It made me feel less alone on the one hand, but on the other hand, I didn't have an understanding of how I could get out of the situation that I was in. I'm not the only gay dude in the neighborhood. Probably not much, but I remember being in the bar and looking at all these men and then having it dawn on me: all these men are from, roughly speaking, my area of Queens. So we went to this other gay bar called Breadstix. I was standing on Queens Boulevard and crying and my friend manfully wiped away my tears and then said, "Well, there's another gay bar down the street." So my friend comes out of the bar after me and I'm furious. He lifted me up by my armpits, literally, and carried me out of the bar and gently placed me down on the pavement on Queens Boulevard.
The next thing I know, there was a man behind me who says, "Do you have ID?" I didn't actually know you could have fake IDs. He puts it in front of me and I had a sip. So the bartender makes me a White Russian. There was never any question which direction my life was going in. I didn't know what to order but I was in the bar sitting at a stool and-this is how you know it’s 1985-my friend, who was with me, said, "Order a White Russian." I couldn't imagine ordering that today. I didn't know anything about anything and I didn’t know anything about alcohol. I went to my first gay bar, Hatfield's, on Queens Boulevard. There was a lot of shame and fear and self-hatred and self-loathing involved, at least for me. I was terrified that somebody would find out I was gay. You moved east toward Long Island because you wanted a classic nuclear family. You really did one of three things: You either stayed in the neighborhood-the least attractive option. I have a philosophy about kids who grew up at that time, and maybe in that part of Queens. So, all I really wanted was to be below 14th Street in Manhattan. I was young and into arts and culture and moving professionally into the theater and coming out as gay. There was nothing to keep me in the neighborhood. That part of Kew Gardens Hills was actually getting pretty bad.
#Gay bars nyc 1970s crack#
The last few years we lived in our apartment on Kissena Boulevard was just the beginning of the crack era. The moment I graduated high school things really started to change. I had friends of every shape and stripe and ethnicity and I don't remember anyone caring about any of that.
Kids didn't bring knives and guns and whatever. I mean, I was just doing plays in high school and hanging out with whomever I thought was sort of fun and cool.
I was waitlisted for Performing Arts-I'm still waiting. There was Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and Performing Arts, now LaGuardia. There were just a few specialized high schools. Bear in mind, there were no charter schools. The corner that I grew up on in Kew Gardens Hills was the border of four different school districts. Now, the building that I grew up in in Kew Gardens Hills was pretty safe, but it was public housing and there were all kinds of questionable characters in the neighborhood. People talk about how bad New York became in the ’70s and particularly in the ’80s and I think that's absolutely right.