CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: THE PASSÉ RECAPTURED
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
Every day at work my colleagues and I lived out the fantasies of thousands of gay men. As noted earlier, however, those fantasies fell wide of the mark. We arrived at work and left as we might have done at Macy's or on Wall Street. Sex took place -- usually -- after hours. True, our context as purveyors of male flesh was rare in the workplace. Surely neither department store nor fiduciary offered employees our level of glandular stimulation. The quid pro quo, however, was this: popular opinion tarred us as
disreputable and sub rosa. We might have been charter members of the Legion of Indecency. That stigma, though faded, remains. Even in this new century, when
everyone’s orgasm is headline news on social media and elsewhere, I would not be hired to teach at the Rhodes School, that unfortunate institution on West Eighty-third Street, even if it hadn't kicked the bucket years ago. Nor by the Methodists, another former employer, generally a tolerant and forgiving lot. Or so the denomination was until recently, when hundreds of congregations split off over the issue of gay marriage and gay ministers. Meaning, of course, homophobic self-righteousness. Their tolerance and forgiveness, I fear, stops short of turning…the other cheek.
A recent column on Huffington Post sums it up: "Working In Porn Is Awesome, Until You Want to Find Another Job." (The author used a pseudonym, which I would never consider.) I don't know the trajectories of my former colleagues, but I consider myself fortunate to have morphed from editor to writer, first for magazines -- Archetectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Artnews, New York, Opera News -- and later as author of seven books, with others in progress. Do I advertise my years in Triple X? No, just as I don't announce upon meeting someone for the first time, "How do you do? I'm gay." Anyone who's interested will find out soon enough.
The goneness of the world I have revisited in this memoir sometimes haunts me. Kristen Bjorn expressed similar nostalgia in a recent email. In many ways that world of New York in the 1980s is as remote as the Belle Epoque or the Roaring Twenties. In my memory, though, it's vividly present and alive.
Did I imagine, when I jotted those diary entries, and hoarded correspondence, and kept a duplicate Rolodex for some unclear future use, that I might someday be the one to chronicle that short-lived erotic paradise, that gay Camelot of the late twentieth century? Maybe so. More likely I assumed that, like everything else, it would pass and that I must grab and perpetuate every transitory moment. Let us remember, also, that in the 1980s and beyond, many of us walked a shaky tightrope over a deep abyss. It was ill-advised not to seize the day. A man I dated said, "Why save money, why plan for the future? Let's go! Next year we could all be dead."
About ten years after leaving the magazines, I began planning a memoir of my time there. That was in the mid-1990s. But I was still too close to the event. Trying to focus the recent past proved a frustration, like reading at twilight through smudged eyeglasses. Then, too, the present overruled the past, as it always should do. I laid the memoir aside to write other books, to travel, and, ironically, to find more lovers than ever walked through the door at Modernismo.
Then, in those first desperate days of 2020, when Covid-19 menaced the world and a pandemic ensued, and a fool in the White House advised household bleach and other idiotic curatives, I assembled my papers, set about locating everyone I knew back then who still survived, and established a daily writing schedule. Soon I realized that this book, more than just a memoir, would record a vanished era that deserved preservation for gays of the future. My self-appointed task was to shape the material of those years into a clear and coherent narrative.
Unlike several other memoirists who lived through those post-Stonewall decades, and especially the AIDS-haunted eighties, I have written without sobs of survivor guilt or tarantellas of regret. Those indulgent emotions serve no purpose and do no one any good. Extremists would say even now, as some did then, that the sexual content of gay magazines encouraged unsafe behavior. Which is like blaming Agatha Christie for serial killers.
Nor have I bowed to the overbearing, self-righteous, politically correct who, perversely, have concocted an agenda that approves sexuality only if it privileges oppression, remorse, and contrition over pleasure and intimacy. That joyless demographic, so happy to be unhappy, seems ignorant of its lineage, as of so much else.
In truth, it is the offspring of harsh, seventeenth-century New England puritanism mated with hypocritical Victorian morality, and glued onto present-day American religiosity. A joyless pedigree indeed, fueled by arrogant self-righteousness that is dangerously similar to the agenda of those who hate us. Those crusaders who, like the late Andrea Dworkin, claim feminism in their anti-porn crusade, do not stop there. Gay erotica is as much their target as are the nude paintings of Gauguin, Renoir, Titian, Botticelli — their blind rage has no end. Nor does their stupidity. Have you encountered a member of this species? I have; and I assure you they’re available in male as well as female form.
