Party of One (13 page)

One Sunday night when I was eleven, I flipped through the channels for something to watch, and I rested on PBS, because there were robots on it. And thus began my brief but intense love affair with
Doctor Who.
The show hit all my buttons: it was sci-fi, it was British, and I was the only one I knew who had heard of it. Plus, it was all so charmingly low-budget. It felt like it needed me, and I needed to be needed. I became a fan right away.

After I'd been watching for a few months, the station ran a promo for a “
Doctor Who
and
Star Trek
Convention” down at the St. Louis Art Museum.
What.
I begged my parents to drive me down there and drop me off for the day. I was sure it would be packed with people my age, people who wandered their schools feeling like half a circle. People who were waiting for me the way I'd been waiting for them.

My parents relented, and we drove the half-hour downtown. I got there right as the doors opened at 10 a.m., and told my folks: “Pick me up at five.” I went inside and, well, it was full of what I now recognize as the kinds of grown-ups who would willingly have gone to
Doctor Who
and
Star Trek
conventions in 1982: adults with long Tom Baker scarves and Captain Kirk costumes, or pointed ears, or
I GROK SPOCK
T-shirts. Or all of it.

I remember saying to myself, “Oh,
hell
no.”

The attendees weren't particularly kind to me, for what it's worth. I was the youngest person there by a decade or more, and people gave me looks. Like:
We have come to dress like space lords and talk to each other in Klingon; what on Earth is a
child
doing here?

I made the best of it for as long as I could, sat through a screening of
The Trouble with Tribbles
that the entire audience recited line for line, and then gave up and called home, begging my parents to pick me up.

Twelve years later, this would basically be the story of my first few gay bar experiences in New York.

In 1994, the biggest of the big gay bars in New York City was a place called Splash on Nineteenth Street in the eastern reaches of Chelsea. I had learned this from the
Village Voice,
which in my last few weeks of college I studied more closely than any textbook. The clubs—Limelight, the Roxy, the Tunnel—were out of the question, as a $20 cover charge was not in my budget, so I wrote down the address for Splash and made a plan to hit it on my first Friday.

The countdown to the end of that first Friday was endless; I watched the clock at Saatchi & Saatchi like Britney would, years later, at the beginning of the “Baby One More Time” video. At 5:00 p.m. on the dot, I ran out the door. I didn't even go home to have a spritz of Drakkar Noir and put on a casual button-down; there was just no time. My people were waiting. I threw open the doors, and, as was required by local ordinance at the time, Robin S's “Show Me Love” was playing. The place was jam-packed. Go-go boys in speedos taking showers in glass cases. Videos of gay pride parades of old playing on the video monitors. And as I ordered a beer and scanned the crowd, I began to notice something. The boys were…oddly similar. Short hair, lots of product, styled forward. Tank tops, tight. Jeans, tight. They even had the same shoulders. I had never seen such uniformity, and I had spent six years at a boys' school with a dress code.

Once I had downed the two beers necessary for striking up a conversation with a stranger, I picked a handsome guy who was standing alone at the other end of the room. My attempts to make eye contact were not working out, so I walked over and extended my hand. “Hi! I'm Dave.” He scanned me from head to toe.

“No, thanks.”

I have a theory. I think everybody needs to join a club at some point in his or her life. People have a natural hunger to be on the inside, and the later they satisfy that hunger, the more of a nightmare person they turn into. Take fraternities and sororities: a person who has fit in somewhere before having joined a fraternity tends to put the experience in its proper place, while a person for whom it's their first club tends to take it way too seriously. Similarly, if a person gets through college without ever having been on the inside, and then moves to a big city and is immediately accepted into the gay community, he has a tendency to be the worst. He learns the rules and the lingo and the dress code, and he is fucking vicious to the people who don't know them. He has been denied membership in a club until very late in life, and
someone is going to pay.

In the gay male community of New York City in 1994, the fat guy was the someone who paid. It was not yet cool to be a hefty, scruffy gay dude the way it is now. Gay men have always been a little more body-conscious than the rest of the population; guys are visual and sexual and disgusting and hot, after all. But in the years after the initial AIDS crisis, as its death toll kept hitting new peaks, the focus on the physical became manic. A community whose most public faces had been sick and dying for more than a decade seemed bent on projecting health. Fitness. Power.

Or maybe broad shoulders and abs are the mutually agreed-upon hottest things, the way blond hair and big tits are the all-access pass to the straight male world, and having them is the surest way to get yourself laid. A little of both, probably.

