer, I Can't Stand the Rain. Sylvester's former backup singers, now called the Weather Girls were Raining Men.

Six o'clock a.m. was still the very best dancing time on a Monday morning as far as I was concerned. About then the DJ's would usually slow down the beat considerably and play somewhat offbeat stuff that brought out the Serious Dancers to spin and drift around the floor each in his floating solo dream world. Music like Teena Marie's Portuguese Lover, Tina Turner singing Private Dancer, Simply Red doing Holding Back the Years (chillingly appropriate) and Sade's first album, Diamond Life, or music with a slight tripping Brazilian beat, and anything with a long, wailing sax. An exquisitely personal time for each dancer.

"Relax... don't do it, when you want to go to it... relax, don't do it... when you want to come....." (Relax, Frankie Goes to Hollywood)

The White Lady (slang term for cocaine) was in full control of Jack and Tom's lives. Jack held onto his job and a diminished social life, but he had developed a taste for what was once termed "balling" (which originally meant using cocaine in the vagina or rectum). The most important part of his life was that devoted to coke use, and he became a fuck toy -- locking himself in his bedroom for four to six hour marathon sessions with a partner or alone. It no longer mattered which, as long as he had coke to snort and more to put up his ass while getting fucked or fisted or using dildos. He ceased bothering to cop grass or poppers for his friends as often, but Thursday nights were now open house for people picking up coke.

Finally, in an effort to try to cut down on his habit he stopped dealing. Tom, who had been getting his "commission" of free coke for selling to the women in Gloria's club, as well as buying from other dealers, decided he would go into "the business". He located another dealer who was a quicker connection and began buying frequently; he also cut the coke to stretch the amount and increase his profit. The traffic of dealers and new customers was endless, all hours of night and day. Tom's hours became unpredictable. He no longer appeared to have a schedule at all. When people dropped over the coke was not passed around but just dumped on a table in a big pile, roughly chopped with a credit card and snorted through a cut-off drinking straw. The amounts used and the waste would have been ostentatious, if it weren't so obviously just mindlessness.

An endless stream of young tricks disappeared downstairs with Tom, brought home after all-night sessions in the bars and back rooms.

Reality ended at their front door, but for the Jack and Tom it only began there.

"Oh I'm running slower, slower and      slower to somewhere 'cause the city is closing tighter, tighter and      and tighter around me..." (Faster and Faster to Nowhere, Donna Summer)

After a night at The Saint I used to drop my friend Vin off on the East Side at dawn and then have the taxi drop me off on the West Side, a few blocks from my apartment. I would be soaked through my levis, even my shoes would be wet through from the dancing and I would walk up the street with my shirt off in the soft morning light. Everything was quiet and it provided a small opportunity to try to depressurize from The Saint. It seemed as if everything were at rest and as if life were just as it should be.

But when I turned the corner of my street, I had to forget that within the two blocks between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue there were 15 people sick with AIDS or dying of it while I walked past their apartments. The Upper West Side had a case rate second only to that of the Village.

Jack and Tom, and the Last of Jack and Tom

"What's yours is yours and mine, just like always, But there are times when I want to give up Sometimes I think someone put poison in my cup" (Sometimes, Cock Robin)

It became clear that Tom no longer had a job. He had fucked-up with Gloria too many times in the past year, she had given him a chance to pull himself together and then reluctantly dropped him. Tom was supposedly a dealer, but he couldn't keep it together enough to make "the business" a business, thousands of dollars passed through his hands, but none of it stuck. He could barely scrape together enough to pay his half of the rent.

His existence became furtive. His living room downstairs was paneled in deep lavender and the furniture was grey carpeted modules. There were two large four-panel mirrored screens and pin-spot lighting. The other piece of furniture was a large black table where he weighed coke and cut it. The decor had been copied from the lounge in Gloria's sex club. In these surroundings he had met his customers and entertained a tight little circle of druggie friends. His bedroom was painted black, with a sling, hooks, chains and two bags of sex paraphernalia.

Now his quarters were kept shut against the light and stunk from being closed up.

