Postcard from the Pines

One thing I figured out about Fire Island right away: isolation costs more. A few short miles from Long Island, the sandbar known as Fire Island requires that any good consumed by a human being be brought in by ferry. That includes everything from fuel for hot water to chilled Bandol Rosé. This kind of glorious isolation can lead you to hit “empty,” a state that my fellow blogger Charlotte Moore talks about in a recent post (see http://thedailycure.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/day-9-the-heart-of-the-matter/). It will also empty your wallet. But for many of the summer inhabitants at the gay male end of Fire Island known as the Pines, the isolation leads to a desire for some of the action of home. Shed a few clothes, shed your inhibitions.

Our pool

There is one dusty, sandy, and sometimes (after a storm) muddy street called Fire Island Boulevard, used by access vehicles and the rare truck. Every other street is a narrow boardwalk winding through clusters of pine and bamboo. Housecleaners, repairmen, and delivery boys ride little Cushman scooters, but almost everybody walks at least a few miles a day on these endless planks that are always in a state of semi-disrepair. This is one of the greatest charms of the Pines. Just about every house feels like a secret compound.

As soon as you board the jitney at the Sayville Train Station to take you to the ferry, you know this is a summer camp of some kind. The wild-eyed driver sports swimming trunks, a tank top, flip-flops, and tattoos, and he doesn’t bother with a seat belt. He turns up the volume on the disco beat, and everybody is ready to roll.

After two days, most visitors to the island have been to all of the bars and hot spots. The restaurants are not memorable, but the Pines Pantry is surprisingly well stocked, given that it has a captive market. If you want to go out to dinner, you can catch a “water taxi” to Cherry Grove, which is similar to what we used to call an “E” ticket at Disneyland. After a few moments on the short journey, I was worried that our little boat would break into a thousand pieces.

On the way back, we heard stories of waves crashing over the captain. Cherry Grove does not have the same orderly, cedar-sided modern houses as the Pines. The retail area has honky-tonk, slapped-together ambiance. At Cherry’s on the Bay, a tree covered in red lights pierces the tent that serves as the disco/bar. Drag queen entertainer Hedda Lettuce points out that the tree is better dressed than she is. Everybody is talking about Liza Minnelli’s appearance at the Ice Palace disco and subsequent sightings. Unlike most folks, she gets her own Cushman/Popemobile or “Lizamobile.” One friend who attended her show observed that after her performance, she saw two drag queens dressed like more decrepit versions of her, and she uttered, “Dear God.” It must be hard to find yourself in Cherry Grove performing a few songs only to be confronted with poor male impersonations of your fading self. Joni Mitchell has fared so much better in this department. Hedda Lettuce referred to the weekend as “Lizapalooza.”

Liza Minelli in her "Lizamobile"

A day in the sun and the salt water makes guys out here randier than usual. Since Fire Island is so absurdly expensive, older men, who may be bald and chubby, are quite common and even welcome. (Although at the “shareathons” that take place each year in New York City, some people with a lease freely state that they don’t want “fatties.”) Younger men are willing to take 1/16th of a 1/8th share and share a room with somebody they barely know. Or they attach themselves to older prosperous men. The natural environs where men seek each other out have been described in great detail several times in queer literature of yore so I won’t go into that.

One topic of conversation was whether Grindr would kill the turf between Cherry Grove and The Pines. Seems unlikely. While all the testosterone informs a lot of fantasies and realities, there are also numerous couples and other folks who are just looking to find that quiet empty, the isolation that was the original draw. For them, discos, drugs, and multiple hook-ups are history. The area around the ferry landing does feel like a flashback to the late 1970s and early 1980s to us middle-aged folk. But then the weekend ends and the temperature drops. Even the waves got calmer.

For me, the “empty” has something to do with the temporal nature of the place. As soon as someone finishes a multimillion dollar house here, it begins to disintegrate. The salt, rain, and bugs devour these wood boardwalks and beautiful modernist homes. When everything is closed for the winter, the storms come and occasionally take a house or two away, and according to some reports, are taking the island itself away. Last winter, the famous Pavilion dance club burned to the ground. By next summer, a new one by architectural firm HWKN should be up, and there will be another place to celebrate “tea.” When everything quiets down, you hear the cicadas, birds, an occasional vehicle, a distant boat, and then a sound like trains on the track. But there is no train here. That sound is the bouncing of roller bags as somebody walks to the ferry to return home.

A modernist collage

A more recent house

An early house in the Pines

Image of the new Fire Island Pines Pavilion
Courtesy HWKN Architects

This spit is 31 miles long and somewhere between 520 and 1,300 feet wide. It can’t last. But for a few days, it’s bliss.

Testing the Real

John Irving’s In One Person

I have always looked for a believable narrative. When we were kids my brother and I played for hours with toy cars inventing stories to go along with the towns we built. Essential to our play was that we never mixed the different scales of the miniature cars. We had Matchbox scaled cars (1:64), Corgi (1:43), and model kits (1:25). There were houses and roads to match each size. When my brother tried to mix it up I would cry, “You can’t do that. It’s not real.” I wanted my make believe to be authentic. This is why I am not a big fiction reader. My taste runs to believable fiction, not fantasy. More along the lines of what Truman Capote used to call, “the nonfiction novel.”

The Matchbox scale

The Corgi scale

The kit scale

So I found John Irving’s thirteenth novel, “In One Person” a little hard to believe. This is no small disappointment because I think what Irving is trying to accomplish is hugely important. While sexual outsiders have appeared in his other work, in this novel he is showing, by exaggeration, that the outsider is us. Part of experiencing a play for example is to be suspended between illusion and truth. But in a novel I don’t want the seams to show.