The rest of the Chelsea bars followed the same template as Splash. Same guys. Same rules. Same Robin S. But I was an eager young man fresh out of Catholic school, so I kept searching. In any major city, there are gay bar magazines, tour books to the scene to tell you where to go and which nights to go there. There were two in New York at the time:
Homo Xtra
and
Next.
I grabbed them both from Splash, took them home and went at them with the Hi-Liters I'd stolen from work. My home on the Upper East Side, the place where all postcollegiate prepsters settle when they move to New York, boasted affordable rents and numerous draft beer specials, but almost no gay bars. The magazines listed one ritzy piano bar in the east Sixties for guys in their seventies, another place near Bloomingdale's exclusively for Asian twinks and Asian twink enthusiasts. And then one place called The Regent, which was summarized thusly: “A young entrepreneurial crowd mixes with an appreciative older audience.” Young?
I am that!
Entrepreneurial?
I am in the world of business, sort of!
Older people?
I have been taught to respect my elders, plus think of the stories they could tell!
Sold. I dressed in my finest polo shirt and khakis and hopped on the southbound 6 train, toward my destiny.

The Regent was down by the tram to Roosevelt Island, a hidden little place without so much as a sign—just a red light over the door.
The appreciative older audience likes to relive the bad old days,
I figured. I swung open the door and entered just as “Show Me Love” by Robin S. made its crescendo. The lights were dim. The crowd was segregated: young'uns along the wall, older guys—and we are talking
older
guys—along the bar. Three empty, silent feet in between. The two groups surveyed one another. It was like a junior high mixer. I struck up a conversation with a good-looking younger guy in a very tight tank top and a goatee. “You new?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at the older gentlemen. “I am!” I said. “Well, you know.
Good luck.
” Talking did not seem to be on anyone's agenda at this place. A guy at the bar signaled him over and he went. They spoke for a quick moment, the older guy settled his tab, and they left. I stood alone, with my back against the wall, nursing a Bud Light bottle.
A cold room. It'll warm up,
I figured.

After twenty minutes or so, the drunkest of the older guys at the bar waved me over. I stepped to him.

“Hi! I'm Dave.”

“You're new.”

“I am!”

He looked me up and down and then up again and then down again. “How much?”

Have you ever had the experience of being in your kitchen and you see an ant, and you think
How strange, an ant,
and then your scope of vision immediately widens out, and suddenly you see a
vast network of ants
who have just been there—making orderly lines, serving their queen, eating your food since God knows when—and until this moment you were utterly, blissfully blind to what was right in front of you? This was that kind of deal. Immediately I realized what any halfway-savvy fifth-grader with decent reading comprehension skills would have picked up on immediately: “young entrepreneurial types and an appreciative older audience” meant “prostitutes and johns.” This was a hustler bar. I shook the hand of my appreciative older audience, finished my beer in one large gulp, and excused myself.

I had a hard time finding my place in New York's gay scene, and while today I recognize the problem as internalized homophobia and a lamentable eagerness to find fulfillment in a bar, at the time I blamed CeCe Peniston. Where now I recognize that the mid-'90s were a golden age of gay-bar music—a perfect, shining moment in time that has earned its place alongside the Motown era and the classic rock of the '70s—at the time it worked my nerves. But that shit holds up; go into the most basic gay bar in your area—the one that smells like an old fog machine and is called Rumors or Illusions or The Malebox or whatever—and see how long it takes for you to hear “Finally.” If you have not heard it in thirty minutes or less, drinks are on me. (Limit 1, well and draft only.) In the '90s, disco was becoming less of a dirty word and the gay community was becoming a marketing segment. Suddenly all you needed was a drum machine, some rudimentary recording equipment, and a shouting black woman, and you could be a gay bar superstar. Black Box, La Bouche, Corina, Real McCoy, too many to mention. They aimed for “Let the Music Play,” and when they missed, at least they landed among the “Gonna Make You Sweat”s.

There were a handful of bars in the still-intimidating East Village, and I thought if I didn't find my home there, maybe I'd just get stabbed to death and the whole thing would be less of an issue. I immediately felt more at home in these places: The Boiler Room, The Phoenix, Wonder Bar. They had less hostile guys and more adventurous ninety-nine-compact-disc jukeboxes, stocked with ninety-eight fresh, interesting albums—Stereolab, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing—and, in position ninety-nine, Madonna's
Immaculate Collection.
And come 11 p.m. on a Friday night, the Chelsea boys in their Caesar haircuts would start to arrive, and your Morphine would be cut with “La Isla Bonita.” It never failed.