we're bigger on the inside / turn left / what we're all about
James McCourt, Queer Street
BEWARE GIRLS: the call is coming from inside the house!
The first Stonewall commemorative parades. The Changing of the Guard: post-war compliant and closeted Cherry Grove queens relent.
(“The generation sacrificed to the epoch of doctrinal metamorphosis remains essentially alienated from and directly hostile to the evolution at hand”—Auguste Comte, Un Appel aux Conservateurs.)
A great wave of the affluent decamp from Fire Island to Long Island’s East End, to Quogue, Southampton, East Hampton and Sag Harbor. Those left behind, the medium forever gone in which their ardent deeds took shape, the bright new day of their post-war ebullience overwhelmed by the low scud and gathering shadows of an alien, grubby sadistic devolution of values, taste and performance, hole up at the Firehouse, in what has become known as So-Ho (Miss Dean dubs it “So-ho-hum”) in the upstairs lounge, and in wrinkle rooms around the city: Uncle Charlie’s, the Beau Geste, the Menemsha Bar, Julius’s.
“Everything’s changed.”
“You’ve noticed.”
In reaction to the mustaches, flannel shirts, construction-worker boots, faded Levi’s, leather-tongued key rings (with more keys dangling from them than can possibly be necessary in a single civilized life) and color-coded handkerchiefs (“They call that cruising? I call it the cruising equivalent of paint by numbers”), they, the old proud, dress in pressed chinos, button-down shirts and striped ties, and in rumpled pebble-weaved tweeds, drink bourbon old fashioneds, stingers, brandy alexanders and awfully good old vintages. They smoke Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Kents, and play and sing the golden oldies.
They venerate Ruth Draper, Bea Lillie and Judy, making homosexual proof texts of the lyrics to “The Man That Got Away,” “Alone Together,” “Smile” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Also Madame Spivvy, Frances Faye and Elaine Stritch (“Stritchy”) and refuse to jump into the political fray. Laudator temporis acti, they stage their own incredibly long last stand.
Like characters in epic poetry, older battle-tried men are surrounded, and, calling out to younger men (of the class that used to furnish them with eager protégés) for aid, are largely ignored—the cadets, in fact, having almost to a man turned on their elders, whom they denounce as paleozoic losers, damning the lives they have led as essentially lives of furtive, obsessional, voyeuristic longing.
James McCourt, Queer Street, 2004
People were dancing the Madison, all synchronized. Jameson, his masks removed, sat down to look at them. His eyes fixed on Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, laughing, dancing face to face in the two seemingly endless lines—Czgowchwz facing in Jameson’s direction. He began seeing other figures dancing awkwardly *in words* in the middle distance. Lurking there, glaring past these at his subject (Mawrdew Czgowchwz), he commenced to hear his own voice reading his own ode in his own head, as if it were another voice (on its own). The dancing figures in the words in the middle distance grew even sharper in their definitions. Their movements grew elegant. The colors of their raiments stood out against the ground of the dawn.
The first, in ruby, proclaimed the wedlock of the noun and the verb. The second, veiled in divers tones of the emblematic Czgowchwz color, kept repeating Jameson’s own first words in his own voice. The third, the yellow didact, transformed Jameson’s words into flesh. The fourth shown green, announcing words that contain their opposites, resolving them at the liquid center of formal intention. The fifth, garbed in forthright blue, presented the words in a patter of intentional sounds, aspiring to the condition of music. The sixth, the indigoferous, the illative, dharma shade, the tantric, insisted the words go galloping—winding on and on until *the words said the reader*. The majestic, purpled seventh came through at the precise moment of the first light, silent at first, then, assuming audible force, repeating Jameson’s words over and over again until, dissolving into the first dawning mist (the while the other figures fell away in shadows and the unheeding dancers dancing the Madison rollicked on), it chanted: “To turn about, to abstract, to salute, to celebrate.” Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Jameson began to write, sitting there, looking.