I was drawn to the book because it is one of the first novels to deal with bisexuality so directly. Since high school I have argued that most men (I can’t speak for most women!) fall somewhere along a bisexual continuum. I have straight male friends who have never had any experience with a man and gay male friends who have never had any experience with a woman (by the way, they are referred to as “gold star gays”) but I would say these are the exceptions. That is not to say that most men reach adulthood as practicing bisexuals. It’s just too hard in this society. But John Irving’s new novel tells, in the first person, the tale of novelist William Abbott who takes this most difficult of paths. The beauty of the story is that Abbott does it honestly -- in part to renounce the secrets in his own family.

For the literary minded there are lots of references to Shakespeare (including the title), Ibsen, Dickens, and Flaubert. But it is the staging of Shakespeare’s plays that dominate. The backstage spying and the revisiting of old friends as they are dying of AIDS are some of the most poignant stories within the novel. Billy Abbott eventually emerges from his backstage adolescence to directing plays in his mature years after witnessing so much devastation. But he is also oddly cold when people within his own family die. He seems strangely unchanged over the course of his adult life. One aspect of the novel that rings true is how people from our childhood and adolescence can shadow our entire adult lives.

In One Person by John Irving

John Irving wrestling

John Irving

Irving’s novel takes on the challenge of living openly as a bisexual but also the challenge of living as a transgendered person. Indeed, the novel seems to be heavily populated by transvestites and transsexuals. And the strange little town of First Sister, Vermont in the middle of the twentieth century seems tolerant of these sexual differences -- unless they stray too far out of line. Miss Frost, the transsexual librarian (and former wrestling champion), is run out of town after she sexually initiates Billy Abbott (“without penetration”) in her basement apartment at the town library. An apartment built by Harry, Billy’s cross dressing grandpa, who also happens to own the mill and play the leading ladies roles in the town’s amateur theater group. I am not sure, but this may say more about Vermont than small towns. But it is all too fantastic for this skeptic.

What makes the novel tip over into fantasy is the preponderance of sexual outsiders including mothers who seduce their children. Perhaps Irving wants to include large numbers of sexual outlaws in order to defend them, but he may have overpopulated this novel to achieve his goal. Maybe this is my own prejudiced slip showing? Irving’s large number of outlaws serve to defend his own point of view rather than convey a deep compassion. This is of course a delicate balance and perhaps there are just not enough novels dealing with the lives of bisexuals and transgendered people.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Early on in the book the librarian, Miss Frost, gives young Billy a copy of James Baldwin’s novel, “Giovanni’s Room” so he can accept his “crushes on the wrong people.” That’s a bold move that still feels believable. I remember a high school teacher giving me Christopher Isherwood’s “A Meeting By The River” and it was a welcoming gesture. And perhaps that was the librarian’s more serious transgression. The novel penetrates young Billy’s consciousness. You could say that part is real.

For more information:

http://john-irving.com/category/videos/
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2757/the-art-of-fiction-no-93-john-irving

Johnny: Finding His Way - Part 1

John in YMCA newsletter

My former boyfriend John is a film and television sound designer living in Los Angeles. His family had deep roots in Culver City where his grandfather owned a well-established electrical business. After his father bought out his uncle the business failed and the family moved around California as his father sought work. Culver City was one of the early centers of the film industry with the famous MGM lot. John remembers his father telling tales of drunk Munchkins causing trouble at the Culver Hotel during the filming of the Wizard of Oz. Following his passion for cinema John studied film at San Francisco State and eventually worked for the bay area’s leading directors as a sound editor before moving to Los Angeles to pursue more steady work. In this interview John describes his growing up, his first queer involvements and living with his girlfriend.

Interviewer: I'm really interested in stories about queer men coming of age, their experience, and how other people perceived them. Try to set the scene in terms of when you were a little boy and what Culver City was like and then how your life changes radically.

John: The life that changed was more my sister’s life because I had only finished the second grade when we started moving.

Interviewer: What did your father do?

John: My father was an electrician. It was a family business that had been my grandfather's. My father and my uncle did not get along, and there were problems with the business that I don't really understand because I was too young. My father bought my uncle out, and there was animosity about that for the rest of their lives. Ultimately, my father lost the business anyway, which is what started the moving because he basically went out of business. But before that, there were the salad years, which I kind of only vaguely remember. There was a new house that was built for us on Keystone in Culver City, which was 8 or 10 blocks away from where my grandparents lived.

John and his father in the house on Keystone.

My father drove an El Camino. My father loved cars. He also had a Corvette that I remember. My mother drove a convertible Chrysler.

The El Camino

I remember those days feeling kind of grand. My mother had a little fur. There were red panel trucks that we washed every weekend. So, there was that kind of small town success. Even in my adolescence, when I returned there, because we shared the same name people would ask after my father or my grandfather. My grandparents moved there in the early 1900s from Iowa. Culver City was a small town in the first half of the twentieth century. It would have been a very different life had we stayed there, but we didn't. My father moved us.

The Salad Years in Culver City

Interviewer: After the business failed?

John: Yes. But mind you, I didn't know that. My mother didn't want to leave, and my father insisted that we go. We went to visit a friend of his that had already moved to Humboldt County. That was pretty weird for me because my father's friend lived on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. I mean, Humboldt County at that time, this was the early '60s, I want to say '62, '63, maybe, was a very remote place. But this guy lived an hour away from any town. They were isolated on this big ranch. And I went with their kids to a one-room school where one teacher taught everybody. And what I remember about that visit is that while she played the piano she kept having to hike her bra strap up. This is all before we moved. My father said, "Okay, that's where we're going to go." And that’s where we went.

He used to say that he was "getting out of the rat race." It was the beginning of a downward spiral economically, and probably emotionally too, that lasted basically until my parents split up when I was in high school.

Interviewer: So do you remember moving vans?

John: A caravan. In fact, my father and I went up first in this big truck that he'd borrowed to bring his shop, his electrical stuff, because he had a huge storehouse of parts and things that he wanted to move up there. I remember the anxiety of that was that I was supposed to be telling him when he could change lanes and when he could merge, and I had no idea. It was a huge truck that drove really slow, and I was terrified of being wrong and getting us into an accident.

