The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  They all claimed they could drag the city out of the dysfunctional mess it had fallen into under Beame’s caretaker government. Koch tacked to the right. As racial tensions mounted between blacks and whites and blacks and Jews, Koch, who’d participated in civil rights marches in the South back in the 1960s, sided with the whites and Jews, scandalizing many of his Village friends. They included Jack Newfield, a Village Voice muckraker, who started out Koch’s supporter and became one of his most dogged critics. When Son of Sam terrorized the city, Koch came out for the death penalty, styling himself as the tough guy the city needed. Meanwhile he cut deals, sometimes secretly, with the sort of old-school machine bosses he had always railed against, including Carmine DeSapio’s counterparts in the other boroughs. It would come back to haunt him.

  The race came down to a fight between Koch and Cuomo, and it turned ugly. Bess Myerson, America’s first Jewish Miss America, had constantly been at Koch’s elbow to ward off the gay question. Then some “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo” signs appeared, and Cuomo added an insinuation or two of his own, forcing Koch to deny in public, for the last time, that he was gay. To help keep the volatile Koch from blowing his cool, his team got his old pal Dan Wolf to stay at his side in the last weeks before the election, counseling calm. Koch prevailed.

  Modeling his mayoralty on his hero La Guardia, Koch was the hardest working man in the city, on the job before and after everyone else. He rode the bus to his inauguration and took the subway to work. He outdid even La Guardia in his ubiquity and in his love of the media, and for a long time the media loved him back. He was the city’s—and his own—most ebullient promoter, sometimes its wackiest clown, sometimes its nastiest scold. Hamill writes that he was like “some mad public combination of a Lindy’s waiter, Coney Island barker, Catskill comedian, irritated school principal, eccentric uncle.” There was something a little desperate in his constantly asking New Yorkers “How’m I doing?” If you answered “Not so hot,” he was likely to lash back with a brusque insult. He hadn’t actually been asking for your opinion, just your approval.

  The austerity measures Beame’s economic advisers had imposed in 1975 had dragged the city back from the precipice by the time Koch took office. He and his team won a new round of loans from Washington, with the proviso that they balance the city budget in four years. Koch earned the nickname Dr. No as he cut more spending, jobs, and services. He faced down transit workers and firemen and tried to abolish the woefully crony-packed Board of Education. He enjoyed a reputation as one white liberal who could say no to black leaders’ demands and shrug off charges of racism. The city beat the four-year deadline by a full year. By the mid-1980s it had gone from a miserable deficit to showing a budget surplus. The city would be back in the red by the end of Koch’s long reign, but for a few years there he looked, and acted, like a miracle worker.

  Saving the public sector from ruin helped create a setting for a private-sector resurgence. Developers like Donald Trump went on a skyscraper and high-rise building spree the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. The new commercial spaces they built in the 1980s equaled the total commercial square footage of Boston and San Francisco combined. Koch’s administration helped by offering sweetheart tax abatements and cutting miles of red tape. Meanwhile it was greed-is-good boom times on Wall Street. The terms “yuppie” and “masters of the universe” gained currency. Financial institutions, including more than three hundred foreign banks, brought two hundred thousand white-collar workers back to Manhattan in the first half of the decade—but not necessarily as residents. Many still commuted from the suburbs. The tourists started coming back, though Koch still warned them to avoid Times Square. (The Koch administration’s plans for the rebirth of Times Square, like the construction of a new West Side Highway, barely got off the ground in his time, leaving his successors to complete and take credit for the projects.)

  Inevitably, not all New Yorkers benefited equally from the boom. Those with vested interests in the new city they were creating profited handsomely but little trickled down to workers and the poor. In fact, the gulf between the very well-off and the terribly poor yawned again as wide as it had in the Gilded Age. Homeless people, many of them unwed mothers and their children, others deinstitutionalized mental patients, appeared in record numbers on the sidewalks, in the parks and subways, in the welfare hotels. In the outer boroughs, in Harlem, and on the Lower East Side there were still acres of bombed-out buildings and rubble-strewn lots. Koch was slow to commit to the redevelopment of housing in those areas, and the Reagan administration offered no federal help. Neighborhood and church groups began their own grassroots rebuilding campaigns. In his third term, considering a run for a fourth, Koch finally pitched in with billions of dollars in city support.

