The Dyke March just went by on Fifth Avenue. I was unpacking stuff, and I started to hear all these whistles and shouts, so I opened the window, looked out, and saw a huge crowd marching down Fifth. I saw some rainbow flags. It had to be the Dyke March, which is always the day before the Pride March.
Below us, down on Eighth Street, there’s an NYC truck unloading metal barricades for said Pride March, which will go right past our building. Yay! (Yay I think…)
The views from this apartment are beautiful. If I stick my head out the window (which makes Matt very nervous) and look left, I can see 8th Street all the way to Tomkins Square Park; if I look right, I can see 8th Street end at Sixth Avenue, and in the distance I can even see New Jersey. Looking south out the windows, we can see the tall buildings of the World Financial Center – this apartment must have had a great view of the World Trade Center towers. The kitchen has a window facing north, out of which, in the distance, we can see just the edge of One Penn Plaza on 34th Street.
One of us will take some photos soon and post them.
8th street and Sixth Ave — my misspent youth!
So strange to be reading about you guys moving in and settling down. Reminds me of the New York I knew 40 years ago. But that’s all changed, of course — and not just because of 9/11.
I last visited the city in 99 and I scarcely recognized it anymore. It was like an old boyfriend who’d let himself go — trading in his Cerutti suits for Hootchiewear That’s why I started writing my memoirs. Well that was one of the reasons any way. I’m trying to summon up the Lost Continent of the New York that I knew.
Odd too to think about the fact that I used get the bus to the Newark airport (in the 90’s I always flew from L.A. to Newark and back again to avoid the crush of JFK) right in front of the WTC.
My New York still exists in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, certain films (Shadows, Guns of the Trees, The World of Henry Orient) and The Count of Montebello
Now you guys are busy making New Memories.
All My Love!
Be sure to wave to me when the Lambda contingent passes by tomorrow! (You might need to run out and bring me a cold diet Coke.)
Frank O’Hara rocks!!!
Indeed he do!
Jeff, please tell me you ran right downstairs (after pulling on a supportive flannel shirt) and cheered the Dyke Marchers past your swank, new, entirely free digs!
Cuz, I need to know at least SOME of our guys were out there cheering them on.
My buddy Terrence and I decided to go show some
sweet support to our Sapphic sisters, arriving yesterday in Bryant Park with a trio of angel-faced Ohioan baby daggers we had met earlier while standing in quiet befuddlement before a MOMA installation called “Open Playpen”.
However, aside from the usual sprinkling of sleeping hobos and smoking secretaries, the place was abandoned, with only the detritus of a presumably “strident yet hopeful” rally remaining, tumbling across the lawn as wasted slogan stickers.
The problem, as viewed from space?
1. The fags were late, according to their own original plans.
2. The fags *insisted* that THEY were right about the scheduled departure of the March.
3. The daggers meekly disagreed, were shouted down, then shut up.
4. The Dyke Marchers HAD rudely stepped off precisely when they had said they would.
5. The fags were angry at the Dyke Marchers’ unreasonable and inflexible adherence to an arbitrary time shedule in which the fags had NO input.
6. The baby daggers felt quietly but uselessly vindicated and secretly agreed that the fags couldn’t stop thinking about disco and capri pants long enough to be of much use, should a similar situation ever arise again, an observation that likely will have been reproven many times in the 20 or so years before they rise to positions of daggery leadership.
All day long, I’ve been thinking how those six items seem to generally characterize the problem of fag/dagger cooperation.
I sure David E. will verbosely disagree (and manage to call me a barebacking Nazi while he does, cuz hey, ad hominem is fun). But what does Tin Man think? Will there ever be effective fag-daggeryness?
“Barebacking Nazi”? Joe must be planning a gay remake of thos old Diane Thorne movies like “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.”
Good luck with that. But filmmkaing requires organization and from the tone of your post re the Dyke march you have the soul of a hall monitor.
I’d actually never heard the term “dagger” until just now… is that a general term for “lesbian”? Anyway, if the world’s gay men merely set their watches and clocks ahead by 15 minutes, everyone will be happy. I know it.
“Dagger” as in “Bulldagger” is a term Bruce Rodgers in his invaluable The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon (Straight Arrow Press, 1972) dates from the 1940’s: “1. the burly lesbian who dresses more like a truck driver than a PTA member; lesbians who assume the male role in lovemaking 2. girlish homosexual man who will conduct himself in a two-fisted fashion.”
“tbe soul of a hall monitor”
David, you are *nothing*, if not dependable.
Joe, don’t know what time you went, but the Dyke March started at 5pm. I have a link to some pics for it on my site if you wanna see ’em. There were a handful of gay boys along the route holding up signs and so forth and getting TONS of love from their sistahs, so it’s too bad you missed it!