Interviewer: And you are six years old?

John: Yes. I would get yelled at if somebody honked at us 'cause it was too close or something. My father was a very odd combination of things. He was kind of just toughen up and suck it up kind of guy. He also gave me over to other men to kind of toughen me up as well and basically just stood back, which just makes me think that he felt like he was not adequate to do that.

John in Myers Flat, 1963-64.

Interviewer: Do you think that he sensed then even when you're that young that you're kind of effeminate or soft?

John: He must have because it was a recurring theme -- my father was a big tease, but it was mean-spirited and could be humiliating. Often it had to do with being “girl-boy.” Like when the '60s music started, the British invasion, I was just obsessed with it, and I took a lot of shit. If ever I wanted to watch something on television, I had to endure his ridicule if he were in the room.

Interviewer: You mean The Beatles?

John: They were girl-boys, and he bet that they shaved their armpits, and that they wore frilly underwear. He was constantly feminizing almost anything that I was interested in.

Interviewer: So you were kind of an exotic in your own family?

John: Oh, yes, sensitive, smart, intuitive. One of the lessons I learned from the trouble I had seen my older sister get into and from a variety of family experiences was to keep to myself, to keep it under wraps.

Interviewer: Don't expose yourself?

John: Just don't let them know what you're doing, who you are really. I had a lot of independence. My parents were very self-involved and just didn’t pay attention. By the time I was an adolescent, their marriage was on the rocks, and they were both drinking a lot, so that meant as long as the police didn't come and I got good grades in school, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, which was perfect for me.

Interviewer: I want to go back to when you move up to Humboldt County and your father is pawning you off on his friend.

John: Warren Linville. Well, my father had a series of friends. Warren is the best example, but he was not the first one -- people that he kind of submitted to and modeled himself after. Warren was the superintendent of the little school district in southern Humboldt County. And my mother ultimately worked for him; she was his secretary. He had been a Marine officer of some kind, and he had two daughters. He was a hunter; he was constantly killing things. He had guns in his truck. It was what you would imagine -- guns in a rack behind him, and he'd see a deer and pull over and shoot the fucking deer on the spot.

Interviewer: Did he put it in the back of the truck?

John: Yeah. This was the part of the toughening up period in Humboldt County. I was in the third and the fourth grade, so that's still a pretty little boy. They used to slaughter animals, and I was expected to participate, or at the very least witness. And it was things like slaughtering a steer, slaughtering lambs. There was one day where they were neutering the young male lambs, and there were a lot of them so they cut the balls off of 50 sheep like all in a row, it seemed like a thousand, and I'm just standing there and watching this. One time they decided that they would butcher a whole bunch of chickens at once. They were chopping the heads off of chickens and then handing them to me. So I had a chicken’s foot between each finger. I had two fists full, eight chickens all with their heads cut off, flapping their wings like mad. And if you dropped one, it ran away.

Interviewer: Headless?

John: Right. I was horrified by this, but that did not seem okay. To be horrified was not a reaction that was acceptable, so I just kind of had to find a way to get through it.

Interviewer: In those kinds of gruesome situations, did you hide that you were horrified?

John: I tried my best. I can't imagine that they didn't know, which is why I loved Ed. Ed was a very old Russian man who didn't speak English who lived on Warren's ranch. I guess he came with the place.

Interviewer: He was a caretaker?

John: He was just there, and you had to let Ed live there. He would just show up in these situations when no one was around and show me how to do stuff that frightened me, like how you could move the chickens with a stick so you didn't have to touch them.

Interviewer: Helpful hints on how to get through this nightmare?

John: Ed was my hero. He would just appear like Boo Radley. "Oh, there's Ed." I don't even know if Ed was his name. That's just what we called him. It probably wasn't his name.

Interviewer: After Culver City, Humboldt County couldn’t have been more different. Can you talk more about how that influenced you?

John: Well, Humboldt County was the first of many situations where I would go to school for the first time in this town that was wildly different from anything I'd ever experienced before, so I was certainly other. Now whether or not that other was identified as feminine or not, I'm not sure. In this case though I was a city boy for sure.

But the experience of holding back and observing becomes a big piece of my personality. Seeing the lay of the land, what do people do here? What do people respond to? How do I place myself in this environment? I would take a bus for half an hour or 40 minutes to go to school, as everybody did. When I was young, I would get fixated on the other boys. Now I understand that I had a kind of sexual attraction to them. But at the time, I would just become obsessed with some boy. There was a boy whose father must have been a logger because he lived way up in the hills. And if it rained, he didn't come to school because the road would wash out. Often these boys were nothing like me, but I would fixate on the clothes they wore. He wore rubber boots, and I wanted rubber boots. "Why do you want rubber boots?" "I have to have rubber boots." And I was indulged with that kind of thing too, which I guess is feminine. I always had very strong ideas about what I was supposed to wear. But it was usually associated with some boy that I was fascinated with or something I saw on TV. I would try to emulate what was attractive to me without really understanding why.

I just would watch this boy. He didn't like me. He wasn't my friend. Later I got to be friends with some of these boys, but in those days, I just watched them. I just watched what they did, listened to how they talked, watched how they moved. It was also very important to me the way they moved in their bodies, which makes me think it was sexual in nature.

Interviewer: You lived in different places in Humboldt County?

John: We lived in Phillipsville, a very small town, something like 250 people. We lived there for two years. I was in the third and the fourth grade there. And we were there when that big flood happened in 1964 too, the same year as the Alaskan earthquake.

That was fantastic. I loved that because our house wasn't flooded, but our town was isolated. It was flooded on either side, and the Red Cross would fly in with helicopters and bring supplies. I just loved it. And my sister…one time they came to bring supplies and literally we were all standing there, and the helicopter blades are turning and the wind's going everywhere, and the soldier says, "We have room to take someone out. Does anyone need to leave?" And my sister Sheila says, "I do. I need to go back to school." And she got in the helicopter and flew away. And I just thought, oh my god, I want to do that.