  While Koch was developing what some analysts called his “corporatist-pluralist” regime, his support in the Village plummeted. Although he won reelection by a landslide in 1981, the Village Independent Democrats endorsed an opponent, a Brooklyn liberal named Frank Barbaro, who, tellingly, was “the first serious citywide candidate to campaign in gay male bars and clubs.” And in his second term Koch made mortal enemies in the Village over his response, or perceived lack of response, to AIDS.

  IN 1981 THE FIRST REPORTS CAME OUT OF GAY MEN WITH THE RARE cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma, usually seen only in the elderly; or with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a form of pneumonia suggesting immunity deficiencies; or cytomegalovirus (CMV), a form of herpes that also attacks the immune system. By the end of the year almost three hundred cases of severe immunity deficiency had been reported, mostly in New York City and San Francisco, the two largest gay communities in the country. Nearly half the cases were fatal. The gay periodical New York Native was the first newspaper to report the story, in 1981. Names suggested for this new syndrome included GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) and CAID (Community Acquired Immune Deficiency) before it came to be known as AIDS in 1982.

  Gay men had been getting sick all through the 1970s. The high levels of sexual activity in their relatively closed communities created an excellent environment for the spreading of opportunistic and infectious diseases. In the Village the Gay Men’s Health Project clinic had opened in 1971 to treat men with STDs. Through the decade the clinic treated many cases of gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, herpes, mononucleosis, urethritis, a range of intestinal parasites, scabies, venereal warts, and various other infections. “People were continually sick, low-grade fevers and what have you, and in denial,” Agosto remembers. “People said, ‘Sex was created by God. Why would he curse us in this way? It can’t be sex.’ ” Men would go to the clinic, get their antibiotics, and continue partying.

  In 1982 a group of gay men in the Village met in Larry Kramer’s apartment and formed the grassroots Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first volunteer AIDS organization in the country. In its first newsletter that year, GMHC counseled against panic in language that showed how closely sexual freedom and gay liberation had become associated in many men’s minds. “Wherever we gather—at our gyms, in bars, at parties—clone banter is switching from the four D’s (disco, drugs, dicks and dish) to who is the latest victim . . . All this talk has produced a toxic side effect. We are overcome by hysteria.” Kramer, who believed that gay men should in fact be very frightened, fell out with GMHC and in 1987 founded the extremely militant ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

  Politically, AIDS could not have appeared at a worse time. Ronald Reagan had entered the White House in 1981. Exhausted after two extremely unsettled decades of revolution and rebellion, of political violence and economic dysfunction and, many believed, moral decay, mainstream America needed a break. Many Americans were ready to retreat to a neo-fifties conservatism, with a new edge of right-wing militancy and Christian fundamentalism. Political and religious leaders who spoke about AIDS at all in the early 1980s tended to declare it a gay plague and God’s retribution on perverts. President Reagan would not say the word “AIDS”
in public until 1987, two years after the world was shocked by Rock Hudson’s death from the disease. Like most gay Hollywood movie stars, Hudson had kept his sexuality a secret. The year after Hudson died, Bob Hope was in New York for centenary festivities at the Statue of Liberty. He joked, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.”

  Added to that was the terror of AIDS that spread outside the gay community. Straight people feared that any sort of contact might be deadly—toilet seats, kissing, handshakes, a trip to the disco or the dentist, eating in restaurants where infected people might work. The mainstream media fanned the fears with articles like the Associated Press report in 1987 forecasting that AIDS could be worse than the Black Death, with tens of millions of AIDS deaths over the coming decade.

