DESTRUCTION OF SODOM
Melik Kaylan reports on
the troubled gay culture of Greenwich Village
New York MARCH was quite the cruellest month for New York's Mayor Koch. At the same time as a massive corruption scandal con- sumed his executive branch, a different scandal which he gets embroiled in annual- ly, namely the Gay Rights Bill, moved through the city legislature. Towards the end of March the Bill was passed. It was a triumph the Mayor can ill afford.
As things stand, two dozen of the Mayor's appointees and close friends have variously resigned or been indicted — one has even committed suicide over rather routine practices such as extortion and bribery in the Parking Violations Bureau and other city agencies. Explosive though the situation is, in the eyes of many New Yorkers these are venial sins. They've been around for years and, despite media shock horror, the popular indignation against them remains diffuse. New Yorkers are egregiously individualistic creatures; on the whole, they prefer a bureaucracy they can do business with, shall we say' personally? The Gay Rights Bill is another matter altogether. Ed Koch's sponsorship of this legislation has been his single most un- popular, hence by definition most prine,1‘ pled, stand over the last few years. Right*: or wrongly he is thought to have a persona' interest in the Bill's passage. It is, perhaPs, the only issue over which his Jewish consti- tuency has been prepared to abandon hiln. During his recent successful run for re- election, a Brooklyn-based group of rabbis excommunicated him for abetting homosexuality. Every year, when the Bu came around, New York would host one of its most colourful and characteristic specta- cles. Outside the City Council building throngs of excited homosexuals would, shout support, while opposing them stood rows of Hassidic Jews, black-garbed and bearded, hurling biblical insults and chant- ing invocations against the devil. It's a scene which, incidentally, speaks volumes about the problems faced by religion in the television age — religious fervour looks s° much uglier than political fervour. Up to now Mayor Koch has been lucky. The Bill has been voted down every Year: and the publicity around it has faded quickly thereafter. This year the Mayor s lobbying finally paid off and enough key votes changed sides to change the balance. However innocuous it is said to be, the Bill, which outlaws discrimination on sex- ual grounds, will cause enormous resent- ment. New Yorkers now know a thing or two about homosexuality, chiefly because of the Aids epidemic, but also because gays, like all minorities, seek recognition so stridently, falsely equating it with acceptance.
Acceptance they can forget, at least for how, but certainly gays have achieved recognition. Until very recently, it was a little indecent, if not suspicious, for heteros to know too much about homosexuality. Indeed during the hearings conducted last autumn in the borough of Queens into whether healthy children should be forced to attend classes with children suffering from Aids, it became clear that some parents didn't realise that homosexuals actually exist. For those of us unfortunate enough to reside in Manhattan's Green- wich Village, the epicentre of Aids, it was impossible to believe such blissful ignor- ance still existed. If one million Americans now carry the virus, as is estimated, 40 per cent of whom live in New York, meaning 400,000 souls, and 78 per cent of those are gay men, one can only imagine how many human vessels of the disease are spilling around the streets of the Village. For this historic neighbourhood is the country's, Possibly the world's, biggest homosexual ghetto.
As anybody who is remotely literary Probably knows, Greenwich Village used to be a literary ghetto. Its largely cobbled streets with brownstone houses run west- ward from Washington Square to the Hudson riverfront. Poe, Dreiser, Bret Harte, Dos Passos, Marianne Moore and many other illustrious literary figures lived here at one time or another. In the Fifties, Jazz and beatnik clubs found a congenial home here. When people described the Village as bohemian, that's what they meant. Not any more. Times have changed. Since the early Seventies, gays from around the United States, and, even- tually, the world, have moved here in such numbers that they have created a new kind of ethnic neighbourhood, one based on sexual proclivity. The old ethnic groups, Irish, Italian, Jewish etc, each already endowed with its Own shared sense of family, religion and national tradition, brought them to bear on the process of creating a neighbourhood. The homosexual community, by its very nature bereft of these properties, substi- tutes in their stead its own actuating Principle of sex. Furthermore, these mis- sing properties are the only bulwarks against the relentless commercialism of American life. It is not surprising, there- fore, that the two distinguishing features of the e gay community are sex and commerce to put it another way, the commerce of 'ex. Hence the proliferation of sex clubs, sexual merchandise shops, men's fashion boutiques and so on.