I just thought everything about that episode was fantastic. We mucked out the houses. One of the teachers organized the kids, and we went down -- there was a hotel that was owned by this old woman and her brother who was blind who also made wooden shop things, like planters. And he had cut off his arm 'cause he was blind and working with power tools.

Interviewer: Of course.

John: So he had this wooden prosthetic, which he sometimes cut off, you know?

Interviewer: Just make another one.

John: We went down to help muck out their place because they weren't able to do it themselves, so we were down there digging. And the mud was all the way up to the roofline. It was like digging to get down to even get in. I just loved it.

The flood of 1964.

Interviewer: After Phillipsville where did you move?

John: My father had his first heart attack in Humboldt County, '63 or '64. My father had this plan that he was going to be an electrician in Humboldt County. Well people there just didn't hire people to do their electrical work, they just did it themselves. There was some work, but not nearly enough. And then after his heart attack, he had to do something less physically taxing. He started driving a school bus.

So we lived there for two years, and then we moved to Eureka, which is still in Humboldt County, it's a small city. We moved there because they were building a community college, The College of the Redwoods. He was hired as a construction foreman. I'm not sure precisely what, but he was involved with the building of the school. But we only lived there one year and then we moved to Barstow.

John with fish in Humboldt County.

Interviewer: Barstow?

John: Warren Linville moved to Barstow first. He was the superintendent of schools there and he offered my father a job. That was the first time my father worked for a school district as a maintenance foreman. And that was a job that he did basically for the rest of his life. We went from foggy, cold, northern California to the Mojave Desert. These were the kinds of moves that we made.

Interviewer: You are in the sixth grade in Barstow?

John: Yes. We lived there for some time, two and a half years. I was in the sixth, seventh and first half of the eighth grade in Barstow. I didn't mind Barstow when I was young. When I got into junior high it was bad, and it would have been worse in high school. There were gangs there. The SA’s and the surfers they called themselves. The surfers were the white kids, and the SA’s were the Hispanics. And they fought. And they attacked in the hallways and slam you against a locker and ask, "Are you a surfer or an SA?" Well obviously I'm not an SA. I don't know. What's the right answer?

Interviewer: Did you have any friends?

John: In Barstow there's a lot of military because of Fort Irwin. So there was a culture of people who didn't stay anywhere very long. There was a kid named Bill I particularly liked. I had friends there, not a lot of friends, but, as you know, I only need a few.

Interviewer: Did you start to become aware of your sexuality at that point? Typically, that’s when there is some sort of awareness.

John: There was some of the kind of boy humpy stuff that we did. And I also kissed my first girl then. That was funny. I had a crush on a guy, but it was his sister who I kissed.

Interviewer: Do you think anybody there was gay?

John: Yeah, there was a little bit of that kind of laying on each other and kind of pushing with the crotch stuff. I did that with several different boys at that time. Oh, but I did have one of my boy crushes there. He was the older brother of one of my friends. He had a strange haircut, which thankfully I didn't emulate. It was really short on the top and slicked back on the sides. It probably had a name. And he drank too because his father kept a keg. Alcohol is part of my story but I wasn’t drinking yet, just noticing.

His father kept a keg in a refrigerator in the garage. It wasn't locked or anything. And so the thing that I emulated with this guy was motorcycles. He had a motorcycle. None of us had licenses, we were too young, but you could ride in the desert. It was a lifesaver because there was nothing to do in Barstow, but that was really fun. My father went along with that. My mom didn't like it, but she was overruled. So yeah, I'd follow this guy anywhere, we'd go on the bikes off into the desert.

Interviewer: Did you have your own motorcycle?

John: Yeah, it wasn’t large.

Interviewer: Is this sexually charged, this riding, or is it just because there was nothing else to do?

John: At thirteen it was really fun to be off on on our own in the middle of Mojave Desert riding motorcyles. There was no adult anywhere. As I mentioned before what I did with these guys was fixate and emulate them. I saw them as knowing what to do and I didn't. I wanted to not just emulate them, but inhabit them if it were possible.

Next stop: Barstow.

Interviewer: Where do you go after Barstow?

John: From Barstow we moved back to Culver City.

My grandfather died, and my father thought that we needed to go back to Culver City so that he could help my grandmother run her affairs. And I think my father must have imagined that there was more of an estate than there was. There wasn’t much to manage.

And then he started working as an electrical engineer, but none of those jobs lasted very long. He would get a job and then get laid off. I think this was more because of the economy of the time than anything my father did.

This is another interesting, emotional period in my family life. Both of my sisters are long gone. They were gone by the time we moved to Eureka. They missed all this crazy moving.

But my father was very depressed after we moved back. He couldn't really hold a job, and that's the period of time when he was the most abusive towards me. It was horrible. He would taunt me and bait me, and then pull the, "You can't talk to your father like that" when I got mad.

One of the things about returning to Culver City was it was the first time that I really felt like I found some people; I made a life for myself. That’s where I met Greg, which was just kind of love at first sight for me. But this time I was determined that I would get to know this boy and make him my friend.

The conflict with my father came about because he was trying to step on my life that I finally liked, and I was willing to fight to protect it. And that was our showdown basically.

Interviewer: So you're 15 or so and you're in conflict with him. But are you more aware about gay feelings or is it all kind of rolled together, you're just sexual because you're a teenager?

John: Well, at 15 I had sex for the first time. And within a couple of months of sleeping with a girl, I slept with a boy. So they kind of happened concurrently. One of my friends from back when we lived in Culver City the first time before I got to know Greg and Mitch and other people I got close to later. This friend and I started having sex. Neither of us knew much but it went on for a few years.

