Not Just Dying: Gay New York Living, 1989–2001

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The Coded Page

The New York Times ran a standard, unvarying vocabulary on its obituary page for most of the period, applied at scale to a fact its own house style would not otherwise print: “is survived by his companion of thirty-two years,” “he never married,” “died after a long illness.” The phrasing was not a reporter’s discretion improvised case by case. It was formula, deployed identically across years of death notices for men whose relationship to the deceased had no other sanctioned entry onto the page — no legal category to name, since New York recognized no such marriage or partnership through nearly the whole period — and an editor assigning space to an obituary, like a reader working through it over coffee, understood exactly what the words stood in for without the paper ever printing the word itself. The formula held through the worst years of the epidemic, when the volume of exactly this kind of notice was highest, and only in the period’s final years did an occasional death notice use the word “husband” in its place, a word the page would not have printed a decade earlier for lack of any legal container to put it in.

How the 1990s Obituary Page Coded Gay Lives

A New Yorker who read only the mainstream press between 1989 and the middle of the 1990s, working through pages built on formulas like that one, could reasonably have concluded that gay life in the city consisted of one long funeral. The frame was not wrong — the obituary page carried the epidemic’s arithmetic in exactly that coded vocabulary — but it was, on any given Tuesday, incomplete. Two men could sit at the corner table of a restaurant on Eighth Avenue, order the same thing they always ordered, argue about a movie, split a check, and go home, and nothing about that Tuesday would register anywhere in the record the city kept of itself. The West Village and, by the early 1990s, Chelsea were full of exactly this kind of ordinary evening, accumulating in volume even as the epidemic continued its worst years, and the two facts ran side by side in the same neighborhoods at the same hour, rarely set together in print. A gym opened. A bookstore stayed open, as it had for two decades. A bar changed owners and kept the regulars. A magazine could have covered any of it as a trend, a threat, or a eulogy, and largely did — when it covered it at all — as the last of the three.

Out, 1992 to 2001

What “out” meant to a person working in New York media shifted considerably across the period, and the shift had a specific starting point. On March 18, 1990, the biweekly newspaper OutWeek ran a cover story naming the late publisher Malcolm Forbes — dead two weeks earlier, on February 24 — as gay, over the objections of Forbes’s own circle and the continued silence of The New York Times, which declined to use his name in that context for months.¹ Michelangelo Signorile wrote the piece; the editorial around it, by Gabriel Rotello, argued explicitly that the discretion Forbes’s set had always assumed the press would extend, even in death, was itself the problem worth exposing. Time covered the fallout under the headline “Forcing Gays Out of the Closet” and, in doing so, gave the practice its name. The episode broke an unwritten contract that had governed how a certain kind of prominent man’s life got written up, and prominent men noticed.

Two years later the same question resolved itself the opposite way, voluntarily. On November 18, 1992, the entertainment executive David Geffen stood at a fundraising dinner for AIDS Project Los Angeles and opened his remarks with a sentence that had not existed in his public life before that night: “As a gay man, I’ve come a long way to be here tonight.”² The Advocate named him its Man of the Year. Two years after Forbes had been outed against his estate’s wishes, a man of comparable wealth and comparable prominence made the same fact public on his own terms, at a podium of his own choosing. The distance between the two moments — 1990’s forced disclosure and 1992’s chosen one — was not merely rhetorical. It tracked, however unevenly, across the rest of the decade: Ellen DeGeneres’s Time cover in April 1997, timed to a coming-out episode that aired that same month, ran under the flat headline “Yep, I’m Gay,” a sentence a magazine editor in 1990 would not have printed as a cover line without a great deal more hedging around it.³ By September 21, 1998, when NBC put Will & Grace on its Thursday schedule and its pilot drew a Nielsen rating of 8.6, an openly gay lead character on network television was no longer, on its own, a controversy calculated to draw hate mail; it was a scheduling decision.⁴ The obituary page’s coded formula moved more slowly than television’s.

