Clifford Browder's Blog, page 34

243. Dorothy Norman and Alfred Stieglitz

           [This post is a reblog of post #147, another of the most visited posts of this blog.]

         She is 23, dark-haired, beautiful, with big brown eyes, and wants to know about art.  He is 64 -- old enough to be her father and then some -- with deep-set, piercing eyes framed by glasses, his hair and mustache gray and bristling, and he knows all about art.  She encounters him in a shabby little gallery on Park Avenue where he holds forth daily in a resonant voice, telling visitors that the world of our dreams is more real than the world that exists, and that art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.  He makes the first satisfying statements about art she has ever heard and speaks with total conviction; she is entranced.
         The young woman goes back to the little gallery again and again, listens to the man talk to others about art, learns his name, writes down afterward what he has said.  The paintings shown there fascinate her, as does the man himself.  Finally she speaks to him, talks with him about art.  His words pour forth, don’t explain anything, but change something indefinable inside her.  Though the paintings exhibited are available for purchase, he isn’t selling them, just talking about them, about art.  He says the very things about art that she has been waiting to hear from someone knowledgeable and mature.  Finally she writes him a breathless letter, says she can’t keep away from the gallery, loves what he is doing there, would like to help him do it.  Answering her letter in bold black strokes of a pen that are almost chilling in their beauty, he tells her to feel free to come to the gallery and ask all the questions she likes.  She does.  She talks with him, looks at his photographs, feels his attraction like a great force of nature. 
         One day they find themselves alone in the gallery; a tense silence, as they look at each other intently. 
         “I want to say something to you,” she whispers. 
         “Say it,” he says.  His voice is encouraging, but she holds back.  “Say it.”                              “I can’t.”
         “Say it.” 
         She makes a great effort.  “I love you.” 
         His face softens.  “I know – come here.” 
         He kisses her.  Their lives are changed forever.
         She is Dorothy Norman, a young woman from an affluent Jewish family in Philadelphia who is now living in New York.  He is Alfred Stieglitz, a renowned photographer and fervent advocate of contemporary American art.  The year is 1928.  She has met the man who, more than any other, will profoundly influence her life.  There is just one problem: they are both married, but not to each other, and feel a loyalty to their respective spouses.  And she has just given birth to her first child.  So begins a long, fervent, but complicated relationship that could have happened only in New York.
         Born Dorothy Stecker to an affluent Jewish family in Philadelphia, she grew up surrounded by privileges that puzzled, then annoyed her.  At a party in New York in 1924 she met Edward Norman, the son of a wealthy Sears Roebuck heir and they fell in love; overcoming opposition from both families, they married in 1925; she was 19, he was 25.  On the wedding night he was dismayed, then angry, to learn that her parents had told her nothing about sex.  When he entered her, she felt agonizing pain, bled, sobbed; in the morning, apologies on both sides, tenderness, assurances that all would be well.
         They moved into an apartment on East 52nd Street in New York, lived well but not lavishly, traveled abroad, became involved in progressive causes, advocated reform, not revolution.  Though given at times to outbursts of anger, her husband was intelligent, knowledgeable, idealistic; she admired him greatly.  She did volunteer work for the ACLU, visited art galleries and then, at the Intimate Gallery on Park Avenue, she met Alfred Stieglitz.
         A strange but passionate relationship developed.  Stieglitz was wise, informed, mature, yet possessed a youthful vigor and sense of fullness about life unlike anyone she had ever known.  She didn’t see in him a father but a lover and mentor; they wrote, phoned, and saw each other daily, experienced physical love that she found breathtaking, almost frightening, in its intensity.
         And the spouses?  She still loved her husband, but in a different way, had no thought of divorcing him.  They lived, vacationed, and traveled together, but the relationship must have been altered since he surely knew of  her affair with Stieglitz almost from the start.  How did he feel about a wife who, to be sexually and emotionally fulfilled, needed both a husband and a lover?  Candid as her autobiography can be, of this she says almost nothing.  She and Edward shared much, and yet …
         As for Stieglitz, he was married to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, 23 years his junior, and likewise had no thought of divorce.  He had discovered her years before, a talented young artist who had yet to make a name for herself, and had divorced his first wife to marry her and promote her work.  To judge from Dorothy Norman’s memoir, one might think that O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were by now estranged, but O’Keeffe’s biographer, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, tells it differently: O’Keeffe was heartbroken by her husband’s open affair with Norman but endured it until 1933, when she suffered a nervous breakdown that hospitalized her for two months.  After that there was indeed estrangement, as more and more she pursued her art in New Mexico, far from Stieglitz and Norman.
     A personal note:  I first heard of Dorothy Norman when, as a freelance editor in the early 1980s, I was hired by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to edit the manuscript of her memoir, Encounters.  I worked with an in-house editor from whom I learned certain things about Norman not mentioned in the memoir; I will introduce them when and if relevant.
         With Stieglitz’s help, as well as her own beauty, intelligence, and charm, Dorothy Norman expanded her horizons and deepened her understanding of art.  At a party she met the artist John Marin, whose work she particularly esteemed, and the sculptor Gaston Lachaise, and became good friends with both.  She met Georgia O’Keeffe, a handsome woman strikingly dressed in black with a touch of white, though for obvious reasons the acquaintance  could only go so far.  In 1929, when Stieglitz learned that the Intimate Gallery must vacate the premises, she and O’Keefe and others helped finance a new and better gallery, An American Place, at 509 Madison Avenue.  There Stieglitz, who disapproved of the recently founded Museum of Modern Art’s emphasis on “French Old Masters” (meaning Impressionists and Post-Impressionists), could continue to exhibit and promote American art.  At his insistence the walls were painted white and gray and were unadorned, so as to convey an atmosphere of austerity, nor  was it listed in the phone book.  But right from the first – even in the wake of the Crash – people flocked to it. 
         Among those she came to know at this time, whether at An American Place or elsewhere, were the poet Hart Crane and the young theater director Harold Clurman.  Clurman, who always enjoyed the company of attractive young women, took to her at once and expounded excitedly on the American theater’s need for direction, for a philosophy of life, and she helped raise funds so he and his colleagues could found the Group Theatre and put these ideas into practice.  Through Stieglitz and her own social connections she was now well on her way to becoming the self-assured and knowledgeable young woman who knew everyone.
         And her husband?  She continued to admire his honesty, intelligence, and integrity, but realized with great regret that they were growing differently, and apart.  Further endangering their relationship were his irrational outbursts of anger and her increased awareness that he was psychologically disturbed.  Concern for their two children and a persistent devotion sustained their marriage, and every year they summered together in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  But their youthful hopes and dreams were fading fast.
         Stieglitz photographed her repeatedly and taught her to become a photographer herself.  And in 1932 he arranged the publication of her poetry, which she herself feared was too immature.  In her memoir she tells how she sent the volume to her British friend Dorothy Brett, an artist and onetime associate of D.H. Lawrence living in Taos, New Mexico, and was amazed by Brett’s enthusiastic response, which proclaimed the poems “beautiful” and “incorruptible.”  Yet in the manuscript I edited, as I recall, it went somewhat differently.  Yes, Brett praised the poems, but only after Norman waited anxiously for a response and finally queried Brett about her reaction, thus putting Brett in an awkward position, torn between candor and the claims of friendship.  Was Brett’s response the response of friendship or was she truly impressed?  And wasn’t Norman a bit of a dabbler here?  Serious poets work at their craft for years.  Norman didn’t pursue her poetry, having other and stronger claims on her attention.  Throughout her life she had so many interests, and went in so many directions, that she risked – perhaps unfairly -- the label of dilettante.
         Indeed, she had so many commitments and knew so many people, only a few of her “encounters” can be chronicled here.  She helped Henry Miller financially so he could return from Europe and, when she met him, was surprised to find, not the sensual, rather ferocious man she anticipated, but a modest and proper individual who resembled a preacher.  Through him she met his inamorata the author Anaïs Nin, who struck her as almost nunlike in her simple gray coat and hat, though her small mouth was carefully painted, and her mascaraed eyes stared at Norman ecstatically.  Norman soon realized that Nin was slowly drifting apart from her wealthy banker husband, just as she was drifting apart from Edward.
         In 1937 she began publishing Twice a Year, a journal of literature and art, which she herself financed; well-known writers, including European expatriates soon displaced by the war, appeared on its pages: Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and later Sartre and Camus.  Then in 1942 she began writing a column for the New York Post entitled “A World to Live In,” commenting on social welfare issues and politics.  The column would continue for seven years, and she became involved in city and state politics, even to the point of being offered political positions and a chance to run for Congress, invitations that she always turned down, knowing that politics and the compromises it entailed were not for her. 
        Neither she nor her husband liked living ostentatiously.  Their Park Avenue apartment building was designed to look imposing, with a gloomy and pretentious entrance hall, a uniformed doorman and elevator man, and an apartment with ugly windows, false moldings, and sconces with pointed light bulbs absurdly imitating candles.  So the Normans engaged a large real estate firm to find them an unrenovated house no wider than twenty feet, with no tall buildings in front or back, the rear facing south, and not near an elevated or bus line, since they both slept badly.  And it should not be above 79th Street or below 68thStreet on the East Side of Manhattan.  Rather strict requirements for a couple in search of something simple, but they found it: a Victorian brownstone at 124 East 70th Street, nineteen feet wide with a high front stoop, in dire need of renovation.  Months of work followed as the front of the building was moved forward, the rear slanted to admit the most daylight possible, and the interior reorganized imaginatively to create spare, clean lines throughout.  Finally, in 1941, they moved in.  The building was voted one of the two best new buildings of the time; photographs of it were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; and architecture students gathered outside to sketch it and often asked to be shown through.  Simplicity had been achieved.
         Joining the newly established Liberal Party in 1944, she found herself involved in debates as to who the party should endorse for mayor.  The feeling against William O’Dwyer, a former Brooklyn district attorney, was strong, since he had Tammany backing, but she decided to interview him for her column.  Since he was off in seclusion in California planning his strategy, she made a long-distance call and, to her surprise, reached the man himself.  A candid conversation followed, and an invitation to meet him in New York.  He proved to be a ruddy-faced man, well built but hardly handsome, with an Irish sense of humor, and she urged him to run for mayor and be a great one.  Leaving the Liberal Party, she supported O’Dwyer and was delighted when he won.  From then on she called him daily at 8:30 a.m. on a private line and had talks with him that were often hilarious.  He read  passages from Yeats to her, then they talked politics; he listened to her suggestions about health and hospitals, day-care centers, delinquency, whatever.  Knowing she was “in” with the mayor, people played up to her, hoped for an introduction.  “Of course you’re having an affair,” a journalist friend told her.  “Everyone knows it.”  Which made her furious, since she never saw O’Dwyer alone, was most definitely not having an affair with Hizzoner, and had even declined positions that he and others offered her.
         In July 1946, while summering in Woods Hole, she got a phone call from a friend informing her that Stieglitz had had a stroke and was in a hospital, and she must come at once; O’Keeffe was in the Southwest.  Her husband was kind and understanding, had no objection to her going.  She rushed back to New York, went to the hospital, found him in a coma but with a look of peace on his face; later she broke down, wept.  O’Keeffe arrived the next day, their paths didn’t cross; Norman made no further attempt to see him, knew that he was dead.  Harold Clurman phoned her in sympathy, found her a typewriter so she could do a brief obit for the Post, then accompanied her to a restaurant for dinner.  They were sitting at a table outside when suddenly, quite by chance, Eleanor Roosevelt walked by with a companion and saw her.  The former First Lady approached and greeted her graciously and in a warm and cordial voice asked what she was doing in New York in the miserable summer heat.
         “I’m here because a great friend, Alfred Stieglitz, has died.  I’ve come down for his funeral.”
         Eleanor Roosevelt looked at her, perplexed, not having the slightest idea who Stieglitz was.  Norman wept, uttered a perfunctory wish that Mrs. Roosevelt was well. 
         Did Norman and O’Keeffe encounter each other at the funeral?  Her memoir doesn’t say, but one suspects that Norman maintained a discreet distance.  Back in Woods Hole, having read again the last note Stieglitz had sent her the day before he died, she wrote a poem that she could show to no one.
         Stieglitz’s death, however shattering, did not keep her from being Dorothy Norman, the woman who knew everyone.  Her “encounters” continued: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Richard Wright, D.T. Suzuki, Osbert Sitwell and his sister Edith, Saint-John Perse, Jawaharlal Nehru – the list is endless.
         When her husband became stern, dictatorial, harsh with the children and her, Dorothy Norman, fearing sudden violence on his part, went to Reno in 1953 and got a divorce.  They both were heartsick.  She then went on to make more friends, develop an interest in myth and symbolism, and work on her memoir, which she told her in-house  editor could never be published while Georgia O’Keeffe was alive.  O’Keeffe died in 1986, and the memoir appeared in 1987 with a dedication “To Edward, my first love.”  It does not chronicle her later years, and with a single exception includes only photographs of her in her youth.  She died in 1997 at age 92.
         What is one to make of this woman who knew everyone?  Limousine liberal, do-gooder, dilettante – she can be stuck with all these labels, but I think it would be unfair.  She served the great without herself attaining greatness.  She never worked a day in her life, in the sense of a salary-paying job, but she was constantly busy, never idle.  A doer, she made things happen.  What was it that let her bond so easily with others?  Her beauty, her charm, her intelligence.  And from that bonding came results: books, articles, exhibitions, her biography of Stieglitz, her collection of Nehru’s writings, the Alfred Stieglitz Center in Philadelphia.  And if her later turn toward myth and symbolism gets a bit vaporous and “New Agey,” that is probably the case with most Western followers of the great traditions, which for deep understanding require a focused lifelong commitment that few of us can offer.  But Dorothy Norman lived intensely, lived meaningfully.  May we all do as well.

