City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Read Online Free PDF

have said I was too “radical” to vote or that “revolutionaries” like me saw no need to reinforce the “system” by participating in it. I’d learned to talk that way at the University of Michigan, where my friends and classmates Tom Hayden (later married to Jane Fonda) and Carl Oglesby hadwritten the Port Huron Statement and had been among the first members of the Students for a Democratic Society. This was the beginning of the New Left. In the Port Huron Statement , which was completed on June 15, 1962, the Vietnam War was still so minor that it rated only a brief mention. The rights of Negroes were the primary concern. No thought was given to women. “Man” and his future were endlessly discussed. Nevertheless, it was a sensible and inspirational document, though of course from the perspective of the early twenty-first century it appears naïve. For instance, it calls for the United States to help third-world countries to industrialize; ecological worries are never voiced. Competition in the economy must be replaced by cooperation. The Cold War must give way to nuclear disarmament; the Bomb weighed on everyone’s mind.
    Though I knew how to talk the Leftist talk, those high-flown demurrals would have been dishonest. I wasn’t a dissenter; no, I was disaffected. When I was fourteen, a plainclothes cop had entrapped me at the urinal of a movie theater and threatened to arrest me. At last he’d let me go, but I had grasped the lesson—gay desire was illegal. The most fundamental thing about me—my desire to sleep with other males—was loathsome to society, even to other gay men, as much as pedophilia would be today. Many of the gay men I picked up made it clear that what we were doing was dangerous. If I could have stopped my “acting out,” as my various psychiatrists called it, I would have.
    I was an individualist in the sense that I responded in no way to the appeal of clannishness. I didn’t belong to a clan. I didn’t know any published novelists except one friend at my office, George Constable, who brought out three novels in the sixties. I had a few college friends in New York, but we’d gone to the University of Michigan, a huge state school that didn’t instill the same pride or command the same loyalty as Harvard or Yale or Princeton. I was a Midwesterner living in New York, but even in Ohio and Illinoismy parents had been displaced Texans. My mother made spicy Tex-Mex food that was distasteful to the few kids from school I invited home. I had no regional allegiances. I had friends now at work but all but one of them were straight and would have felt intensely ill at ease or even repulsed had I discussed with them my sexuality. My one gay friend at work was in the closet. Two or three of the girls at Time-Life might have guessed I was gay, but that recognition was never articulated and would have called for no possible response beyond melancholy compassion for my “sad” affliction.
    Perhaps if I’d gone to Harvard or Princeton (I’d been accepted to both) I’d have benefited from those connections after graduation. As it was, I had no contacts with the rich or even the prosperous or the influential in New York. I’d obtained my job with no help from anyone. My parents, now that I’d graduated, never gave me a penny. I loved New York, but not because it had showered its favors on me. The people I worked with were all Ivy Leaguers, but I seldom hung out with them after work.
    I didn’t feel an affiliation with anyone. I had a few friends but I don’t think at that age I’d yet learned what friendship was, what it would eventually come to mean to me. I knew how to be interested in the people around me and how to say warm things that would attach them to me, and I was so grateful to anyone who seemed to like me that I would pursue him or her tirelessly. But that was exactly the problem. I hadn’t stopped to wonder what was in it for me. Perhaps my self-esteem was so low that I was