Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
boys and girls.
And, oh yes, Seduction of the Innocent and the ensuing Congressional hearings all but destroyed the once booming comic book industry. In the forties a comic book might sell as many as six million copies, sometimes even more—and remember, the population was much smaller then. Today a bestseller means 100,000 copies. This was done, you understand, in the name of wiping out juvenile delinquency.
And it worked, didn’t it, at least in part? You can prowl the streets today of almost any major American city and you will be hard pressed to find a single juvenile delinquent wearing a cape.
Shazam! Welcome to the fifties, Beav!
(And I still say Spiderman looks like he’s humping in most of those pictures.)
CHAPTER FOUR
THERE IS A TAVERN…
Things hadn’t gotten much better by the time the sixties rolled around either. Showing or describing the human body was still invariably illegal—murder wasn’t, at least not murdering a gay man. A gay hustler could, and did with grim frequency in those years, murder his john and in order to be acquitted had only to plead that his victim had been homosexual and had tried to molest him—usually after paying the young man for his favors. If you were assaulted, or “bashed,” you didn’t call the cops—they would be more likely to arrest you than your assailant, as my friend Ernestine had so painfully found out.
I was brutally beaten in 1960 in Louisville, Kentucky—by a cop. Nothing sexual. I was in the wrong place and opened my mouth when I should have kept it shut—a lifelong habit, I’m afraid.
In 1961 I spent most of a night with a gun at my head in a gay related robbery. It really is more frightening in retrospect than it was at the time. In all candor, when you have been to some of the gay dinner parties that I have attended, you get over your fear of death. Could it be more painful than another bad impersonation of Prissy?
It was certainly uncomfortable, however. And there were some possible complications that were worrisome. My man with the gun considered the idea of going next door and raping my female neighbor; and I had a roommate who might come home at any time and step into a volatile situation. Mostly I was thinking about how to avert either of these tragedies. He already had my entire stash of cash—twelve dollars and some change. Talk about petty thievery.
I did what I generally do at times of crisis—I talked. And talked. And talked. He was disappointed with the paltry sum of money at hand. “I could write a check,” I offered. Yes, of course, I understood that he had no bank account into which to deposit a check. Perhaps we could go out—away from neighbors and roommates though I didn’t say that—and find a place to cash the check.
As the night progressed, I am afraid the situation deteriorated into a rather sad farce. Of course no one was going to cash a check in the middle of the night in Los Angeles. I was counting on that—what was open? Filling stations. A rare convenience store. Coffee shops.
The check started at one hundred and fifty dollars. After a few stops I scratched out those numbers and changed it to one hundred. I thought it was certain that now no one would cash an altered check, though that seemed not to occur to him. I was still talking, bear in mind. By now we were friends, brothers under the skin. I can be very convincing when I talk.
Dawn came. He treated me to breakfast—with the money he had taken from me earlier. We talked. He was, I swear it, beginning to get a romantic glint in his eye by the time Sears opened their store on Saturday morning. The check had been altered yet again. It was now for fifty dollars and looking like hens had been scratching at it. Both the one hundred dollar amount and the one hundred and fifty dollar amount had been exed out. I handed this pathetic scrap of paper to a cashier at the service window at Sears where, I should add, I did not even have an account (there is, I believe, a certain threshold of taste below which one should not descend, no matter the circumstances).
The cashier studied the check. I twitched, I winked, I flung glances over my shoulder in an effort to convey to her that there was something wrong, that the man behind me had a gun, that this was not a kosher situation.
Bear in mind I had been up all night. Those of you unfortunate enough to have seen me in the wee hours know that I could not have been a pretty sight. At the least my clothes were rumpled and my hair on end. I don’t want to think of the state of my make up.
She stared at me, seeming to note my twitches, if not my dishabille. She stared at the check, with its multitude of shrinking amounts. She stared at me some more. Behind me people were shuffling impatiently. I was all too aware that one of them was armed.
“I guess it’s okay,” she sighed. She put the check into her drawer, and handed me fifty dollars through the window cage. Never before or since have I cashed a check with so much ease at a department store cashier’s window.
Well, at any rate, that ended our night’s adventure. He was apparently satisfied with the fifty dollars pay for his time, or perhaps he was just tired of my incessant chatter. He dropped me off at home, by which time we were such good buddies that he even offered to come back some other day and teach me self-defense so that no one could again take advantage of me this way.
Self-defense? Self-defense was talking. Boxing was what you did at Christmas, and wrestling was for fun. I survived, without the boxing lessons, but the point of the whole story is, I didn’t call the police.
When I was gang raped by a trio of uniformed police officers—men who had sworn a sacred oath to protect and defend—I could hardly have called the police. To have lodged a complaint would have been to invite almost certain reprisals from their fellow officers. My lesbian friend, Joy, whose rapists called her “dyke bitch” and other endearments while they raped and beat her, didn’t call the cops either. Nor did my friend Don, after a nightmare night of multiple rapes combined with physical abuse that left him covered in blood and looking like so much raw meat.
Women today decry—and rightly so—the judgmental attitudes they sometimes get when reporting rape to the police. Multiply that a hundred-fold and you’ll have an inkling of what it is sometimes like for the gay male even today, outside of the gay capitols like San Francisco and New York City.
And that’s an improvement. In the fifties and sixties, they would have laughed us out of the station without even bothering to take a report—perhaps, as sometimes happened, after taking a turn of their own. To whom would we complain? Gays didn’t enjoy police protection in those days. We solaced and succoured one another. We were all we had.
Well, we had our bars, of course. Much has been written about the incidence of alcoholism among gays, but that is hardly surprising when the focus of our social life for so many years was the gay bar. In Los Angeles the biggest concentration of them was in L.A. 69—West Hollywood or, as we called it, Boy’s Town. The Hollywood Hills were the Swish Alps and Robertson Boulevard was Suckleberry Lane. I don’t know why we bothered with postal codes.
Although West Hollywood was not then its own city, it was outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department—county territory, in other words, and patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who for whatever reason tended to be more tolerant of gays and gay bars.
Which is not to say that the West Hollywood bars weren’t occasionally subject to raids, though less often. You always ran the risk of picking up a vice officer, and no dancing or untoward behavior was allowed.
Still, in general, the atmosphere here was more relaxed. Sometimes one saw a celebrity or quasi celebrity. Dorothy Parker and on-again-off-again husband Alan Campbell lived around the corner from The Four Star and he was frequently wont to linger at the bar of an afternoon, occasionally with, and more often without, wifey.
In the seventies comedian Michael Greer and actor Don Johnson, then appearing at the Coronet Theater in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, were a regular twosome at the West Hollywood watering holes. Lovers? Friends? I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty. Mr. Johnson invited me to go with them as they were leaving one night, but neither our destination nor our intentions were made entirely clear. I declined. Of course, had I know then