Ultimately he was straight so he was doing that thing that young, straight boys do, and I was ultimately gay so he was just my first experience with a man. The first girl I slept with was a slutty girl who said, "I'm sleeping with boys and I think it's fun, so you want to," and I said yes because I thought that's what you did, and it was horrible. I remember that she had an aquarium and I just was looking at the fish hoping it would be over soon.

But then I had a girlfriend who was a hippie, on the pill and who was enamored of me, so it was kind of perfect. That was probably the most sexually-active period of my life, when I was 15 to 18. This was also when my young, hippie friends and I were smoking a lot of pot, and I was taking hallucinogenic drugs. I wasn't drinking too much then because I was underage and it was hard to buy.

Interviewer: Whereas pot and mushrooms and LSD and all were relatively easy to get.

John: Yes. I went up to see friends at UC Santa Cruz, met Michael, and it was a jaw-dropping attraction. In fact, Michael and I dropped acid together for the first time about two hours after we met. So that relationship was very much about LSD.

Unfortunately we never had sex. I don't know why we didn't. I think I was terrified. He was even bisexual. It was an intense relationship, and it definitely was romantic, but it was not physical, which is a regret of mine. That was kind of the first time I actually had feelings for a man that were reciprocated in some way.

Interviewer: But at this point, your parents are beginning to kind of let go of you?

John: Like I said earlier, they just didn’t pay much attention. They would believe whatever I told them. My bedroom in Culver City was a guest room that was off the garage, not attached to the main house, so I could come and go easily.

Interviewer: Did your father finally get work?

John: No. My mother slept in the bedroom, and he slept on this horrible, uncomfortable, hide-a-bed in the den, which I could see from my bedroom. I could see him because that was in the back of the house. He eventually gave up even looking for work and was just watching T.V. and sitting around the house being morose. So when Warren Linville offered him another job in Danville, we were packing up.

John as a teenager.

Interviewer: All of you?

John: Yeah, mother and my father and me.

Interviewer: I didn't remember that your mother went to Danville.

John: Well, the interesting part of that story is that Greg decided that he wanted to come with us. And this was big -- I loved Greg. Greg was my best friend. But he not only wanted to come with us, but when his father said no, he cried. I had no idea that his attachment to me was so strong. And he could not have picked a worse time to want to enter into our household. So, Greg moved with us.

Interviewer: His father relents? And he’s straight?

John: Yes and yes.

Interviewer: What do your parents think of your best friend moving with you?

John: They both liked Greg, I don’t know what they thought about us. I was a little flamboyant in the Danville days. Why the hell did Greg want to move with us? I'll never know -- you'll have to interview him.

I was really angry. And I didn't care who knew it. I was kind of mad at the world. And I would do things to be kind of contrary and spiteful. I had very long hair then. Greg and I spent a lot of time at the Renaissance Fair in Southern California. One of the affectations I picked up there was wearing a feather in my hair. It kind of had a leather thong and you tied it in your hair.

John takes a picture of his friends
on the way to the Renaissance Faire.

And I wore a jumpsuit because I fancied myself kind of hippie radical. It was a military green jumpsuit. And I had a big purse that I carried, and I just didn't give a fuck. Well, everyone thought that Greg and I were lovers. And I was perfectly happy for them to think that because I worshipped Greg, and I was proud to have them think that I was his lover. I don't know why Greg didn't mind. He didn't seem to care.

Greg had been studying dance in Culver City, and I hated P.E. We befriended the girls' P.E. teacher. In fact, she had a big crush on Greg. So we arranged to get ourselves admitted into girls' P.E. so that we could take dance classes with her. And so now we're thought of as the two queers from Los Angeles who were in girls' P.E. and dancing instead of playing football. We’d put on our dance clothes in the boy’s locker room and then walk to the girl’s gym. Oh, so this was my great moment with Warren Linville because he tells me that this is all getting around the school district.

Interviewer: In Danville?

John: Yes, and it's quite an embarrassment for my father He’s basically asking me to tone it down. And I said I couldn't care less if my father is embarrassed.

Interviewer: So people think you and Greg are lovers in Danville among the adults as well as the other kids, and Greg doesn't seem to care?

John: Doesn't care at all. God bless him. I adore Greg for that. He's the only one really that stood by me during that time, the only one really.

Best friend Greg moves in.

  
Interviewer: What happens in Danville?

John: Well, this is when my parents’ relationship is really disintegrating. There's a lot of drinking going on. And I am stoned a lot. So the household is kind of tipsy most of the time. And I hate it there, and I want to go back to Culver City. I think Greg would have stayed.

My father was receptive to me leaving and going back to Culver City, and I think it helped facilitate my parents splitting up because if I was gone like what was the point? So the upshot was Greg and I stayed in Danville for one semester.

Interviewer: What grade is this?

John: We are in the 11th grade. We return to Culver City and lived with Greg's father. After one semester Greg’s father suggests I make other arrangements. My plan was to move in with my grandmother, which would basically be back in that same house I'd lived in before with my parents. But my mother leaves my father and also goes back to Culver City, so I lived with her.

Interviewer: In an apartment?

John: In an apartment, across the street from my grandmother, who was my father's mother, not my mother's.

Interviewer: Were they close or friendly?

John: They were quite friendly. My parents were married for 28 years.

Interviewer: So then for your senior year, you end up…

John: In an apartment with my mother.

Interviewer: But you're almost like roommates by then, right?

John: Pretty much. In fact, we negotiated. She didn't assume that I would live with her. She basically came and asked me if I would live with her and we agreed to terms. I essentially said I'm not interested in being parented. I'll be respectful, and I'd be happy to live with you, but I don't want much interference, and she agreed to it.

Interviewer: At this point, are you having boyfriends and girlfriends?

