The Cool School (59 page)

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the Gay Rights Bill is unpopular. And more importantly, it’s completely unpopular among the people it would affect—employers, landlords, school boards, and so forth. The people of this country don’t want to hear about Adam and Steve’s honeymoon. People do not want to hear about “lovers” and “longtime companions” and they especially don’t want their children exposed to what these people do or don’t do as so-called “consenting adults.” Where does consent come in when you’re acting under a compulsion?
We don’t talk about consenting psycho killers and consenting necrophiliacs will tell you off the record, homosexuals are basically men who for one reason or another are afraid of women, afraid of sexual relations with women, and afraid of mature relationships generally. In other words they’re like children saying, along with Peter Pan, “I won’t grow up,” yet here they are demanding equal rights, and demanding that other people recognize them as “equal.” Go into any neighborhood gathering place, any hardware store, any church basement, in New York any numbers parlor or corner saloon, and ask the common man what he thinks about so-called “gay people” teaching in the public schools and you’ll be lucky if you get out of there without your clipboard wrapped around your neck. That’s how the people of this country, and this city with all its vaunted liberalism, feel about this perversion of biology and nature. So Mayor Koch thinks he can swish his pen over a piece of Gracie Mansion letterhead and eliminate three thousand years of established sexual morality.

You know, it’s personally quite ironic to me that the sob sisters going along with the Gay Rights Bill are the same pinkish Democrats that back in the ’50s tried to smear that McCarthy Committee with suggestions that David Schine and myself, that we had some sort of . . . well, involvement, merely because we were both bachelors . . . suggestions about David and me—which were completely ridiculous, David Schine went on and got married to Miss Universe and had eight children. And anybody that knows anything about Roy Cohn knows there is nothing (
series of muffled words
) about me. (
Pause
) Whatever. I’m not afraid of women, I like women. David Schine liked women and still likes women, as for Joseph McCarthy he married his secretary.

There’s a moral argument to be made as well. Take this set of facts. For two thousand years Christianity has considered homosexuality an abomination in the eyes of God. It’s condemned in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy. I don’t recall the exact quotes, but the Bible is explicit in saying if a man lieth with another man as if with a woman he shall be put to death, period, end of story.

Then we return to Jewish law, again, in three thousand recorded years of Jewish teaching, Jewish practice, not one single instance of any provision, any exemption, any suggestion of the legitimacy of a single homosexual relationship. Homosexuality is condemned pure and simple.

So in the moral code of the West, the Judeo-Christian code, we find absolutely no toleration of or excuses for homosexual behavior. It’s licentious, it’s venal, it’s perverted, it’s against nature.

You know, one person who was untiring in fighting this thing was Cardinal Spellman, god rest his soul. I had dinner with him last year in Provincetown, and he told me this homosexuality thing just broke his heart. They’re sick, he told me, sick in spirit, sad people, and only Jesus himself can really free them from the chains of this perversion, and to see how many of them are turning their backs on Jesus just broke the Cardinal’s heart. Now, this was a man of God talking, with all the compassion and wisdom of his cardinalship. He didn’t hate the gays, far from it. Neither do I, I feel sorry for them. I sincerely do. Kitty—Cardinal Spellman even counseled these kids, troubled teenagers from broken homes who get mixed up in child prostitution and so forth. Breaks your heart, the way the old ones prey on the young and so on.

This gay lib business can be traced back. 1951, the foundation of an organization called the Mattachine Society. Interestingly and perhaps significantly, this first American homo organization was founded by a Communist named Harry Hay.

June 1969—the vicious Stonewall Riots in which various transvestites or female impersonators upset over Judy Garland’s death threw garbage cans at the police and set police cars on fire. Next homosexual groups such as the Gay Liberation Front who made a relentless assault on the American Psychiatric Association, to force them to drop homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. Which the apa officially did in 1973, after years of intimidation, disruption of its annual meetings, et cetera. This has to be the first and only time in the history of medicine that a disease disappeared from the official vocabulary through the demands of people suffering from it.

Next gay radicals espoused a strategy called coming out of the closet, meaning to make a very dramatic public declaration of their homosexuality, showing off what they do in private, with the female names for men, the limp wrists, the swishery, the various signals by which homosexuals recognize each other, to say nothing about the lezzie girls in their tuxedos and cigars, all the while bringing a lot of pressure on people responsible for public policy.

I can hear howls of protest from the radicals if they ever heard me say this, but in fact, a homosexual who doesn’t draw attention to his private behavior in some obnoxious way is not gonna encounter any discrimination. Now that idea comes straight from the
Village Voice
, strange to say, by a writer named Jeff Greenfield who is way to the left of me or you but obviously still has a shred or two of common sense. Gays are not the only people condemned to behave one way in public and another way in private. All of us check some of our habits at the door when we enter the public arena.

Isn’t that the whole issue in a nutshell? A black person doesn’t choose to be black, a woman is obviously a woman—all right. They can’t hide what they are, or change it. So if people discriminate against them—well, it’s wrong, a lot of the time. But a drug addict, on the other hand, very much like the gays, the drug addict indulges in behavior abhorred by the majority. So the gays have a responsibility, if they refuse to seek help to change their behavior, which is done, I’m told, with electrical shocks, the gays can be made normal, but okay. If they refuse, the least, the least they can do is act in a way that doesn’t draw attention to themselves, or else bring down the wrath of the community.

New York is a melting pot, yes, but let’s not forget, it’s a melting pot of families. Of Italians and Irish and Jews and Catholics, of Puerto Ricans and Germans and Russians. I think we’d all agree that one place where unusual personal habits have to be checked at the door is the classroom. And there, I really believe, the parents of America have every right to demand that no homosexual phase on their way to maturity, and that’s exactly when they’re the most vulnerable to seduction by an older person. If the gays can get at our children when
they’re most susceptible to the virus of homosexuality, we risk an exponential increase of inversion in this country that will amount to a plague-like epidemic.