Jack finally realized that they had gone over the edge, and he pulled himself together. But Tom refused to get help and became aggressively hostile. Tom was unable to pay his share of the rent any longer; then Jack's best friend was diagnosed with AIDS. One day Jack left with his clothes and his books and records, abandoning his furniture and household effects -- leaving Tom in possession of the apartment. Jack went to take care of his friend. Eight months later Chuck died suddenly on Halloween, and Jack was never seen in the neighborhood after that.

Tom had already rotted away in the virtually empty apartment. What happened to the furnishings no one knew, and he died in squalor of alcoholism and drug addiction brought to a quick end by AIDS-related meningitis.

My friend Vin began to become more and more reluctant to go to The Saint. Finally he said it was because of "the holes in the floor" -- he meant the absence of certain people whom you were used to seeing there for years, even though you never knew them. The crowds were smaller and for several years the side entrance had been used for admission rather than the large front entrance. This was because with the smaller crowds using the large front entrance the local addicts and street people were no longer intimidated and tried to sneak into the club.

The music was now heavily non-black dance music. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a favorite -- War, Relax, Two Tribes. The Bronski Beat album Age of Consent was a monster hit, every cut was mixed and remixed in every possible combination. Jimmy Sommerville's howling gay soul filled the dome.

In 1986 there were 17,792 new cases of AIDS; 11,069 deaths.

After going to The Saint one night in February, Vin refused to ever go again. I never went again either. At the end of the 1988 season The Saint closed and that was the very last gasp of a lifestyle which had been unwilling to die for most of the decade even as the men who had created it were dying by the thousands.

Five hundred thousand people marched in Washington, DC for gay rights. Black actress Whoopi Goldberg referred to Ronald Reagan as "the fucking president" in a speech criticizing the administration's slow response to the epidemic.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed for the first time and it covered and area the size of two football fields.

Let me stand here, let me delude myself that I see these things (I really did see them a moment when I first stopped); and not that here too I see my fantasies, my memories, my visions of sensual delight. (Constantine Cavafy, Morning Sea)

Billy W...., Bill O'....., Miguel M......., Robert P......., Tom K......, Skip P....., Robin B........, Bob W....., John M...., John L...., Billy C....., Gary B....., Chuck G..., Tom W..., Ecke B..., Steven G....., Charlie C......, Andreas S....., Richard S....., Frank McG....., Hal S......, David D......., Mark B...., James L....., Michael W....., Samson N....., Bob C....., Rick J....., Skip H........, John H.....,. Steve B....., John C......., Tom C......, Bill C........., George M......, Lou K........, Carl K......

When suddenly at the midnight hour an invisible troupe is heard passing with exquisite music, with shouts -- do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now, your works that have failed you, the plans of your life that have all turned out to be illusions. .... approach the window with firm step, and listen with emotion, but not with the entreaties and complaints of the coward, as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe, and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing. (Constantine Cavafy, The God Forsakes Antony

In 1987 there were 26,240 new cases of AIDS in the U.S., and 14,706 deaths. Almost half still in New York and San Francisco. Finally all of my friends have died, and eight guys I took as clients for GMHC. The Upper West Side has only two gay bars and no gay-oriented businesses. The streets there have noticeably fewer gay people. In the Village too, the proportion of gay men seemed visibly smaller. Gay bashing in the Village had become a serious menace. For several seasons some houses in The Pines went unrented, this had never happened before. Grass now cost $200 a half ounce, and cocaine use had decreased enormously.

On the Nightline TV program the night they featured Ryan White's funeral, C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General, told of how he was not allowed to make any public statements about AIDS until Reagan's second term (1985). Koop said that some members of the Cabinet were not concerned about a disease that only seemed to strike those people they believed to be immoral.

I mentioned to someone that I had heard of some people who had never heard of Stonewall, he looked at me and said that he had met someone who had never heard of The Saint.

Late in the winter of 1990 I was walking down East 6th Street late in the afternoon. I passed The Saint, which was covered in longing graffiti and plastered with shredded posters. On the doorstep of the side entrance there was a little bouquet and a candle burning beside it. Someone's name was written above it in magic marker, and a pair of dates. He had been 32 years old and his friends had made the door of The Saint his monument.

In March 1992 reported deaths from AIDS reached 26,657 within the city.

Traveler, if you are an Alexandrian, you will not condemn. You know the rushing torrent of our life, what ardor it had, what supreme pleasure. (Constantine Cavafy, from The Tomb of Iases)