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.
![[At The Mountain Playhouse] I was currently appearing in support of that funniest of ladies and niece of one of America’s first cardinals—young Elaine Stritch… [The founder] imported her “stars” through her connections with New York’s famed Irwin Piscator Institute where she studied with and had become close friends of Stritch and Marlon Brando.
[At Sardi’s] Elaine Stritch, representing, all on her own, most of the actresses in Equity, proved once again that she could drink all of us stalwarts under the table and still be the leitmotif of the room.
[At Theatre Bar] Stritch would be there with that wonderful raucous cackle of hers dropping one-liners by the bucketload at one end of the counter…
[At P.J. Clarke’s] I always had a seat, so I’d usually find myself rustling feathers with a gaggle of fast-living, fun-loving geese. My favourites: Elaine Stritch and Ben Gazzara—a new item and a good rowdy one at that…
[At The Palace Bar and Grill] Donald Voorhees, Gene Kelly, Adlai Stevenson, Bernie Hart, Ben Gazzara, Maureen Stapleton and dear Stritch often dropped in and paid their respects.
—Christopher Plummer, In Spite of Myself, 2008](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0am6qonWw1qzbo0uo1_1280.jpg)