John: I didn't have any boyfriends in high school other than the one I mentioned. I had some gay friends. And I was involved in theater at Culver High. And the theater teacher, Mr. Bodger, was an older gay man, kind of Tennessee Williams Theater gay. So there were places to sort of try that out. What did we do? What was that theater that they did in the '60s where you kind of were blindfolded and people touched you and it was this whole sensual thing? The Living Theater, we did some version of that, which was just an excuse to be horny and rub on each other.

But it was all couched in theater. My first real boyfriend was in my first year of college.

Interviewer: So do you identify yourself then as bisexual? How do you see yourself in this kind of last year of high school?

John: I was definitely bisexual because I continued to have girlfriends. I liked intimacy with girls more than boys really. And I hadn't had sex with a boy who knew anything because my friend in high school and I hadn't had sex with anybody but each other. I didn't do the “go to the bars and have sex with an older man thing.” I think that's how you learned to have sex then. It wasn't really until I met Jeremiah that I had sex with somebody who knew what to do.

Interviewer: So are you identifying yourself as bisexual to other people?

John: It depends on who they are. I was pretty much in the closet. My girlfriend at the time, who was a bit more worldly than some, she knew I was bisexual and was totally into it. She thought it was very exotic and fun.

I can't remember at what point I told Mitch and Greg; not initially. It depended on who you were. I was not out, no. And oddly enough, in Culver City I didn't necessarily have the same rep that I had in Danville.

Interviewer: Was your hair still long with a feather?

John: Yeah, but it wasn't so unusual there. Maybe it just was a different environment.

John and Greg at high school graduation.

 Interviewer: Are you working at this time?

John: I always had a job because I needed money to be able to go places and do what I wanted to do. I had a job in Danville. That’s a funny story. So my father is the maintenance foreman for the school district and gets me a job as a janitor at the junior high school. Greg had one too. We both did that. I was cleaning urinals and sweeping and cleaning chalkboards. I didn’t really like doing it so I was usually stoned and kind of hostile to the kids.

And then I got fired for nepotism, and I just laughed. Some personnel guy called me down to meet with him and fired me because of nepotism, and I just like, "Oh yeah, my family connections makes it so I can clean urinals."

Interviewer: So when does the interest in film start to happen?

John: Well, that's actually something I shared with my father. My father was into movies and not necessarily mainstream movies. He liked foreign films. He thought they were earthy. He liked it that people pulled off the road and peed and then got back in their car. He liked things that felt human and real to him. So my father and I went to the movies wherever we lived. And when we lived in Humboldt County, there was only one theater, and they showed horrible films. They showed those bad Roger Corman movies and we went and saw them because that's all there was to see.

When I was in high school, I found there was a theater downtown, I can't remember what it was called, that showed foreign films, so I saw Fellini films. I had a lot of significant, emotional experiences that were tied with movies too. I've been moved by films all my life.

Interviewier: Was film a vehicle that allowed you to get outside of yourself?

John: They showed me a world that I could live in that was different than the one that I lived in currently. I hung my hopes on that.

Interviewer: So how do you get to San Francisco from Culver City? Why didn't you go to Cal-State L.A. or Northridge or UCLA?

John: I love it when my friends say "Oh, we're taking our son to go look at schools on the East Coast." I borrowed my mother's car and took a road trip and looked at schools by myself.

I considered Fresno State because they had a big theater department. I considered Hayward. But San Francisco was easy because they actually had a film department. And I hadn't gone there thinking that I would study film. But when I got there and found that it was an option, because I didn't know that it was an option -- I didn't know much.

Interviewer: There were no fleet of counselors.

John: There was nobody helping me figure things out. I wasn't really able to go to a university. I didn't have the money for that. When my father died I got some Social Security to go to college, which was really great; it really helped a lot. I got some money from my mother. I had a job, so state college was manageable.

Interviewer: And it was $90.00 a semester.

John: I hadn't really realized that you could study film, and then, "Whoa, sign me up." Plus it was in San Francisco.

Interviewer: Of course.

John: When I moved to San Francisco, it was before The Castro. I actually witnessed The Castro blossoming. I didn't move to San Francisco because it was a center of gay life, but I just wanted to get away. And I lived in the dorm my first semester because I didn't know the city, and I had never had an apartment. The dorms didn’t work for me. I actually got chased by drunken football players one night. I was not in the right dorm. There was a gay dorm there, but I picked the wrong one, who knew?

Interviewer: When did your father die?

John: He died the summer before I started at State. 1973.

Interviewer: On the very eve of your mother getting remarried right?

John: He died the morning of the day that my mother married Jack, yes.

Interviewer: Unbelievable.

John: My sisters and I made the decision not to tell my mother until after the ceremony so that she could have her day. So we spent the day of my mother's wedding with this knowledge that nobody else had, which was very surreal. It feels like so many times in my life when big, emotional things have happened there's been some reason I've had to cope in some way rather than just react. I mean, there's always been some other thing that needed my attention rather than how I felt about it.

Interviewer: What did you do?

John: My sister Sherry and I had had a little gin bender. That's what we did.

John at his mother’s second wedding reception
the day his father died.

Interviewer: When did you meet Jeff?

John: I met Jeff Sevick right away, He was in the dorm that I should have been in. I had a big crush on Jeff. We tried to be boyfriends off and on here and there, but it just was not what we were meant to be. But I adored him, and we were good friends most of the time until he died. But at times we would be not seeing each other so much when he got involved with a boyfriend, and then he'd be off in that for awhile. But he was always coming and going. He had strawberry blonde hair that stood straight up like David Bowie and he wore this old, kind of wool, '40s sports coat. And oh god, he was gorgeous.

Around that same time I met Jeremiah. And I was crazy for him. It was not a relationship without conflict, but I was crazy for him. It was also the first time that I had good sex, and so that kind of opened my eyes to being gay in a different way.

Interviewer: Was Jeremiah a student at State too?

John: Yes. I met him on a bus going to State. Oh god, do you want these kind of details?

Interviewer: Yes, I love these kind of details.