     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 


          Coming soon: Tammany, the tiger whose claws got clipped.
          ©   2016   Clifford Browder

242. Willie Sutton

     On February 15, 1933, a postman entered the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust Company of Philadelphia, but an alert passerby foiled the attempted robbery and the postman fled.
     On another occasion a postal telegraph messenger entered a Broadway jewelry store in broad daylight, robbed it, and escaped.
     On other occasions the thief disguised himself as a police officer, some kind of messenger, a window washer, a maintenance man, or a striped-pants diplomat.  No wonder he was known as “Willie the Actor” and “Slick Willie.”
     Prisons had trouble holding him.  Captured in June 1931 and sentenced for assault and robbery to 30 years in Sing Sing, on December 11, 1932, he used a smuggled gun to take a prison guard hostage, then got hold of a ladder, scaled a 9-meter wall, and escaped.
     Captured again on February 5, 1934, he got 25 to 50 years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, but on April 3, 1945, he and 11 other convicts escaped from there through a tunnel.  Alas, he was recaptured that same day by a Philadelphia police officer.
     Sentenced to life imprisonment as a fourth-time offender, he was transferred to the Philadelphia County Prison, but on February 10, 1947, he and some other prisoners disguised themselves as guards and after dark carried two ladders across the prison yard to the wall.  When the prison searchlights spotted them, he yelled, “It’s okay!”  And off they went to freedom.
     On March 20, 1950, he was the eleventh criminal listed on the FBI’s newly created Ten Most Wanted List, replacing one of the original ten who had been captured.
     When asked why he robbed banks, he allegedly – and famously – replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”
     The gentleman in question – and by all accounts he was indeed a gentleman – was Willie Sutton (1901-1980), a Brooklyn-born desperado who preyed upon the banks of the eastern United States for some 40 years, and who, despite his three escapes, spent more than half his adult life in prison.
Slick Willie
     Brooklyn-born to an Irish-American family, he was the fourth of five children but never went beyond the eighth grade in school, finding that his talents led him elsewhere.  Willie was slight of build, just 5 feet 7, a gentleman by all accounts, a chain smoker, a constant talker whose witty talk entertained all within earshot, including the Mafiosi who befriended him and protected him from assaults when in prison. 
     In all his long career of robbing banks, Willie never committed an act of violence, and even insisted that the weapons he carried weren’t loaded.  Because yes, although a gentleman, he did carry a revolver or a Thompson submachine gun, since, as he explained, “You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality.”  But he claimed that he never robbed a bank if a woman screamed or a baby cried.  Had the bankers known this at the time, they might well have hired some women to be on the scene, ready to emit ear-splitting screams of alarm.
     His final capture came in Brooklyn on February 18, 1952, when a young clothing salesman named Arnold Schuster recognized Willie on the subway and followed him out onto the street, where he alerted two police officers on patrol.  They found Willie hunched over his car, fixing a dead battery.  Asked for his registration, he produced a document identifying him as Charles Gordon.  The officers summoned a detective, and the three of them escorted their prisoner to the station house for questioning.  Willie was amazingly calm and went along without protest.  About to be fingerprinted, he admitted to being the famous Willie Sutton.  The two arresting officers were immediately promoted three ranks to first-grade detective, and Police Commissioner George P. Monaghan called the arrest the culmination of “one of the greatest manhunts in the history of the department.”  Willie, it turned out, had been living in a $6-dollar-a-week room only a few blocks from the police headquarters in Brooklyn.  Reporters flocked to the station house, where Willie was paraded before them in the company of his nemesis of three.
     Mr. Schuster went on television to recount how he had helped the police capture Willie.  On March 9, 1952, he was killed on a Brooklyn street outside his home, shot once in each eye and twice in the groin.  The murder was never solved, but it is said that Albert Anastasia, the much feared Mafia boss of the Gambino crime family, a veteran hit man known as “the Lord High Executioner,” concluded that Schuster was a “squealer” and ordered the murder.  Anastasia himself met a similar fate on October 25, 1957, while sitting in a chair in the barber shop of the elegant Park Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, his face swathed in white towels; two men with scarves covering their faces entered, pushed the barber out of the way, and shot him repeatedly until he fell to the floor, dead.  Obviously a gangland killing, but no one was ever indicted.
     Such violence was alien to mild-mannered Willie, who deplored Arnold Schuster's murder.  After his 1952 arrest he was convicted of robbing a bank in Queens and given a sentence of 30 to 120 years in Attica State Prison.  This time he didn’t escape.  Always ready to give legal advice to other inmates, he was known by them as “a wise old head.”  In December 1969 his good behavior and deteriorating health due to emphysema led a judge to commute his sentence to time served.  “Thank you, your Honor,” said Willie.  “God bless you.”  He wept as he was led out of the courtroom.  Released on parole, he gave lectures on prison reform, advised banks on how to prevent robberies, and starred in a TV commercial for a bank’s new credit card.  He spent his last years with a sister in Florida, died there in 1980 at age 79, and was given a quiet burial in a family plot in Brooklyn.  How the family felt about his professional career I haven’t discovered.
     The famous quote about robbing banks "because that’s where the money is" has often been quoted and is known as “Sutton’s law."  Yet Willie claimed he never said it and attributed it to some enterprising reporter in need of more copy.  Why then did he rob banks?  “Because I enjoyed it,” he says in his 1976 autobiography.  “I loved it.  I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life.” 
     Gangland killings:  Such killings were once common in Brooklyn and elsewhere, but we like to think of them as bad memories from the distant past, inconceivable in our more enlightened age.  But the Times of July 2 reported that Louis Barbati, the owner of a Brooklyn pizzeria, was shot five times and killed by an assassin, his face hidden in a hoodie, who was waiting for him as he came back from work to his house in Dyker Heights in southern Brooklyn.  His flash jewelry, cash, and other valuables were not taken, which seems to refute the police’s initial assumption that the shooting involved a robbery gone wrong.  Complicating matters was his feud with a former employee who stole the secret recipe for his sauce and opened a pizzeria on Staten Island.  The police are investigating, as well they might.  But in today’s somewhat gentrified Brooklyn, renowned for its hipster culture, this seems like a troubling throwback to the past.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 


     Coming soon:  Tammany, the Tiger Whose Claws Got Clipped.  But before that, in midweek, maybe reblog of another popular post.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder




     

241. Francis J. Spellman, the Controversial Cardinal

Cuddly and cherubic?  Appearances
deceive.This post is a reblog of post #136, published on July 20, 2014.  Of all the posts in this blog, it has the most views, surpassing even Man/Boy Love.
     He was born to an Irish American family in Massachusetts in 1889, as a child served as an altar boy, graduated from Fordham in 1911, decided to study for the priesthood, and was sent to pursue those studies in Rome. Ordained in 1916, he returned to the U.S. and did pastoral work in Massachusetts, but was unable to become a military chaplain during World War I because he failed to meet the height requirement.  Other posts followed, including U.S. attaché of the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1925.  He was in Rome from 1925 to1931, where he made useful contacts in the Curia, and in 1927, during a trip to Germany, he began a lifelong friendship with Eugenio Pacelli, then the papal nuncio to Germany.  Named Auxiliary Bishop of Boston in 1932, he had strained relations with his superior, Archbishop O’Connell of Boston, but did further pastoral work in Massachusetts, and in 1936 helped arrange a visit by Pacelli, now the Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State, to these shores, where he countered the influence of the Detroit-based Father Coughlin, whose popular nightly radio broadcasts were harshly critical of President Roosevelt.  But the real reason for the visit was to meet secretly with the President and discuss establishing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Holy See; Spellman was present at the meeting, though no formal diplomatic ties resulted at this time.  It should be clear by now that Francis J. Spellman had a genius for making the right connections almost from the start of his career.

     In 1939 Pope Pius XI died, to be succeeded by Pacelli as Pius XII.  One of the new Pope’s first actions was to make Spellman Archbishop of New York and vicar of the U.S. armed forces, just in time for World War II.  The new Archbishop moved into the archiepiscopal residence, a handsome neo-Gothic structure at 452 Madison Avenue, at the corner of 51st Street, adjacent to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, where he would reside for the rest of his life amid oak paneling, thick red carpets, ornate furniture, priceless antiques, and a quiet almost unheard of in busy midtown Manhattan.
     Spellman was soon exerting great influence in religious and political matters and hosting prominent figures of the day like Joseph P. Kennedy, the Wall Street speculator turned Securities and Exchange Commission chairman turned Ambassador to Great Britain (and, incidentally, another Massachusetts-based Irish Catholic), and financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch.  Clearly, he had a genius for relating to the rich and powerful.  Once the U.S. entered the war, His Eminence supported the war effort vigorously.  In 1943 President Roosevelt sent him as his agent to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, where the peripatetic Archbishop covered 16 countries in 4 months, rivaling the whirlwind tours of American tourists of the postwar era; he met with Franco in Spain, the Pope in Rome, and Churchill in London, and on his return to the U.S. helped arrange to have Rome declared an open city and thus spared further bombing.  Roosevelt’s death in 1945 diminished his influence in higher circles, but after the war Pius XII made him a cardinal in 1946, just in time for the Cold War. As always, Spellman’s timing – or was it just dumb luck? – was flawless.  And he was impressive to behold in his scarlet cardinal’s robes.
         In the years that followed – the years when I first became aware of him – Cardinal Spellman showed that, much as he loved the red of the cardinal’s  robe, he loved the red, white, and blue just as much.  “A true American can neither be a Communist  nor a Communist condoner,” he declared.  “The first loyalty of every American is vigilantly to weed out and counteract Communism and convert American Communists to Americanism.”  Needless to say, he was a fervent supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who without offering hard evidence had the public believing that there were Communists in every nook and cranny of the government, and that -- as I heard the Wisconsin senator say once on television, ever so convincingly – the world was going up in flames.  The politics of fear, always effective.
     In 1949, when the gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery in Queens, went on strike for a pay raise, he called them Communists, labeled their action an immoral strike against the innocent dead, recruited seminarians as strikebreakers to dig graves, and set them a vigorous example in that worthy activity.  In that same year he locked horns with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, when in her newspaper column “My Day” she opposed federal funding to parochial schools.  He accused her of anti-Catholicism and “discrimination unworthy of an American mother,” though in time he met with her and made peace.  But peace was not his prime concern; he was too busy denouncing immoral Hollywood films and, in time, comedian Lenny Bruce, who had often satirized the Cardinal. 
Arrested in 1961, one of his many arrests.     The irreverent comedian, who was no stranger to obscenity, sometimes imagined Christ and Moses returning to earth to observe people in East Harlem crammed 25 to a room, and then notice the Cardinal’s ring, worth ten thousand dollars.  Or the two visitors would enter Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, followed by lepers whose flesh was falling on the polished floors, causing His Eminence to phone Rome in a panic and tell the Pope to put the holy duo up, since he was up to his ass here in crutches and wheelchairs.  Admittedly, Bruce was breaching the limits allowed to comedy in America; jibes at religion were risky, and out-and-out obscenity taboo.  No wonder the Archbishop encouraged the D.A., another Irish Catholic, to charge Bruce with obscenity.  Bruce was convicted after a controversial and widely publicized six-month trial in 1964 and sentenced to four months in a workhouse, but was set free on bail pending an appeal.  He died of an overdose in 1966 before the appeal had been decided, and in 2003 received a posthumous pardon, the first in New York State, from Governor George Pataki.
     The Cardinal that I knew from photos at the time showed a portly, spectacled, jowly prelate whom some thought cherubic and humble (I would have said a cuddly, well-fed little porker), a man with a ready smile but perhaps not too bright.  But behind this façade was a shrewd, almost ruthless player on the world stage who had no qualms about fighting, and fighting hard, to get what he wanted.  A longtime Jesuit friend and his official biographer described him as “fearless, tireless, and shrewd, but at the same time humble, whimsical, sentimental, incredibly thoughtful, supremely loyal, and, above all, a real priest.”  A complex individual, then, a seeker and wielder of power whom others playing the same game had to take into account and respect.  But also  a tireless worker, a skillful administrator, a shrewd negotiator of real estate deals, and an excellent fund-raiser – in short, a first-rate businessman.  And a poet and novelist, his novel The Foundling coming out in 1951.  But not one to admit error or to give up an opinion, no matter now outdated or unpopular; prudence was unknown to him.
     A participant in the 1958 papal conclave that elected Pope John XXIII, Spellman, though a conservative, was in some ways progressive, insisting on a declaration on religious liberty, yet in the long run he was critical of the new Pope’s liberal and reformist leanings.  “He’s no Pope,” he reportedly said.  “He should be selling bananas.”  In the following year, during a visit to Central America, he disobeyed the Pope’s instructions by appearing in public with Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the right-wing dictator of Nicaragua, of whom President Roosevelt had once allegedly remarked, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”  (There is some doubt as to which Latin American dictator he was referring to.)
     In the 1960s the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the eruption of antiwar protests on college campuses across the country, brought new opportunities for the zealously patriotic Cardinal and his critics.  So outspoken was His Eminence’s support of the war that protesters labeled it “Spelly’s War.”  He spent the Christmas of 1965 with the troops in South Vietnam, said Mass in Saigon, sprinkled holy water on B-52 bombers and blessed them just before they departed on a mission, and described the war as “Christ’s war” and a “war for civilization.”  This did not go over too well with the Vatican, since Pope Paul VI had urged negotiations and an end to the war; sources made it clear that the Archbishop spoke only for himself, not for the Pope or the Church.  Back home, where humorous buttons were now all the rage, one saying  DRAFT  CARDINAL  SPELLMAN  was popular, and in January 1967 war protesters disrupted a Mass in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1965.
uwdigitalcollections
     In 1966, when Pope Paul initiated a policy whereby bishops would retire at age 75, Spellman, then 77, offered to resign, but the Pope asked him to remain at his post.  He died in December 1967, of what has not been disclosed.  His funeral was attended by President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, New York State Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor John Lindsay, and others, and he was buried in the crypt under the main altar of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, alongside other deceased archbishops and cardinals.  No question, he went out in style.  His 28-year tenure as Archbishop is the longest to date in the history of the Archdiocese of New York.  A New York City high school bears his name.
Cardinal Spellman's coat of arms.
Sequere deum = Follow God.
SajoR
     And now we come to the crucial question: Was Cardinal Spellman gay?  Rumors then and now have abounded.  A friend informs me that in the standees line at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s gay jokes about “Franny” Spellman were rampant, especially among standees with a Catholic upbringing, though all the ones he remembered are too bawdy to bear repeating here.  I’m always skeptical about such stories, until conclusive evidence appears.  Some elements of the gay community commonly assert with conviction that this or that world leader or celebrity is or was screamingly gay, without offering any such evidence.  Long ago a dapper Brooks Brothers-clad East Sider who had been in the military in the Pacific during World War II assured me that reports of General Douglas MacArthur’s homosexual escapades had constantly surfaced and of course had been vigorously suppressed.  I didn’t believe him then and I don’t believe him now, since I know of no reliable confirmation of his story.  But the case of Cardinal Spellman isn’t that simple.
     One of Spellman’s biographers, John Cooney, whose workThe American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman appeared in 1984, mentioned four interviewees who stated that Spellman was indeed homosexual; Cooney offered no direct proof but was convinced that the allegations were true.  “I talked to many priests who worked for Spellman and they were incensed, dismayed, and angered by his conduct.”  Not surprisingly, Monsignor Eugene V. Clark, Spellman’s personal secretary for fifteen years, promptly labeled Cooney’s accusations “utterly ridiculous and preposterous,” adding that "if you had any idea of [Spellman's] New England background and his Catholicism, you would know it was a foolish charge."  (Interestingly enough, Clark, an arch-conservative who was notoriously anti-gay in his pronouncements, had to resign as rector of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in 2005 when, at age 79, he was named as the “other man” in a divorce case.)
Signorile
David Shankbone     Reinforcing Cooney’s claim is gay author and journalist Michelangelo Signorile’s online article “Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy” (2002), which labels Spellman “one of the most notorious, powerful, and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history.”  According to him, the closeted Cardinal was known as “Franny” to assorted Broadway chorus boys and others, but the Church pressured Cooney’s publisher, Times Books, to reduce the four pages on the Cardinal’s sexuality to a single paragraph that only mentioned “rumors.”  Signorile also asserts that Spellman was involved in a relationship with a dancer in the Broadway revue One Touch of Venus, whose original production ran from 1943 to 1945; Spellman would have his limousine pick up the dancer several nights a week and bring him to the archiepiscopal residence.  And if a portly prelate might seem lacking in sex appeal to a frisky chorus boy, his status as the Cardinal Archbishop of New York probably enhanced his image considerably.  All of which prompts a titillating nocturnal fantasy: the young man exiting the limousine discreetly and slipping into the neo-Gothic mansion, with its ornate furnishings and uniformed servants, for a most clandestine tryst.  When he asked Spellman how he could get away with it, His Eminence allegedly answered, “Who would believe that?”  It should be noted that Signorile has made a name for himself by “outing” public figures whom he claims are closeted homosexuals, a practice that is highly controversial and will be discussed in the next post.
     Further complicating the picture is Curt Gentry’s biography J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (1991), which alleges that Hoover’s files had “numerous allegations that Spellman was a very active homosexual” (p. 347).  Still, these are only allegations.  Surprisingly, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s declassified file on Spellman is available online and I have looked at it.  Unsurprisingly, what are probably the most informative and juicy parts are blacked out.  So what do we learn?  Here is a sample from the 1940s:

