After the Orlando massacre a few weeks back I have been giving thought to my past, particularly my youth and what a miracle it is that I am here today. Lets say the theme of Memento Mori is my day to day soundtrack of late.
My youth was a turbulent period, my parents were furious at my being gay and they regularly changed the locks after tossing my meager belongings out onto the lawn. Their flashes of temper left me homeless for periods of time, sometimes a few days, sometimes weeks. Often I would just float around , I had a large car, a Chevy Impala, it was an ugly beast but it was commodious; frequently it sufficed as the roof over my head.
This was the early years of the 80’s and with the little cash I scratched together I would head north; NYC beckoned me away from that shit-hole in NJ. And like many suburban gay boys I fantasized about that city, I picked up copies of the now defunct Soho News, the Village Voice, Interview magazine, fantasizing about this paradise only a train ride away. I imagined living in this fantasy loft, with beautiful pine floors and expansive windows, “artistic” furniture and of course Boston ferns. Boston ferns were not negotiable .
But of course that was not my reality, I was poor and not that cute in a city of incredibly beautiful people and my only real companion was an on again- off again drunk drag queen named Leo, her drag name Leonora- perfect Lenny and Leonora. What a pair we must have made.
Leo was only six years older I have just discovered but gosh, I thought he was so mature, so experienced. He had BEEN to Broadway, had been to the Met(both the opera house and the museum), the ballet, he knew everything . He was an introduction to a level of sophistication I hadn’t imagined. On our first encounter he bought me the cast recordings to “Dreamgirls” and “Evita”,both spectacular hits. I hadn’t a stereo or even a home at that point but they were totems of a life I so desired.
But Leo as sophisticated as he was, as genteel as he was, was also very familiar with the sordid (yet exhilarating) aspects of the city. We went to the nightclubs if they were free, the lights flash now in my memories , one blur after another. But what Leo enjoyed most was going to the baths. And really they were perfect, they were cheap, all you had to do was buy a towel and you were in…for hours, until dawn. Leo would buy his towel, often if he was flush, buy mine as well, kiss me goodbye, tell me where and when to meet up, and off he went. I can remember still how he draped his towel, he tucked it up well over his chest, inching it as if he had breasts, pushing them together to imitate a cleavage he didn’t possess . I often wondered what the hell he was doing, here in this hyper masculine world , here he was sashaying like some peculiar version of Marilyn Monroe. Yet he was popular.
I was not, I was an invisible boy, goofy, plain and confused . Also I was exhausted. What I often found myself doing was falling asleep. I wasn’t deliberately chaste, I just wasn’t chased. So as I was too broke to buy drinks and afraid of the drugs around me, I found myself falling asleep in the oddest of places, the orgy rooms of the bath houses. I think my unpopularity saved my life. Leo would be dead in less than a decade, and so would pretty much anyone else I knew in this strange wonderful new world. But I survived, and that , I have been thinking about of late. How when I was a young kid,as young as many of those kids in Florida, how I desired to attract the attention of the many beautiful gods that surrounded me, only a few feet away yet I remained invisible. I was lucky.
That is what I wanted to capture in this drawing, that confusion, that dizzying excitement, the pagan energy, that now is only a shadowy memory. Elusive as a lost soul.
The Temptation of St.Anthony (of the Desert)in the St.Marks Baths
2016
sanguine pencil on paper
18 by 24″
It is of course a dense image one full of meaning but what is most significant at least to me is the image of the saint, who resembles a younger me, the clown like figure in the lower right; the skeletal figure in the mask is my dear friend Leo soon to be almost as ruined as this figure I depict.
I haven’t much from that period, the LP’s Leo gave me our long gone, the cliched pink flamingo statuettes he bought ( even though I essentially lived in a car) long broken, but I still have the post card from The New Saint Marks Baths, it captured the glamour and excitement of that place then and now years later, it still does .
An odd bit of ephemera to a period long past. I can’t think about it anymore…
Have a good Independence Day
Boondocks Babylon 
Dear Leonard, thank you for this post; beautiful and heartbreaking, i’m deeply moved reading it. I think of you, as you write about yourself here, and about me, as a young man, going through very similar things in the UK in the ’80s. It was such an intense period; our growing-up was so profoundly affected by not one, but two evils, homophobia and the early years of the AIDS epidemic. It’s a miracle we survived in one piece. But we did, and I give thanks every day. Surviving those times also give my every day present a particular sweetness and beauty, it brings home what a precious gift life is.
Once again, you’ve tackled a subject and made it absolutely your own, I can think of no other expression of these themes that is anything like this drawing, it’s a masterpiece. You go beyond the mundane surface of the scene, and conjure something timeless and something magical that is yet still rooted firmly in your personal experience of that place and time. That detail of you and Leo is so, so touching. I’m in awe my friend!
Oh, and I adore that postcard from the baths, that don’t make them like that any more, sadly. Love and best wishes, Phil x
My dear friend , thank you for the kind words. The drawing drew itself but I hesitated posting the accompanying text (even as I had tried to temper it to be more agreeable ). But I did post it and I’m pleased you found something familiar in it, we are brothers after all.
They were mad times , exhilarating, terrifying and yet so formative . I haven’t the luxury to ever take even one day for granted . It is all so brief and so fragile, that was the greatest gift from those dark days .
Love to you , Lg