CHAPTER FIVE -- ALL RIGHT, MR. MAVETY, I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
I realized, during those first mornings as editor, the difficulty of accomplishing anything. Everest loomed, and I gazed upward from the depths. Modernismo resembled no mainstream business -- people felt free to drop in without appointments, and George expected me to make them feel big, important, top of the world. The reason: He imagined that anyone -- scrawny, pimply-faced wannabe models eager to drop trou, "writers" who planned to write a story but never would, photographers who hadn’t progressed beyond motel-room Polaroids -- anyone at all was a possible source of revenue. Since George perceived no difference between top-notch photography, professional writing, beautiful flesh, and their negative versions, any jackass off the street carried, for him, the same potential as a Robert Mapplethorpe or a Jim French...an Andrew Holleran or an Edmund White...an Al Parker or a muscleman from Colt Studio. ("Money, Mr. Staggs," he often reminded me, rubbing his hands like Shylock.)
Suddenly le tout New York wanted me, for I was in a position to do things for them. Or so they thought. They phoned to invite me to restaurants, bathhouses, to Studio 54 and the Palladium, to birthday parties for strangers and orgies with one sex, both sexes, and others. My phone never stopped ringing, and when I wasn't at my desk the receptionist paged me by intercom: "Sam, Chuck Holmes of Falcon Studio on line 2; "Sam, call Casey Donovan; Catalina Video, line 4; Graven Image, Zeus, Surge Studio, Kristen Bjorn on long distance from Rio, Jean-Daniel Cadinot calling from Paris;" and a hundred other specialists in the art of male nakedness, all eager to speak to me a.s.a.p.
Agents phoned, the genuine and the faux. A dominatrix named Victoria who did a bit of agenting in off hours tried to strong arm me to accept the work of her client, T.R. Witomski, a wannabe humorist who wasn't funny. Amazingly, she herself accused the client of plagiarism even while pushing his work! At times, I almost missed the rowdy Rhodes School teens. And working for the Methodists surely took a lesser toll on nerves and spirit.
Publicists phoned too, though only, I noticed, to invite me to obscure gay musicals and message-ridden coming-out dramas staged in dank venues far from Broadway. Because, of course, "respectable" New York, the New York of show biz, fashion, and publishing, couldn’t afford to deal with real, out, gay magazines. Or so they believed. The gayer these respectable citizens were -- e.g., employees of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, denizens of the Manhattan art world, minor lights of network television, emerging film stars -- the more closeted and the more fearful of exposure. Still, they all knew who we were, having read us or, more accurately, ogled our pages. The gayest city in the world was still, in many ways, a closet. New York was never the liberal oasis of repute -- and still isn't. Under the thin patina of tolerance lurk all the prejudices. I heard more antisemitic remarks in Manhattan than I did in the South.
In a later chapter you’ll read about Virginia Apuzzo of the National Gay Task Force and her heroic battles for gay rights. In one angry confrontation she likened members of the New York City Council to the Ku Klux Klan — and she was right!
The eighties, of course, was a right-wing decade, even in New York. The Times, that bastion of bourgeois duplicity, reported not on gays but "homosexuals." Only recently had the paper eliminated such words as "faggot" and "fruit." For a time early in the decade AIDS did not yet have a name. In my early days at the magazines it was often called, with nervous uncertainty, by the grotesque epithet "gay cancer." Gays on TV were flaming queens like Paul Lynde, or maudlin closet cases like Tony Randall on Love, Sidney, or killer lesbians in a dreary movie of the week. In Washington, the Reagan White House did nothing while thousands died. Forty years later, in the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump would do the same.
Like a forlorn Cinderella with feet in the chimney, I worked long hours and offered up my personal life as a sacrifice. Not to money, for the pay was decent but not six figures, nor was my sacrifice made to the Cause, though I believed in one back then. No, I set out to teach myself how to be a damn good editor. By that I mean not only putting together well balanced and engaging issues of the magazines, but also such essentials as line editing, i.e., transforming mediocre writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, into something at least readable, if not exactly immortal prose. Also correcting grammar and killing typos. I knew I could do it, and I did. I turned many a sow's ear into a well-told story or, on occasion, a riveting nonfiction article. I say this not to boast, but because it's factual. Something of a case history, perhaps. And I'll always be grateful to George Mavety for sweeping aside his doubts and letting me run the show.
By coming in on weekends I streamlined the editorial office and brought order to the chaotic art department, which up to now had been run like a preschool for grown-up boys. More important, I taught myself to plan an issue, edit it, and shepherd it through publication. In that, common sense was invaluable along with a certain sense of style. I wondered why the editors of In Touch, Blueboy, Torso, New York Native, Christopher Street, and other gay monthlies and weeklies hadn’t given it a try. I remember those publications either as drab, arch, strident, or strung out.
My goal was to rebrand the content of our magazines while retaining the erotic structure. The prevailing editorial vision among gay publications was "gimme another one of those." Unoriginality reigned, along with resistance to anything new. Then, too, recreational drugs and creativity make a bad match. I'm not calling names, but -- certain publications reflected the drug habits of those who produced them. One of my contributors, who wrote for other gay monthlies, told of his visit to the offices of ______. On the receptionist's desk was a large crystal bowl of what he took at first to be confectioner's sugar. "Help yourself," he was told. "C'mon, do a line."
No doubt it was sweet, but this wasn't the "sugar" you sprinkle on coffee cake. And it soured the magazine in question.
An exception was The Advocate, well edited and wide ranging in coverage, and later, under the same umbrella, Advocate Men. I had cordial relations from afar with several of the staff in California. And Stallion, whose editor, Jerry Douglas, became a fine colleague and friend.
As that winter of 1982 lapsed into early spring, someone gave me a ficus tree to prettify my office in the Sahara of the beaux arts. It grew, and so did my self-confidence in the job. I knew I would survive.
I loved your books. Re-read them many times, loaned them, out never to return! I tried signing up for this subscription, but Substack really hated Canadians who love Americans writing. I'll keep trying. 💜🇨🇦🍁🍁 Rick