·  A letter of June 16, 1942 to Hoover (signature deleted) giving him the names of all those attending a luncheon at the Archbishop’s residence on June 11, 1942, with all those names blacked out.
·      A letter of June 21, 1942, to Hoover from Spellman’s office (signature deleted) saying that the sender is glad he enjoyed the luncheon, and that the Archbishop has confirmed his standing invitation to Hoover to lunch at the Archbishop’s residence whenever he is in New York.
·      A letter of November 30, 1942, from Spellman to Hoover congratulating him on “your twenty-five years of devoted, patriotic, successful service to the country in the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” and Hoover’s appreciative reply on December 10, 1942.
·      A letter to Hoover from Rome (signature deleted) of February 7, 1946, noting that Spellman will arrive in Rome on February 14 to be consecrated a cardinal by Pope Pius XII.  The writer believes it will be of interest to the Bureau to know that there is speculation in Vatican circles and the Roman public at large regarding Spellman’s perhaps being appointed Papal Secretary of State, a position giving the recipient a better than average chance of being elected Pope.  Feeding the speculation is the fact that Pius XII is said to be tubercular and in poor health generally.  [Spellman was indeed offered the position but turned it down.]
     So what have we learned?  About homosexuality, nothing; if there are any files mentioning it, they must still be classified.  The letters show Spellman and Hoover exchanging cordialities, and His Eminence and others keeping the Director well informed about Spellman’s activities and a possible significant appointment.  Spellman was careful to maintain friendly ties with Hoover, and Hoover was keeping track of Spellman’s career.   Which shows how powerful people deal with one another, and that in itself is hardly surprising or shocking.  

     But does this exchange of cordialities mask another game?  If Hoover reportedly had a file on President Kennedy's sexual escapades and was quite willing to use it as blackmail to get what he wanted from the Kennedys, he would surely have had a similar file on His Eminence's escapades, if such there were.  If so, this unclassified file shows the Archbishop making nice with J. Edgar for the best of reasons: to flatter him and lessen the chance of any embarrassing revelations from that quarter.  In 1972, when Hoover at last relinquished his position and power through death, many a public figure must have clandestinely sighed with relief.
     Certainly it is in the Church’s interest to squelch, whenever possible, even rumors or allegations about His Eminence’s sexual proclivities.  After all, what would happen if the charges turned out to be true?  Would the Cardinal Spellman High School have to be rechristened?  Would His Eminence’s remains have to be disinterred from under the main altar of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and if so, where should they go?  Messy, messy, messy.  But if he made a full confession on his deathbed, probably it wouldn’t be necessary.  Who among us has not sinned?  Still, messy in the extreme.
     So what do I conclude?  Was Cardinal Spellman gay?  Possibly.  Monsignor Clark's argument citing Spellman's New England background and Catholicism doesn't impress me, since I have known, and known of, gay men raised in a very traditional Catholic environment who, but for their sexuality, would have been classic conservatives in life style, politics, and religion, and who sometimes, with great anguish but without success, tried to be so anyway.

     Is Spellman's homosexuality absolutely certain?  No.  Is it probable?  I haven’t quite decided.  What would nudge me toward “probable”?  If one or several ninety-year-old ex-chorus boys surfaced and announced, “Yes, I had sex with His Eminence back in the 1940s,” that might do the trick.  In the meantime I’ll only say, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.  But given the specificity of the charges, the more I ponder, the more I edge toward “probable.”  Yes, he probably was.  [Today, upon further reflection, I would say almost certainly.]

      So what is one to make of all this?  I don't share the opinion of Michelangelo Signorile, who labels Spellman "the epitome of the self-loathing, closeted, evil queen," for no known facts substantiate the statement.  We have no glimpse into the inner workings of the archbishop's mind.  Perhaps his sex life was high drama or even tragedy, perhaps it was comedy laced with farce, perhaps it was something in between; we will probably never know.
     Contact with the rich and famous, luncheons with J. Edgar, a confident of three presidents, a strike-breaking gravedigger, a white-hot patriot who went against papal pacifism to bless departing bombers, and posthumously the subject of a passionate controversy – what a career!  They don’t come like that very often.  


     A Spellman quote:  “There are three ages of man – youth, age, and ‘you’re looking wonderful.’ ”  So he did have a sense of humor.

     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 


     Coming soon:  As announced, a celebrated bank robber who often brandished a submachine gun but wouldn't hurt a flea.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

