Checking Out More Than Groceries

I had a nice surprise at the supermarket yesterday, and it had nothing to do with anything being on sale.

I was looking for the right jar of mild salsa when I saw a flamboyantly feminine young man pushing his cart up the aisle toward me. I said hello to him; he smiled and said hello back. I'd never seen him there before.

A lot of people say hello at our supermarket, but very few of the gay male customers do. Generally, whether in pairs or alone, they avoid your eyes if you too are gay -- as if fearful of outing themselves. So it was refreshing to encounter this guy. He didn't care if the whole world knew.

When I got to checkout, my new acquaintance was ahead of me in line. The clerk was a young guy I'd wondered about -- nice, good looking, a manly young guy but a bit more polite and articulate than his fellow workers. As I unloaded my groceries from my cart onto the conveyor belt, I could hear him telling my flamboyant friend which dorm he lived in. They were obviously making a date. He lowered his voice when he saw me, so I pretended to be narrowly focused on my purchases.

When his previous customer left and he started ringing me up, the clerk seemed a little embarrassed (apparently he still hasn't read me after all the times I've made a point of getting in his line). I went out of my way to be friendly, to convey without actually saying so that I had no problem at all with what I'd witnessed.

In the parking lot I found my partner waiting for me, blasting show music on the car CD player. The clerk's soon-to-be-date was pulling out of the nearby drive-through bank. With a huge grin, he drove past us and waved, elaborately wiggling all of his fingers as he did so. I was surprised he didn't blow us a kiss!

(c) 2007 by Jack Veasey

Drag

I never had any desire to get in drag myself. I've never found men in drag sexually attractive either -- when I was a young gay man "back in the day," I was looking for somebody like Kris Kristofferson, not Carol Channing.

But the bar in Philadelphia where I generally had the most fun was owned by (and named after) a man who looked (and sounded) just like Carol Channing, who hit on me relentlessly. I never dated him, but I did enjoy a lot of free drinks. It was called Miss P's, which referred to his drag name, Patti (as in his favorite singer, Patti Page. He couldn't manage to look like Patti (unless, as one of his MC's once wisecracked, "that doggie in the window was just her reflection!")

Zingers like that were delivered with affection at Miss P's, and intended to be all in good fun. Drag and camp were about to fall out of favor with a lot of people in the gay movement for awhile, but they were certainly friendlier and more fun than the sourpussed political correctness that was to dismiss them. I'm glad my introduction to gay life happened before that change.

I went to Miss P's partly because it was a place that wouldn't card you if you were a little underaged -- Patti liked them young, as they say -- but while people flirted with me a lot, it was all an expected part of the atmosphere. Patti and her customers were anything but predatory. They were protective toward me -- kind of, well, motherly, strange as that may sound. They were quick to warn me if a person was "bad news" (gay bashers would sometimes lurk outside, and undercover cops would occasionally visit the place), or to listen understandingly if some guy I'd dated a few times had broken my heart.

The main attraction was regulars dressing up as their favorite singers and lipsynching to their records. One very handsome black queen regularly mimed Shirley Bassey's melodramatic and mannered anthem, "This Is My Life," complete with Shirley's mile-high wigs, grand gestures and strange twitchy mouth. He really had her down, except for one thing -- his taste in gowns wasn't as tacky as hers.

Some people in the bar were more talented -- when Miss P was hostess, she would do her job as Carol Channing, and looked, moved and sounded just like her, speaking through a hand-held mike in her own Carol voice. She also amazed us a time or two with some genuinely impressive tap dancing (she had, as she put it, "great gams for an old broad!")

I remember those experiences very fondly. I got to see a couple of the great female impersonators when they came to Philly (namely Charles Pierce and Lynn Carter), who were great voice impressionists and standup comics as well. Pierce amazed me by moving from one side of the stage to another and acting out an argument between Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead, changing his voice and face lightning-fast. But those local boys lipsynching to scratchy forty five RPMs had a funky charm, and indomitable heart in a world where they could get beaten up for just walking outside. I'll never forget them. Some activists saw them as a backward embarrassment, but to me they were real heroes in gay history.

And they were not, as some feminists have contended, ridiculing the women they portrayed. They were honoring them with great respect and affection. Years later, as a journalist, I got to interview the pop singer Jane Olivor, a big favorite with gay men. I told her I'd seen a young drag queen "do" her version of Neil Sedaka's "One More Ride On The Merry Go Round" at Miss P's. Her eyes grew wide with surprise and she said, "Wow! I guess that must mean I've arrived!"

(c) 2007 by Jack Veasey

Isaac Asimov, A Pigeon, And Me

This started out as a post on “Hippies For Life,” on a thread about meeting well-known people. Somebody else had mentioned the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and I chimed in with this. I added a little to it before reproducing it here. It does have a gay dimension.

A funny story involving Asimov: I never met him, but I did have a 15 minute phone conversation with him once. I was writing an article for the local Sunday magazine about the science fiction scene in Philly. It was in the late seventies. Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine was located in town, but Asimov just lent his name to it and occasionally contributed an article or story -- he had nothing to do with editing it. Despite that, my editor wanted to have at least a quote or two from him in the story, so he agreed to talk to me on the phone.

