50 years ago, today, I stepped from a Greyhound Bus, walked to Washington Square with a new friend and future lover, Joe Kelly, whom I had just met during the bus ride from Atlanta, via Richmond, to NYC, not giving a '20-somethingish' thought about the events that were soon to make our 'play-pretend' 'Happenings' in Atlanta seem like 'minor' skirmishes, compared to what was to ensue on Christopher Street, just days away........The 'seed' had been planted, even before I was aware of what would germinate from it......in 1962-3, when, as a then-naive teenager, I had stepped from a Silver Eagle to the hot New York Pavement, quickly separating from my classmates ....on our 'Senior Class Trip'....and sought out the possibilities that there were 'people like me'....somewhere, outside French Art Films.........well, the two or three that I had watched, after walking backward through the exit door of the Lyric Theater..... Shirtless men in warpaint, bohemian 'artistes' wearing berets and sandals, crowded shops....full of counter-cultural paraphernalia, women in heavy eye make-up, drag queens & gender-challenging 'fags'.....challenged my preconceptions of 'normality'....as that very word came to represent the 'aliens' who posed as the representatives of what American Society had become before the windows were shattered, as our own burgeoning Police Gestapo desperately moved 'in' to establish Control and Conformity.......again......I brought a new set of eyes to the World that I had dwelt uncomfortably within, only weeks before......and drove to Lee Optical to get a pair of glasses to facilitate better focus on what I was 'seeing'...... For a while......no more technicolored, wide-screen MGM Versions.......only the coarse-grained Black and White countercultural 'stuff' was even 'believable', now..........I was afraid of American propaganda , not of Virginia Woolf's license! Now....for a good microscope, and the tools to dissect the cadaver that had posed as 'Reality'.......
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