City Boy

by Edmund White

  The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached Twenty-first Street and Eleventh Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At five foot ten I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Spike and the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at Sixteenth Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defense—a fairly effective system. I thought back to the fifties when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby-blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not anymore. Now many of us were taking judo classes.

  And now the dress code was strict:

  At one time, the Mineshaft was New York’s most notorious “members only” club. Membership was granted on the spot if one passed muster—no designer clothes, no sneakers, no cologne. Located on Washington Street at Little West Twelfth Street in the heart of the meatpacking district, it was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a clothes check, dungeons, and other amenities. Yes, one was allowed to check all one’s clothes and stroll about naked or in a jockstrap—undress was encouraged. The Mineshaft opened in 1977 before the AIDS era and was finally closed by the city’s Department of Health in 1985, four years after AIDS was first diagnosed.

  People from out of town were astonished by the club and the neighborhood. All night long in the neighboring blocks, butchers in streaked aprons were unloading skinned and dressed calves and lambs onto overhead hooks traveling from the refrigerated trucks parked on the sidewalk (slick and smelly and black as varnish with blood) into the huge refrigerated warehouses. The butchers’ voices were loud and their faces lurid as they bent over oil drums containing warm-up fires.

  Within the nondescript street-level door of the Mineshaft were stairs leading straight up to the doorkeeper sitting on a barstool, no longer the stogie-smoking Mafia guy of yore in a porkpie hat but rather a bearded and equally heavyset gay man in jeans and workboots. Inside was the big bar area with its low lights and pool tables. Behind a partition was the “action” part of the club on two floors. There was an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections. A fist-fucking sling was suspended on heavy chains from the ceiling, and a small crowd of men stood around looking at the nearly gynecological examinations. A whole rabbit warren of small rooms was downstairs and in one was a bathtub where men would take turns being pissed on.

  In 1979 I wrote an essay in the left-wing New Times justifying gay S&M. I acknowledged, “As for gay S and M, it is as disturbing for heterosexuals to contemplate as was the thought of fair Celia on the potty for Jonathan Swift.” I was alert to the drama and romanticism of glimpsed scenes at the Mineshaft: “In the basement two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire’s swan bathing its wings in the dust.”

  My main argument was that S&M was a scaled-down way of enacting and exorcising the brutality of our class society. As I put it, “Whereas ordinary social interactions are characterized by the joke, humor has always been inimical to sadism, just as light is to vampires. This humor that defuses outrage, no matter how justified, and dampens indignation, no matter how righteous, is just another name for surrender. Sadomasochism rejects the laugh that paralyzes social conscience. Within the charged space surrounding the master and his slave, true deeds are performed. One man does submit to another. One man does humiliate another. The same relief we experience in watching a Shakespeare play, the relief of participating in action devoid of irony and freighted with clear values, is the release offered to the sadist and masochist. The couple perform the mysteries of domination, of might, that obsess our culture. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri have said in the Anti-Oedipus, ‘Class struggle goes to the heart of desire.’ “

  I’m not sure I would subscribe to such a penitential view of S&M today, nor do I believe now in such an un-nuanced Shakespeare. Moments of intellectual “breakthrough” are always difficult to recapture, and embarrassing to mention, since later they seem so obvious—or wrong. But I remember distinctly that when I wrote “Sado-Machismo” for New Times a young straight writer from the Village Voice and I were fired up by the notion that sex need not be Freudian or Darwinian but could be “artistic” or “expressive” or possibly “Marxist.” We were so thoroughly part of a puritanical society that it seemed daring to claim that sex might be as “useless” as art or that, alternately, it might be as dramatic as class conflict. We sat on the couch in Richard Sennett’s Washington Mews town house, egging each other on in this strange new direction.