Christopher Street to Eighth Avenue

Through the 1980s the gravitational center of gay male New York sat on Christopher Street and the blocks around it, anchored by a bookstore that had been there since 1967. Between roughly 1990 and 1993 that center shifted north, to a stretch of Chelsea running from the Meatpacking district’s edge at 14th Street up to 23rd, with Eighth Avenue as its spine and Seventh as a secondary corridor. The move had ordinary real-estate logic behind it: Chelsea’s former industrial buildings offered larger floor plans at lower rents than the Village, and the neighborhood’s proximity to the Meatpacking clubs made it a natural extension rather than a rupture. By the early 1990s the strip between 16th and 23rd Streets carried a legible commercial grammar of its own — the bookstore A Different Light at 151 West 19th Street, the coffee shop Big Cup at 228 Eighth Avenue (open by 1994, laptops on the tables by the decade’s end), the restaurant Food Bar at 149 Eighth Avenue, and a run of bars that displaced the Village as the male scene’s center of gravity: Splash, which opened in 1991 at 50 West 17th Street with go-go dancers behind glass and a full dance floor after its 1995 cabaret license; Barracuda, opened 1995 at 275 West 22nd Street by Bob Pontarelli and Stephen Heighton, its Thursday drag competition hosted by Mona Foot; and the g Lounge, which opened in 1997 at 225 West 19th with a floor-to-ceiling window onto the street — the first major gay bar in the neighborhood’s history that was not, by design, dark and windowless.⁵ HX, a free weekly launched in 1991, tracked the whole strip and rode the subway in the coat pocket of the men who read it. The neighborhood was also the winter base for a summer geography beyond it — the Pines and Cherry Grove on Fire Island, weekend shares booked months ahead — and for the era’s circuit of large charity dance parties, the Black Party and the GMHC Morning Party among them, that moved thousands of men through a single room for a single night.

The gym stood at the center of the neighborhood’s self-image, where the bar once had. David Barton opened his eponymous gym in the basement of 552 Sixth Avenue in 1992, under the slogan “Look better naked,” built around candles, mirrors, and a velvet-rope locker room — a nightclub’s decor applied to a nautilus circuit.⁶ Membership ran $80 to $110 a month, a real sum for a man in his twenties working an entry-level job in publishing or advertising, and the look it produced — defined shoulders, five to ten percent body fat, by 1996 a buzz cut and cargo shorts, by 1999 a year-round tan from one of the tanning salons that opened along the same stretch of Eighth Avenue — was legible from a block away. What the body meant did not reduce to one thing. It was, depending on the man and the year, a refusal of the wasted image AIDS had made into the era’s dominant picture of gay men; a professional asset in the industries — advertising, fashion, retail, hospitality — where a Chelsea address most often supplied the paycheck; and, for some, simply a project a person could control when the actual problem could not be controlled at all. Older gay men, the ones who had come through the worst years already, did not always receive the new physical culture warmly. Andrew Holleran’s 1996 novel The Beauty of Men set a forty-seven-year-old man named Lark against the gym-built generation arriving after the losses, friends dead or scattered, watching bodies get built in a community where bodies had spent a decade failing.⁷ The resentment was generational and it was also, underneath that, a resentment about who had arrived after the cost had already been paid.

Two Marches

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising fell on June 26, 1994, and the city produced, characteristically, two separate marches rather than one. The official Stonewall 25 march, organized under the International Lesbian and Gay Association, started at the United Nations at First Avenue and 47th Street, ran north, and ended at a rally on the Great Lawn in Central Park; corporate sponsors backed it, delegations from more than fifty countries marched in it, and even Tiffany hung a rainbow flag on its building along the route, a gesture that would not have occurred to the store a decade before.⁹ A separate march, Spirit of Stonewall, started instead at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street and ran up Sixth Avenue — the historic West Village route the official march had abandoned for the sake of crowd capacity — and drew the marchers the larger event’s corporate framing and its exclusion of transgender participants and sex workers had pushed to the side. Sylvia Rivera marched with this second contingent, in explicit protest of her own absence from the official program. Estimates for the combined crowd ran as high as a million, though the figure’s sourcing back to any single count was thin enough that a more careful accounting simply said several hundred thousand to over a million.¹⁰ Gilbert Baker, the rainbow flag’s designer, unfurled a version thirty feet wide and a mile long along the route, his largest to that date.¹¹ Bill Clinton sent a video greeting to the Great Lawn rally, the first time a sitting president had addressed a gay rights march in any form. The march coincided with Gay Games IV, eleven thousand athletes competing across forty-one sports, opened on June 18 at Columbia University’s Wien Stadium and closed a week later at the old Yankee Stadium; a few dozen HIV-positive athletes from abroad, mostly European, needed a waiver under the federal travel ban still in force to enter the country at all.¹²