John: It's kind of like out of a movie.

Interviewer: Tell me!

John: He was sitting several rows away from me, and he was staring at me. And when I made eye contact, he mouthed the words, "I think you're perfect."

So obviously I had to go with him.

He was a little bit older than me, but not very much. He was studying Russian. He had Russian charts all over his room. He lived in a house with two or three straight men, so then there was that dynamic because we'd come to breakfast in the morning, and there would be these guys with their girlfriends and me and Jeremiah. It was friendly. I don't know why he lived with them. I don't know what they were to him, but that's where he lived.

Interviewer: Did you ever see Jeremiah again after you broke up?

John: No. And I've actually tried Googling him. I have no idea what became of him. I hope he didn't die.

Interviewer: What happens next?

John: That's what I was trying to figure out. Well, as you know, I didn't have a lot of boyfriends. So in 1978 is the year I bought a house with the woman that I was involved with. We'd already lived together for a year before we bought the house. When we made the decision to move in together that time, we also made the decision that we would be monogamous. And that was really the first time that I'd ever committed to a gender, not only to a person, but that meant I wasn't going to be sleeping with anybody else. Not only was I going to be monogamous, but I wouldn't be sleeping with men.

Those years were really good years. I loved her. I loved the intimacy and we tried hard to make it work. We were two young people making our way in the world on our own, and we helped each other with that. And it is part of our bond to this day.

John with nephew

END OF PART ONE

In Part Two John talks about his beginnings in the film business and living as a queer
man.

Postcard from a Queer Colonialist in PV

All photos courtesy of Courtney Harrell

The last time I was in Puerto Vallarta was the summer of 1976, just before I turned 18. If the town was gay then, I missed it, but I wasn’t looking. Mexico was the first third-world country I ever visited, and the poverty, threat of dysentery, and stern-looking federales frightened me into following around my taller and more worldly lady friends like the proverbial puppy. I was not venturing into territory that I’d only recently acknowledged.

These days Los Muertos Beach, the center of gay activity, is also known as Blue Chairs Beach. Blue Chairs is a well-known gay hotel and entertainment venue named after its distinctive blue beach chairs. Although called a hotel, the place seems more dedicated to entertainment than hostelry.

The blue chairs themselves cover a narrow stretch of beach from the hotel to the water’s edge. The food is so-so, but if you are staying up in the hills and want a place to hang out under an umbrella, they don’t bother you to buy more than an obligatory beer or soda. The waiters are often incredibly handsome, and many are fluent in English. All are friendly and some flirt.

A fellow at the next table had purchased a wood mask with a long curving tongue, and the conversation quickly focused on the sensuous protuberance. The guest joked that the waiter could come back later that day to enjoy his tongue or something to that effect. I was only half listening. In perfect English, the waiter responded that he preferred fish—he meant women. The gay guest and his buddies were a little taken aback by the frankness. That’s when I paid more attention. Someone stepped across the divide. The waiter chatted about his wife and kids, who were almost grown, and how the last little one came much later. He said the last one was a mistake, that his wife wore a diaphragm and that he must have been just too powerful. Suddenly it had turned from gay flirting to straight male locker-room talk. By accident, everybody had stepped outside what I would consider the boundaries of slightly distasteful discourse, but not in the ways I am used to. Sex talk, straight sex talk, is preferred to nothing? But the gentlemen seemed to have something of a conversation, even if it was somewhat offensive, that wasn’t the usual waiter/client banter. Interestingly, there were few Mexicans sitting on those blue beach chairs. A few internet searches (unconfirmed I might add) suggest that the establishment does not encourage Mexican citizens to pull up a blue chair and have a beer.

Earlier in the week, our writing group met for drinks at the club on the top floor of Blue Chairs. Of course, the elevator was broken, so we took the stairs. As I walked up the six flights, I thought it would be hell to stay there and have to listen to an incessant disco beat. Most of the ladies in our group ventured to the very top floor, which opens to the sky and features a cool soaking pool (a common feature in PV’s heat) and views overlooking the beach. The gents wandered down to the next level, which had curtains to provide a faint gesture of privacy for the dancing go-go boys. I found out that scantily clad smooth-skinned young men gyrating on a platform or bar are not uncommon in the town’s nightspots.

You can trace this objectification back to the young men who live at Maxine Faulk’s hotel in John Huston’s film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ “Night of Iguana” shot down the coast in the early 1960s. The general idea these days is to tuck pesos into the dancer’s skimpy shorts. If you are lucky, perhaps you get a peek at what was barely left for the imagination anyway. I watched this transpire a few times at another club, La Noche, one night, didn’t care for it, thought little about it, and went back to dancing with my friends.

But at Blue Chairs, the dancers are less discreet. You get more than a peek, apparently. Truth be told, I cannot verify this, because I had to escape the pulse of the music, but I heard stories later that the dancers removed their shorts and displayed themselves. My prudish side kicked in when I heard this. No doubt this kind of paid intimacy leads to other paid intimacies. On this front, I try to remain without judgment. “Happy ending” massages are a common occurrence in the gay male community. If it’s mutual and safe, I am neutral. But what about interactions where the balance of power is so one sided? Are we (generally white) wealthy master colonialists buying favors from oppressed poor men (generally of color)?

One person I told this story to assumed the men were under age. No, that is not the draw here. There is some kind of myth, one that writers like Tennessee Williams picked up on decades ago. Hard-working strong men with smooth brown skin represent something slightly unattainable or naughty to affluent white boys. If you have traveled in Mexico and have any kind of conscience, you are aware that your tips to taxi drivers, waiters, cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, and all of the people who serve you in some way or another make an enormous difference in the working person’s income. So is liberal guilt assuaged somewhat by the realization that someone serving tourists in a place like Puerto Vallarta might make an income that might be almost enough to live on? But in this age of internet porn (and everything else), the idea of paying almost naked men 20 or 50 or 100 pesos (at thirteen pesos to the dollar right now) for a peek at their genitals seems more degrading than forbidden. Degrading to those who pay and those who work? I am not writing about this experience to criticize the people who dance or watch or even touch. But I want to understand why it bothers me. Perhaps it is my age. At 53, I am more tuned into my role as an oppressor than my role as a libertine. If I had had more confidence in 1976, I might have been lining up at the bar.

