TetRefine

I found this fascinating interview with the said partner, in which he talks all about their life together, both from the 70s when they first met on Fire Island, to their 20+ years together until he died. https://www.thebody.com/article/interview-with-larry-kramer-husband-david-webster

I agree that Faggots was a hot mess, for a whole variety of reasons. It's clear from very early on that Kramer was simply angry that he didn't fit in with "mainstream gay life" of the time in New York. To me, it came across like he always wanted to be "the cool, pretty cheerleader everybody wanted to be around", but he couldn't be that, so he derided everyone instead. Thankfully he was a much better activist/hell-raiser then he was a novelist.

Ahh yes, the feeling of walking out that office door on a Friday afternoon and knowing that the pleasure of sin awaits for the next two nights.

Somehow I’ve never come across this this man or his autobiography. I’m definitely going to have to get my hands on a copy and read it. The 70s, as this in-between period of liberation and near extinction, is fascinating to me. The pure freedom and uninhibited lifestyle is something that I feel is making a serious comeback, at least in my circles.

And honestly, it's very true to the way things actually happen in the real world. Something "better" comes along, and a relationship goes right out the window in the blink of an eye.

I've felt this feeling so many times coming out into the early morning light of a Sunday: "...and they would walk up Broadway together, exhausted, ecstatic their bones light as a bird's a flotilla of doomed queens on their way to the Everard Baths because they could not come down from the joy and happiness." Someone I know fits this to a T: "He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted-so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle..." My Absolute Favorite: "Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between the friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life: and for the people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had." Finally Finding Inner Peace: "And so Malone came that afternoon to a kind of truce with the city: He was leaving it, now he had found a way, and it faces no longer kept him there against his will. He was free. Free to go. Free even to please Sutherland one last time and show up at the party on Fire Island, which till now had seemed reprehensible." When You Realize You Were Subconsciously Pushing Away What You Thought You Wanted (but really couldn't handle): "And he had been, all those years, just as lost as we were, living on faces, music, the hope of love, and getting farther and farther away from any chance of it." Regret, And The Feeling Of Chasing The Next Best Thing To Come Along: "It was the most beautiful illusion of homosexuals and romantics alike: if only I'd loved that one." When You're No Longer The "Next Best Thing": "Friends came up to embrace Malone, people he had known for years-how many years, they did not want to think. They were all looking at the new faces with an odd sensation of death, for they had all been the new faces once. Each summer on Fire Island had a star: the boy who moves through the little society with the youth and beauty he has just begun to squander (and what else can be done with them). The old friends embracing Malone and Sutherland had each had his summer, had once caused hearts to lurch as fawns. And now they were wondering-as men had wondered about them- if they could get any of these stars into their beds, or were they older then they thought they were?" I don't know if these would stand out or mean much to GA (which very few have ever lived this kind of life), but they mean a lot to me, and strike me in a very deep way.

So the last time I read it (my 5th or 6th time), I marked all the memorable lines and/or quotes from the book. I'm going to go home today and look through it again and find some!

Absolutely. The part that never ceases to amaze me, as a gay man living in New York around the same age as many of the characters, is how little has changed about the fundamentals of gay life here. The names of the place have changed, and the faces have turned over, but the "thumpa thumpa" of the clubs, the parties, the sex, the drugs, the wandering of lost souls in a big city and gay island, remains so eerily similar almost 50 years later.

I read this probably about five years ago after I randomly came across it at a gay book store in Philadelphia. I think I finished it in like two days it was so good. Christadora, by Tim Murphy, is another novel that reminds me of this (published in the 2010s, but takes places in New York from the 80s to the present).

It's surprisingly muted amongst my generation (20s and 30s), considering it was written over 40 years ago. Yet the amazing thing about it is that how little has changed about urban gay life from the 1970s to the 2010s and 20s. I live in New York, and frequent the bars/clubs/parties that happen here. While the people have changed and the names of the places have switched, the basic premise of it all remains eerily the same. I know so many people like Malone and Sutherland and the people who tag along with them, and see a lot of that in myself as well. The attitudes about living for the moment and chasing something that they subconsciously continue to reject are all just as present in 2022. The scenes of the wild house parties on Fire Island happen year after year now just as they did then. The cruising, the drugs, the dancing, the music....it's all still there in very recognizable form. It's beautiful and tragic all in the same breath. The only difference is that the boys in the '70s had no idea their newfound freedom was about to run head first into deadly tragedy. That tragedy has been largely minimized now (amongst certain segments at least), but new problems have reared their head as well.