The date carried a weight the anniversary alone did not explain. There was, in June 1994, no protease inhibitor yet; the therapy that would change the epidemic’s arithmetic sat two years off. Nineteen ninety-five, the following year, was the worst single year of the American epidemic by death count, and the marchers on First Avenue in June 1994 were, on average, a season or two away from another funeral, not further.¹³ The march was consequently a strange hour in which grief and a still-unfounded hope for a different future occupied the same crowd, the same avenue, without either canceling the other out. A day earlier, on June 25, the Dyke March — organized independently, with no permit — drew more than twenty thousand marchers up Fifth Avenue from Bryant Park, the first of what became an annual event and a deliberate answer to the question of whether the anniversary belonged to one march or required its own separate one.¹⁴

The Argument Inside the Argument

Same-sex marriage entered the period’s public argument before the decade proper began. On August 28, 1989, Andrew Sullivan published “Here Comes the Groom” in The New Republic, a conservative case for the institution built on the claim that marriage was the one reform that would actually matter.¹⁵ That same fall, in the journal OUT/LOOK, the attorney Paula Ettelbrick answered with an essay whose title became the position’s shorthand: “Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?”¹⁶ Ettelbrick’s argument was not that marriage should be denied gay couples but that winning it would not, on its own, liberate anyone — that the goal ought to be dismantling marriage’s privileged legal status rather than seeking admission to it. The two essays set the debate’s terms for the rest of the period, and the terms ran inside the gay and lesbian community as much as between it and everyone else.

The legal question moved from theory to case law on May 5, 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in Baehr v. Lewin that denying marriage licenses to three same-sex couples amounted to sex-based discrimination under the state constitution, subject to strict scrutiny, and sent the case back to a lower court to determine whether the state could show a compelling interest to the contrary.¹⁷ It was a narrower ruling than its reputation — no court had yet held there was a fundamental right to same-sex marriage — but the reputation did the political work regardless. Congress answered preemptively: the House passed the Defense of Marriage Act 342 to 67 on July 12, 1996, the Senate 85 to 14 on September 10, and Bill Clinton signed it after midnight on September 21, with no ceremony and no photograph, his press secretary attributing the timing and the manner both to “the political realities of an election year.”¹⁸ The act let states refuse to recognize other states’ same-sex marriages and defined marriage, for every purpose of federal law, as the union of one man and one woman — more than a thousand federal benefits withheld at a stroke from any couple the law would not recognize.

Vermont broke the pattern at the end of the period. On December 20, 1999, the state’s supreme court ruled unanimously in Baker v. State that the state’s constitution required the legislature to extend marriage’s rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples, in some form.¹⁹ Governor Howard Dean signed the resulting civil-unions law privately on April 26, 2000; it took effect that July 1 and created, for the first time in the country, a status carrying every state-law right of marriage without the name.²⁰ Dissolution required Vermont residency, but formation did not, and couples from outside the state traveled in for the ceremony the way an earlier generation had traveled to Reno for the opposite purpose. Underneath the legal argument, most of the community was not weighing constitutional theory on a daily basis; what people wanted, in practice, was hospital visitation rights, inheritance without a will contested by a partner’s family, and joint custody that held up in court — practical entitlements the marriage debate’s opposing camps agreed mattered, however they disagreed about the vehicle that ought to deliver them.

