.
Lately when I wake up in the morning in
my magical home on east 2nd street in New York and find myself (as usual)
seeing what anyone would first be likely to see waking up in my bed – the
floor-to-ceiling bookcase facing it – I've been prodded, as if by nearly 3
years of passive subliminal indoctrination (I moved here March 21, 2016), to
actually look at the books in the
bookcase, which has prodded further interest in looking at the books that
surround my head in my bedroom and fill some of the lower walls of my studio
and have their place as well in the living room, not to mention the Jewish
Library (Richard's domain).
.
There's an effin' lotta books around
here. And you know what? It turns out many of them are splendidly interesting.
And I'm finding that I actually want to read many of them. Some of course I've
read already, but not nearly as many as the hubris of displaying what are
supposedly 'my' books (as if I'd read them all) might suggest. I actually don't
read a lot these days. But it turns out that even looking at a book I did once
know well can have salutary effects.
.
I was about to say salutary nostalgic
effects, but I'm not a fan of nostalgia, which to me seems to invite wallowing
"in a time gone by," as Quentin Crisp would say. I have no desire to
resurrect the past. But reflecting on it, as my mention of Quentin Crisp
indicates I'm doing at the moment, can make for some truly nourishing
thought and remembrance. The book I just came upon for the first time in ages which
occasions this piece, the Advocate's capacious compendium "Long Road to
Freedom" about the evolution and history of gay rights in this country, was
published in 1994, and edited by Mark Thompson, who with Malcolm Boyd (the same
name as of someone I went to high school with!), his lover (the term we'd have
used in the '70s), were two of my brother Bob Kettelhack's closest friends.
.
Mark was a well-known editor and writer
one of whose subjects embraced the spiritual aspects of the gay male leather
community and the meaning of the sex they had (Mark had been a Radical Faerie,
which with this made an intriguing mix), and Malcolm was a sort of renegade
Episcopal priest (as was my brother) and activist, first known for his book
"Are You Running With Me, Jesus?" amid numerous other subsequent titles,
whose parish was in Santa Monica but who lived in a wonderfully leafy secret L.A.
lair - you descended a staircase through the thick fecundity of Southern Californian
flora and vines to reach their home below the street (you half-expected to meet
Tarzan aka Johnny Weissmuller). Bob had moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and
was smitten with it instantly. He loved L.A. the way I love NYC. Everything
about it regaled and amazed him: weather, birds, trees, flowers, the Hollywood
glitz, even the incessant driving -- the whole vibrant newness of it. I
remember, visiting him for the first time in 1982 (the pic of us sitting on his
couch in the bungalow he shared with his lover Jack in Mount Washington dates
from then), being taken by him to the top of Griffith Park so to see the panoply
of the city below us (cue James Mason showing Judy Garland a similar view in A
Star is Born). "Here it is!" he said excitedly, sweeping his hand
across the horizon. "Here what is?" I replied, mystified: to me it
mostly looked like Sunrise Highway with palm trees. But he saw a paradise. And
through his eyes, I began to see it too.
.
We forward to 1982 in New York when I
began working first as assistant, then as agent and writer, to literary agent
Connie Clausen at Connie Clausen Associates, which since about the year before,
had taken on Quentin Crisp as a client. (Connie had seen him perform his show,
marched backstage at the end of it and informed him she was to be his New York
agent. "I want what you want," Quentin probably replied. They were a
fascinating combo.) Meeting him was like my brother meeting L.A.: he was an
inexplicable marvel. Most of you know of my 17 year-long association with
Quentin as a co-writer, agent and friend. But not many know that only a few
months after I plunged into the Clausen Universe, and effectively as another
agent handling Quentin, I arranged with my brother (who excitedly tugged at me
to do it) to allow him and his cohorts in L.A. to give Quentin a welcoming
party in Beverly Hills (my brother, through Jack, knew some interesting peeps
in the town, among them Vincent Price, Carol Burnett and Jean Stapleton) when
Quentin next appeared in the city with his "An Evening with Quentin
Crisp." By all accounts, this party went swimmingly - indeed was held next
to a colonnaded swimming pool in the luxurious patio and gardens of a grand
house belonging to I cannot recall whom, with a view of all the creation that
mattered from the top of one of Beverly Hills' hills. Quentin was so taken by
the party that glimpses of it got into his writing about L.A. - which you'll
have to take on faith, because I can't (after a quick Google search) find any
QC quote about L.A. besides "Los Angeles is just New York lying
down." It probably got into one of his books. But he described his evening
there with an awe-struck wit: the swimming pool and the columns and the sense
that he'd reached at least a minor pinnacle of Olympus, which is what he
considered Hollywood to be.
.
The memory of the success of this
party, marking the single instance that connected my brother and Quentin and me
(by the way, they liked each other enormously), comes back in a glance at Mark
Thompson's "Long Road" and the piece I wrote about Quentin which
appeared in it, which Mark hired me to write. It was featured as if it had been
an Advocate article in 1979 (actually I didn't meet Quentin until 1982), but if
you won't tell anybody I won't. Bob died of AIDS in 1989, Connie Clausen died in
1997, Quentin in 1999, Malcolm Boyd in 2015, and Mark Thompson in 2016. Though
this may not amount to much of a tale to tell about how each of our lives
crossed in L.A., cross happily they did, and oh, how glad I am that I can claim
the tale as part of my improbable life.
.
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