240. Gay Pride, Anaïs Nin, and Erotica

     Though I always take out my rainbow flag (scavenged from a trash can last year) and wave it about the apartment, I hadn't planned to watch this year's parade, having seen it several times in the past.  Instead, knowing the nearby restaurants would be crowded even while the parade was in progress, I planned to take refuge in a quiet Chinese restaurant on West 3rd Street, at a safe remove from the brouhaha.  So I left the apartment at about 2 p.m. and went out into a mild, cloudless day – perfect for a parade.  I planned to follow West 4thStreet east to Sixth Avenue and, depending on the volume of the crowds, find my way from there.  Which, it turned out, was naïve.
     Walking along West 11th Street toward 4th, I immediately encountered a group of girls, one of whom, with flaming pink hair, launched into a frenzied dance.  As I passed them I applauded, and her companions cheered my applause.  Which set the tone for the day: wild and joyous.
     As I followed West 4th toward Sheridan Square, where West 4thintersects Christopher Street and the path of the parade, I soon saw a mass of people ahead of me blocking my way to Seventh Avenue and the Square, so I turned left onto West 10th Street (yes, West 4th crosses West 10th – this is the Village and even the streets are crazy) – and, with the help of police who were directing traffic and the flow of pedestrians, managed to cross Seventh Avenue, then Sixth, where I found the crowds still impossibly thick, then Fifth, still crowded, and ended up on University Place, far removed from the parade, where I found only the usual Sunday-afternoon crowd enjoying the Village on a sunny day, fewer rainbow flags, less frenzy.           So what had I seen en route?  Not just rainbow flags, but flaring rainbow skirts, rainbow boas, rainbow capes, rainbow necklaces and bracelets and shirts and caps and headdresses – in short, rainbow everything.  And T-shirts blazoning a message:
IT’S  ALL  ABOUT  LOVELOVE  WINSMANILA – PHILIPPINES
And on a very straight-looking guy:
YOU’REABITCH
     And the people?  Policemen everywhere (in the wake of Orlando, no doubt), and firemen and their vehicles as well.  As regards the celebrants, mostly young people waving rainbow flags, but also older ones, some of them same-sex couples holding hands.  Muscled studs stripped to the waist, displaying the torso they’d worked so hard to achieve.  And women with pink, purple, blue, or yellow hair.  And, here and there, costumes wild and weird, as if from another planet, indescribable.  But nothing negative; a joyous mood throughout, albeit with signs – I  AM  PULSE, WE  ARE  ORLANDO -- commemorating Orlando and the 49 victims.
     As I approached my Chinese restaurant, I grew apprehensive, for even on West 3rd Street there were ground-floor bars and restaurants jammed to the gills, with occasional cheers and applause, probably sparked by watching the parade on television.  But when I mounted the short flight of stairs to my restaurant, I left the hullabaloo behind and entered a sheltered space of calm with only a handful of other patrons present.  I was soon at a table awaiting my scallion pancakes and tea, while perusing a book I had just bought at a sidewalk stand on West 4th Street and University Place: Delta of Venus: Erotica by Anaïs Nin (Bantam, 1978), which made available to the public some erotica that, needing money, she had done in 1940 for an anonymous male patron for a dollar a page.  And who had put her up to this endeavor?  Her friend and lover, Henry Miller, who had other projects in mind and so offered the job to her.  (Note: In 1940, a dollar a page wasn’t a bad rate.  Accounting for inflation, it is the equivalent of $16.89 today.)
     Though I have read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) in Latin and, in translation, a similar treatise in Arabic, I’m not much into erotica, whether gay or straight.  I bought the book on an impulse, because I had met Anaïs Nin here in New York in 1968, at which time I sent her some poems (she pronounced them “subtle”), and she sent me A Spy in the House of Love, a title that I still find arresting.  But what does this have to do with Gay Pride?  Nothing, yet everything, for a candid celebration of female sexuality signals the same emancipation for women that the Stonewall riots of 1969 signaled for the gay community.  What is the Gay Pride celebration all about, if not a celebration of sex?  While at the restaurant I got through the first chapter, about a fictional Hungarian baron whose appetite for sexual adventures is satisfied – for a while – by a free-living Brazilian dancer name Anita whose narrowed, lascivious  eyes resembled those of a tiger, puma, or leopard.  (To my knowledge Anaïs Nin had no close acquaintance with feral felines, but her imagination was surely piqued by the thought of $16.89 a page.) 
     Yes, this is erotica, but today it lacks the shock value that it must have delivered when first published long ago.  And the Anaïs Nin that I met back then had nothing loose or rakish about her; she was very much a lady, carefully got up, petite, soft-voiced, sensitive, articulate.  Her preface tells how, when she was writing the erotica, her patron urged her to “leave out the poetry,” which she found that she couldn’t do.  In addition, she realized that feminine erotica, unlike male, couldn’t focus on sex acts alone, but required a component of emotion and love as well – a realization that made her work more challenging, even difficult.  Men and women, she saw, were put together differently and required different stimuli for arousal.  Henry Miller’s accounts of sexual experience were explicit, hers were ambiguous; his were Rabelaisian and humorous, hers were poetic.  As a woman writing erotica – a genre hitherto dominated by men – she was a pioneer.  (For an account of my brief acquaintance with Anaïs Nin, see post #133, June 29, 2014.)
     This account of my Gay Pride Day peregrinations left me at the restaurant with my nose deep in the delta of Venus, but having finished my digression on erotica, I’ll get back to me and my further adventures.  What then happened was simply my attempt to brave the commotion and get back home in one piece.  I followed West 4thback across Sixth Avenue (no problem), and then traversed the West 4thblock between Sixth and Seventh which I have already commemorated in a much-visited post for this blog (#154, November 23, 2014).  When I reached Sheridan Square, the whole area was packed, and the parade was in progress on Christopher Street, passing the celebrated Stonewall Inn on its way to Seventh Avenue and beyond.  From a distance I could see, over the heads of other bystanders, several floats pass by, blaring loud music to which a pack of young celebrants, some in fantastic outfits and some in almost nothing at all, vibrated frantically and joyously.  Each time a float passed the crowd at or near the Square, a huge ovation erupted, while everyone waved their rainbow flags in a frenzy.  And in the park itself the life-size statues of two couples, two men standing together and two seated women, were still heaped with flowers and cards and candles commemorating the victims of the Orlando massacre.
     At intervals the police halted the parade and let people cross Christopher Street, so I was able to escape north from the crowd and reach West 10th again, which took me back to West 4thand so on to my apartment.  The more space I put between me and the parade, the less frantic the crowd and the fewer the flags, until the crowd frayed into small groups here and there, including some, both old and young, content to sit on a stoop and watch the others go by.  But right up to the entrance to my building, I sensed excitement in the air, something very special under way.  So ended my witness of the celebration, except for sounds that night of fireworks.
     Today the Times informs me that some 30,000 marched in the parade, and that Hillary Clinton made a surprise visit, popping out of a van near the Stonewall to march four blocks in the parade in the company of such notables as Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and black activist Al Sharpton, who took care to position himself right next to the lady in question.  Recognized and hailed all the way, and showered with confetti from a rooftop at Bleecker Street, she waved and smiled and shook hands with onlookers held back by police barricades.  Then, just as suddenly and mysteriously as she arrived, she popped back into a vehicle and was whisked off to fly back to Indiana, where she is now campaigning.  Mr. Trump, who claims he will do more than Hillary for gays, was not in evidence, having other fish to fry.
     TheTimes also interviewed some bystanders.  A young man from Bangkok had thought about dressing in drag but decided not to, heeding his mother’s advice, “Just don’t go crazy.”  A 20-year-old transgender American said he felt proud of being who he was, but declined to give his surname because his family disapproved of his transition.  And a 74-year-old American who has attended some 30 marches told of losing 75 friends to AIDS; when he informed the families, some of them immediately hung up, so he deposited their ashes in the Hudson River and the Grand Canyon: a sad note indeed on an otherwise joyous occasion.
     Erotica vs. pornography:  What is the difference?  Off the top of my head I’m inclined to say that erotica deals candidly with the sexual, but pornography goes further, dishing out luscious adjectives and juicy descriptions in hopes of sexually arousing the reader or viewer.  Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is certainly not pornography; rather, it’s a sex manual instructing male and female readers on how to “connect” and, once you’ve done it, how to keep connected.  His advice is often simplistic, yet relevant: “To be loved, be lovable.”  He arms his readers for sexual encounters, but he doesn’t whip them up into a frenzy of desire. 
     Throughout the book Ovid is urbane, sophisticated, witty.  Which did him no good whatsoever: in 8 CE he was banished by the emperor Augustus to the farthest limits of the empire (to what is now Romania) because, as the poet puts it, he was guilty of a book and an error.  The book was obviously the Ars Amatoria, which may have offended an emperor eager to restore the traditional polytheistic religion of Rome, and opposed to well-bred Roman women going out in public to “connect.”  The error may have been political, related to rival factions intriguing to secure the aging emperor’s succession;  possibly it involved the emperor’s granddaughter Julia, who was banished for adultery in the same year and subsequently bore a child that Augustus ordered put to death.  Neither Julia nor Ovid ever got back to Rome.
     The Ars Amatoria was burned in a bonfire of vanities by the fanatical Florentine monk Savonarola (who later himself got burned), and an English translation of it was seized by the U.S. Customs in 1930.  One wonders what happened to the confiscated copy, and who got to read it.
     Even more taboo in the U.S. was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, recounting his sexual adventures and misadventures in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.  It was first published in Paris in 1934 with financial help from Anaïs Nin.  When I went to France on a Fulbright years later, a friend asked me to bring back a copy, since it was banned in the U.S. but available in France.  I did as he requested and in the process stuck my nose into it and, far from being aroused sexually, roared with laughter.  It was funny, funny, funny, at times uproariously so.  A Supreme Court ruling in 1964 declared the book “non-obscene,” ending the longtime ban; I hope the justices enjoyed their reading.
     Obviously, the line between erotica and pornography is hazy at best; one man’s erotica is another man’s porn.  But I hold to my opinion that porn is different in that it is a no-holds-barred effort, not to entertain or enlighten the reader, but to stimulate him (almost always a “him”) sexually.  And does it find its audience!  Forbes estimates that in this country the porn industry  grosses from $10 to $14 billion a year.  Neither Henry Miller nor Anaïs Nin ever dreamed of realizing even a tiny fraction of such a sum, nor did Ovid either, I suspect; if they had, they might have done better financially, but we would be poorer literarily.  So it goes.


     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.







The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 



     Coming soon:  A reblog of post #136 on the very controversial cardinal Spellman (was he or wasn’t he?), the post with the most views of all in this  blog, topping even Man/Boy Love.  Then, as originally announced, a celebrated bank robber who preyed on the city’s banks for 40 years, escaping from prison three times.  A rather charming, gentlemanly fellow who, even when brandishing a submachine gun, wouldn’t hurt a flea.  Alas, they don’t make thieves like that any more.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

     

239. Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo

     [This post is a reblog of post #43, the most visited of all the posts in this blog, originally published on January 20, 2013.  The comments that followed are included.  It does not appear in my book (see below), because Mill City Press feared legal complications -- a concern that I think exaggerated, since I do not promote (or condemn) these relationships, but above all want to understand them.  My friend Joe is now out of prison and doing well; he is on good terms with Allen, though they are now only friends.]

         When our friend John came to visit Bob and me recently, he asked an interesting question:  “Have you ever held a strong opinion about something and then, in the course of time, come to hold the opposite opinion?  In other words, regarding something significant, have you ever changed your mind?”  The three of us pondered but came up with nothing.  But I had a sort of answer (“sort of” because my first opinion was not a firm, well-settled one): I once had a mild, rather passive opinion and later came to a distinctly strong opposite opinion.  The subject: man/boy love.  Which brings us to this post, a departure for three reasons: (1) it is not specific to New York; (2) it may seem like advocacy, though I mean only to relate my own change of opinion on the subject; (3) the subject being controversial, it may raise a few hackles.
         I myself have never experienced man/boy love, neither as the younger partner nor the older one, or felt any urge to do so.  When, long ago, I would at times  encountered a gay teenager who was obviously eager to connect, he was always too immature to interest me.  So my attitude toward such relationships was vague, casual, and rather orthodox: if the boy was under the age of consent and therefore "jail bait," such a relationship was dangerous, probably dubious, and best avoided.  Yet man/boy love has been documented and even illustrated in many cultures, so graphically, in fact, that I wouldn't dare show some scenes from Pompeii, or certain Japanese and Chinese works, lest my blog be labeled a porn site.  And in classical myth Zeus became so enamored of the beautiful young Trojan boy Ganymede that he whisked him off to Olympus to be the cupbearer of the gods.  (How Hera felt about this is not recorded.)  But for me such love was even more remote than Olympus, so I didn’t think much about it.
[image error] A sheikh and a youth partying in a garden: a Persian painting of 1530.  Does this suggest man/boy love?  Viewers can decide for themselves.        What changed?  In July 2000, having heard of his case on GrandpaAl Lewis’s WBAI program (see post #19), I wrote to an inmate in North Carolina named Joe and initiated a pen pal correspondence that continues to this day.  Joe, I learned, was serving 25 years in prison on 25 counts each of indecent liberties with a child and crime against nature, and could hope to be released sometime in 2014.  “Crime against nature” – the very term angered me.  Against what nature, whose nature, etc.?  But be that as it may, Joe at my request gave me a streamlined account of his consensual three-year relationship with a young teenager named Allen (a fictional name) and how it led to his arrest. 


Another Persian work: Shah Abbas and a wine boy.  Shah Abbas ruled Persia 1587-1629.  This one is even more suggestive.  What was going on in ancient Persia?
         Fascinated by Joe’s story, I urged him to write his memoir, telling in detail the entire story from beginning to end.  (Not that it has an end; it is still ongoing.)  Though he had never written anything before, with my help he set out and over many months, sending me periodic installments, told his story in three sections: My Life before Allen, My Life with Allen, Locked Up.  Because of his remarkable memory for detail and his skill in description, it reads like a novel: a gripping and very moving novel.  He will self-publish it when released, so as to give his version of the story, totally at odds with the statements of the prosecutor at his sentencing hearing.  (With great effort I obtained the official court record of the proceedings, so I know exactly what misstatements and falsehoods were uttered.)  Clearly, this three-year man/boy relationship was doing no harm to anyone until other parties interfered, and the heavy-handed criminal justice system brought trouble to all concerned.





Zeus embracing Ganymede, an engraving by the Italian artist Cherubino Alberti (1553-1615), based on a work by Polidoro da Caravaggio (not to be confused with the famous Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio).  Some versions describe what Ganymede is holding in his right hand as a purse, suggesting prostitution, but Ganymede didn't need money; closer inspection reveals it to be the male genitals! 























A story within a story:  In his memoir Joe tells how, when working as a counselor in a boys' camp, one of the boys -- we'll call him Jim -- told him an interesting story.  A man moved into his neighborhood who started having consensual sex with the local underage boys.  Word got around; the boys flocked.  Jim himself had sex with the man, as did his younger brother.  But one day the police came calling: word had reached them too, and they wanted Jim to testify against the man, so this predator could be locked up.  Jim didn't want to, but under great pressure he agreed.  In court he saw the man, now in custody, and realized that the whole case against him depended on Jim's testimony.  But Jim reflected: he liked the man, liked the sex, and didn't think the man would harm anyone.  So when he took the stand, he testified  that he and the man had never had sex.  Pandemonium erupted, as the prosecutor and a social worker upbraided him, and the judge pounded his gavel for order.  The session was suspended, so the social worker could talk to Jim in private, with only his father present.  The social worker again described the man as a monster and said it was Jim's duty to testify against him so he could be locked up. "Lady," said Jim, "right now I'm more scared of you than I am of him!"  Her jar dropped, and Jim's father intervened: "If you don't mind, I'm taking my son home."  For the next few days his father kept a close eye on Jim, lest he see the man again, but the man soon moved away.  This story taught me something useful:  It isn't enough to just tell the truth; you must tell it for the right reasons.  Jim lied in his testimony, but to have told the truth would have gone counter to his own perceptions of the situation and betrayed a man who he felt had done him no harm.  Few teenagers would have had the courage to do this; I applaud him.
         Obviously, it was Joe’s story that caused me to reconsider my attitude toward man/boy relationships and the notion of the pedophile and pedophilia, terms that are used – and misused – much too freely.  Webster’s New Collegiate defines pedophilia as “sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object.”  In this context I take “children” to mean young persons who have not yet reached puberty.  In the recent scandals regarding priests in the Catholic Church, the perpetrators were invariably referred to as pedophiles, though most of the cases involved teenagers.  We lack a term for sexual attraction to adolescents – “ephebophilia” exists but has
not passed into the general language – hence the misuse of “pedophile” and “pedophilia.”  Joe was 26 and Allen was 13 when they met, but at 13 Allen was tall, rather broad-shouldered, and well past puberty, so for me this story does not involve pedophilia. 