A Different City

Lesbian New York occupied a different physical map than the gay male city the same decade produced, with a smaller number of venues, thinner real-estate margins, and its own generational and political fault lines. The center held in the West Village and, increasingly through the decade, the East Village and Lower East Side, rather than in Chelsea. Elaine Romagnoli’s Cubby Hole, at 438 Hudson Street, closed in 1990 when she sold the space; the following year Lisa Cannistraci and Minnie Rivera opened Henrietta Hudson in the same location, with Stormé DeLarverie — who had worked the door at the original bar — continuing on security, and it became, and stayed, the longest continuously running lesbian bar in the city.²¹ A few blocks away, a bar that had operated since 1987 as DT’s Fat Cat took, in 1994, the name Cubbyhole — one word this time — after its owner Tanya Saunders bought the name from Romagnoli, and filled its roughly eight-hundred-square-foot room with paper lanterns, model airplanes, and a jukebox that ran from Madonna to the Indigo Girls.²² Crazy Nanny’s, Romagnoli’s next project after selling the original Cubby Hole, opened on Seventh Avenue South in 1991 and drew a Friday-night crowd more racially mixed than either of the Hudson Street rooms.

The scene’s political organizing tracked the same neighborhoods as its bars. The Lesbian Avengers formed in the summer of 1992, founded by Ana María Simo, Sarah Schulman, Maxine Wolfe, Anne-Christine d’Adesky, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire, and staged their first action that September.²³ Two years later, on June 25, 1994 — the day before Stonewall 25 — the group helped organize the first Dyke March, an unpermitted march up Fifth Avenue that drew more than twenty thousand people and became an annual fixture rather than a one-time answer to the larger anniversary’s crowding-out of lesbian visibility. On the social side, a Sunday-night gathering at the French bistro Café Tabac on East 9th Street, promoted between 1993 and 1995 by Wanda Acosta and the DJ Sharee Nash under the banner “No Day Like Sunday,” drew a mixed celebrity and downtown crowd — Madonna, kd lang, Sandra Bernhard, Queen Latifah among the regulars — and gave the era a phrase, “lesbian chic,” that the mainstream press picked up and ran with for the rest of the decade.²⁴ The literary side of the same world produced, across the same years, Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia (1995), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls (1994) — a title that, in the same years Eighth Avenue was becoming the gay male city’s new address, staked a competing claim to the same neighborhood’s name from an entirely different direction.

Thesis

The obituary told the truth about the decade and told only part of it. A city that read its gay neighbors mainly through the death notice missed the gym membership renewed in January, the bookstore that had been on the same corner since before most of its Chelsea customers were born, the argument two men had in a restaurant about whether to spend the summer on Fire Island or in Vermont, the bar that changed hands and kept its regulars anyway. None of that was a rebuttal to the epidemic sitting alongside it in the same years and the same streets — the two facts did not cancel each other, and no one living through both mistook one for a correction of the other. They were simply two clocks running at once, in the same neighborhoods, and a newspaper that could only find the story in the one clock was, whatever its intentions, only reading half the city out loud.

At the Magazine

The Forbes outing would have made its case in The Essay, arguing that the discretion assumed on his behalf was itself the story worth telling. Geffen’s own choice, made on his own podium two years later, would have needed no such argument — The Back would have carried it as a paragraph of record instead, an item rather than a case. The Ellen cover would have landed the same way five years further on, a single Back paragraph noting a fact television had already settled without asking Meridian to settle it again.

The march’s twenty-fifth anniversary would have claimed The Feature Well outright, both marches and the Games folded into one long piece the room would have wanted regardless of cost. The Dyke March a day earlier would have read, at the room’s table, as the larger piece’s footnote rather than its own story, duplicating ground the Feature Well piece had already claimed. The Lesbian Avengers’ founding, two years before that, would have come up at a desk already closing that month’s City well, and by the time anyone circled back the space would have belonged to another story entirely. David Barton’s gym would have arrived at the room in the right subject and the wrong tone, read every time as advertorial no matter who drafted it. Cubby Hole’s quiet handoff to a new owner on the same Hudson Street address would have sat entirely outside any beat the masthead kept, unnoticed rather than declined.

The debate underneath all of it — Sullivan’s case for marriage, Ettelbrick’s case against seeking it — would have supplied The Essay with three further entries across the decade. Baehr’s Hawaii ruling would have opened the sequence in 1993; the Defense of Marriage Act’s signing would have taken the slot in 1996; Vermont’s civil-unions law, taking effect in 2000, would have closed it, the last of three Essay pieces in an argument that ran the length of the decade.