  In the early eighties the Mineshaft scene turned sour. Not only was the specter of AIDS dogging everyone’s steps, but there was also a ghastly ritualistic murder. Apparently a coke-snorting art dealer, Andrew Crispo, while sitting in his apartment, kept dialing the number of the public phone booth just outside the Mineshaft. A handsome Norwegian model answered and agreed to be picked up by Crispo’s passing car and to submit to a night of torture. The fun and games got out of hand, however, and the model, after hours of being tortured, was shot twice through the head by Crispo’s assistant and bodyguard, a renegade rich boy. The body was dumped in a smokehouse on the estate of the bodyguard’s parents’ estate on Long Island. When the victim was found much later, the leather mask had burned into his face but most of the body had become unrecognizable.

  A new friend was Robert Mapplethorpe. I don’t think anyone before him in the art world had ever courted me. But Mapplethorpe, who was just becoming prominent, had spotted me as someone who could write about him. I don’t remember where we met—maybe on the street through a third person or at a party. He made it clear that he wasn’t interested in sex; no, he wanted me to write about him.

  He certainly wasn’t afraid of being considered gay—on the contrary. He was interested in leather, S&M, scat, pain, blood—all those things that most gay men are careful to exclude in their list of desired activities when they write a personal ad (or now an online profile). He had had a famous affair with the punk singer Patti Smith, but now he was famously in love with the tall, much older, aristocratic Sam Wagstaff. Sam had launched Robert’s career by buying and exhibiting the greatest private collection of photographs ever put together, going back to Fox Talbot, then placing Robert at the end of this magnificent tradition. Sam showed all these photographs together, then had a big party for Robert at what was then the chic watering spot, One Fifth Avenue, and inviting all the press and all the important critics and collectors (Sam lived upstairs in the penthouse).

  Mapplethorpe was the high priest of virilization, that moment in the 1970s when gay men rejected other people’s definitions of homosexuality and embraced a new vision of themselves as “hypermasculine”—the famous “clone” look. Soldier, cop, construction worker, these were the looks celebrated and parodied by the disco band the Village People. But Mapplethorpe rejected the conformism and anodyne masculinity of the look and made it transgressive by pushing it toward pain, torture, sacrifice. His pictures weren’t erotic and were seldom arousing except to fetishists. Nor were they of unnamed subjects by an unnamed photographer, one of the usual prerequisites of pornography in the past. No, Mapplethorpe, like the good Catholic boy he was, believed in the devil. When he would have sex, he would whisper in his lover’s ear, “Do it for Satan.” Perhaps Pasolini, the Italian film director, was one ahead of him, since in his scandalous movie Salo he honored the two greatest sins or crimes in the gay world: satanism and pedophilia. Although Mapplethorpe was uninterested in children, he had his biggest scandal in England when he showed at the Tate a little girl exposing her crotch. That
the child did this innocently, and that her mother had attended the shoot, meant nothing to the dirty-minded.

  When I knew him, Mapplethorpe went nearly every night to the foot of Christopher Street across from the trucks and the Hudson River piers. There he was one of the few white men to be found in a gay black bar called Keller’s. Robert would sometimes wear his leathers, but they weren’t clunky Marlon Brando, The Wild One leathers with chains and buckles but rather elegant formfitting Dutch leathers seamed in blue or red. There he would stare with rapture and a single purpose at the person he most desired that evening.

  I never understood Mapplethorpe’s sexuality. He would explain it to me and keep correcting with a little smile the wrong conclusion I’d jumped to. He’d say, “No, it has nothing to do with fantasy.” Or he’d say, “No, it’s not a matter of role-playing. Nothing could be realer than what I like. That’s why I like it—it’s real.”

  He was soft-spoken and polite. He was completely unpretentious and talked freely but without too much interest about his poor Catholic family on Long Island. He’d lived with Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, but he seldom talked about her. Maybe I didn’t ask enough questions, but, no, I think the reality of being young and on the make in the seventies in New York was so absorbing that people didn’t dwell much on the past. People who talk a lot about the past believe it was better, but for us the present was the golden age.