Man/boy love in ancient Greece.  An Attic vase of the 5th
Century BCE, now in the Louvre.  Ah, those Greeks!  In
pre-Christian times they got away with a lot,
incorporating ephebophilia into their societies, on
condition that the partners in time marry and beget
offspring, so as to assure the future of the city state.
Marie-Lan Nguyen


         My interest in Joe’s story led me to two books treating the subject of man/boy relationships, one studying the problem in Denmark and the other in Holland, but both now available in English.  The Danish one, originally published in 1986, offers interviews with a defense attorney, a judge, admitted pedophiles, and above all a number of boys involved in consensual relationships.  One boy, who says he isn’t exclusively gay, asserts that it would be boring to be purely heterosexual.  A boy of ten (the youngest of those interviewed), when asked how old a person should be before having sex, replies, “Zero years”; his mother, aware of the relationship and her son’s love for his older friend, refuses to interfere, and regrets that the relationship has to be hidden from the outside world.  Another boy describes himself as bisexual, deriving great pleasure from sex with girls, though he says his best experiences were with his stepfather, when he could just surrender and let the stepfather take the lead.  Finally, a boy of 16, now interested in girls, says of the older friend whom he started having sex with at age 13, “He understands me better than my own mother”; he expects that, even without sex, they will remain friends indefinitely.  The aim of the study, the authors say, is to induce parents, teachers, and the various authorities to listen to what the boys say, and to understand their joy in the relationships and their need of an older friend.  Significantly, just as the boys reach 15 or 16, their older friends lose interest in them sexually, and the boys usually begin having sex with girls.  Significantly too, the English translation’s title is Crime Without Victims.
          First published in 1981, Theo Sandfort’s Dutch study was based on a government-funded report examining the stories of twenty-five boys currently involved in a consensual man/boy relationship, all but one of whom considered the relationship a decidedly positive experience.  When, before the AIDS epidemic appeared, a limited English edition reached these enlightened shores, it was reviewed by a pediatric psychiatrist inContemporary Psychology (vol. 30, no. 1, 1985), who dismissed it as the rationalizing of a criminal activity, tainted both because it avoided the usual labels of "victims" and "perpetrators," and because it was sponsored in part by an organized group of pedophiles (which was news to the Dutch government!).  Circulating here at the same time was the accusation (never substantiated) that a tidal wave of "kiddie porn" was flowing across the Atlantic from Amsterdam; those permissive Dutch were trying to corrupt our youth and undermine the moral fabric of the nation!  There were other negative reviews of Sandfort’s work as well, all but dooming the boys and their partners to fire and brimstone, and Sandfort, the voyeuristic author, to a new persona as a pillar of salt.  Obviously, even with an influx of porn, the relatively tolerant attitude toward sex that prevails in secular Holland has not corrupted our fair land.  (A side thought:  When it comes to fire and brimstone, wouldn't free-living San Francisco be Sodom, and turpitudinous New York Gomorrah?  So maybe, by implication, this post does relate a bit to the Apple.)
         And what of the 25 boys themselves, age 10 to 16, of whom 11 were clearly beyond puberty?  When interviewed, they usually said that they met their older partner through family or friends; certainly they were not stalked.  And after the first encounter, which rarely involved sex, it was the boys who sought to renew contact and develop a friendship.  The ensuing friendship did involve pleasurable sex, but even more important were shared activities like swimming, movies, or visits to an amusement park.  At their partner’s home the boys were more relaxed and enjoyed more freedom than at their own home, even when the boys had good relations with their parents.  Trust and loyalty developed, and the ability to talk freely about anything: as an American teenager in a similar relationship once said to Oprah, "I can tell him anything and not feel judged!"  While the parents usually knew about these friendships, they didn’t know about the sex, which they would think “really bad” or “not nice” or “dirty” – attitudes that the boys considered old-fashioned and stupid.  A common thread in these stories was the boys’ determination to live their own lives, regardless of the opinions of others.  The study concluded that, for boys in pedophile relationships, the present laws in Holland posed far more of a threat than a protection, and urged the passage of more enlightened legislation.
         In the light of such studies, which reinforce the lessons of Joe’s story, I revised my attitude toward consensual man/boy relationships.  Of course child molestation exists: three friends of mine were molested as children and bear the resulting emotional scars to this day, but these were nonconsensual encounters.  I now view consensual man/boy relationships as legitimate and constructive, if the boy is past puberty and able to give knowing consent.  This does not mean that I go along wholeheartedly with the arguments of the North American Man/Boy Love association (NAMBLA),

which beats the drums for complete tolerance of these friendships, regardless of the age of the boy.  Certainly I agree with their plea for greater tolerance and understanding, and their wish to free all men imprisoned for having had consensual sexual relationships with minors.  But they want no age of consent at all, which at this point I find questionable; arbitrary as it is, the age of consent -- 15 or 16 in most states, but 17 in New York -- should be lowered but not abolished.  Yet even here I confess that NAMBLA's arguments against any age of consent at all are powerful, since such stipulations are not only arbitrary but subject to prosecutorial abuse.          NAMBLA's is a lonely path, shunned and even condemned by mainstream gay organizations, who don’t want their campaign for gay rights to be contaminated with anything that might be construed as child molestation.  Pedophiles are only a tiny minority of the gay population and suffer prejudice and misunderstanding accordingly.  I am not of them, but I can sympathize.  Which puts me in a strange middle place, tolerant, yet tolerant with a few reservations.  But since when was life not complicated?













Source note:  The two books mentioned earlier are:

Crime Without Victims, ed. the "Trobriands" collective of authors, trans. E. Brongersma, Amsterdam: Global Academic Publishers, 1993.

Theo Sandfort, Boys on Their Contacts with Men, Elmhurst, NY: Global Academic Publishers, 1987.

I queried NAMBLA by e-mail, asking permission to use a photo from their home page, but got no response.  So I've done without the photo and have included no link to their website.  I would still welcome feedback from them on this issue.

Thought for the day #1:  Desire is holy.  (Yes, a repeat from earlier, but relevant.  Please note: I didn't say "wise" or "prudent" or "legal," just "holy," which viewers will interpret as they wish.)

Thought for the day #2:  Humankind cannot bear very much reality. -- T.S. Eliot.  Indeed, we live immersed in illusions and surface only occasionally to glimpse what is really real.

P.S.  I finally heard from NAMBLA; their e-mail follows.  They also made an interesting comment: see Comments.  I won't reproduce the photo of a painting, since  by itself it could be misinterpreted.


Hello, Mr. Browder,
Thanks for your message, and for your interest in our organization.   It has taken me too long to respond, and I must apologize.

The picture you asked about could be seen as too narrow a focus on younger boys, although it is a famous work by a first-rate American painter.  And, while that simply wouldn't be an accurate portrait of NAMBLA, it was legally unobjectionable.  I couldn't know the context, nor could I guess what use you might make of this image, so I asked for the opinions of our editorial crew.  And, as usual, that is a slow process.

The responses were, generally, "Okay".  But people asked me -- to ask you -- that you wouldn't misrepresent us (as others have done, too often).

Once I read your blog, my doubts were gone.  You are a shrewd and generous commentator on our society and its foibles.  Thanks for writing on this subject!  And, feel free to use anything on our website as you see fit.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schoen

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder7 comments:Gerry BurnieJanuary 20, 2013 at 7:18 AMA very interesting and thought-provoking discussion.

I think it is unquestionable that there is a good deal of paranoia associated with man/boy love, and therefore more emotion than logic or common sense.


The bottom line is that it happens, and it is more often consensual than exploitative. Moreover, youths often benefit from the erastes-eromenos relationship.


Another great tragedy associated with the topic is that logical discussion is discouraged by the hysteria involved. It is indeed the love that dare not speak its name.
Reply  Chris AlbertsonJanuary 20, 2013 at 11:08 AMI agree with Mr. Burnie and understand your own conclusion, shift, or whatever we should call it. Growing up in Denmark, in a household that neither condemned nor embraced religion, I suppose I took free thought for granted.

I recall how my friends and I, as teenagers and young adults, laughed at American movies that showed chaperones and referred to pregnant young ladies as being "in trouble." We also found the mere idea of "panty raids" on college campuses ludicrous beyond belief. It all added up to an impression of Americans as uneducated and naïve. Having spent a couple of years in the states during WWII, attending PS 101 in Forest Hills, I could vouch for low standard of education, at least in elementary school. It was appalling—I learned not a thing other than English, and that was something I absorbed in the schoolyard and through listening to Captain Midnight, Suspense, etc.


Thank you for another interesting article.
ReplyClifford BrowderJanuary 20, 2013 at 2:23 PMThanks for the comment, Chris. Coming from a Dane, your comment is especially interesting, since one of the books mentioned deals with these relationships over there. I think we're making slow but (I hope) steady progress here, except in fundamentalist circles. But you're a better judge of that than I am.ReplyGeraldine EvansJanuary 21, 2013 at 8:26 AMMy, Clifford, but you're a brave man to post such an article. But, for a woman brought up strict Catholic, I found it very thought-provoking. You've certainly given me something to ponder...Reply

Clifford BrowderJanuary 21, 2013 at 11:33 AMYou're keeping an open mind -- bravo! The emphasis, of course, is on consensual relationships. The main thing now, I think, is: LISTEN TO THE BOYS. Adults have so often failed to do that. But this will be debated forever. Better debated than ignored. Thanks for the comment.ReplyPeter HermanJanuary 23, 2013 at 1:48 PMDear Mr. Browder,It appears that NAMBLA owes you an apology for its delay in responding to your request for permission to use a photo from our Web site. It is not that we ignored you but that our system of consultation is rather slow. Our need to deliberate carefully is informed by the too many who seek only to misrepresent us. Your essay was indeed a refreshing departure.
As for the photo you requested, I had communicated misgivings on its use to our steering committee. We tend to rotate images so as to give a broader view of our organization but do not always have the manpower to update our Web site.


Your remark on our position on age of consent is interesting in that you immediately follow it by recognizing one of our reasons for this stand. Another point in defense of this position is that human sexuality is no different from other aspects of development. For example, human beings are capable of absorbing knowledge from the earliest years. Yet no one would suggest that even a one-year-old Einstein would have been able to digest differential calculus.


Consensuality has been our guiding principle from the beginning, and it goes without saying that we have always condemned subterfuge and force. These would indeed be greatly reduced if through peer pressure and transparency the acceptance you promote were to become actual.


I am writing this to you as an individual member of the MAMBLA steering committee and without having consulted with it.


Peter Herman
ReplyPLATANIA AETERNUM KLINGSORJune 25, 2015 at 9:16 AMI'm a Boylover and I'm pro ancient paidophilia conceptReply

     The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon: Gay Pride, Anaïs Nin, and Erotica.  After that: another reblog of a popular post, and then“Slick Willie,” the gentlemanly thief who for 40 years preyed on the banks of New York and Philadelphia, sometimes with a submachine gun in hand, but more often disguised as a messenger or a maintenance man or a policeman. 
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

238. Construction and Destruction in the City

     New York has always been a tear-down, build-up city: tear down the old, build something new on the site.  In the nineteenth century there was a constant rattle and screech and grind and thud as workmen hammered and sawed and bolted materials into place, or hauled them in wagons, or hoisted them by means of a horse-powered windlass or derrick: operations that raised up clouds of dust and plaster, and sent avalanches of brickbats and splintered wood and slate down upon the heads of luckless pedestrians, or when blasting, even on one occasion dropped a boulder through the roof and three floors of a mansion to lodge between two ceiling beams in a gentleman’s parlor. 
     And if such an intrusion violated that revered sanctum, that shrine of Victorian gentility, what can one say of the cemeteries, those sanctified refuges of the dear departed, when development decreed their closing, and workmen excavating the site shoveled out onto the pavement shreds of grave clothes, bones, and bits of skull with tufts of hair.  Yes, the kin of those buried there had been notified of the cemetery’s closing and been given time to remove the loved ones, but sometimes no kin could be located, with desecration the result.
     What was the city up to?  It was called Go Ahead: the passionate belief then gripping the nation that More and Bigger and Faster = Better, that the city and the nation were vehicles of Progress, that old fogyism and reverence for the past must yield to Young America and its fervent embrace of the New.  And who could doubt the cult of Progress, since in a single lifetime a citizen could witness the coming of gaslight, replacing candles and whale-oil lamps, and then the electric light; steamboats and railroads and the telegraph, making travel and communication easier; and that undreamed-of amenity, the flush toilet, right inside one’s abode?  Americans were gaga over material progress, and for New Yorkers this meant tearing down old buildings to replace them with new and better ones, while pushing the city’s limits farther and farther north on the cigar-shaped island of Manhattan, and, with the coming of better construction materials and the elevator, pushing it up as well – up, up, up to eight-, ten-, and twelve-story buildings, and who knows how much farther up one could go into the blue vault of heaven?
     And today?  When I go out on errands, I am constantly forced into detours because of construction; I pass graffiti-adorned scaffoldings masking construction or renovation within; I see trucks coming and going with lettering on their flanks announcing
PLUMBING  HEATING  ELECTRICALLUMBERINSTALLATIONSDEMOLITION & CARTINGINTERIOR  DEMOLITION
     When I get a glimpse of an excavation site, I see a deep pit with rubble and debris, and an outsize dumpster at the curb overloaded with bricks, bits of wood and plaster, twisted steel, and heaps of bent nails and rubble.  Or I get a peek through the open doorway of an old brownstone, its façade intact, its interior gutted and strewn with debris, a glance that often goes the depth of the building to a gaping window frame in the rear wall that affords even a glimpse of the back garden, or what remains of it.  Yes, the West Village is a historical district, but interiors can be revamped to one’s heart’s content, as long as the exterior is preserved.
     And the cranes – those towering devices whose installation may cause the closing of a whole block to traffic, and whose soaring spikes reach up high to remove debris from the topmost floors of a building, or to hoist materials onto the structure, or to do whatever is necessary at those dizzying heights.  Like most passersby, I always pause a few minutes to watch them in operation, staring in disbelief at the compact power house at street level, amazed that this little structure can command the metal giraffe neck of a monster reaching so high into the sky.


