Though I always take out my
rainbow flag (scavenged from a trash can last year) and wave it about the
apartment, I hadn't planned to watch this year's parade, having seen it several
times in the past. Instead, knowing the nearby restaurants would be crowded
even while the parade was in progress, I planned to take refuge in a quiet
Chinese restaurant on West 3rd Street, at a safe remove from the brouhaha. So I left the apartment at about 2 p.m. and
went out into a mild, cloudless day – perfect for a parade. I planned to follow West 4th
Street east to Sixth Avenue and, depending on the volume of the crowds, find my
way from there. Which, it turned out,
was naïve.
Walking along West 11th Street toward 4th, I
immediately encountered a group of girls, one of whom, with flaming pink hair,
launched into a frenzied dance. As I
passed them I applauded, and her companions cheered my applause. Which set the tone for the day: wild and
joyous.
As I
followed West 4th toward Sheridan Square, where West 4th
intersects Christopher Street and the path of the parade, I soon saw a mass of
people ahead of me blocking my way to Seventh Avenue and the Square, so I
turned left onto West 10th Street (yes, West 4th crosses
West 10th – this is the Village and even the streets are crazy) –
and, with the help of police who were directing traffic and the flow of
pedestrians, managed to cross Seventh Avenue, then Sixth, where I found the
crowds still impossibly thick, then Fifth, still crowded, and ended up on
University Place, far removed from the parade, where I found only the usual
Sunday-afternoon crowd enjoying the Village on a sunny day, fewer rainbow
flags, less frenzy.
So
what had I seen en route? Not just
rainbow flags, but flaring rainbow skirts, rainbow boas, rainbow capes, rainbow
necklaces and bracelets and shirts and caps and headdresses – in short, rainbow
everything. And T-shirts blazoning a
message:
IT’S
ALL ABOUT LOVE
LOVE WINS
MANILA – PHILIPPINES
And on a very straight-looking guy:
YOU’RE
A
BITCH
And
the people? Policemen everywhere (in the
wake of Orlando, no doubt), and firemen and their vehicles as well. As regards the celebrants, mostly young
people waving rainbow flags, but also older ones, some of them same-sex couples
holding hands. Muscled studs stripped to
the waist, displaying the torso they’d worked so hard to achieve. And women with pink, purple, blue, or yellow
hair. And, here and there, costumes wild
and weird, as if from another planet, indescribable. But nothing negative; a joyous mood
throughout, albeit with signs – I
AM PULSE, WE ARE
ORLANDO -- commemorating Orlando and the 49 victims.
As I approached my Chinese restaurant, I
grew apprehensive, for even on West 3rd Street there were
ground-floor bars and restaurants jammed to the gills, with occasional cheers
and applause, probably sparked by watching the parade on television. But when I mounted the short flight of stairs
to my restaurant, I left the hullabaloo behind and entered a sheltered space of
calm with only a handful of other patrons present. I was soon at a table awaiting my scallion
pancakes and tea, while perusing a book I had just bought at a sidewalk stand
on West 4th Street and University Place: Delta of Venus: Erotica by Anaïs Nin (Bantam, 1978), which made
available to the public some erotica that, needing money, she had done in 1940 for
an anonymous male patron for a dollar a page.
And who had put her up to this endeavor?
Her friend and lover, Henry Miller, who had other projects in mind and
so offered the job to her. (Note: In
1940, a dollar a page wasn’t a bad rate.
Accounting for inflation, it is the equivalent of $16.89 today.)
Though I have read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) in Latin and,
in translation, a similar treatise in Arabic, I’m not much into erotica,
whether gay or straight. I bought the
book on an impulse, because I had met Anaïs Nin here in New York in 1968, at
which time I sent her some poems (she pronounced them “subtle”), and she sent
me A Spy in the House of Love, a
title that I still find arresting. But
what does this have to do with Gay Pride?
Nothing, yet everything, for a candid celebration of female sexuality
signals the same emancipation for women that the Stonewall riots of 1969
signaled for the gay community. What is
the Gay Pride celebration all about, if not a celebration of sex? While at the restaurant I got through the
first chapter, about a fictional Hungarian baron whose appetite for sexual
adventures is satisfied – for a while – by a free-living Brazilian dancer name
Anita whose narrowed, lascivious eyes
resembled those of a tiger, puma, or leopard.
(To my knowledge Anaïs Nin had no close acquaintance with feral felines,
but her imagination was surely piqued by the thought of $16.89 a page.)
Yes, this is erotica, but today it lacks
the shock value that it must have delivered when first published long ago. And the Anaïs Nin that I met back then had
nothing loose or rakish about her; she was very much a lady, carefully got up, petite,
soft-voiced, sensitive, articulate. Her
preface tells how, when she was writing the erotica, her patron urged her to
“leave out the poetry,” which she found that she couldn’t do. In addition, she realized that feminine
erotica, unlike male, couldn’t focus on sex acts alone, but required a
component of emotion and love as well – a realization that made her work more
challenging, even difficult. Men and
women, she saw, were put together differently and required different stimuli
for arousal. Henry Miller’s accounts of
sexual experience were explicit, hers were ambiguous; his were Rabelaisian and
humorous, hers were poetic. As a woman
writing erotica – a genre hitherto dominated by men – she was a pioneer. (For an account of my brief acquaintance with
Anaïs Nin, see post #133, June 29, 2014.)
This account of my Gay Pride Day
peregrinations left me at the restaurant with my nose deep in the delta of
Venus, but having finished my digression on erotica, I’ll get back to me and my
further adventures. What then happened
was simply my attempt to brave the commotion and get back home in one
piece. I followed West 4th
back across Sixth Avenue (no problem), and then traversed the West 4th
block between Sixth and Seventh which I have already commemorated in a much-visited
post for this blog (#154, November 23, 2014).