My wish, in writing this memoir, has been to summon up New York as it was in the 1980s and will never be again, and to focus those days at 155 Sixth Avenue with clarity and honesty, with carnality and wit, and with the occasional tear. I wrote the book I wanted to read, as every writer should do. But I had in mind also those who might savor these pages like the unfolding chapters of a novel, or lose themselves in the narrative as if at the movies.
Still others, I imagined, might stroll through and pause here and there as if visiting a museum. Call it the Museum of Modernismo Art. In nonfiction writing, one can use novelistic techniques without shortchanging facts. To do so, I set out to produce a factual, realistic entertainment set in New York, with plot -- beginning, middle, end -- dialogue, scenes of conflict and hilarity, friendship and betrayal, romance and disappointment, irony and suspense, along with music, money, guest appearances by the famous and the infamous, and a generous amount of sex.
And sad farewells to those who died too soon.
Attempting to broaden the memoir genre, I wanted readers to look with me, not at me. To that end I turned the spotlight whenever possible on others rather than myself, for I did not want the book to read like the vain imaginings of a minor celebrity once removed. After all, without my colorful cast of characters, there would be no story.
Dare I add that, owing to the ultimate sameness of porn, I tried whenever possible to emphasize the many other aspects of this branch of publishing? In addition to examples of how to make sex sexy for twelve issues a year, I included a template of how magazines -- all magazines -- were produced in those years immediately prior to the electronic revolution that led to the Internet.
Before I go, however, I have a feeling I've left something out. Something important I was asked many times while editing the magazines. Readers wanted to know, they asked again and again whether I -- "Did you," they inquired..."Did you, well, you know, did you...”
Sorry, I didn’t quite understand. What was the question again?
THE END (or maybe not…)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tony Turtu, friend and colleague, read each chapter and made enormously helpful suggestions. More specifically, he provided meticulous data for Mamie Van Doren's life and career in Chapter 27. These data came from his long and detailed Van Doren chronology, which is one of dozens devoted to the lives and careers of Hollywood glamour girls. Anyone writing on studio era Hollywood is advised to enlist his services. I will forward serious email inquires to him.
Others whose kindness and expertise filled many gaps in my chronicle include the late Joseph Arsenault, Don Bachardy, Richard Bernstein (a.k.a. Mickey Squires), Kristen Bjorn, Roy Blakey, Steve Bolerjack, Tim Boss, the late Ron Bowers, Charles Harmon Cagle, Dan Callahan, Mark Chataway, Dennis Forbes, J.R. Giesen, Graham Gremore, Curt Hadaway, George Heymont, Steven Hughes, Greg Jackson, Larry Jurrist, Daniel Kusner, Steve Lambert, Bridget Leslie, the late Scott Lindsey, Evan Matthews, Eric Myers, Matthew Rettenmund, Glenn Russell, Leigh W. Rutledge, Peter Sanborn, Robert Sanchez, Jeffrey Schwarz, Ken Smith, Richard Teleky, Lee Tsiantis, Wayne Wright, and Bo Young.
Ron Pyatt, the IT specialist who has taught me over the years ninety-five percent of what I know about computer technology, did the impossible, or almost, when we sat down a year ago to prepare Did You Sleep With the Models? for posting on Substack.
Dashboard? Settings? Paywall? Custom button? I felt as lost as if I were suddenly asked to pilot a 787. Thanks to Ron, however, I now handle all but the most advanced maneuvers on my own. If you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and need his expertise, let me know and I’ll put you in touch.
A portion of my editorial papers are housed in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. I am grateful to the following personnel there for their friendliness and professional skill in providing every relevant document: John Cordovez, Cara Dellatte, Tal Nadan, and Kyle Triplett.
In Chapter One, I borrowed the phrase "a corporation of nuts" -- so apt for Modernismo and for other publishers I’ve encountered -- from Jan Morris's essay on New York in Destinations, her book of travel writings published in 1980.
At the beginning of Chapter Three, readers of Daphne du Maurier will spot my paraphrase of her opening lines from Rebecca.
Finally, two epigraphs that would have appeared before Chapter One if DYSWTM? had been published as a book. I hope you’ll find them as clever as I do.
“I'd like to get out of the indecent photograph racket. It's so wearing on the nerves.” — Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw
“This journal of mine will offend many people. It has offended even me.” — Jules Renard
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THANK YOU! Please keep your sharp eye alert for further typos. And thank you, also, for the compliment. You are the kind of reader I write for.
Flagging a typo, as requested… “Archetectural Digest”
Love your SS. I’m plowing through it quickly, but don’t want it to end.