     Do these towering monsters ever collapse?  You bet!  At about 8:00 a.m. on the morning of February 5, 2016, when falling snow was accompanied by wind gusts, the crew of a crane rising 565 feet into the air in TriBeCa in Lower Manhattan decided to lower the crane to a more secure level.  But as the crane descended, it suddenly toppled over and came crashing down on Worth Street, killing a pedestrian, injuring three others, shaking nearby buildings, and littering the surrounding blocks with debris.  Thinking a bomb had exploded, people going to work panicked and fled from the area.  Firefighters, policemen, and utility workers flocked to the scene to cope with the resulting damage to a water main and a number of gas lines.  Gas was shut off in the immediate area, streets were closed, and subway lines skipped nearby stops – and this during the morning rush hour.  Photographs show the toppled crane stretching the length of a city block.
     The sole fatality of this incident was a Czech-born immigrant of 38 who had a mathematics degree from Harvard.  To die in a crane collapse strikes me as one of the weirdest possible deaths in this city, topped only, perhaps, by being killed by a falling branch while crossing Central Park on a windy day.  And what was the crane doing there?  Installing generators and air-conditioning units atop the building at 60 Hudson Street.  As a precaution, city officials ordered 419 other cranes then operating in the city to be secured, and the Mayor promised that inspectors would be tough on the companies responsible for construction site accidents. 
     Will cranes continue to be a feature of life in the city?  Of course.  Moving horizontally instead of vertically because it’s the only way it can expand, Rockefeller University on the Upper East Side is building over (yes, over) the F.D.R. Drive, and a huge crane has already hoisted a prefabricated  800,000-pound metal structure from a barge in the East River and lowered it into place over the Drive.  This is the first of 19 such structures, and the crane is the largest marine crane on the East Coast, able to reach as high as a 21-story building and carry up to 2 million pounds.  The hoisting will be done at night, and the Drive will be closed for the operation.  Even so, good luck, East Side motorists!  Heavy heavy hangs over thy head.
     If dying in a crane collapse is weird, how about being buried alive?  On April 6, 2015, when a 14-foot trench at a construction site on Ninth Avenue collapsed, an Ecuadorean immigrant working on there was crushed under thousands of pounds of dirt.  The machinery of justice grinds slowly, but on June 10 of this year the contracting company was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, both felonies, and of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor; sentencing will be done at a future date.  No date has been set as yet for the trial of two construction managers and an excavation subcontractor, but the company itself faces possible fines of up to $35,000.  When the jury verdict was announced, relatives of the victim, including his mother who had come all the way from Ecuador, broke down in tears and were hugged by the prosecutor.  The verdict was significant, since criminal liability in such cases is hard to prove. 
     And when buildings are torn down in the city, what becomes of the debris?  It is carted off, one assumes.  But what of the ornamental fixtures and furnishings that once adorned them – the ornate fireplaces, carved oak paneling, stained glass, vintage plumbing, terra cotta curlicues, and antique lighting fixtures?  They are rescued by a special breed of scavengers who, by prior arrangement with the demolisher, rush in to collect architectural artifacts and either preserve them or offer them for sale.
     And where do they end up?  One huge trove is in a sprawling complex of buildings on Main Street in the sleepy little town of Ivoryton, Connecticut, a two-hour drive northeast of New York.  Inside the buildings is a vast array of scavenged artifacts:
·      carved oak transoms from the first Helen Hayes Theater on West 46th Street in Manhattan·      seven phone booths covered with band stickers and graffiti from the Roseland Ballroom, which closed in 2014·      antique carved oak paneling from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Fifth Avenue mansion·      marble fireplaces from the elegant Plaza Hotel·      Tudor-style stained glass from a penthouse on 57thStreet where actor Errol Flynn once lived·      bars from Gino’s restaurant on Lexington Avenue, which closed in 2010·      the reception counter and display cases from Manhattan’s prestigious  21 Club·      the terra cotta façade of the Savoy Theater on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn
And this is only a fraction of the trove.
     So what is all this stuff doing in Connecticut?  It is the collection, assembled over many years, of Evan Blum, who calls it the “Sixth Borough,” and the items are for sale at prices you might not want to pay.  And how does he get the stuff?  By making an agreement, often for a fee, with the company doing the demolition.  Some preservationists criticize him for selling the artifacts, arguing that this creates a market for items that should be placed in museums.  But he insists that he hates to see old buildings demolished, and that he is rescuing the stuff from a trip to the landfill.  The Connecticut trove isn’t open to the public, but a sampling of his collection can be seen at Demolition Depot & Irreplaceable Artifacts, his showroom on East 125thStreet in Harlem, well known to collectors and designers.  But demolition keeps Mr. Blum busy.  He told a Times reporter recently that they’re taking down and gutting buildings faster than he can keep up.  “I have 25 churches to do before the end of the year.”
     Source note:  For information on Evan Blum’s collection of artifacts in Connecticut, I am indebted to Corey Kilgannon’s article in the New York Times of June 14, 2016.

      First gay monument:  Last Friday, June 24, President Obama issued a proclamation making the Stonewall Inn, the site of the 1969 riots that began the gay rights movement, the Stonewall National Monument, the first National Park Service unit dedicated to gay rights.  The monument comprises 7.7 acres, protecting not just the bar but the Christopher Park across the street, and several other adjacent streets and sidewalks involved in the riots.  This comes soon after the mayhem in Orlando, and just in time for today's annual gay parade, which always comes down Christopher Street past the Stonewall, before disbanding at Christopher and Greenwich Street, near the Hudson River.  And why a monument, rather than a park?  To create a national park requires action by Congress, whereas a monument does not.  Given the chronic inaction of the current Congress, the choice was obvious.  (The riots and parade are chronicled in chapter 31 of my book.)

The Stonewall in 1969.  Nothing special to look at,
until history intervened.
     The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon: “Slick Willie,” the gentlemanly thief who for 40 years preyed on the banks of Philadelphia and New York.  But before “Slick Willie” I’ll probably reblog the ever popular and much visited post on “Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo.”  What better way could there be to celebrate Gay Pride Day, albeit a day or two too late?

     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

237. Roy Cohn, Attack-Dog Lawyer and AIDS Denier, p...

 237. Roy Cohn, Attack-Dog Lawyer and AIDS Denier, plus Outing
(This post is a reprint of #137, published on July 27, 2014, long before most people could imagine Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate.  It is republished here because of the interest, sparked by an article in the New York Times, in Cohn as a friend and mentor of Trump.  By his own account, Peter Fraser was Cohn's lover for more than the last two years of Cohn's life. The Times article reports that Fraser returned to New Zealand, where he now works as a conservationist at the Auckland Zoo.)

