The Gay Metropolis (48 page)

“I said, ‘Yeah, I am.'

“He says, ‘Don't you remember me?'”

Geto did not, but Marc remembered the pol very well because Marc was a political junkie who had known Geto in several Democratic campaigns, including Bela Abzug's run for the Senate in 1976. “Marc had been a political groupie as a kid,” said Geto. “And all he ever cared about, before he got to this great elevated stage in life, was politics. Bob Abrams and Bela Abzug were the big people in his life.”

So Marc told Geto he could get in for free any night of the week. “From that day on, it was the greatest thing in the world. I went to Studio 54 five hundred times. I didn't have to pay to get in [the cover was $10 on weekends]. Inside it was an enormous amount of drugs. People used to do cocaine openly. They had a lounge upstairs. You walked up a flight of stairs, and there was, like, a plateau before you walked around to the balcony. And all kinds of things went on in the balcony,” where the Rubber Bar was located.

“You would sit around in this lounge and people would just put lines of cocaine out. This wasn't the VIP lounge! This was an open, public lounge with a massive amount of pedestrian traffic and people sitting around drinking and talking. And in the middle of this lounge was a big, black, glossy table. And people would put lines of cocaine on the table and take $100 bills, and just lean over the table and start snorting. And one day, a top political consultant was leaning over the table, snorting the cocaine. Gets tapped on the shoulder by a young city councilman. And the councilman says, ‘You shouldn't be doin' that in public.'”

Philip Gefter remembered arriving one night in a group of four and immediately giving up on getting in because of the size of the crowd. “We started to lean against a car to decide where to go next, when all of a sudden the ropes parted and the doorman pointed at us and we were in—and it was only because of our insouciance that he noticed us. God knows I did a lot of things there. But I could have been there every Thursday night and I still felt like an outsider: that I was missing out on the epicenter of activity.”

As well as movie stars on the dance floor, there were future movie stars
eager to serve them. Waiters at Studio 54 were beautiful boys of about twenty with prominent muscles, satin gym shorts, tennis shoes—and no shirts. Bartenders were slightly older, in black tank tops and blue jeans. In 1978, Alec Baldwin was a twenty-one-year-old waiter in the balcony at Studio 54.

Was he hit on continuously by members of both sexes?

“Usually men,” Baldwin remembered.

“Gay men would go up to the balcony and fondle one another. Usually couples. Very distinguished, wealthy, well-dressed,
well-heeled
gay men would go up to the balcony and ‘discuss things.' And they'd ask your boy here to go downstairs and, quote unquote, ‘fetch them' a pack of cigarettes. They'd give me $10 and I'd get a pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes at Studio 54 were probably like
eight
dollars. And they'd say, ‘Well, keep the change.'

“I was a very popular cigarette snatcher in the balcony,” said Baldwin. “I was the Rick Blaine
^*
of well-heeled homosexual balcony dwellers at Studio 54.”

Naturally, Howard Rosenman was a frequent customer at the discotheque. “You needed something to get in: You needed either good looks or brilliance or talent or a big dick or big tits or money or social cachet. Or Roy Cohn's friendship. When you walked in, there was that incredible lobby, brightly lit, like a movie theater lobby, ornate and mirrored. Then you walked through those grandiose, glamorous doors, like theater doors, and you came on a space that was dark. The coat check was over on the right, and then there were the steps going up in front of you. Slightly to the left was the bar, the dance floor in front of it, and in back of the dance floor, in the fly and scrim area of the old stage, was a VIP area. It wasn't a room—it was separated by curtains and stanchions and guards. They wouldn't let you in unless you were one of the chosen. On the second-floor balcony there was another VIP area. Finally, there was the sanctum sanctorum, which was downstairs.

“Steve would ask you to go down those stairs. It was a grovelly, horrible little basement, where Liza and Andy and Halston and Calvin and Diane and Barry and David and the chicest women and tricks galore and Elsa Peretti and Marina Schiano would be.”

It was also where Rubell handed out drugs to anyone who wanted them.

“Oh yes: Just handed you a bottle of Quaaludes, or handed you a bottle of cut blow. He got those huge shipments of giant Quaaludes. He was always botsy out of his mind on Quaaludes. [But] there was something
about him everybody loved. He had that club and he had that power and he had all that connection to Halston. Above all, he was very generous to those he liked.”

But the “Roy Cohn thing” was “scary,” Rosenman remembered: “I'll never forget. There was a bartender at 54, he was Armenian, and he was preternaturally beautiful. One night he asked me to wait for him. I went to his home in New Jersey and spent the whole night there. We had an incredible time. And the next morning he said, ‘Let's fly into Manhattan.' He had a biplane. He flew me down the Hudson, all the way around Manhattan Island, and it was unbelievably romantic. And I was on the moon.”

But the next night Calvin Klein took Rosenman aside when he noticed he was about to leave with the bartender again.

“Very gently, Calvin said to me, ‘I don't think you should do this again.'”

“Why?” asked Rosenman.

“Because that's Roy Cohn's boyfriend,” Klein explained. “And if you want to have cement wedgies on your feet when you wake up in the Hudson tomorrow morning …”

“Who knew?” said Rosenman. “The Roy Cohn thing wasn't my scene.” Rosenman did not leave with the bartender again that night, nor did he fly down the Hudson the next day.

Everything about the ambience of Studio 54 made it the antithesis of the spirit of the sixties. There was certainly nothing democratic about it. Frank Rich remembered that “to be there as a peon, as I was on a few occasions, was to feel that the Continental Baths crowd had finally turned nasty toward the intruding straights and was determined to make them pay (with overpriced drinks and condescending treatment). Even as everyone was telling you that this was where the action was, you felt that the real action, not all of it appetizing, was somewhere in the dark periphery, out of view—and kept there, to make you feel left out.”

The excluded establishment took its revenge on Rubell and Schrager at the end of 1978 when a squad of Internal Revenue agents descended on the club, seized its records, and arrested Schrager for cocaine possession. Federal agents told reporters that they had raided the club because they believed it had been financed by the Mob, an accusation that Cohn heatedly denied. But six months later Rubell and Schrager were indicted on twelve counts of “systematically” skimming $2.5 million—or more than sixty percent of the club's daily receipts during its first two years.

Their first ploy to get the charges dropped against them was to offer up someone more important than themselves to the Feds. The club owners
alleged that the presidential aide Hamilton Jordan had used cocaine at Studio 54. Federal officials immediately told reporters that they were dubious about this information, but the accusation still led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a very lengthy investigation, and Jordan's eventual exoneration. After that strategy had failed, Rubell and Schrager pled guilty to charges of tax evasion. Both men were sentenced to three and a half years in jail after conceding that they had evaded more than $400,000 in taxes.

Ethan Geto was at Studio 54 for the farewell party in February 1980, just before Schrager and Rubell went to jail. Rubell said good-bye from a mechanical platform which held him and Bianca Jagger above the dance floor. “They stopped everything in the place,” Geto remembered. “And Steve was coked out of his mind. And Bianca was hugging him, and he was saying, ‘I love you people! I love you people! I don't know what I'm gonna do without Studio!' And everyone was crying and weeping.” Diana Ross was there, and Liza Minnelli sang “New York, New York.”

Later the club owners' sentences were reduced to twenty months after they cooperated with another investigation that revealed widespread fraud among their competitors in the discotheque industry. During their prison visit, the club was sold to the hotel owner Mark Fleischman. It closed in 1983.

FIVE YEARS AFTER
young muscle boys had become standard-issue Studio 54 waiters, Calvin Klein brought this aesthetic into the mainstream with his first underwear ads, most of them photographed by Bruce Weber. Then he went further with a huge billboard of a young man who looked to many like a forty-five-by-forty-eight-foot gay pinup in the heart of Times Square. Klein had “consummated the country's previously unheard-of love affair with the male torso,” as Frank Rich put it.

It
was
a consummation, but it was hardly “unheard of.” It had started with Brando's bare chest on Broadway in 1947, accelerated through Elvis and the Beatles, and reached its first culmination with Mick Jagger's barechested (and bisexual) looks and leaps.

“The gay physical ideal, once rigidly enforced by the culture, could be as cruel to those who didn't match it as straight conformity was to gays,” Rich wrote. “The Klein style excluded unpretty men, zaftig women, the imperfect, the overweight, the square.” What had been a magnificently inclusive culture in the sixties suddenly seemed very exclusive indeed. “As had also been true of the discos that restricted entry to the gay and the pretty, there was a scent of fascistic decadence to the Klein ads,” Rich
believed. “The least appealing aspect of gay aesthetics, the obsession with a standardized perfection of surface beauty, could be dynamite in the hands of the heterosexual majority. Such a rigidly enforced code of prettiness aroused nightmare visions of a latter-day master race.”

Rich's observations, which appeared in
Esquire
at the end of 1987, split the gay community in Manhattan down the middle. Those who had embraced the Calvin Klein-Fire Island aesthetic found them offensive, but those who still clung to the more democratic ideal of the sixties were delighted by his plainspeaking.

AT THE BEGINNING
of the seventies, Hal Offen invited Ethan Geto to come visit the Gay Activists Alliance headquarters in the former New York City firehouse at 99 Wooster Street in S0H0, before gentrification had converted the neighborhood into a colony of artists, and later, stockbrokers. Geto was nervous because he was still firmly in the closet. “I said, ‘I can't go down there. People'll think I'm, you know, I'm, uh, I'm gay!' And he says, ‘Well, aren't you?' And then I said, ‘Well, let's talk outside of the office.'”

Geto made an appointment to meet Offen, and the activist picked him up in his Volkswagen after work. Geto decided to tell him the truth, but he didn't get exactly the reaction he was looking for. “I said, ‘Well, I think I'm gay.

“And he says, ‘I knew it! No straight person would ever support us! You were too sympathetic!' He was so disappointed in one way.

“So I came out to Hal. He was the first person I ever came out to in a political context.” Offen continued to want Geto to come to GAA headquarters, but Geto was still living with his wife and two children. So he asked Offen to tell all his friends that Geto was really heterosexual: “You have to tell everybody that this is your straight, political friend who's coming down because he's a sympathetic liberal who knows city hall and knows New York politics. He works for the Bronx borough president.”

Geto was very assertive in the GAA meetings; he knew he was a political hotshot and never hesitated to act like one. In 1972 he was tapped to help run George McGovern's New York campaign for president, and McGovern swept the New York primary. “I was one of the leading strategists in the whole Democratic reform movement.” And he told the gay activists, “No! Ya gotta do this! No! Here's what you tell Mayor Lindsay! No! You go there! I knew what I was talking about. I was in politics.”

But GAA president Jim Owles was not amused. He rose at a meeting to
declare, “I'm sick and tired of straight people coming down here and telling us what we should do! We shouldn't listen to straight people! Even if they're friends. We should be doing this ourselves! Gay people should be telling gay people what to do!”

When Offen drove Geto home that evening, Geto was crying: “They don't want me. They hate me. They think I'm straight. I'm being disingenuous. I'm in the closet. It's disgusting. I'm not being brave. I'm not coming out. I can't live with myself anymore. So I said, ‘Okay, Hal. The next time you're down there, just go around quietly, and say, ‘He's really gay.' So Hal told everybody that I was gay. And then I came down to the firehouse and came out.”

In 1972, Geto came out to his wife. She was devastated, and he agreed to move out. He told McGovern that he needed a place to stay. Fortunately, two of the candidate's supporters were the owners of the Plaza Hotel. “So I go to McGovern and I say, ‘Look, I need a place to live and I don't have any money. I'm splitting up with my wife.'” McGovern called his friends at the Plaza and for the next six months Geto was living in a suite: “I'm twenty-nine years old. I've left my wife. I'm going down every night to the trucks down on West Street and picking up guys. Bringing them back to the Plaza Hotel. I was impressing these guys. Everyone's dressed in leather and chains and this is 1972. And I'm marching them into the Plaza. And I'm working for McGovern.”

The trucks were parked in Greenwich Village, and the trailers were left open between trips. At night, they were pitch-black inside, and filled with men having sex. “I totally disappeared into the gay subculture, culturally, socially, and sexually,” said Geto. “That's it! My straight life is over. I'm totally gay. I'm going to be gay for the rest of my life. I went to all the back room bars, the trucks, the Continental Baths—the whole thing.”