  It all contributed to a context in which a gay man who suggested a link between a decade of sexual promiscuity and this new disease risked being accused of self-hatred and aiding the homophobes. Even after the National Cancer Institute reported in 1982 that “the median number of lifetime sexual partners for gay AIDS victims being studied is 1,160,” just using the word “promiscuity” was anathematized. Early on, doctors at the Gay Men’s Health Project suspected that no single new virus would be found as the cause of AIDS but that rather it was caused by a breakdown of the immune system after a decade of STDs, other infectious illnesses, drug abuse, and serial use of antibiotics. When Richard Berkowitz told an AIDS support group in 1982 that on the advice of his doctor at the clinic he intended to “stop fucking around and give my body a chance to heal from years of taking recreational drugs and getting sexually transmitted diseases,” he “ignited a firestorm of outrage” and was shouted down. Randy Wicker characteristically positioned himself on the politically incorrect side of the issue as well. “I always tell people the AIDS epidemic happened because if you let a bunch of kids loose in a candy store, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna eat too much candy, and they’re gonna get sick,” he says. “The gay liberation movement doesn’t like my opinion. I say we turned liberty into license. It’s still divisive.” Wicker’s live-in lover wasted away from AIDS in their Hoboken apartment, with Marsha P. Johnson nursing him during the days while Wicker went to his Village shop.

  Gay men and AIDS activists “were less than eager to pull closely at the threads of AIDS history,” Gabriel Rotello writes. “[M]any felt that the stigma of causing an epidemic was so politically damaging that it rendered open discussion of the epidemic’s origin extremely unwise.” Asked on CNN in 1983 why AIDS first appeared in the gay community Larry Kramer, who had all but forecast a plague in Faggots, shrugged and replied, “No idea.”

  In 1982 Berkowitz and Michael Callen, who had met through their doctor at the clinic, cowrote an article for the Native outlining the theory that AIDS was the cumulative result of a decade of abuse to the immune system. They then wrote How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, the first “safe sex” pamphlet, advocating the use of condoms. The gay Village was at first highly resistant, even derisive. By the 1980s the Pill had made condoms virtually obsolete among heterosexuals, and gay men of course had never needed them. Within a few years, however, the practice was universally advocated for both heteros and homosexuals. Callen went on to be a leading AIDS activist, a cofounder of the organization People with AIDS who spoke eloquently before Congress and in the media. He was skeptical when the Centers for Disease Control declared HIV the sole cause of AIDS in 1984 and held that opinion until he died of the disease in 1993. By then such skepticism was condemned as heretical and branded “AIDS denialism.” Nevertheless, Callen is remembered for his work in raising public awareness of the epidemic. The Callen-Lorde Community Health Center for gays and lesbians, located in Chelsea, was named for him and Audre Lorde.

  As the 1980s progressed AIDS ravaged the gay Village. Survivors of the decade remember when they seemed to be visiting a sick friend or attending another friend’s funeral every day. “I probably lost sixty to seventy people to AIDS, easily,” Chris Kapp says. “Just about everyone. I mean they were dropping like flies.” St. Vincent’s saw some of the first AIDS patients in the city and opened the first and largest AIDS wing in the Northeast. Beds overflowed, until even the corridors were commandeered, with masking tape on the floor designating “rooms.” It would be likened to a military hospital in a war zone and be referred to as the ground zero of AIDS.

  In 1983 Larry Kramer wrote a jeremiad in the Native in which he accused the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, other health care facilities, and Mayor Ed Koch of dragging their feet on AIDS. Kramer and other activists believed that Koch had two reasons for skirting the issue: first, because he was in the closet, and second, because he didn’t want to scare away the tourists who were just then returning to the city. Kramer went on to pillory Koch in his plays The Normal Heart, produced at the Public Theater in 1985, and Just Say No three years later. In the former, the Kramer-surrogate character complains that the only way to get a message to the mayor would be to “[h]ire a hunky hustler and send him up to Gracie Mansion with our plea tattooed on his cock.” Just Say No was a farce that lampooned political figures including the Reagans, and portrayed Koch, identified simply as Mayor, as a horny, power-mad closet queen with lines such as “Oh, Gilbert, just hearing your whiny voice, just looking into your dribbly eyes, just feeling your dumpy body, I’ve got lover’s nuts.” Gilbert was apparently a stand-in for a former aide and alleged lover of Koch’s from the 1970s, whom Kramer, as well as investigators working for U.S. Attorney Giuliani, tried to convince to go public. In panning the play, the Times’s Mel Gussow, who’d seen and enjoyed his share of envelope-pushing farces by then, wrote, “Imagine the worst possible taste, then take it several steps further.” In 1989, when Koch appeared in Sheridan Square to proclaim June Lesbian and Gay Pride Month, hundreds of ACT UP hecklers booed and shouted him down.