      I first heard of him when, studying in France in 1953, it was reported that two twenty somethings, members of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s staff, had been sent to Europe to investigate waste and mismanagement in U.S. Army bases, embassies, and offices of the U.S. Information Service, and see if there was any – heaven forfend! -- Communist or left-leaning literature available there.  This was, after all, the early days of the Cold War, and the rabidly anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin stretched his sinister shadow as far as Western Europe.  The two peripatetic staff members were Roy Cohn and David Schine, though at the time their names barely impinged on my psyche.  Their 18-day whirlwind tour, highly publicized, earned them the label “junketeering gumshoes” from a disgruntled U.S. employee in Germany whom they accused of having once signed a Communist Party petition, a charge that later cost him his job.
     But this was mere prelude.  I returned that year to the U.S. and began graduate studies in French at Columbia, which brought me to New York.  By the summer of 1954 I was busy writing my master’s thesis, but not so preoccupied that I didn’t find time every evening to join a thong of students in the campus TV room watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.  The hearings had been provoked by Roy Cohn’s excessive demands on the Army to give special privileges to his friend David Schine, who had been drafted into the Army but, in Cohn’s opinion, merited nightly passes while in basic training, exemption from onerous kitchen duties, and respect such as few draftees ever received.  So oppressive had Cohn’s interference become, climaxed by a threat to “wreck the Army,” that Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens brought formal charges against McCarthy and Cohn.  Extensive Senate hearings followed, and it was the daily evening summary of those hearings that I and twenty million others watched obsessively.
     The hearings revealed to us and the public at large the heavyset McCarthy’s obnoxious manner, and Roy Cohn’s heavy-lidded eyes, deep tan, and knowing grin, and above all his aggressiveness; they were not people you would care to meet.  Climaxing the hearings was Army counsel Joseph Welch’s passionate response, when McCarthy questioned the loyalty of one of Welch’s aides: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?” -- a query that provoked applause from the gallery.  Indeed, it was a turning point in McCarthy’s career; from then on his support steadily eroded.  In December 1954 he was formally censured by the Senate on a number of grounds.
McCarthy (left) and Cohn at the hearings.
     Among the students watching the hearings, and not just the gay contingent, it was commonly assumed that Cohn and Schine were lovers; how else could you explain Cohn’s fanatical insistence on special favors for his friend?  And how else explain certain innuendoes that spectators elsewhere may not have caught, as for instance when McCarthy asked Welch for a definition of “pixie,” a word that Welch had used casually in a question, and Welch replied that a pixie was a close relative of a fairy.  Or when Senator Flanders, Republican of Vermont, sauntered into the hearings one day to suggest that the relationships of those involved should be further explored. 
     The going Washington rumor of the time about McCarthy, as I knew indirectly from an uncle who was a PR man there, was that the senator had a babe stashed away in a hotel.  And since McCarthy had an abundance of enemies, savvy Washingtonians wondered why no one had leaked this to the press.  The explanation: everybody else probably had a babe stashed away also, and didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.  But there were other rumors, too, as I told the cousin who had passed this on to me: McCarthy, still a bachelor in his early forties, was gay.  But in 1953 he married a researcher in his office and four years later they adopted a baby girl.  His homosexuality was never established, but what also went unreported was his alcoholism, which contributed to his death in 1957.
Cohn in 1964.  Did he ever smile?  Certainly not
in a courtroom.     The hearings made Roy Cohn famous, but who was he?  He was born in 1927 in New York City to a nonobservant Jewish family, his father a judge with considerable political clout in the Democratic Party.  Raised in a Park Avenue apartment, he proved to be a bright student, attending local schools and then Columbia Law School, and was admitted to the bar as soon as he reached the age of 21. Appointed to the staff of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, he impressed others as precocious, brilliant, and arrogant, qualities that would characterize his whole career.  He was soon making a name for himself prosecuting subversives, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951, and was transferred to Washington to serve as special assistant to the Attorney General.  In 1953 he went to work for Senator McCarthy, and got his friend David Schine, the son of a multimillionaire real estate mogul, a job as consultant; their 18-day junket to Europe soon followed.
     Cohn’s work with McCarthy ended in 1954, but his career had barely begun.  Returning to New York, he joined the New York law firm Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, brought it numerous high-paying clients, and moved into the East Side townhouse that housed the firm’s offices, which made for a minimal commute.  His professional and private life were so intermixed that his colleagues were not surprised to see his doting mother wandering about the office, as she often did.  An only child, he was close to her and, following his father’s death in 1959, moved into her seven-room Park Avenue apartment.  After she died in 1969 he moved into a 33-room townhouse at 39 East 68th Street (presumably the same one already housing his law firm’s offices), though he also had a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and in the summer went to Provincetown.
     Combative by nature, he became known for his aggressive courtroom technique, intimidating prosecutors, flustering witnesses, and impressing jurors with his photographic memory, so that he rarely referred to notes.  “My scare value is high,” he once boasted.  “My area is controversy.  My tough front is my biggest asset.  I don’t write polite letters.  I don’t like to plea-bargain.  I like to fight.”  No, not a fellow you’d care to know, but maybe just the attorney you need, if you’re involved in serious litigation and have a lot to lose.  Esquire magazine called him “a legal executioner”; the National Law Journal, an “assault specialist.”  His clients over the years included a juicy mix: real estate mogul Donald Trump; Mafia bosses Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti; the owners of the popular New York nightclub Studio 54; the New York Yankees; Cardinal Spellman; and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
     Short and light of weight, he was almost fragile in appearance (an impression well masked by his aggressive demeanor), with thinning hair and blue eyes often bloodshot from his late hours at fashionable discotheques. Socially active, he gave lavish parties where the guests included many celebrities.  All his life he had a penchant for the rich and powerful, and given his legal ability and political connections, they had a penchant for him.  Among his friends were President Ronald Reagan, Norman Mailer, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Walters, Rupert Murdock, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Safire, and numerous Democratic and Republican politicians at every level, from the obscure nether depths to the shining heights.  Who, indeed, didn’t he know?
     Not that he was free of troubles.  To keep his income tax to a minimum, he had his law firm pay him a modest salary of a mere $100,000 a year, while giving him all kinds of perks that wouldn’t be taxed: a rent-free apartment, partial payment of the rent on his Greenwich, Connecticut, home; a chauffeured Rolls Royce and other limousines; and his bills at chic restaurants – perks said to total a million dollars a year.  From 1973 on he paid no income tax at all.  But the IRS, no doubt mindful of his sumptuous life style, audited his tax returns for over twenty years and collected more than $300,000 in back taxes, a mere fraction of what he finally owed them. Their pursuit of him would continue even after his death.
     Cohn’s courtroom tactics were condemned by many in his profession, and three times – in 1964, 1969, and 1971 -- he was tried in federal courts on charges ranging from conspiracy to bribery to fraud, but was acquitted each time.  In 1976 a federal court determined that he had entered the hospital room of a dying client and, by misrepresenting the nature of the document, got him to sign a codicil to his will that would have made Cohn one of the man’s executors.  Cohn’s reaction to these incidents?  A smear: the authorities were out to “get” him.  And get him they finally did: on June 23, 1986, when he didn’t have long to live, he was disbarred by the unanimous decision of a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and the 1976 matter of pressuring a client to amend his will.
     Cohn always claimed that his friendship with Schine involved nothing sexual, and some biographers have come to that conclusion.  But by the 1980s he was obviously in poor health.  A friend once asked him, “Roy, you don’t have AIDS, do you?”  To which Cohn replied, “Oh God, no!  If I had AIDS, I would have thrown myself out the window of the hospital.  I have liver cancer.  There would be no reason to stick around and live if I had AIDS.”  And that was his story to the end: liver cancer, not AIDS.
     But Roy Cohn was gay and he did have AIDS.  In 1984 a routine visit to his doctor had discovered malignant growths on his body.  His young lover Peter Fraser later said that Cohn cried only a tear or two and then dealt with the situation practically and began writing his memoir longhand on yellow legal pads.  Peter and a law partner of Cohn’s were the only ones who knew for sure that Cohn had AIDS, and for as long as he could, Cohn tried to live normally, which for him involved lunching, partying, water skiing, traveling, and of course doing deals in politics and business.  On December 31, 1985, he gave his traditional New Year’s Eve party in the second-floor foyer of his townhouse; among the hundred guests were Carmine DeSapio and Andy Warhol (a fascinating juxtaposition; see posts #135 and #108).  Cohn received them in a white dinner jacket and red bow tie with sequins, said he looked forward to seeing them all again next year.
     Being Cohn’s lover, however clandestinely, was fraught with adventure.  Raised on a farm in New Zealand, Peter Fraser had left there at age nineteen with only a pack on his back to see the world.  Blond and attractive with a sinewy body, he met Cohn at a party in Mexico and was immediately swept up into Cohn’s opulent life style: lavish parties with celebrity guests, visits to the rich and powerful, trips hither and yon to the most fashionable places; he never rode the New York subway until Cohn died.  Once Peter went to the White House as Cohn’s “office manager,” the same label used for his predecessors.  “Why don’t you come meet a friend of mine?” Cohn suggested.  As Cohn led him across the crowded room, Peter scuffed his shoe and the sole came off,  so he dragged his foot on the floor so he “wouldn’t go flop-flop.”  Then Cohn said, “I want you to meet the President and Mrs. Reagan.”  Peter reported that Reagan was very warm, probably thinking that this poor boy dragging his foot was handicapped. 
     On another occasion a New York socialite hosting a luncheon introduced Peter, to his astonishment, as Sir Peter Fraser.  The next day a society columnist mentioned, among the luncheon guests, Peter Fraser, the Prime Minister of New Zealand.  But when Americans, remembering the Army-McCarthy hearings, asked him how he could be associated with a man who did those awful things back in the 1950s, Peter, who was in his twenties, could reply honestly, “I don't know about any of that.”
     While almost nothing is known of Cardinal Spellman’s final days and death (post #136), Roy Cohn’s ending is well documented.  When diagnosed with AIDS, Cohn thought he had six months to live, but it turned out to be two years.  He was taking shots of Interferon, which sapped his energy and disoriented him; becoming aware of this, he panicked and then became depressed, since he had always prided himself on his intellect.  Troubled breathing and short-term memory loss followed, and he tried the experimental drug AZT, which many thought did more harm than good.  Rumors circulated about Roy Cohn’s having AIDS, about his dying.  
     The dementia intensified.  “The six senators who were here this afternoon,” he told Peter, “I’m going to talk to them, and you are all going to be sorry.”  Or he would accuse Peter of trying to kill him, and only after much persuasion became convinced that Peter was his friend.  When he got back from a stay in a hospital, telegrams came wishing him well, one of them from President Reagan.  Looking gaunt and wasted, he was interviewed by Mike Wallace on TV, denied being homosexual or having AIDS.  He flirted with the idea of suicide, tried one night to get his bottles of sleeping pills open, couldn’t cope with the childproof bottles, finally at Peter's insistence went back to bed. 
     When he invited other boyfriends to come for a last visit, Peter raged with jealousy. 
     “What’s he coming in for?” he would ask.
     “I’m dying, goddamit!” Cohn would shout.  “It may be the last time I see him.”
     “You said that the last four times!”
     When the New York State Bar Association began disbarment proceedings against him, he would go to the proceedings in his red convertible Cadillac, top down, and swagger into the closed hearing room.  But in June 1986, when a reporter phoned with the news that he had at last been disbarred, he announced, “I couldn’t care less,” then went to his room and cried, and wouldn’t eat unless Peter forced him.  His once fiercely resonant voice, the terror of witnesses, became a whisper, then fell silent.  He died in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on August 2, 1986, at age 59; Peter was there, holding his hand.  The hospital announcement made it clear that he died not of cancer but AIDS.  In his coffin he wore a tie bearing President Reagan’s name, though the Reagans did not come to the memorial service held in October.  He was buried in Queens.  Though he left his property to Peter and a longtime law partner, the IRS froze his assets; he still owed them millions.
     Roy Cohn had many friends, many enemies.  The gay community condemned him for not telling the world he had AIDS and using his contacts to raise money to fight the disease.  In Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991) he is portrayed as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite who to preserve his reputation denies that he has AIDS, and as he is dying of it is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whose execution for espionage he had helped bring about.  Personally, having never faced him in a courtroom, I could overlook a lot, but I can’t forgive him using his lawyerly wiles for years to avoid paying income tax; this I find reprehensible. 
     Asked by a friend if he ever resented Cohn, Peter Fraser declared with tears in his eyes, “He was wonderful to me.”  I confess I am rather taken with Peter.  It was the most unlikely of circumstances, that a kid off a farm in New Zealand should become the lover of one of the most controversial – and many would say obnoxious – figures in twentieth-century American politics, and that he would be whirled off to Provincetown or Palm Beach or Monte Carlo, meet the President of the United States, and when the bad days came, stick through to the end. 
     But what then became of him?  A cousin of Cohn’s tells how Peter gave him a last look at the townhouse, now in need of repair.  On the fourth floor Cohn’s office was locked tight.  “The firm wants to keep me out,” Peter explained.  “They think I’m going to steal things.”  The firm was letting a friend stay in Cohn’s third-floor bedroom.  “I don’t even know who he is,” said Peter with disgust.  The Rolls Royce that Cohn had been chauffeured in was for sale; Peter was about to move all his belongings out.  After that I lose track of him.  Presumably he dropped back into the obscurity that Cohn had plucked him out of years before.  I wish him well.
Outing

     The story of Roy Cohn, like that of Cardinal Spellman (post #136), raises the question of outing. Outing, a term first used in the 1980s, is the act of revealing the sexual orientation of a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered person without their consent.  After the Stonewall riots of 1969, champions of gay liberation began shouting, “Out of the closets, into the streets!” Encouraged by a growing social tolerance, more and more homosexuals began voluntarily revealing their sexual inclination, but many others held back. 
     In February 1989 several gay activists, angered by Senator Mark Hatfield’s support of antigay legislation proposed by Senator Jesse Helms, declared that Hatfield was gay; in spite of this, Hatfield won reelection in 1990.  Then in March 1990 gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile outed the recently deceased Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magzine; his column “Gossip Watch” in the gay publication OutWeek became famous – or infamous – for outing the rich and famous, and Signorile was either hailed as heroic or decried as revolting and infantile.  Obviously, right from the start outing had both supporters and detractors.
    In 2004 gay activist Michael Rogers launched a blog to out closeted gay politicians who actively opposed gay rights.  He began by outing Edward Schrock, a Republican congressman from Virginia, claiming that Schrock used a phone sex service to meet other men for sex.  Schrock didn’t deny the charge and did not seek reelection.  Rogers’s motivation: to punish Schrock for his hypocrisy in opposing gay marriage by voting for the Marriage Protection Act and signing as a cosponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment. 
     In 2006 Rogers reported sexual liaisons between Idaho Senator Larry Craig and unnamed individuals in Union Station, Washington, D.C.  Craig denied the report, but nine months later Craig was arrested in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for allegedly soliciting an undercover police agent for sex in a men’s restroom. Craig’s explanation that he simply had a “wide stance” was played for all it was worth by late-night TV comedians, and later he pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and paid a fine.  His attorneys then filed a motion to withdraw the guilty plea, but the motion was denied.  After that he served out his term but did not run for reelection.
      Rogers has outed others as well, but the pattern is obvious and doesn’t bear repetition.  The practice has been both praised and blamed in homosexual as well as heterosexual circles.  Is outing ever justified, and if so, when?  My personal take:  The right to privacy should protect us all, except in very special circumstances.  But if a public figure, especially a politician, is conspicuously active in antigay causes, as for instance supporting antigay legislation, then I think, with care, that outing is justified.  But otherwise, outing a living person is reprehensible.  Why some people choose to remain closeted in this more tolerant age may seem baffling to others, but personally I consider it their privilege.  


  The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  (For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  It does not contain the post about Roy Cohn, but includes many other colorful New Yorkers of past and present.



     Coming soon: Construction (and destruction) in the city.  Dumpsters and debris, towering cranes, two horrible deaths, and what happened to the seven phone booths from the Roseland Ballroom?


     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

236. Con Men, Scams, and Frauds

     This country has always enjoyed the attention of con men, scams, and frauds, and today is no exception.  The May 2016 issue of the AARP Bulletin, published by that guardian of golden oldies, the American Association of Retired Persons, warns of several scams, since seniors are especially at risk of being tricked.
Black Market MedsAre Flooding theNation’s PharmaciesAnd Hospitals
Older Americans are at theGreatest risk of being scammed.Here’s what you need to know
Thieves, it seems, are stealing vast amounts from drug company warehouses and dumping them on the black market.  Often adulterated, these drugs then make their way into pharmacies, nursing homes, hospitals, and doctors’ offices, along with out-and-out fakes.  They may be worthless, or they may even be toxic.  The greatest risk is from Internet pharmacies that mail drugs directly to consumers.  Advice to consumers:
·      If shopping online, deal with one of the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites accredited by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy.·      Avoid companies selling prescription drugs without a prescription.·      Avoid so-called “Canadian storefronts” – small pharmacies, often in strip malls, offering cut-rate drugs.·      If a price seems to good to be true, don’t buy.
     Other hoaxes to beware of:
·      Letters urging you – often with an “act before” date – to order a copy of your property deed, often for $80 or more.  You can get a certified copy from the county clerk’s office for as little as $2 per page.·      Letters or phone calls saying that, for a fee of $200 or more, you can lower your property tax by filing a dispute of the tax assessment.  You can request a lower assessment from the city or county assessor’s office without paying a fee.·      Credit-repair services offering to “remove bad debt” from your credit file for as much as $5,000 or a monthly fee of $100.  You can challenge items in your credit report by contacting the credit bureaus yourself for no fee.
     A completely legal practice by states is to grab “abandoned” financial property for themselves.  So if you get a letter from your bank, broker, or mutual fund company saying they haven’t heard from you for a while, don’t ignore it.  Some states are worse than others in this regard.  A student in New Jersey got $500 worth of stock in 1995.  By 2014, when he finished college, it was worth $8250.  But when he wanted to sell the stock so he could buy a car, he learned that the state had sold it eight years before for $900.  Not a scam or a fraud – quite legal.  So Happy birthday, New Jersey!
     The same bulletin reminds seniors not to fall for the “grandparent scam,” when a grandchild phones in desperation, saying he’s been arrested on some charge, or is stranded somewhere abroad, and needs money – a lot of it – for bail or whatever.  He explains that he may sound strange to them because he has a broken nose or some other injury affecting his voice.  Don’t fall for it.  Check with the grandson or his parents; he’s probably studying in the school library or out playing soccer.  A scam, pure and simple.
     That same issue has an interview with a reformed con man, Frank Abagnale, who now works to expose the latest scams and help people avoid them.  Some of his observations:
·      It’s easier today to forge checks.  Decades ago he had to have a costly press and some journeymen printers to operate it, but now all you have to do is go to a corporate website and, within minutes, obtain a beautiful four-color check.·      The day of the old-fashioned con man – well-dressed, sophisticated, well spoken – is over, for today you can be a slob in your pajamas and con people miles away by telephone or computer.  (Clearly, a great loss.)·      The most ingenious recent scam he knows of: account takeover.  You write me a check, then I go online to a check-printing service and order 200 checks with your account info; by the next time you read your monthly account statement, I’ve cleaned out the account.·      Use credit cards; if someone gets your card number and uses it, your liability under federal law is zero.  Avoid debit cards; all the money in your account is at risk.·      Don’t use a “mug shot” of yourself online, since it can be appropriated and misused; use a photo of yourself with friends or involved in some activity.·      Never give your place of birth or full date of birth online; they too can be appropriated and misused.
All this from a charming white-haired gentleman with a winning smile.  It’s good that he’s reformed; otherwise, even today he’d find a way to con us, gullible prey that we are.
     Also in this bulletin are tips from a retired homicide detective about how to tell when someone being questioned is either lying or withholding some of the truth:
·      They fidget, touch their nose, pull an ear.·      They talk fast, as if they don’t want you to hear them.·      They try to change the subject.·      They repeat a question, even though they obviously heard it loud and clear, because they need time to come up with a believable answer.·      They either won’t look you in the eye, or do.  Whichever it is, it’s a departure from their usual behavior.
     So armed with this info, and the tips from a reformed con man, we should all be better prepared to fend off fraudsters.  And if the fraudsters are Big Pharma or Wall Street?  Ah, that’s a subject for another post.