When I reached Sheridan Square, the whole area was packed, and the
parade was in progress on Christopher Street, passing the celebrated Stonewall
Inn on its way to Seventh Avenue and beyond.
From a distance I could see, over the heads of other bystanders, several
floats pass by, blaring loud music to which a pack of young celebrants, some in
fantastic outfits and some in almost nothing at all, vibrated frantically and
joyously. Each time a float passed the
crowd at or near the Square, a huge ovation erupted, while everyone waved their
rainbow flags in a frenzy. And in the
park itself the life-size statues of two couples, two men standing together and
two seated women, were still heaped with flowers and cards and candles
commemorating the victims of the Orlando massacre.
At intervals the police halted the parade
and let people cross Christopher Street, so I was able to escape north from the
crowd and reach West 10th again, which took me back to West 4th
and so on to my apartment. The more
space I put between me and the parade, the less frantic the crowd and the fewer
the flags, until the crowd frayed into small groups here and there, including
some, both old and young, content to sit on a stoop and watch the others go
by. But right up to the entrance to my
building, I sensed excitement in the air, something very special under
way. So ended my witness of the
celebration, except for sounds that night of fireworks.
Today the Times informs me that some 30,000 marched in the parade, and that
Hillary Clinton made a surprise visit, popping out of a van near the Stonewall
to march four blocks in the parade in the company of such notables as Governor
Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and black activist Al Sharpton, who took care to
position himself right next to the lady in question. Recognized and hailed all the way, and
showered with confetti from a rooftop at Bleecker Street, she waved and smiled
and shook hands with onlookers held back by police barricades. Then, just as suddenly and mysteriously as
she arrived, she popped back into a vehicle and was whisked off to fly back to
Indiana, where she is now campaigning.
Mr. Trump, who claims he will do more than Hillary for gays, was not in
evidence, having other fish to fry.
The
Times also interviewed some bystanders.
A young man from Bangkok had thought about dressing in drag but decided
not to, heeding his mother’s advice, “Just don’t go crazy.” A 20-year-old transgender American said he
felt proud of being who he was, but declined to give his surname because his
family disapproved of his transition.
And a 74-year-old American who has attended some 30 marches told of
losing 75 friends to AIDS; when he informed the families, some of them
immediately hung up, so he deposited their ashes in the Hudson River and the
Grand Canyon: a sad note indeed on an otherwise joyous occasion.
Erotica vs. pornography: What is the difference? Off the top of my head I’m inclined to say that
erotica deals candidly with the sexual, but pornography goes further, dishing
out luscious adjectives and juicy descriptions in hopes of sexually arousing
the reader or viewer. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is certainly not
pornography; rather, it’s a sex manual instructing male and female readers on
how to “connect” and, once you’ve done it, how to keep connected. His advice is often simplistic, yet relevant:
“To be loved, be lovable.” He arms his
readers for sexual encounters, but he doesn’t whip them up into a frenzy of
desire.
Throughout the book Ovid is urbane,
sophisticated, witty. Which did him no
good whatsoever: in 8 CE he was banished by the emperor Augustus to the
farthest limits of the empire (to what is now Romania) because, as the poet
puts it, he was guilty of a book and an error.
The book was obviously the Ars
Amatoria, which may have offended an emperor eager to restore the
traditional polytheistic religion of Rome, and opposed to well-bred Roman women
going out in public to “connect.” The
error may have been political, related to rival factions intriguing to secure the
aging emperor’s succession; possibly it involved
the emperor’s granddaughter Julia, who was banished for adultery in the same
year and subsequently bore a child that Augustus ordered put to death. Neither Julia nor Ovid ever got back to Rome.
The Ars
Amatoria was burned in a bonfire of vanities by the fanatical Florentine
monk Savonarola (who later himself got burned), and an English translation of
it was seized by the U.S. Customs in 1930. One wonders what happened to the confiscated
copy, and who got to read it.
Even more taboo in the U.S. was Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, recounting
his sexual adventures and misadventures in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. It was first published in Paris in 1934 with
financial help from Anaïs Nin. When I
went to France on a Fulbright years later, a friend asked me to bring back a
copy, since it was banned in the U.S. but available in France. I did as he requested and in the process stuck
my nose into it and, far from being aroused sexually, roared with
laughter. It was funny, funny, funny, at
times uproariously so. A Supreme Court
ruling in 1964 declared the book “non-obscene,” ending the longtime ban; I hope
the justices enjoyed their reading.
Obviously, the line between erotica and
pornography is hazy at best; one man’s erotica is another man’s porn. But I hold to my opinion that porn is
different in that it is a no-holds-barred effort, not to entertain or enlighten
the reader, but to stimulate him (almost always a “him”) sexually. And does it find its audience! Forbes estimates
that in this country the porn industry grosses from $10 to $14 billion a year. Neither Henry Miller nor Anaïs Nin ever
dreamed of realizing even a tiny fraction of such a sum, nor did Ovid either, I
suspect; if they had, they might have done better financially, but we would be
poorer literarily. So it goes.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Coming soon: A reblog of post #136 on the very
controversial cardinal Spellman (was he or wasn’t he?), the post with the most
views of all in this blog, topping even
Man/Boy Love. Then, as originally
announced, a celebrated bank robber who preyed on the city’s banks for 40
years, escaping from prison three times.
A rather charming, gentlemanly fellow who, even when brandishing a
submachine gun, wouldn’t hurt a flea.
Alas, they don’t make thieves like that any more.
©
2016 Clifford Browder
My books: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.) As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.