  In another only-in-the-Village coincidence, Koch and Kramer were living by then in the same modern high-rise at 2 Fifth Avenue just above Washington Square Park. The first time Kramer ran into Koch in the lobby, he pointed at him and screamed, “Murderer! No one wants you here!” The building’s management warned he’d be evicted if he ever did that again. Later, they encountered each other again at the mailboxes. When Koch bent to pat Kramer’s dog, Kramer yanked her away, saying, “No, Molly, that’s the man who murdered all of Daddy’s friends.”

  In 1985 the city’s Department of Health shut down the Mineshaft, citing activities that could spread AIDS. The Anvil and Hellfire closed voluntarily. The city shut the Everard and St. Mark’s Baths and Plato’s Retreat as well. Owners of other establishments managed to skirt the law and stay in operation by resurrecting the old mob ruse of becoming quasi-private members clubs. But the era of the far west Village and meatpacking district as a gay sexual playground was drawing to a close.

  Reported AIDS cases in the city peaked in 1993 and dropped fairly steadily thereafter. The reported demographics shifted from white gay men to nonwhite drug users. By then AIDS had decimated the Village. As the far west Village where Chris Kapp lived emptied out of gay residents, either because they died or because they moved out of what had become a death zone, “that’s when the straight people moved in. It was weird . . . All these little apartments got bought up and the rich started moving in.” Where most of her neighbors had once been gay, she says, now it was “yuppie families.”

  Plague had played a significant role in the development of Greenwich Village in the early nineteenth century. Now another plague contributed to its transformation at the end of the twentieth.

  Epilogue

  WE WERE ALL SO LUCKY TO BE IN THE VILLAGE WHEN YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO BE A ONE PERCENTER TO RENT A PLACE.

  —David Amram

  MARKY IANNELLO SITS IN THE GLOOM OF THE XR BAR AT THE corner of Sullivan and Houston Streets, a couple of blocks from his apartment. It’s late on a warm summer aft
ernoon in 2011. Rush-hour traffic booms by on Houston Street. The after-work crowd is just filtering in from the sidewalk. They’re mostly young office guys with their ties loosened and their shirtsleeves rolled up, a few young women in summer dresses fiddling with cell phones. Marky turns his back to them and hunches his shoulders. An older guy in work clothes and a ball cap, he doesn’t fit in. He hunkers at his end of the bar like a ghost of the Village past.

  “The Village is all full of people who are not from New York, who don’t give a shit about New York, who are only here to make money,” he grumbles. “They don’t give a fuck about New York. They don’t want to be a part of the community. They only care about their little thing. They’re worried about their job. You can get a job in Milwaukee. This is not the New York that I grew up in. They’re like carpetbaggers. They’re always trying to figure out how to make it ugly and make a buck.”

  Three young office guys in shirtsleeves and ties enter the bar on cue. Marky glares at them. “Like look at these fuckin’ mooks.” He shakes his head. “It can’t really be the way it used to be. But to see it replaced with people who really don’t give a shit, that’s what bugs me.”

  “I think what’s changed is its personality more than anything,” Suze Rotolo had said of the Village earlier that year. “Physically its core is still there, but the personality has changed. There’s no more funky little mom-and-pop shops, funky little restaurants, places that were owned by families for generations, like the little Laundromat I used to go to on West Fourth. People would sit on the benches outside, and we’d always say it would be nice to have an outdoor café here. Well, now there are twelve of them, and the Village is very wealthy. Only wealthy, successful artists can live here. I’m sure they’re attracted for the same reasons I was attracted to come here, but it’s not the same. It still looks wonderful but it lost its funk. And funk has its good points.”