I take for granted that all those things I lived through exist in the common memory, but the longer I live, and I'm 54, the fewer people there are who have a similar frame of reference. And by that I mean not only my place in the world but my time.
My adult self was formed in the 80s, when it became popular for musicians to cross gender lines – from hair bands like Poison who mixed machismo and makeup – to the Eurythmics' Annie Lennox, Culture Club's Boy George, and Grace Jones. There was a big difference between how they toyed with gender and the drag queens and kings who went to one extreme or the other. Instead of trying to look stereotypically "masculine" or "feminine," they borrowed from both to make a gender mashup that sometimes seemed like parody and sometimes looked like a form of art.
Madonna's Vogue gave pop culture a piece of gay performance art, and a few bands' lyrics and videos, like Bronski Beat's Why and Small Town Boy, gave overt glimpses into the pain, rejection and danger that comes with being gay.
It's tempting to look back with nostalgia, idealizing "those days." I know people who talk about the 50s that way, even though they weren't even born yet. But we're good at erasing the big bad events of the past, maybe because we somehow survived them, so they're diminished in the rearview mirror. And it's true that I rarely remember that the headlines when I was in college included millions of people starving in Ethiopia, which was suffering its worst famine in a century. The world's attention was also on upheaval in South Africa, where institutional apartheid was being challenged.
Meanwhile, AIDs was tamping down whatever remnants were left of swinging, free love, and gay cruising and spreading the paranoia virus. I remember my study abroad flat mate – a woman whose London internship involved caring for AIDS patients. In those days, people were afraid to stand near someone like her in case her breathe might contaminate the room. Closer to home, Marco, a friend of my parents, asked if he could use my parents' van to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning to avoid the slow agony of HIV. I still have a turquoise and silver necklace given to me by one of my parents' actor friends when I was nine or 10, sometime in the 70s. They told me in the 80s he had died from AIDS.
Safe sex posters were everywhere on campus, and there were posters, print ads and billboards urging people to use condoms. And after learning that more than 1,000 San Franciscans had died of AIDs, gay rights activist Cleve Jones began the movement to create the NAMES Project AIDs Memorial Quilt, which began with an individual panel devoted to Cleve's friend Marvin Feldman. By the time it was displayed in Washington in 1987, it had 1,920 panels and covered an area larger than a football field. A year later, it was displayed again in Washington but had 8,288 panels.
When I think of this time, I also picture Keith Haring's artwork, which seemed to be everywhere and during the 80s. His artwork was bright and bold with lots of exuberance and movement. Anyone who's watched the recent documentary on Andy Warhol knows that Haring was part of the New York art scene and was influenced by graffiti. He was also a gay man who found his people in New York. His diagnosis of HIV/AIDS in 1987 at 29 years old had the effect of motivating him to use his art to raise awareness about AIDS and to encourage safe sex practices and to promote the work of ACT UP, an organization that was formed in 1987 to advocate for affordable AIDS medication, combat misinformation about the disease, and use civil disobedience to raise visibility. Haring created a design that featured three figures in the
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"see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing" poses of the three monkeys. Above are the words IGNORANCE=FEAR and below SILENCE=DEATH.
Incidentally, Haring was invited to make his mark on the Berlin Wall, which was built in 1961 to stop people from crossing from Soviet-controlled East Germany into West Germany, which was controlled by the US and the UK. In 1986, Haring painted a 300-foot long mural of interlinked figures in the colors of the East and West German flags. Not long after, his art was covered by other street artists, and by 1989, it disappeared altogether the day the wall started coming down. Many consider this the end of the Cold War between the Soviet bloc and Western powers.
My home town during this time was Woodstock, NY - the artist colony my dad visited as a child with his painter grandmother, which was cashing in on the 1969 festival that was supposed to take place there but in fact ended up 55 miles away at Yasgur's farm. There were two or three recording studios. At the top of the mountain was a Buddhist monastery. And not far from there was Magic Meadow, where adults gathered every so often to howl at the full moon and probably bang on drums. Some nights I'd tag along with my high school friends, listening to Pink Floyd, staring at the stars from the meadow or a dark spot along the Millstream, and watching everyone around me get high.
Woodstock was a Twighlight Zone where artists and musicians and those who were wealthy enough to permanently float in the New Age psychedelic groove could live without much fear of being harassed for it. Not that it was a gay mecca, but it was apparently a place where Lydia and Lisa, who were friends and contemporaries of my parents, felt comfortable opening their home for a rotation of potlucks and other get-togethers that persist in my memory. I have another memory of another friend of the family who'd visit from Manhattan, sometimes as Shaun and sometimes and Shauna. I remember years later, once I was living on my own, introducing Lydia and Lisa to my girlfriend Amy and feeling relieved when they welcomed her.
By then it was the 90s, and I was living in Connecticut, close enough to New York City that I could visit Rubyfruit, Crazy Nannies, Henrietta Hudson, and other lesbian haunts that are long gone. I could walk in the Pride march with the bi contingent and yell "No!" at the top of my lungs when members of the peanut gallery told us to make up our minds.
With their mile-high wigs, and their swagger, and their over-the-top glam at Wigstock in New York City to the raucous drag queen contests in Miami Beach, it sometimes seemed to me that the drag queens got all the glory. But then I visited Provincetown on Women's Weekend and was treated to what to me felt like a rare underground treat: a drag king contest, which apparently is still a favorite in P-Town.
This time and those places were rare glimpses into safety in numbers, a sense of fun, acceptance, community, and celebration. I knew so many people whose families had disowned them or forced them into conversion therapy, and many who'd been physically and verbally abused. But here they were safe.
I was extremely fortunate to have come from an environment that didn't shame me for my life choices. It gave me the room to find my own way.
Robin Whiting has spent her career as a writer/editor covering a range of topics, media, and perspectives. She's kept her sanity by balancing the cerebral with the tactile (in the form of stained-glass design, beadwork, and gardening). She lives in Connecticut with her partner of 20+ years and a menagerie of furry and scaly friends.
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