Have You Seen Your Brother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?

His friend, Seymour, a plump international queen with dark glasses and a rain coat slung around his shoulders, interrupts to talk about gay liberation. He things GLF should be training guerrilla bands of homosexuals to go round beating and robbing straights and queer bashers. “The only riling this stupid bourgeois society understands is fear. Physical fear. Look at the blacks. They never got any respect until the Panthers started carrying guns and it became impossible for white society to spend Saturday night out in Harlem. Homosexuals have a political right and duty to terrorize straight male heterosexuals. Look what I carry.” He pulled out a little ice pick from his handbag. “I used it once, in Barcelona.”

from “Somerset Maugham in Morocco,” an article in 6Z by Jim Anderson

Lucy looks sweet

cause she’s dressed like a queen But he can Kick like a mule

—from Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” by David Bowie

Billy and I hit on the idea of gay gangs while watching a David Susskind show about the resurgence of street gangs in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Susskind was surrounded by ten or twelve young gang members, Puerto Ricans and blacks, all in that tough little drag of jeans and sneakers and denim jackets with the sleeves cut off and sometimes turned inside-out and decorated shieldlike across the back with the names and icons of their gangs. The Black Spades, Ghetto Brothers, Seven Immortals, Savage Nomads, Royal Javelins, Young Sinners. They were sharp, street-smart and articulate; they talked about the People, the Community and the System and their reality made the language a lot more than second-hand rhetoric. Because the gangs are generally credited with driving junk and junkies out of their immediate communities, there was a lot of talk, much of it evasive, about their methods. On the surface, the idea was, they bring a brother or sister who’s an addict down to the clique headquarters and talk to them about the politics of junk on a very basic level: it’s the pig s way of making zombies out of people who might fight back, it destroys the community from within, etc. Behind the talk, understood, is the threat of violence; get it together or else. The new vigilantes.

When the discussion drifted on to other things, Billy and I started to speculate about which of the guys had fucked around with men, looking for certain self-conscious signs, revelations of a sense of one’s self and one’s body that men get from otfier men, sweet give aways. (Which is probably not much different from the highschool game of guys trying to figure out which girls had been fucked, only the signs are even more subtle and fleeting.) The next logical step from imagining gay gang members was imagining gay gangs — tough street faggots with the same ideological discipline of the Reapers or Savage Nomads but they’d work something like this: Some motherfucker calls you a faggot on the street, you get the gang together and confront him verbally — about the oppressiveness of the macho mentality and its self-destructive repression,, about personal freedom, breaking down stereo-types and roles, all that shit — with the implicit threat that if he doesn’t listen and understand real quick you’ll confront him physically. Rape wouldn’t be a bad idea. Especially if you made sure he liked it. Or just beat him up a little. Fantastic. Sure would be nice to get rid of that image of the weak, scared faggot; not merely to turn the tables — I’m not interested in exchanging one fucked-up role, that of the passive weakling, for another, the dominating pig — but to reassure ourselves that we can be strong and, at the same time, to rid ourselves of a negative obsession with strength. That’s hard to explain. To a great extent, accepting other people’s definitions of gayness as a man means being weak, physically and emotionally, “just like a woman.” To fulfill this role, a lot of time is spent searching outside yourself for the Real Man, someone with the strength you never had. I mean, I always thought that the real relationship in those bodybuilder cartoons was between the pathetic skinny dude and the bully who kicked sand in his face; the woman, as usual, was as much a prop as the beach umbrella. But I could never imagine taking those steps that led the 99 pound weakling to become His Own Man, even if it took only ten effortless minutes a day exclamation point. Not only didn’t I want the cartoon rewards, women objects, but I always thought my own man had to be someone outside of me. So you become obsessed with strength in other people and repress any strengths of your own (unless it’s the intellect cause that doesn’t count).

CONTINUED ON PAGE 77.

TIGHTEN UP

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 46.

What I’m saying is, I — alot of us — have some very fucked-up ideas about where the power lies. The women’s movement, the gay movement have begun to challenge those ideas and make us realize that some of the Real Man’s greatest power was the strength we gave him in our dumb subservience (mental and physical). If the idea of faggot gangs isn’t totally serious — I don’t think Billy and I will be out carrying lead pipes — just thinking about it is liberating. Even a year ago it never would have occurred to me; being brainwashed as a faggot, you practically think straight men have a moral right to fuck you over. But like one day on Avenue A some creep sneered at me and I suddenly thought, Hey this motherfucker thinks he’s better than me cause he fucks girls. What kind of shit is that? And part of rejecting the power and oppression of men-who-fuck-girls is discovering your own strength and beginning to project it. Gay gangs is just a fantasy of the ultimate, ultra-violent projection of gay power (just like gangs of women whistling and leering at construction workers is a fantasy projection of woman power — one that’s been realized at least once in Manhattan). And if it upsets people, that’s ok. That’s just fine.

The gay bank robber upset a lot of people — in funny ways. You know about it? — These two guys hold up a Brooklyn bank at closing time, get $29,000 and seven hostages and one of them demands the release from a mental institution of a transvestite lover whom he had “married” several months earlier. The New York papers devoted pages to the “bizarre” robbery and the story read like a Iragi-comic tale: surrounded by police, the robbers held the bank for hours, meeting in the doorway with friends whom the self-described gay robber embraced and kissed to appreciative cheers from the standing room only crowd; ordering pizza and paying for it with a shower of stolen bills; ordering police to keep at a distance; talking to newsmen. The “wife” was released but refused to join her robber-boyfriend and it all ended in an FBI ambush while waiting for the getaway plane at the airport, the gay robber captured and his young, supposedly straight accomplice killed. The surviving robber claimed the whole scheme came to him while “drinking with a Chase Manhattan executive in a gay bar downtown.”

On the most immediate level, it was a great Eyewitness News event, full of drama and suspense. Much was made of the robber spokesman being gay, with the media paying him a curious sort of respect (oddly comparable to that accorded the First Black Mayor of a Georgia Town or the First Woman Umpire: our minorities continue to move into new fields and, well, you just gotta hand it to ’em, folks). Once past the Oh wow stage, most faggots didn’t know quite how to take it. Unless you thought any weird striking-out was ok, it was hard to see the robbery as a political act, although most people seemed dismayed not so much by the gangsterism involved as by the fact that it was so clumsily carried out (as any movie-goer will tell you, the clever, successful criminal is one of our favorite folk heroes but the bungling hoodlum is a national embarrassment). If the gay bankrobber had been successful and flown off god-knows-where with the loot, handsome accomplice and recaptured “wife,” he probably would have become the D. B. Cooper of the gay movement. I don’t know. It’s all part of searching for a new self-image; you look in some funny places just to compensate for all the bullshit in the past. Out here in TV Land, you get more respect for being a hoodlum than a hairdresser. Only I suspect the real way lies somewhere inbetween: You know, dress like a queen but kick like a mule.^^