Welcome back. I remember you from back in the day (been around since 2009 myself). A lot has changed over those years, but like Steve said, there's still a small handful of us who are still around from the way-back years.

Okay, I actually own a pair of these, and honestly they're amazing. I'm the kind of person who absolutely hates when my shirt starts to come untucked and bunched at the waist. These keep that from happening even if I'm moving around a lot or getting up and down from my desk. As someone who works for a company that unfortunately still goes by the 1990s corporate America dress code, these have been worth every penny.

Well this was quite an entertaining joyride of a story.

I always recommend Andrew Holleran's Dancer From The Dance. It's considered a gay classic, written in 1978 in the wild and crazy decade of post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS. It's told from the perspective of multiple unknown narrators, and some would even argue that the narrator is the city itself. It's got plenty of humor, but definitely does not have an upbeat tone or ending. The story follows a young man's futile search for love in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways in the newly liberated gay scene of 1970s New York City. Even if it is not necessarily "happy", it's absolutely worth a read. Snippets from the Wikipedia page: The novel revolves around two main characters: Anthony Malone, a young man from the Midwest who leaves behind his straight life as a lawyer to immerse himself in the gay life of 1970s New York, and Andrew Sutherland, variously described as a speed addict, a socialite, and a drag queen. Their social life includes long nights of drinking, dancing, and drug use in New York's gay bars. Though they enjoy many physical pleasures, their lives lack any spiritual depth. The "dance" of the novel's title becomes a metaphor for their lives. Malone is described as preternaturally beautiful; The book switches perspective often. Sometimes characters are tracked closely using more traditional omniscient narrative techniques. On other occasions (especially later in the book), the lives of Malone and Sutherland are seen from the perspective of bystanders in the New York gay scene — the book itself is literally written by the other dancers at the dance.

I joined GA over twelve years ago when I was just 17 and still in high school. If I think back to that rock bottom point in my life, I would never have imagined then that I'd come to enjoy life as much as I do now. I honestly never thought I'd make it to now, on the brink of turning 30. The last time I wrote a blog entry on here was in August of 2019, a time in my life that was so immensely exciting and filled with never-ending hope for the future. I had met and fell deeply in love with a boy, had moved to New York to be together, and had spent that summer traveling, partying, meeting new friends, and finally achieving my life-long goal of living in the greatest city on Earth. I felt invincible, and for a kid who spent his teenage years in deep depression never thinking he'd become anything, it was as though the world had finally made right what it had wronged me for. It was a natural high on life stronger than any drug. While the high eventually tamed to the hum-drum of everyday life, I was finally a happy person. I finally felt like I could have a real long-term vision for where I wanted to go in life: a career and money, great friends, a nice apartment in a desirable neighborhood, asking the guy I loved to marry me. I had achieved all but the last, yet was planning on putting that part into motion. Then I found out, basically by chance, and all of that disappeared in an instant. I woke up that day thinking life was as good as ever, and by the end of what turned into a very late-6am the next day thing, it was gone forever. Now the weather turns cold, the days get shorter, and I stand on the brink of my 30th birthday, feeling like I have no idea where to go. I always felt terrified about turning 30, as I always heard gay men joke about how it's the age you "die a gay death". Too old to party, too old to get young hot things to sleep with you, when they finally put you out to pasture. For whatever reason, I really internalized that attitude in my early and mid 20s, and only finally began to shake it off the last year or so. I felt at peace, as I realized most of that was bullshit anyway and that I had so much else going for me that turning 30 wasn't going to change that. But now that so much of that security is gone without warning, I'm terrified again. I have to completely reconfigure my life in a way I haven't had to do in a long time. My single friend in his 30s told me that your thirties being single is just as fun as it is in your twenties, yet you have a lot more money and life wisdom to enjoy it with. I think there's a lot of truth to that. While I feel crushed, a part of me also feels liberated as well. I really did enjoy those couple of really wild years in my 20s where it was just me doing whatever felt good in the moment. I had a sense of freedom then that naturally goes away as you settle down more. One of the reasons I think I feared turning 30 was because it represented being just that much more removed from that time where I felt liberated and free to live my life how I wanted for the first time ever. Even through the sadness, I've really noticed how that bliss of pure freedom has returned. I'm free to make completely selfish decisions and indulge again because now, it's me and only me. I live in the city that never sleeps, have a solid job, a great group of friends, and haven't lost my looks quite yet. I can do whatever I want, and I have been. The more I think about it, the more I realize how my friend is right: this new chapter is just going to be an enhanced version of the previous. I've learned in the intervening years how to enjoy that untethered freedom while avoiding a lot of the dumb mistakes I made the first time around. So much physical, emotional, and sexual freedom awaits, and I feel well positioned to really enjoy it. It's not what I asked for, but it's what I got.

