Welcome! I’m glad you’re here, and I’m delighted that you like hearing about my adventures in the gay world of New York in the 1980s. Before Substack, I never imagined that posting a book online, chapter by chapter, could be such a lively challenge as well as so much fun.
As I explain in my Introduction, this memoir was intended as a hardcover book. It remains a book, of course, although you are reading it in a radically different format. I’m still fine-tuning various parts, especially illustrations and options for readers such as the Comments button, which is now enabled. I look forward to hearing from you.
Since this is indeed a book, perhaps you would like to see the Contents page as a kind of road map (oops! GPS). I hope the chapter titles will amuse and intrigue you. Have you guessed that I like a punchy title? You can’t judge this book by its cover, since there isn’t one, but I hope that readers, those present and those yet to come, will judge it favorably by its unfolding chapters.
I plan to post one chapter a week, usually on Friday, which, according to my calculations, will take us to early autumn 2023. I hope you’ll not only stay with me but also invite your friends to join us.
Beyond that…May I tempt you with an hors d’oeuvre? After Did You Sleep With the Models? I plan to post another book. That one, also completed during the pandemic, is similar (e.g., it has a celebrity conga line and a villain list) but also quite different and again with what I’m told is a fetching title, one word of which is “Sodom.” I can’t reveal more at this point, but if Sodom comes, can Gomorrah be far behind? One editor called it “the best title I’ve seen all year” before deeming the manuscript too hot to handle. I trust you won’t have the same concerns.
Cheers,
Sam
DID YOU SLEEP WITH THE MODELS? — CONTENTS
1 Thank You for Dropping Dead
2 A Famous Artist Sets My Story in Motion
3 Tu che le vanità
4 Conniptions
5 All Right, Mr. Mavety, I'm Ready for My Close-up
6 Arsenic and Old Fakes
7 Limited Warfare
8 Putting It Together
9 Mid-Century Modernismo; or, How to Succeed in Publishing Without Really Decorating
10 Kristen Bjorn on Both Sides of the Camera
11 Dirty Words
12 Diplomacy; or, How to Say Nasty Things in the Nicest Way
13 Al Parker, Maybe the Biggest Star of All
14 Mickey Squires, The Nicest Naked Man in the Business
15 The Street of Boys
16 ICONS: Richard Locke, Casey Donovan, Dick Fisk, Kurt Marshall, Jack Wrangler
17 Springtime for Rutledge
18 Part One: Writers, and What They Wrote
18 Part Two: How Dare You Call Me a Philatelist!
18 Part Three: A Night at the Opera, “Tales of the City,” Homo Verse, and The Men That Got Away
19 Here a Bulge, There a Bulge, Everywhere a Bulge Bulge
20 Who’s That Lady? That’s No Lady, That’s Albert Nobbs
21 How We Got That Model: Mandate Attends a Photo Shoot
22 Don’t Put the Blame on Mame
23 Mr. President, Miss Taylor, Mr. Thomson, Our Miss Arden, and Fellini With a Laptop
24 Pauline Kael Talks About Gay Men
25 Who’s Afraid of Robert Mapplethorpe?
26 Yes, Virginia, There Really Is a George Mavety
27 Maria Callas, Meet Mamie Van Doren
28 Tom of Finland
29 Darkness Visible
30 Confinement
31 Harvey Fierstein on Broadway
32 Shots Are Fired, But the Caravan Moves On
33 Part One: We’re Going, and We’re Gonna Have a Happy Time
33 Part Two: Three Continents for the Price of One
34 Champions
35 An Afternoon with Maureen Stapleton
36 All This, and Fire Island Too
37 USA Confidential
38 Is There Life After California?
39 As Time Goes By
40 In New Orleans, the Streets Are Paved in Jazz
41 Europe on Five Men a Day
42 In Boston, Please Remain Fully Clothed While Dancing…and Toronto Does Not Like the Word “Suck”
43 Part One: “You Stay Long in Greece?”
43 Part Two: The Actress Wasn’t at Home
44 The House of the Setting Sun
45 Bosom Buddies
46 The Passé Recaptured
Acknowledgments