Queer's Progress | Author's Note

This book largely comes from life, following my move to New York City in October 1978.

I’d spent the summer working various Noranda Mines claims amongst caribou and grizzlies in the Alaska Range, the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen. Eating lunch on the slopes of Red Mountain one August afternoon, my geologist boss and I watched a tornado sweeping back and forth in the next valley, quite possibly its sole human witnesses.

Then, telling people I thought I’d give America’s other great wilderness a try, I headed for NYC, hitchhiking the segment from Bozeman, Montana through Wyoming to Boulder, Colorado.

Hitchhiking was something you could do in those days. There was a new twist this trip, in that several drivers found my next ride for me via CB radio. Of course I encountered a glitch, too: Wyoming was enjoying a natural-gas drilling boom and when I arrived at sunset in Lander, no motel rooms were to be had. I presented myself at the jail, where they took away my belt and shoelaces, but kindly put me up for the night.

In New York I stayed with my parents in Kips Bay until I found a job and apartment. In those days one particular pair of buildings on East 10th Street between Avenues B and C advertised weekly in the Village Voice; apparently they never filled up entirely. Part of the problem might have been the super’s appearance. He was a nice guy whose wife—(ex-wife)—had shot him three times in the face. Sometimes, chatting on the sidewalk with him as he awaited a prospective tenant, I’d see someone coming up the street catch sight of him and decide to walk on by.

But finding a rent-stabilized apartment for less than $200 a month in what was coming to be known as Loisaida (I preferred Alphabet City) was not the bargain it seemed, for, as the New York Daily News remarked, it was one of the worst blocks in the city. Unbelievable; perhaps comparable to London’s East End in Jack the Ripper’s era! It looked bombed-out, too, much like a part of Palermo I’d seen, but from arson, not World War II. Most of the buildings—walk-up tenements—were in ruins. On my block, which appeared to be the fiefdom of a burly sort always surrounded by prepubescent boys, only five of some 25 buildings were occupied.

Thus, I really witnessed incidents like the book's dogs and the aftermath of the death-by-hammock. I was mugged at gunpoint once, just like Andrew, and another time with a club held over my head. One morning before dawn I woke up to the touch of a knife; a man had flown through my fifth-floor window, the one well away from the fire escape. But compared to others I fared all right. If eggs were thrown at me in the East River Park, well, others were shot to death there.

Merely living in Loisaida was an education! I decided I’d seen everything the day I saw a woman masturbating on Avenue B’s sidewalk. Then through a friend I met a sweet kid who during our blissful week secretly began seeing someone else, and who moreover worked on the side as a hustler. Pablo is partly based on him (even unto Harvey Fierstein’s accurate characterization and the Ruth Draper and Oscar Wilde memorizations) and partly on several neighbors, one of whom, kicked out of his own apartment by a new roommate in 1979 or 1980, in retrospect was perhaps the first AIDS victim I knew, shivering his life away on staircase landings. In the summer of 1980, fully a year before the Times’ famous first story about what came to be known as AIDS, a young doctor friend doing his residencies told me there were some dozen gay men in hospitals around town dying from an unknown, invariably fatal disease.

But the East Village had its charms. The locksmith down the street said he’d known Walker Evans. My new phone number apparently was Mark Strand’s old one. Alan Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky was rumored to live down the block. (Ginsburg gave a reading at CCNY a few years later, where I admired his technique in picking up young men, choosing beauties from the audience to crouch in front of him holding his zither music. I attended with “Eddie,” whom Ginsberg was on the point of choosing until he saw me glowering at him.) “Eddie” and I loved De Robertis Pasticceria on First Avenue, blithely unaware that it served as the collection point for John Gotti’s daily takings—excellent pastry. There were good movie theatres, too—the St. Marks Cinema, where the audience talked back at the screen (most memorably during the notorious scene in Bertolucci’s Luna, where the profound silence was broken by a strong Black voice: “She—it!”), and Theatre 80 St. Marks. The St. Marks Bookstore was also an asset; I too had a crush on the clerk with the earring. And I remember how the filming of Ragtime transformed 11th Street between Avenues A and B to the teeming Lower East Side circa 1900, hordes of extras dashing around in costume.

The Jeep roaring down the sidewalk to avoid 14th Street’s traffic was all too real. “Shit color” is a direct steal from Charlie Chaplin’s classic My Autobiography. I knew several New York cops, including a rookie who, told to stay until the coroner arrived, helped himself to the dead man’s refrigerator and sat down next to him on the couch with a cold one to watch TV. Andrew’s black eye is based on the one I got remonstrating with kids from Jersey as they pushed a Dumpster into traffic. The landlady scene is a transcript from life (but she ran a good building; I was so happy to flee Loisaida for Hell’s Kitchen).

The decapitation I read about in the Daily News, but in 1984 one of my students at City College gave me her eyewitness account; the description is hers, I swear it. Angel Estrada, the young designer who achieved fame before dying almost overnight after being diagnosed with AIDS, was a boyhood friend of “Eddie”’s. For a long time Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive so dominated airplay that one day I walked all the way to the subway to a relay of radios and boomboxes blaring it.

Ned’s calling Prof. Onorato “Prof. Pastrami” comes from my working as a waiter at a mid-70s seminar of AIG hotshots at C.V. Starr’s estate near Brewster, Back O'Beyond: The phone on the conference table rang, the executives looked at one another, then as one at the sole woman among them. With no good grace she answered it. The call was for Mr. Musto. Covering the receiver, she asked, “Is there a Mr. Pastrami here?”

As for the New York Public Library, renovations during the 80s at one point left the light-board setup as I describe. (“Eddie” never worked there, though.) Incidentally, I only recently saw Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 movie You’re a Big Boy Now; can't say I cared much for it, but its opening is eerily similar to that of Queer’s Progress.

I wrote Queer's Progress in 1995 and 1996 when I was living in Hollywood. From the start the writing went well, giving me the sense of having found my metier at last. And the writing routine was perfect: Coffee with the L.A. Times (then as now a much underrated newspaper), then work while listening to the radio (including KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic with Chris Douridas, the best interviewer I've ever heard), then a stroll or run up Canyon Drive into Griffith Park. Those steep park ascents, surging blood to the brain, are unsurpassed for working out plot points! Frequently I'd see John Rechy walking along, and once the great actor Hal Holbrook. Often I’d go on to the top of Mt. Hollywood; one January day a man there like myself in shorts and T shirt turned and murmured, “It’s 17 below in Milwaukee.” Twice or three times a week I’d circle the park’s whole upper drive on foot, past the famous overlook, thus down to Los Feliz Boulevard and home; a little jaunt of ten or twelve miles, incomparably beautiful and rewarding.