Walking around Greenwich Village one is struck by the sheer commercial success and excess of gay culture. And although many Greenwich Village merchants are old-fashioned immigrants, Greeks, Sici- lians, Bengalis etc, they are only too happy to exploit the habits of their clientele. Sex clubs are mostly run by the mafia. News- agents are well stocked with glossy gay pornographic magazines sporting titles like Torso and Stud. Poster and card shops display an inordinate number of 'Male Odalisques' (sic). Drug accessory shops, seldom owned by gays, were the primary suppliers of 'poppers', recently outlawed drugs which are said to relax the anal muscles. All of which is not to say that homosexuals are not the chief exploiters of their own kind. After all it is they who buy the pornography, who pay -six or eight dollars to enter dark, dank back rooms to sodomise each other anonymously. Bout- iques, bars and sex shops aplenty are run exclusively by and for gays, especially along Christopher Street, the geographical fons et origo of gay culture. Where it meets the waterfront, sinister leather bars with names like the Ramrod, Spike, and the Mine Shaft long catered to gay sado- masochists until they were closed down just two months ago. The Mine Shaft, which was essentially a vast basement with a bar, although it resembled nothing so much as a dungeon, used to make $10,000 on a good day. When the authorities closed the place it was full of racks, some in the shape of crosses, to which men were padlocked before being whipped and sex- ually abused.
The homosexual culture of Greenwich Village does have a literary side. However it is not of the old kind. Gay novels are now written and set in the Village. The Oscar Wilde bookshop located, of all places, on Gay Street stocks most of them. Gay plays are frequently produced in local theatres. Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy opened here before it moved to Broadway. Whereas 30 years ago the area gave birth to the Village Voice, it now sustains several homosexualist journals of opinion such as the Advocate, Christopher Street, and New York Native. They are all highly political and disproportionately in- fluential, capable of browbeating federal Aids researchers and city officials alike.
Here then is the reductio ad absurdum of the ideas of Tom Paine and other prophets of the Enlightenment, in particular Hamil- ton, Madison and Co, who were so con- cerned with protecting the minority from `the tyranny of the majority'. Only in America's fragmented culture where, to borrow a phrase from physics, no unified field theory of morality exists, could mass homosexuality flourish. Numbers dictate; the market, both political and commercial, responds blindly. Gone is the old literary ambience of the Village, obliterated by a subculture whose unifying principle is vice, despite its protestations to the contrary. (If such a high percentage of practising homosexuals were not sexual compulsives, fewer would be infected with the Aids virus than is the case — 80 per cent, according to one official estimate.) Although it is still virtually impossible to utter heresy of this sort in the New York media, I am not alone in wondering if a community or society which prides itself on sustaining such a phenomenon is not invit- ing misfortune. While the country as a whole reels before an enormity whose full dimensions have yet to be encompassed, the effects of Aids are palpable in the Village. Restaurateurs complain of dimi- nished business. In consequence, homosexual waiters, who are legion, are being sacked. Young men visibly suffering from Aids ghost about with rheumy eyes, some on walking sticks because their mus- cles and bones are so weakened. Many wear dark glasses to hid a chalky comple- xion or tell-tale bruising around the eyes caused by chemotherapy. It isn't unusual to discover oneself sitting next to such people in a Village restaurant or café.
Worse, one still sees them coming out of sex clubs, only a few of which have closed down, having perhaps caused the ruin of another life, for habits die slower than people, it seems. I even know a few sufferers who continue to lift weights. What bizarre spectacles they are, each a walking simulacrum of vanity-unto-death.
Little has changed on Christopher Street; if a bit less populous, it still does brisk business, especially at weekends with the influx of out-of-towners. Public tele- phones ring at odd hours with calls from stricken gays who, despite their condition, or because of it, are angling after anony- mous 'phone-sex'. There is still a profusion of posters on walls and lampposts — a testament to the adaptability of the Amer- ican entrepreneurial spirit. Announce- ments advertise bogus cures (`pneumatic medicine' is the latest), safe sex associa- tions, spiritual cults and cheap flights to France for treatment.
Witnessing it all, one cannot help think- ing that the gay community is a victim of its own successful propaganda. Evidently, only homosexuals and their partisans in the media were unable to predict the appear- ance of something like Aids, despite the epidemic of hepatitis, intestinal amoebas and other infections which preceded it.
Always social mores, not natural laws, are at the root of their problems. Pointless to argue that morals are not arbitrarily con- cocted on a sudden whim by a whole civilisation. At the very least, they are surely a code of natural rules by which a tribe learns to survive over centuries.
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