Only people like you and me, ladies and gentlemen, can stop this obnoxious influence from spreading through and polluting America’s school systems, corrupting our young, and ruining the fabric of a great nation.

I’m a New Yorker by birth and as long as there is a Roy Cohn, there’s one New Yorker who intends to stand up for American values and American beliefs.

I know you all here feel the way I do, and I hope that now you’ll join me in singing my favorite song. I hope it’s your favorite song too. Written by Irving Berlin. Let’s all sing “God Bless America.”

1992;
Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010
, 2010

Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, Richard Prince grew up in Massachusetts, played basketball and golf, and attended college in Maine.
As
a young artist he worked nights for
Time-Life
in the tear sheets department where he began making artworks of re-photographed photography. Prince has been writing as long as he has been making art, and his 1980 exhibition at the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo was accompanied by the publication of his book
Menthol Pictures.
He became a key figure in the “Pictures Generation” group during his time with Metro Pictures gallery. He is famed for his cowboys, joke paintings, celebrities, car hoods, check paintings, and nurse paintings, among many other modes. Prince has written many essays and stories, published numerous books (including
Why I Go to the Movies Alone
and
Wild History),
owned bookstores, and now is a publisher through his company Fulton Ryder. “The Velvet Well” is excerpted from
Why I Go to the Movies Alone.
His
Collected Writings,
edited by Kristine McKenna, was published in 2011.

M
AGAZINES
,
MOVIES
,
TV, and records. It wasn’t everybody’s condition, but to him it sometimes seemed like it was; and if it really wasn’t, that was alright, but it was going to be hard for him to connect with someone who passed himself off as an example or a version of a life put together from reasonable matter.

He had already accepted these conditions, and built out of their givens, and to him what was given was anything public, and what was public was always real. He transported these givens to a reality more real than the condition he first accepted. He was never too clever, too assertive, too intellectual . . . essentially too decorative. He had a spirit that made it easier to receive than to censor.

His own desires had very little to do with what came from himself, because what he put out (at least in part), had already been out. His way to make it new was to
make it again,
and making it again was enough for him, and certainly, personally speaking,
almost
him.

H
AVING
FUN
?
They weren’t sure.

I
T
WASN
’
T
a misunderstanding about the feeling, or difficulty about how it could be appreciated. Nothing about shame, or like, hey, is this allowed, should we really be feeling this good? Nothing like that, or stupid, or anything. Just more like they were so keyed up about having Sex and being Serious that the amount of time funning never seemed sufficient, or quite substantial enough for them to form any kind of reasonable opinion about what fun was supposed to be anymore.

They wanted to be flexible. They wanted to be able to say yes, we’ve participated, we’re acquainted with the emotion and have a pretty fair idea of how and why it exists, but aside from appearing happy, there was, in practice, only a slight commitment, and most of their energy was spent protecting their reservation and skepticism.

They understood, too, though, that if fun was rejected publicly, others might point to them and say their preoccupation with S & S made them dark and square and something to be turned out. So, if they knew they could trust you, that’s when they’d come out and just say it, point blank . . . “Okay, out with it. If it was up to us, we’d rather have no part of fun.”

They felt the sudden flux, an inflation, transitory . . . like being in love. A kind of swelling from fever. And, if it wasn’t too much to ask, all they wanted to do was move at a reasonable pace, sounding along at a nice kind of idle . . . so maybe they could get on with their work and their lives.

For them, funning seemed to be another kind of pressure. An obligation they had come to expect as part of the routine. Something to be taken in doses. Part of the checks and balances. The good with the bad. Another factor to figure in what was prescribed to produce a healthy equilibrium.

It was suggested, too, that fun existed on the same coin as guilt, and if the pleasure of its purpose wasn’t occasionally tossed and allowed to be “called” in the air . . . then the game could never begin, and sides could never be taken.

“Lighten up,” was what they heard. “Don’t be such stones.”

They’d hear the dig out doing the shopping. Hear it in the supermarket. Sometimes right in the middle of the week. They would try to smile and sparkle and move down the aisle. One foot in front of the other. They tried. They stepped. They remembered to participate.

They did their bit and acted the part that was called for. Parts of the mood came back, like a view lit up by lightning. Slowly, carefully, as if egged on by some invisible sidekick, they managed to tickle themselves. And, if not exactly to death, then to an acceptable titter and gaffe.

Luckily for them, their having the requisite gullibility, simplicity, and tolerance for repetition made some of life’s little jokes impossible to grow out of.

G
OING
OUT
became as private as staying in. Performance became less public, or at least less visible in public, and unless you were a lucky stiff, the witnessing of a natural sequence in light was pretty unlikely. Anything seen in person was probably, at best, received, rumored, or whispered . . . usually by word of mouth (from ear to ear). And, the source of the telling was either confessing under pressure, or bragging and boasting, acting like a big cheese . . . trying to negotiate a brownie point for, say, passage out of the city.

There were two markets. Black and box office. And, if one wasn’t, shall we say, discretely camouflaged . . . charged with an ability to adapt by distorting, then the percentage of looking real became cut in half, and the chances of being left out, possibly even terminated, doubled.

What this was about was “watch out.” What was real was very real, and it wasn’t all that unique to feel terrorized by the real thing. The game was ghost. And whoever became the least recognizable without totally disappearing got to go home.

He was almost there. Near the end. One step away from autonomy. He made sure that everything about him looked the same, and as natural as it had when he first appeared. He was the look generation, and the effect of his appearance was so unreal that his reality began to resemble a kind of virtuoso real . . . a very
real
Real capable of instamatic ambience.