  The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon:  Construction and destruction in the city.  Dumpsters and debris, towering cranes, two horrible deaths, and what happened to the seven phone booths from the Roseland Ballroom?
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

235. Orlando Rally at the Stonewall: "Read the Names!"

     Shaken by the events in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, on Monday evening, June 13, the gay community of New York flocked by the thousands to the Stonewall Inn, where the riots of 1969 began the modern gay rights movement, on Christopher Street but a few blocks from my West Village apartment.  Brandishing STOP  THE  HATE and LOVE  WINS signs and waving American and rainbow flags and holding candles, they deposited flowers and cards and flickering candles in front of the Inn’s red-brick façade and at the foot of the life-size statues of two gay men in the Sheridan Square park across the street.  “Going to the bars now is an act of activism and defiance,” one young man was quoted as saying.  “It’s a powerful reminder to people that we stand together.”
     Packed tightly together in the triangle of streets facing Stonewall, they heard speeches by Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, other elected officials, singer Nick Jonas, and actor Tituss Burgess.  The speakers lamented the massacre in Orlando and the lack of Congressional action to pass comprehensive federal gun control legislation.
     “We passed gun control in this state,” said Cuomo, standing at a lectern bearing a sign WE  ARE  ORLANDO and flanked by the U.S. flag and a gay pride flag.  “We outlawed assault weapons in this state.  We know it can be done.”
     “We do not accept anyone who would sow division or hatred,” insisted the Mayor.  “We do not accept the notion of our leaders showing hatred and division in the wake of tragedy.  And that means you, Donald Trump!”
     Mr. Trump, born and bred in New York, was not present, busy as he is campaigning elsewhere.  The crowd was well aware that Omar Mateen, the Orlando killer, was also born in New York, and perhaps likewise aware that two of the known victims were from here, one of them vacationing in Florida, and the other having moved to Orlando. 
     On duty at the rally were hundreds of specialized police officers, many in counterterrorism gear, while hundreds more, some in uniform and some not, were on the watch at heavily trafficked areas of Manhattan and at sites frequented by gay people.  Quite a change from 1969, when the only police at Stonewall were staunchly preserving the public peace by doing battle with gay rioters.
     As night came on, participants read aloud the names and age of the victims.  As a gust of wind whipped through the crowd, the mourners raised a hand to guard their candles, aware of the symbolic significance of the persisting flames.
     Meanwhile the spire at One World Trade Center, whose illuminated tower I see from my kitchen window every night, glowed with the colors of the rainbow, and City Hall’s elegant Federal façade was colored with lights and rainbow flags.  In 1969, needless to say, such displays of solidarity would have been inconceivable.
     Such is the coverage of the Times and other standard news outlets.  But a friend of mine who attended the rally adds a piquant detail or two.  The crowd listened dutifully and then cheered as the Governor, who spoke first, orated, but when the following speeches droned on and on, it grew restless.  “Say their names,” it began to chant, and the outburst continued.  “Get off script!” the mourners demanded.  “Say their names!”  Speechifying was all very well – up to a point – but they were there to hear the names and heap up flowers, cards, and candles.  When the chanting began, my friend assured me, it was the most powerful part of the vigil.
  The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  (For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon:  Con Men, Scams and Frauds.  Have you ever been conned?  Learn about the scams of today, and how to avoid them.

     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

234. Monsters and Me

     To begin with, what is a monster?   Says my Webster’s Collegiate:
1 a:  an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure   b:  one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character   2:  a threatening force   3 a:  an animal of strange or terrifying shape   b:  one unusually large for its kind
All these varieties of “monster” will prove relevant.
     To be a monster, then, a thing must be unusual, threatening, or frightening.  But are there monsters in New York City, if one goes by this definition?  One immediately thinks of the 1933 film King Kong, where a giant ape atop the Empire State Building fights off attacking airplanes, but that, of course, is fiction.  As for real monsters, monsters that one can see and be terrified of, the answers is no.  Coyotes prowl the New York alleyways, poking into garbage, and raccoons range Central Park at night, but while both can prove troublesome if interfered with, they hardly qualify as monsters.  When it comes to pit bulls, it’s another matter.  Screams the online headline of the New York Daily News of December 15, 2015:
Brooklyn pit bulls attack passerby for second time, leave dog badly wounded (WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTOS)
The victim in this case was “a small, orange mutt named Cash Money,” whose eye and face were severely injured.  According to the pitt bull’s owner, the mutt invited trouble by sticking his nose in the owner’s fence.            But that headline is topped by another online Daily News headline, dated  September 14, 2015:
Man viciously attacked by pit bulls in Bronx; owner arrested (graphic videos)
In this case a 62-year-old man was mauled and nearly killed when attacked by two pit bulls that broke free of their harnesses, inflicting injuries so grave that the priest of a nearby church – prematurely, as it turned out -- gave the victim last rites.
     Even allowing for tabloid exaggeration, and acknowledging the existence of organizations determined to defend the species as for the most part harmless and much maligned, pit bulls – at least some members of the species – would seem to qualify as monsters.  Certainly they come closer than the mythical alligators said to roam the sewers of New York, or the black bears foraging for garbage in the wooded outlands of New Jersey.
     I personally have never encountered a pit bull and aim to keep it that way, but my awareness of monsters goes back to my childhood in the Midwest.  In my early grade school days I often visited my friend Allen next door with whom I shared an interest in history and prehistoric creatures, but whenever I entered their back yard I was met by Blackie, their chow, who whose frantic barking unnerved me.  “He won’t hurt you,” Allen and his mother repeatedly assured me, but the barking put me off.  My first monster, at least in the eyes of my very young, untutored self.  An ominous beginning.  When, some years later, Blackie went the way of all canine flesh and was not replaced by another chow, I was secretly but vastly relieved.
     In time Allen and I went through the, for boys, near-inevitable phase of obsession with prehistoric monsters, devouring information and illustrations – the more graphic the better – of towering tyrannosaurus rex confronting a spike-backed stegosaur, prowling long-fanged saber-toothed tigers, icthyosaurs raging in primeval seas with flights of vicious pterodactyls  overhead, and lumbering, long-tusked mastodons fatally trapped in pits of tar.  These were long-vanished creatures and therefore no threat to my evolving psyche.  At a safe remove I reveled in their untrammeled ferocity.
     But monsters, even when remote, could still inject me with fear.  Returning from his annual fishing vacation in Land-o-Lakes, Wisconsin, my father told me and my brother stories of the Great North Woods.  The most vivid one involved a trapper who one fierce winter went mysteriously missing.  The following spring, when the snow melted and people could range the woods more freely, his ravaged corpse was found.  Attacked by a pack of ravenous wolves, he had stood them off with his back to a tree and shot several who were then devoured by their fellow predators.  Hopelessly trapped, he saved the last shot for himself, following which his body was likewise devoured by the pack.  Little but bones remained.
     This was frightening enough, but the story that really got to me was one on the radio that told of a massive, half-human monster in the wilds of Alaska who loomed out of nowhere to strangle isolated victims, ripping their teeth out of their mouth.  Probably fictional, the story instilled in me an icy terror that I can recall today.  Police in a low-flying plane spotted the murderer and followed him for hours, amazed at his ability to run overland for such a period without tiring.  Finally they were able to land, confront him, and with a barrage of bullets bring his deadly career to an end.
     My preoccupation with monsters suffered a long hiatus as I negotiated the glories and perils of adolescence and then began graduate studies followed by a bout with teaching.  When I encountered in modern translation the Old English epic Beowolf, Grendel and his avenging mother were authentic monsters, but when I transitioned to French literature, monsters in the narrow sense seemed to be in short supply.  (Had I spent more time in medieval French literature, I’m sure there would have been dragons galore.)  But when I indulged for a few months in the Technicolor hallucinations of peyote, I experienced one, and only one, frightening fantasy, and that involved a monster.  Eyes shut, I saw slowly coalescing in front of me a massive, hairy creature, half human, half animal, that I identified as the missing link.  His look was savage, and as it began to fix on me, my mind in slow motion registered that this was ominous and therefore should be stopped.  Immediately I opened my eyes, and the monster disappeared, never to return.  He – or should I say “it”? – was a reincarnation of that fictional  radio monster roaming the wilds of Alaska.
     Soon afterward I exchanged the academic scene in New York for the chaotic delights of Beatnik bohemia in San Francisco.  During this brief but colorful interlude in my career (if “career” is the word to use), I read up on the Wild, Wild West, and in magazines on the outdoors at the library I perused numerous reports of encounters with grizzlies in the Rockies, reinforced by a stuffed replica in the local museum that towered over me with bared fangs and six-inch claws: not a creature I would care to encounter face to face. 
     Some years after that, back in New York I read an account in the paper of a grizzly attacking a young woman asleep in her sleeping bag at night.  Her friends escaped by climbing up trees, but the zipper of her bag had jammed, leaving her at the mercy of the grizzly.  “Oh my God,” she screamed, “it’s tearing off my arm!”  Leaving her mutilated body, the bear then wandered off into the woods.  She died the most horrible of deaths, and a few days later a grizzly was shot and killed in the area; examination revealed bits of human flesh on its claws.
     One final note on grizzlies revealed: you can’t outrun them; if you try, you are doomed.  The best escape is to climb a tree and cling to it for your life, in case the grizzly tries to shake you down.  If there’s no tree handy, they say you should freeze, make a low growling sound, then quietly back off and depart, though not in a run, since that would mark you as prey and trigger a predatory response in the grizzly.  So that’s the solution; good luck.
     This account of monsters has taken us far afield from New York, where the only monsters I know of are scary radio reports, allegedly authentic, of Big Foot in distant parts of the nation.  Those accounts, fiercely convincing, get to me, but I take comfort in the knowledge that, with the exception of the occasional pit bull, within the five boroughs and adjacent regions, only raccoons and coyotes are a-prowl.  So of course I’ve never been attacked, have I?  Wrong!  I’ve been attacked twice.
     Once, while following a trail through woods in a wilderness area upstate, I heard a shrill kak kak kak and saw a large bird flying back and forth over my head.  At first I shrugged this off, being eager to keeping moving, but then I realized that the bird, with a wing span of at least three feet, was screaming at me and, at a safe remove, buzzing me.  It came just close enough that I picked up a fallen branch and waved it vigorously every time the bird came close.  Only when I had gone on quite a distance on the trail did the kak kak kaks and the sweeping flights low over my head stop.  Who was the attacker?  At the time I didn’t know, but obviously it was a predator, and a large one at that.  Later a little research discovered a likely suspect: the Northern Goshawk, notorious for fiercely defending its territory; habitually it nests in tall trees from ten to fifty feet above the ground.  The bird wasn’t so much attacking me as scaring me off, in which it succeeded.
     The second incident was indeed an attack, and it took place in my beloved Central Park, where I was walking one morning in the North End near the Pool at 103rd Street.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I saw a large dog rushing toward me, barely six feet away.  I thought it wanted to be friendly, but then I found it leaping up on me, front paws on my chest, and tearing at my jacket.  Caught off balance, I fell to the ground, but the owner must have called the dog off, for at this point it abandoned its prey and rushed back to its master, a woman reclining on the ground some distance away, leash in hand.  Getting back on my feet, I saw that my thick jacket had been torn; only its thickness had protected me from injury.  I should have confronted the owner and told her that her dear little mutt had viciously, and without provocation, attacked me, but by now I wanted to keep a good distance between me and my attacker, so instead I sauntered off.

     So ends this account of monsters and me.  If we humans are obsessed with monsters – and we are, as witnessed by endless tales of them in all the literatures of the world – it’s that we in some sense need them.  We like to be scared, to experience the thrill of the monstrous, and we value them as an enemy to overcome.  After all, to be a hero you must slay a monster, and if you do, rich rewards are yours: an endangered and grateful virgin, or a fantastic treasure.  And if, like Wagner’s Siegfried, you are lucky, you may get both … for a while.
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  The book:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  (For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon:  Once again, it's wide open, but something will come to mind.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder