I.M. Read online

  Just like in the movie Fame, every day at lunch there was a deejay who played disco music in the cafeteria, and everyone danced with everyone else. For the first year, while that dance party was going on I would quietly slip out and take walks by myself. I would stop at a deli on Sixth Avenue, buy lunch, and walk across Forty-seventh Street, the block referred to as the Diamond District, which is lined with jewelry stores owned and operated by Orthodox Jews. I’d ogle jewelry, then I’d sit on the steps at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and eat my lunch. On the way I would pass Saks Fifth Avenue and peek at the windows. Eventually lunch became less important and studying the clothes in the windows at Saks became my obsession. Geoffrey Beene. Calvin Klein. Bill Blass. Sometimes I would go inside and look. At the time Yves Saint Laurent was the reigning fashion god and an inspirational figure in my life. Two years prior he designed his great Russian Peasant Collection, which I studied on the pages of W and Vogue, and the collection in Saks that fall still reflected that influence. Fabulous paisley prints, fur-trimmed hats and gauntlet gloves, and suede Cossack jackets.

  Sometimes I went to Rockefeller Center, which since my early childhood had been one of my favorite places. I had happy memories of skating there around the holidays with my uncle Sam and his family. Another walk was into the nearby theatre district, where I would loiter in front of one or other of the great Broadway theatres. My classmates and I were completely obsessed with A Chorus Line, which had opened on Broadway four months before I started at PA. I had already seen it with my family as a birthday treat for Norma’s birthday, and I saw it roughly seven or eight more times that first year at PA via standing room tickets. I would venture to say the entire drama department had seen it as many times as I had and, like me, had the original soundtrack recording down cold. Once a week during my lunch walk I would get to the Shubert Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street and stare at that marquee and hope to see one or two of the stars entering the building.

  One of my first assignments at school was a dream opportunity for a theatre-obsessed kid like me. We were instructed to locate and meet someone who worked in show business and interview them. It could be anyone who worked in any capacity in the theatre. An actor, a stagehand, even an usher. I had a big idea. Having been with my family to see the original stage production of Chicago the spring before, I became obsessed with Gwen Verdon, and I got it into my head that I had to interview her. I stood outside the theatre one Wednesday between the matinee and the evening shows, waiting. I was a nervous wreck. One of the other stars of the show came out and noticed me standing around.

  “Waiting for someone?” It was Chita Rivera.

  I told her about the assignment to interview someone in the theatre.

  “I’m in the theatre,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Oh. I know. Um. I was waiting for Gwen Verdon. But thank you very much,” I said and walked off a few feet, not aware for a second how disrespectful this was. And the same thing happened with Jerry Orbach when he came out a few minutes later! When I look back, I wonder why those great performers even noticed me, let alone offered to be interviewed. Finally Gwen Verdon emerged, and not only did she agree to do the interview, she linked arms with me and walked me to Joe Allen and bought me a cup of coffee. She was wearing a short fur coat, high-heeled boots, and a shoulder bag. She was sweet and solicitous and full of motherly advice about the ins and outs of show business. She spoke lovingly about her association with and marriage to Bob Fosse, another person I was obsessed with. Her advice was to try not to be involved personally with people you work with, which sounded like good advice even coming from someone who so blatantly did not heed it. She told me how she got started, how hard she worked to get a break. She told me that she considered herself first and foremost a dancer.

  That conversation with Gwen Verdon is one of the great memories of my life. It feels like something out of some showbiz novel. The information she imparted was great, but the idea that she would take the time and shower me with attention that way was more than I could have dreamt. I was determined. I reached for a star at a moment of change in my life. I was met with kindness and love. It was a lesson in perseverance and humanity. But more than anything, that meeting was the proof I needed that I was safely en route to the right life.

  * * *

  There wasn’t a locker room at PA so we were supposed to change into tights, which were required in first year acting and dance classes, in the boys’ bathroom. I was too self-conscious and felt too fat to take my clothes off in the presence of the other boys. As a matter of fact, for the entire four years of high school I only saw the inside of the boys’ bathroom a handful of times. Every day I found a deserted back stairwell in that labyrinthine building, and I’d change in a manic fit, all the while hoping no one would pass by. I prepared everything in advance, undoing all the buttons and zippers before I took anything off and I was undressed for only seconds between dropping my pants and shimmying into my tights. If I heard someone coming I would cover myself up or sit on the stairs and throw my coat over myself till they passed. Tights-wearing was a huge concession—almost a deal-breaker. I actually considered dropping out of school based on the mortification of wearing them. There were days when I thought I might pass out or throw up from embarrassment at how fat my legs and thighs were. Even if I had been at my thinnest, I still would never have been able to compare myself to those gorgeous boys and girls in the dance department who lived in their tights from morning till night and did nothing but dance and work out all day long. (Even later in my life, when I was at my thinnest, compared to models and dancers, I was a monster.) When I put those tights on I felt like the butt of some terrible joke. Eventually I managed to find compromises. Instead of the required white T-shirts, the teachers allowed me to wear big white shirts that concealed my huge stomach and cottage cheese thighs and by year two the rules relaxed and we were allowed to wear a broad variety of things to classes.

  We had ballet classes and modern dance classes every day, and yoga on Fridays, all taught by the same teacher, Charles McGraw, who was a prototypical 1970s gay man. He had a thick Southern drawl and liked to call his students kindelah. He also liked to quote Nietzsche and other German or French existential philosophers. I was never any good in dance classes except in teaching myself the way to physicalize comedy. I figured out how funny I looked in my attempts to assume fifth position or downward dog, and I milked it for laughs. I hadn’t watched that many reruns of I Love Lucy for nothing. If I was going to be the class clown, I was going to do a good job of it.

  Like a lot of my classmates, if I lagged slightly in my grasp of method acting, I made up for it in hamminess. I was an ace in my favorite class, which was Voice and Diction. I saw that class as my ticket to a new identity. Coming from Brooklyn, I was marked by an accent that I was painfully aware of, one I associated with the community and that I was committed to leaving behind. Within the first two months at school we had a master lecture by the wonderful actor Raul Julia, who demonstrated for us the thick Puerto Rican accent he naturally spoke with and the beautiful diction he was able to call upon for the stage. He went in and out of that stage diction with ease, and that illuminated an issue that was pretty common among my classmates who were facing similar changes in their lives. He spoke about the family and friends he grew up with and how they saw this ability of his to speak beautifully as an affectation. A lot of eye-rolling took place in Brooklyn in those first months of my studying these new sounds. It was Raul Julia’s advice in that talk that made it easier for me to progress and ignore what my old friends and family were implying about the refinement of my speech. At first I was sorely conscious of dropping in and out of good diction. After a time it no longer felt fake, and after an even longer time I only remembered those horrible old sounds when I heard others speak them.

  More inspiring than anything at PA was the drama faculty. In contrast to the rabbis I was used to—even in contrast to the adults I knew—these were people I could look up to,
people I wanted to grow up to be exactly like. They were sophisticated and authoritative when it came to the arts. They were caught up on current events, they were funny, they had political viewpoints that agreed with their lives. A society of thin, good-looking, more than a little vain middle-aged people who did not judge me or threaten me because I was creative. They knew nothing of Sephardic versus Ashkenazic Jews. They didn’t tolerate racism or sexism. They were irresistible characters right out of a Sondheim musical, full of neuroses, which related more to the situation of being an artist. They were role models, and my inspiration for transforming my body and my speech. They influenced our every move and taught us lessons not just about the craft of performing, but also about life.

  It was because I had these wonderful role models that I was finally able to lose weight. Another factor was that my parents had purchased a stationary bike the year before, and they were ready to admit defeat and move it out of their bedroom and into the basement. I volunteered to keep it in my bedroom, and just the nearness of it became a kind of inspiration. I rode it every night for hours, listening to Juliette Gréco records. I went on the Scarsdale Diet for six months and ultimately lost seventy-five pounds. I bought one pair of tight jeans, a size 32, which was the greatest victory of my life. I wore those jeans most every day with oversized shirts; I wore my fat clothes on my new thin body. Baggy, frayed clothes were stylish then, but in my case they had a double meaning. If my pants were worn paper-bag style, held up at the waist with a belt, it wasn’t merely an ironic fashionable look—it rang with a certain truth.

  On my first day in school I met Robin Leopold, a girl who was at the center of a popular clique of kids who seemed to know one another from their past lives together in Kew Gardens, Queens. Robin was my first close friend at PA, and it turned out we were in the same drama class. She was the opposite of the people I grew up around. I envied Robin the freedom she had to come and go as she pleased, with no commitments to her family. Another revelation: Parents outside of the Syrian community clung to their kids way less than mine clung to me. Robin’s mother was a glamourous divorcée with huge white-blond, cotton candy hair. She wore tight, see-through blouses over lacy lingerie; matching, tight gabardine bell-bottom trousers; and always, always, huge dark glasses and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Robin seemed full of a healthy disregard, almost disrespect, for things like family and religion. This both scared me and inspired me. On December 2, 1975—just three months after I met Robin—her father was killed in a fire at a famous nightclub in New York City called the Blue Angel. There was all sorts of speculation about the fire, inferences made that Robin’s father was a gangster, a target of the mob who started the fire that killed him. I got the impression her parents’ divorce was bitter, and Robin hadn’t been at all close to her father. This suspicion was confirmed a day later, when she decided to go ahead with her birthday party, which had been scheduled earlier that month. I remember how simultaneously scandalized and delighted my friends and I were that she didn’t cancel the party. She didn’t bother explaining, either. I respected her so much for not succumbing to any pretense about the need to mourn an estranged father based on outmoded social mores. (And the party was pretty good, too.)

  Another absolutely fabulous thing about Robin was her older brother, Guy. He worked as a waiter at a restaurant called Serendipity, which was a favorite of mine. The mere fact of him working at Serendipity was proof that he was an actual, living, breathing, out homosexual, because everyone who worked there in those days, I learned, had to be gay. The owners themselves were gay, and it was a policy set in stone that they hired only other gay men. My friends and I used to go there at least twice a month, not merely because we loved frozen hot chocolates, but also to observe Guy and the other gays in their natural habitat. Those were some of the most thrilling evenings of my life—eating Zen hash and knowing that I was in the company of many gay men, and that it was okay.

  During those years the Upper West Side became a second home for me. So many of my friends lived there. Kevin Ryan. Ted Lambert. Francesca Rollins. Gina Belafonte’s apartment on Seventy-fourth and West End Avenue served as a meeting place and sometimes a crash pad after long nights out. When my parents asked where I had been the night before, if I told them I was at Harry’s house, it rationalized my racy new life, and they almost encouraged my independence. The Belafonte place was a gigantic floor-through prewar apartment all done in tones of beige, with luscious upholstery, draperies, more bedrooms and wonderful old prewar bathrooms than in most huge three-story houses in Brooklyn. Even more than the John Banter interiors of my childhood, I formed my ideas about what a chic cosmopolitan interior looked like from that place. There was a separate, smaller apartment in the back, with a recording studio and a guest room where I learned about the glories of prewar plumbing—a good hard shower.

  My one degree away from Harry Belafonte was more than a celebrity association. He legitimized my new life in my parents’ eyes. My mother talked endlessly about her girlhood dancing to Harry’s records. My father’s worship of Harry as a musician trumped any racism. All the parents and faculty kept their eyes peeled on open school events where they might catch a glimpse of him. The first few times I met him I couldn’t speak for awe. He always made a point of welcoming us into his home. He’d walk in, Handsome Harry with the glow of starlight, and knock us all out with his gorgeous smile and easy manner. Overcompensating perhaps, so he might be perceived like other dads, who ironically never showed their faces to us. Gina’s mother, Julie, was also quite gorgeous. Always dressed in Saint Laurent or Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, she had a great face that I always assumed was Native American, which is the look she worked, never breaking her glamourous character. Her olive complexion, braided hair, high cheekbones, and almond eyes, made more extreme with contour and eyeliner. It wasn’t till recently that Gina laughingly set me straight: “No, darling. Julie is a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn.”

  But it wasn’t just a gorgeous physical reality chez Belafonte. Harry was always at the center of things politically. He was exemplary as an artist and an activist. Photographs on the walls in his study ranged from the very chic—Julie in a Dior couture evening gown circa 1955 at the White House—to documents of historical importance, such as pictures of Harry at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr. The stories about Harry’s fight for equality were inspirational. One legendary story involved the co-op board where they lived, which had initially rejected him in his bid to buy the apartment. His revenge was to buy the whole building.

  Gina had a good-looking boyfriend named Hector, and by the end of the second year I nurtured a vicarious fantasy that they were having sex. The issue of sex became more and more important at school as I got more and more terrified of it. A lot of the girls in my class seemed sexually advanced compared to the boys. For some reason the young women at school didn’t feel bound by provincial ideas, even in the late 1970s. The more I observed my girlfriends fulfilling their sexual desires with seeming abandon, the more I pitied the Syrian girls their prudery, and the more I was able to justify my own sexual feelings. I was officially closeted, but I started to open up to my nearest and dearest friends. Most of my gay friends handled their sexuality the same way: by denying it. My best friend, Kevin Ryan, and I were out to each other early on, but it wasn’t something we talked about openly with others.

  Kevin was another very lucky relationship that I fell into. He and I shared a genuine lust for knowledge, an insatiable need to know about art of all kinds, but especially movies. We went constantly to the Thalia, the Regency, the Carnegie Hall Cinema, Cinema Village and saw all kinds of life-altering movies. Kevin and I shared books back and forth. We also assumed each other’s sense of humor. What made him laugh made me laugh, and we gave each other permission to tell each other’s stories in the first person. Our friendship was like a long meeting of comedy writers for some esoteric version of Saturday Night Live. We coined the phrase “Adonis Goldfarb” which describe
d a sexy-looking Jewish boy made even sexier by the presence of a yarmulke. The catchphrase was: “Teach me the Talmud, baby.” In the late 1970s, Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera were in a bomb of a musical called The Rink, which had to do with competitive ice skaters. Kevin and I thought it was hilarious that someone might mistakenly wander into the show expecting a performance of The Ring, the Wagner operas. We did a miniversion alternating as Liza and Chita belting out bits from Das Rheingold, with Fosse-like choreography.

  Kevin and I clung together, and it was that bond that made it feel okay to come out. We were never lovers; there was no physical chemistry between us. Like my earlier relationship with Jackie Gindy and one or two other great friendships after that, it was a kind of romance with everything but sex. In the early years after I came out, I was always complaining that I didn’t have a boyfriend. I thought there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted of men, but my specific sexual desire was starting to merge with my idea of an object of love, love being the primary objective. I watched as my girlfriends paired off with boys, and hoped I’d meet someone who would pull me out of my misery, be my secret lover, validate my feelings. But ultimately I think these close, chaste friendships were the most valuable of my life. In the greater scheme of things, friendship is more important to me. It went on like that for a number of years to come. For the time being love, love between two men, was the motivating factor, the reason I was gay—sex, not as much. That would come later.

  11

  Like any New York teenager, I owed my independence to the New York City mass transit system—notably, the subway. I loved it—it filled me with a sense of freedom, and finally I grew to hate it. I was always late in the morning and would run all the way to the D train or in the opposite direction to the F train, both a long ten blocks away. I’d see the elevated train pulling into the station above me, and I’d speed up, running up the stairs, then jam myself in without thinking. Ten minutes later my claustrophobia would kick in and I’d start hyperventilating. A few times I blacked out. I never made an issue of this or told my parents because I was so afraid that if they found out, they would forbid me from going back on the subway and it would ruin my chances of staying at PA.