Notes On "A Single Man"

Portrait of Christopher Isherwood
Don Bachardy
UNTITLED II, AUGUST 19  1985
Acrylic on paper
29 7/8 x 22 3/8 inches
courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

That man of funky letters, John Waters, once wrote that Tennessee Williams saved his life—in the public library. For me, it was Christopher Isherwood that saved mine. A perceptive high school teacher gave me a copy of A Meeting By the River. I was a sophomore or junior, so what could be better than a novel about being gay and spiritual? Isherwood soon became my patron saint of the fulfilled queer life.

Of all his writings, A Single Man (1964) was said to have been Isherwood’s personal favorite, according to his lover, the painter Don Bachardy. We rented the 2009 movie adaptation the other night and I can’t get it out of my mind. Director, writer, and producer Tom Ford has claimed that it isn’t a gay film, and weirdly enough, after thinking about what defines a queer film, I think he’s right. So, what constitutes a queer film?

Perhaps the first feature-length queer film I ever saw (albeit inadvertently) was Cabaret (1972), based on Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. In the edited-for-TV version, Michael York, as Isherwood’s Brian Roberts, has his queer line deleted, but if you were a hip high schooler, you understood Brian’s bisexuality anyway. Despite the film’s lack of overt queerness, Isherwood’s pre-WWII experience of Berlin came through. Of course, it also featured Joel Grey at his queerest best.

There was no pretending that the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1972) was anything but queer. In a very underground ‘70s way, the open sexuality and pot smoking in public was all part of the movie-going experience. We thought ourselves so brave to be attending the midnight show on Powell Street, where we smoked joints in the theater. We were suburban teenagers committing a revolutionary cultural act.

Clearly, 1972 was a big year for queer-oriented films. There was the made-for-TV movie, That Certain Summer, with Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook. I have always loved Martin Sheen for taking on that role when he was so young and vulnerable. And he ends up becoming President! But it was still too early for an out-and-out queer love story in mainstream movie houses. Ten years later there was a mediocre film, Making Love (1982) that played in theaters all across the country. I admit my pride (and pleasure) in seeing Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin in bed together even if that Angel, Kate Jackson, was awful. When I saw Philadelphia (1993) in downtown Berkeley (of all places), the crowd gasped when Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas kissed. The progress during the two decades from my early adolescence to adulthood seemed slow indeed. But things sped up after that, in part because of TV sitcoms like Ellen and Will & Grace. It is hard to admit that sometimes liberation has popular culture to thank.

Despite this long relationship with cinema, I am still one of those people who would rather read the novel than see the movie. Isherwood, of all people, understood that whenever a novel is adapted for the screen, a lot gets changed. But although it has been thirty years since I read A Single Man, Tom Ford’s adaptation, with its lushness and beautiful quotes from the novel sent me back to the book, and back to Isherwood’s life. He wrote the novel after a trial separation from his partner Bachardy provoked fears about being left alone. Yet they reconciled and lived together in a cocoon overlooking the Pacific until 1986, when Isherwood died at age 81.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968
acrylic on canvas,  83 1/2 x 119 1/2 in.
courtesy hockneypictures.com

In the novel, fifty-eight year old George Falconer lives in a small modest hillside home, not unlike Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s own home in Santa Monica. The literary George is not as debonair or wealthy as his film counterpart. Despite Tom Ford’s incredibly good taste in architecture (early Lautner, natch), décor, clothes, and cars, something gets lost in the film translation. It is not only that George lives in modernist architectural splendor and his gal pal Charlotte’s home recalls Ted Graber’s Beverly Hills, instead of the rickety canyon bohemia of Isherwood’s novel. Tom Ford operates in what some call a “post-gay” world: everybody knows someone gay, and if you live on the coast, you act like half the world is queer.

Santa Monica Canyon

Ford’s introduction of the suicide theme is akin to modern gratuitous violence. If there isn’t a revolver somewhere, we don’t feel alive enough. Of course, Isherwood didn’t need a gun; his text carried the urgency and the radical rage of the voice within, something he was always working with by removing some layers and not others. In the film, a potential suicide stands in for the rage—a sad and angry gay man would be too subtle without a pistol in today’s contemporary world.

A Single Man
courtesy The Weinstein Company

A Single Man
courtesy The Weinstein Company

A Single Man
courtesy The Weinstein Company

Ford takes the most beautiful scene in the novel—a swim in the ocean—and turns it into the visual leitmotif for the film. After his lover dies, George is always suspended in a kind of non-reality, turned upside down and sideways, but not quite drowning.

In 1964, few stories were as bold and took such a strong stance against the heterosexist hegemony as A Single Man did. Even today, save for some minor details, Isherwood’s novel could stand in as a contemporary indictment of the repressive right wing. But in Ford’s hands it feels like a nostalgic and luxurious film about an era when gay partners weren’t invited to the funerals but could still live very comfortable and tasteful lives together. Indeed, the thrill of the secrecy from the pre-Stonewall era has been replaced by Southern California movie affluence. Tom Ford can afford to make a film that floats beautifully above most of the world’s repressive queer reality.

In one of the film’s earliest scenes, adapted slightly from the novel, a child beats a bathroom scale with a hammer. This is the kind of fury that is just beneath the (proper British) surface of the novel, but for the most part it is lost in this all too pretty film. I wouldn’t mind the fabulous Lautner house or the vintage Mercedes, but I would have left the pistol in the drawer.

A Single Man
courtesy The Weinstein Company