I always enjoy the numerous Friendsgivings that take place in the weeks leading up to the actual date. I've always found these gatherings to be much more enjoyable than the actual ones with family. Not that my family is not great, but it's usually not a very exciting affair. I have a friend who lives half a block off Central Park West where the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade goes through, and it's really cool seeing all the floats go down the avenue in person.

We're going to Masterbeat on the Saturday night before Halloween, which is one of the biggest gay parties of the weekend here. We have a couple friends flying in from all over for the party who we haven't seen in awhile, so it should be fun.

My boyfriend and I both got it about a month and a half ago, despite the fact we are both fully vaccinated. The weekend before we tested positive, we had been to a packed nightclub one night, and then a 2,000 person party two nights later. He started showing symptoms less than a week after that, and then I started showing the same the next day. Even though I am vaccinated, I still had a fever, headache, fatigue, and body aches for the first couple days. Being quarantined in an apartment for 10 days in the dead of summer when everyone else is out having fun really sucked. Because I live in New York, I'd say probably 60-70% of my friends have been infected, but luckily none of them seriously. I'm surprised it took me this long to get it.

Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran is one of the few novels that has profoundly impacted my life. Despite the novel being set/written in the 1970s, I felt such a deep connection to the main character and saw so much of my own life in him and his surroundings. I could very much relate to the feeling of trying to drown out the baggage of a past life through hedonism, and getting swallowed up in the process.

Summer weather in New York sucks. It's hot, it's humid, you're surrounded by nothing but concrete, and it's jam-packed with cars and people. Waiting on the platform for a train to come feels like sitting in a sauna that smells like grease and homeless people's piss. I watch the countdown clock for when the train is coming and don't go down to the platform until right before it comes. We try to get out of the city as many weekends as we can, whether that means going to the beach out on Long Island or leaving the area entirely. When we do stay in the city, we have a membership to a gym that has a beautiful rooftop pool overlooking the river, or we hang out in Central Park in the shade.

This is one reason I love Fire Island Pines. It's all gay men, and it's the only place I've ever been where I never had to "straighten" myself up. There's also a very popular gay campground in Pennsylvania called "The Woods". It's clothing-optional too.

So June 1st is upon is, and that means Pride Month! Last year was muted because of COVID, but with things rapidly opening up here in the US, there is a lot of pent up energy to celebrate! Here in New York City, most of the official events are still virtual, but there are movie screenings, panel discussions, gatherings, and of course parties happening all week every week from now till the end of the month. What are your Pride plans?

Offer Nissim- Cha Cha Cha (Peter Rauhofer NYC Remix) There's just something about that repetitive, circuit-tribal beat that can keep you dancing for hours. Also, it fits perfectly for this very hedonistic scene from Queer As Folk.

The thing about astrology is that it's so vague and general that it's easily applied to just about everybody. That wasn't by accident, it was purposely done that way to rope people in and con them. Most of the guys I've dated or had flings with were what my supposed sign said I should be with. And yet, I didn't end up with them.

I absolutely hate them. I walk past them through Central Park every day on my way to work, and they absolutely tower over everything. It's not that they're so big, but the fact that just look absolutely awful from an aesthetic point of view. And the worst part is that almost all of the 8-9 figure units in the buildings are nothing but trophy investment properties that will rarely, if ever, be lived in. I guess I simply prefer things in smaller packages.