  One day he called me and told me he was sending over an interesting new writer—Bruce Chatwin. We had an instant sexual response to each other, possibly because we were meeting through Mapplethorpe. Bruce with his bright, hard eyes and his odorless WASP body and flickering, ironic smile and his general derring-do instantly groped me while we were still standing just inside the door, and a minute later we’d shed our clothes and were still standing. We had sex in the most efficient way, we put our clothes back on, and we never repeated the experience with each other though we continued to see each other up until months before Bruce’s early death from AIDS. Bruce wrote a wonderful essay about Mapplethorpe, but so did Susan Sontag. Robert was good in finding the best writers to talk about his work, though he himself was anything but a reader.

  Robert lived alone in a gloomy loft on Bond Street, not too far from my place on Lafayette. It was filled with dark Stickley furniture from the beginning of the century and big Arts and Crafts pots, beautiful pieces all, but heavy. In the long, skinny sitting room, a curious tray swung out from the bathroom. I never understood its functions, but Robert told me that he’d been “into shit before it got too dangerous when everyone started having amoebas.” It was because he gave up shit, he told me, that he got “into niggers.”

  Several times we had lunch together at a restaurant called Binibon on Second Avenue. My friend John Purcell and I called the restaurant Twisty-Tables because of the way the tables were set at strange angles to each other. A famous murder was committed at the Binibon in 1981 by Jack Abbott, the author of In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott had been released from prison, where he’d been confined for forgery and bank robbery; his sentence had been increased by twenty-one years when he’d stabbed a fellow inmate. Abbott was given early parole due to Norman Mailer’s vouching for his character, but the day before his book was published in July, he killed a Binibon waiter. The whole sorry episode coincided with the end of the Leftish idealism of the seventies. Reagan was just about to be elected.

  I wrote the catalog for Black Males, an early Mapplethorpe exhibit, this one in Amsterdam in 1980 at the Galerie Jurka. I argued that whenever a white man in America looks at a black man, it is a complex and guilty act and that Mapplethorpe went through the repertory of possible responses (art deco figurine, sex object, etc.). Later the black poet Essex Hemphill attacked me (and Mapplethorpe, who was dead by then) for objectifying blacks. He singled out the picture of Mapplethorpe’s lover Milton Moore in Man in a Polyester Suit in which the model’s penis is shown emerging from his fly but his head is cut off. In a debate in a gay magazine I pointed out that Milton had made Mapplethorpe sign a contract promising he would never show his penis and his face in the same frame because he, Milton, didn’t want his family to know he was gay. One could also have argued that the French word for a camera lens is objectif, and that there is no way of not objectifying someone in a photo.

  When Robert had to go to Amsterdam for the opening of his show, he asked me to babysit Milton, who was pretty crazy (eventually he tried to swim the Hudson to New Jersey). He seemed a sweet man, Milton, though he was overwhelmed by Robert’s New York life and would take a dictionary with him to dinner parties to keep up with the big words the others were saying. Before he died of AIDS in 1989 at age forty-two, Robert received a letter from Milton, who’d been convicted of murdering a man with a lead pipe and was serving time in an Alabama prison. He asked if he could borrow three thousand dollars. I don’t know whether Robert sent the money.

  When Robert and I were friends, he didn’t have much money. Sam Wagstaff had undoubtedly bought him his loft, as later he would buy him a bigger one on Twenty-third Street. Robert didn’t seem to have much spending money. In 1980 we did a story on Truman Capote together for the glossy, semi-gay theater magazine After Dark, and another article for SoHo News on William Burroughs in 1981. I doubt if Robert had ever read either writer (or my books for that matter), but that didn’t seem a requirement. At the United Nations Plaza, where we arrived on a June day, the air-conditioning was on the blink and Capote met us at the elevator in bare feet and with a palmetto fan in hand. All through the interview Capote kept dashing out of the room to sniff more cocaine. He went through phases of being sharp-witted and nearly nagging and other moments of mumbling incoherence, as if someone were alternately pumping air into the balloon and deflating it. Robert was accompanied by his handsome assistant, a James Dean lookalike, Marcus Leatherdale, who later became a well-known photographer in his own right. Capote seemed quite uninterested in any of us, though at the very end he told me he’d read some of my stuff and been impressed with it. “You’ll probably write some good books,” he said. “But remember, it’s a horrible life.” Mapplethorpe insisted on taking a picture of Capote and me together. I asked him why. He smiled in his riddling way and said, “You’ll be happy someday that I did so.”