I lived in what was a very bad neighborhood at the time, 29th & Girard, in a big old house -- a former church -- with several other gay men. The house was owned by a fellow named Henri, an impresario who threw notorious Halloween parties at downtown hotel ballrooms. The party posters always said, “Don’t Come As You Are; Come As You Want To Be.” Henri was pretty much Philly’s answer to Tim Curry’s Frank‘N’Furter character in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But despite the glitzy image, his house was in a horrendous location and was also falling apart. He’s since sold it.
One of the young neighborhood thugs, who hated gay people, had just thrown a rock through one of our windows. I was still rattled from this, but it was time to talk to Asimov. I called, he answered, and we began our brief interview -- and suddenly this pigeon flies through the gaping hole in the window and lands at my feet. It began walking in circles around my feet, making this burbling sound that they make. I was in bedroom slippers and was convinced it would start pecking at my feet, but it didn't. Meanwhile, hoping Asimov didn't notice the pigeon sounds, I tried to concentrate on the interview.

I don't know if it was because I was distracted, but I only got one quote I could use. Asked his opinion of the magazine that bore his name, he said, "the only thing I don't like about it is when I send them a story and they reject it!" Hard as this may be to believe, having met the very supercilious and prissy man who edited the mag, I accepted it as true.

As soon as we hung up, I caught the pigeon and tossed him back out of the window. I envied him his ability to just fly away.

© 2007 by Jack Veasey

When did you first realize?

It was a long time ago, but I remember it very clearly. It was the early sixties, and I was probably nine or ten. My parents had gotten rid of me for the afternoon by giving me the admission fee for Steel Pier, which had such attractions as the diving horse and the diving bell (not that Steel pier was a dive or anything!)

One of the things included in admission was a variety show in a small theater, which that day had comedian Shelley Berman as one of its stars. I was already infected with the show biz bug even at that early age, so seeing the show was the first thing I did. Being a
little kid, I didn't get all of Mr. Berman's jokes, but I found something about him very compelling as he stood there in his suit and tie getting people to laugh WITH him, not AT him. (Unfortunately, being a puny kid from a tough urban Philadelphia neighborhood,
I already knew how to get laughed AT).

After the show, as I wandered around, I happened to see Mr. Berman coming out of the theater's back door. I went right up to him, to his surprise, and told him I liked his show. He smiled and shook my hand. He was wearing white shorts and what we would now call a tank top. He was tanned and had dark hair on his chest and arms, and looking up at him I got the strangest feeling -- heart racing, light headed. Then he took off and I stood there watching him walk away.

I knew even then that this swoon I'd fallen into was not just admiration for stand-up comedy. (Though I had similar feelings when, the summer after I graduated from high school, I met George Carlin. Him I got to talk to for about an hour. I wish I could say I'd gotten further than that!)

Anyone else care to share their earliest recollection of being -- um, impressed?

(c) 2007 by Jack Veasey

How did your family react?

My parents were working-class Irish Catholics. My father worked at various jobs. When I was small he worked at an industrial plant in the suburbs at a job that I remember thinking was "like Fred Flintstone's." Later he spent many years as the captain of the security guards at the now-defunct Schmidt's Brewery in Philadelphia. My mother often didn't work, but from time to time held jobs as a waitress or cleaning woman.

My mother had a tyrranical father, and a brother and a sister who were just like him. Always lots of yelling at our house. My dad and grandmother both drank to escape it.

We lived in a neighborhood called Fishtown, a rough waterfront factory enclave along the Delaware river. My grandfather operated a small cinderblock luncheonette that catered to the workers. Freight cars full of cocoa beans sat on tracks that ran right behind our house. The neighborhood was Irish, Polish and so racist that there was a book written about it called "Whitetown USA." Frank Rizzo was police commissioner of a notoriously brutal force, and then mayor. I went to a small Catholic schoolhouse right under the El, with only about 100 students in all 8 grades, and taught by St. Joseph's nuns who were still unbridled practicioners of corporal punishment.

As you might guess, this was not the most sympathetic place to grown up gay. The worst thing you could call somebody was "faggot," and somehow the other kids all knew to call me that long before I ever really had any idea what it meant. I thought I was the only one in the world, and surely doomed to hell.

When I reached my teens, my parents reinforced this -- particularly my mother, who told me repeatedly how ashamed she was of me. I remember once leaving her house with a date as she stood in the middle of the street literally screaming obscenities at us. I got out of there as soon as I could.

Then in my twenties I met the man I would spend the rest of my life with -- we're still together after 29 years -- he's known as SoundGuy here at Eons. And both my mother and father quickly changed their tune after meeting him. In fact, they quickly came to love him and accept him as family. He's such a sweet, kind and gentle man that it would have been hard to imagine them doing otherwise. Oddly, this didn't really translate into accepting ME, at least for my mother. Our relationship remained difficult throughout my life, but she was pretty much mad at the world, so why exclude me from that? But SG was just fine with both of them.

They're both dead now. After my father's passing I found a rather negative, old-fashioned used paperback book about homosexuality in his nightstand drawer. It was dogeared and underlined. I'd never really known how hard he was trying to understand. Ironically, the person whose approval I kept trying to get -- my mother -- was the one to whom I gave a copy of the very positive "Loving Someone Gay," a classic book for parents and relatives of gay people. She put hers in a drawer too -- so she'd never have to look at it again. If only I'd given it to my father.

(c) 2007 by Jack Veasey