  Burroughs received us in the Bunker, his name for his apartment on the Bowery. He lived in the same building as the poet John Giorno, who at the time was writing poems on sugar, alcohol, and meat. Burroughs lived in the old locker rooms of the former YMCA and proudly showed us the ancient graffiti on the toilet walls. So often in Burroughs’s fiction a gray wind is blowing through half-remembered scenes of adolescent loneliness, and these nearly obliterated obscene drawings seemed to be the perfect emblems of that vision.

  As the evening wore on, Burroughs became more and more stoned. Though technically homosexual, he seemed as sexless as Capote, though in a different way. I called my piece “This Is Not a Mammal,” using a remark that Susan Sontag had made to me about Burroughs.

  In the late 1970s, a glory-hole venue suddenly appeared next to the other leather bars. You paid an entrance fee and then suddenly were in a large room full of little booths with doors that latched. The booths had waist-high holes through which you could suck the cock of your neighbor. It was a bit like a confessional booth in that no one could see what you looked like, though sometimes things became romantic and people kissed through the hole and even stuck their hands and arms in and caressed each other’s body and face. I remember that in the center of the room was a big booth with maybe eight glory holes, two on each side. Once I saw a man roaming that room sticking his big, hard dick in one hole after another, a restless minotaur. As I looked from my hole across the room at the other holes, they all seemed to be disconcertingly alive—protruding hands waving him over, mouths gaping, or liquid eyes pivoting and blinking. The minotaur was so angry and passionate, stabbing himself into each living desperate orifice.

  One night when I was there, the boy o
n the door got me high because he was hoping to slow me down so that I would wait till he got off at two in the morning. That sounded like a good plan and I was chatting with him at the cash register when all of a sudden a hot young man with a dancer’s butt and turnout but none of the effeminacy stormed in. I was so high that I followed him closely, almost walking on his heels, and just as he was about to drop the latch on a cubicle, I pushed the door and entered his booth. That was against the rules but no one was monitoring the room.

  I went home with him. His name was Chris Cox. He and I were lovers for the next three years off and on. He was on acid that night and couldn’t get it up, but he was basically a top and I a bottom, so he gave me precise orders about how to fuck him, and that was the last time I ever did that in our relationship. Even then as I was fucking him, I was completely under his spell. I looked at the stacks of books beside the bed and was surprised how many of the titles were the same as those in my room. He was so ardent—even crazy passionate—that I thought if he was this hot and also had all the same books, then we should be lovers.

  The next morning he took pictures of me as I awakened. I look dazed and vulnerable and happy in the photos, a lot younger than my thirty-seven years, well fucked though I’d done the fucking, an anomaly that he immediately set to rights. He lived in a big, empty loft on Twenty-third Street with a skylight overhead and hanging spider plants above the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor. The bathroom was ancient, in a big, separate room. In those days an empty loft was the height of chic, and it was hard to know if a loft-dweller was really poor or just an artist pretending to be a minimalist. Chris’s loft had what seemed like acres of hardwood floors and windows without shades and a phone on the floor next to a metal folding chair and an ashtray. The space was large enough to be a dance studio and sometimes Chris did rehearse there, though he’d given up the theater by and large by the time I knew him. Lofts were often only semilegal as residences and usually went for a low rent.