The Village Voice

A love affair.

Apr 07, 2024

I always thought men would love me the way I loved them. It’s still a shock that men don’t love me the way I love them. I mean men in general. The individual men I have loved and who have loved me back, there’s no knowing what they really felt, and anyway it was personal and not about the fact I was a woman. If you really love someone and they love you, the thing that happens is that you are a complete mystery to each other in a way that is interesting and funny and also you stop seeing them in the terms we think of as “identity” markers, meaning the thing about male or female, or about another sex identity on the analogue spectrum, the thing about religion, or the country they came from, and the color of their skin isn’t something that determines the way you feel them inside you. The way you feel them inside you is more like they are an alien and you are an alien and you are both in disguise as human beings. This is a liberation.

I’m reading the book about the Village Voice, The Freaks Came Out to Write, an oral history by Tricia Romano, and it’s really great. It’s like reading the Voice again, all the conflicting memories and idiosyncratic points of view about a weekly newspaper that was the counterculture at the same time it was reporting on the social changes it partly produced—on AIDS coverage, on the arts, on wars at home and abroad, on feminism, civil rights, gay rights, and on. At the Voice, during the 1970s and beyond, I saw that even the best male humans, and by best I mean the ones you loved and worked with and flirted with and had sex with, these particular men—with rare exceptions—had only contempt for the thing that was central to your life, which was destroying the safety of male authority. That is, the centrality of thinking that the thoughts of men are important because they are the thoughts of men. I wanted these men to love me, anyway! I wanted them to think, you go, girl, go ahead and destroy our stability, we didn’t really need it, and anyway let’s get back to how much we like the smell of each other’s bodies.

Never mind what I wanted. I can’t get it out of my head. What does it matter what I wanted? The thing I want to tell you is that for twenty-five years I was in love with the Village Voice. This is longer than any relationship I have been in. I felt part of something collective and brilliant that I had not felt before, not even in the women’s movement, and I have not felt since. Everyone at the paper had more cool and swagger than me. In the mid 1970s, when I started writing there, I remember telling myself: Don’t show them who you really are. If you show them who you really are, they will toss you out.

It was like being on a first date for twenty-five years. When I told myself not to show my real colors, I meant: Don’t be needy, don’t let them see you feel hurt and excluded when you feel hurt and excluded, don’t do whatever the fuck you do that’s guaranteed to turn people off. I got along with all the people I worked with, as I remember it, anyway. Also, every organization needs some Clydesdale horses, you know the ones with the big hairy legs, to pull the milk carts in a timely fashion. The Voice was a hive of coffee stained flies buzzing in a windowsill after late nights clubbing. (I assumed.) I do not miss deadlines. I learn from editors who are smarter than me. I can write a piece at any time of the day or night.

It’s 1980, and I’m sick. The phone rings at 4 am. It’s Eliot Fremont-Smith, and he wants to edit my piece. I say, “Sure,” and find the pages. I’m on the couch in the living room because I don’t want to spread flu. Phones in those days have curly, umbilical cords that make you feel attached to people on the other end. Eliot sounds drunk and also happy. I don’t feel put out because, as I said, I’m on my first date. The book I have written about is The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. This book will go on to win the award for best fiction from the National Book Critics Circle, the organization founded by Eliot when he was the daily book critic for The New York Times. I hate the book. He doesn’t care. He cares about improving my sentences, and we work until morning light comes through the windows.

Here are some people I got to work with over the years: Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Karen Durbin, M. Mark, Stacey D’Erasmo, Ross Wetzsteon, Vince Aletti, Erika Munk, Alisa Solomon, Robert Massa, Leslie Savan, Hilton Als, Andy Hsiao, Joe Conason, Paul Berman, Alex Cockburn, Lisa Kennedy, James Wolcott, Sylvia Plachy, Alan Stamaty, James Hamilton, Carrie Rickey, Jim Hoberman, and dozens more.

I remember the smell of fresh ink on stacks of papers at the office. I remember the thrill of lifting a copy from a red box on the street and seeing my work there. That thrill never faded. No one changed a word or a mark of punctuation without consulting you. No one urged you to write like them. In Tricia’s book, we depict ourselves as a Breughel painting of manic devils, roasting each other’s body parts, and it’s kind of true. Also true are late nights with Richard Goldstein, talking about every variant of sex. We decide to claim in a piece I’m writing about Beauty and the Beast that when gorgeous Linda Hamilton hooks up with Ron Pearlman, who has the face and mane of a lion(!), it’s the first depiction on TV of interspecies sex. I remember receiving a book in the mail that contained hundreds of pictures of vaginas. There I am, leaning against the mail cubbies, turning the pages, staggered by the array of female parts. Who knew?

I remember the first time I laid eyes on Alex Cockburn, some time in the mid-‘70s, in the skinny elevator on University Place. He’s carrying a briefcase and wearing a cashmere overcoat. There’s a Peter O’Toole slyness and warmth to his mouth, and I look at the floor. Here’s the way Goldstein described him to Tricia: “He was a certified upper-class British communist. Like a hard-core commie. But he was a wonderful writer. A wonderful guy. He liked to wear tangerine scarves. He was a little bit of a dandy, but British.”

Years later, when I can look at him without seeming to dissolve (although I was dissolving), I sit in his office after we’ve had a few drinks and watch him write a column that’s due in three hours. Out come sentences braiding lyricism, acid, learning, and gossip, as he keeps chatting with me at the same time. I remember Guy Trebay’s expanding collection of snow globes. Some contain autopsy remains dusted with glitter. (Not true.) One day I pass his cubicle with a spiky hair cut and dangly, dart-shaped earrings, and he says, “Laurie Stone, the oldest living punk.”

It’s 1981, and I’m on assignment for Red Book magazine to cover a Right-to-Life convention in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I open my press packet to find a piece by Nat Hentoff, the Voice’s beloved jazz and First Amendment maven, who is also vocally opposed to abortion rights in the Old Testament style of Normal Mailer. Hentoff is dead meat to me and other feminists at the paper, and although he may be the only contented pawn of the Right at the Voice, he’s not the only hand-wringing male at the feminist apocalypse.

It’s 1986, and Cindy Carr writes a front-page profile of Karen Finley, praising performance art involving the naked female body and in particular a performance in which Finley shoved yams up her ass. In the next issue Pete Hamill writes that he and the staff’s other “enraged political writers” wonder how anyone can ever again take Voice reporting seriously. He writes, “Carr has given us a brilliant parody of (1) bohemian pretentiousness (2) the emptiness of performance art (3) a certain strain of feminism (4) the Village Voice itself.” Then as now, I enjoy the wit of Hamill’s barbs while noting how well they illustrate Finley’s contention: that the erotic imagination and anxieties about sex, far from being irrelevant to public policy, actually drive it, most pointedly for millions of people in the cases of AIDS and abortion rights.

I cover theater for the paper among other beats, and in 1986—knowing it takes comedians around seven years to create twenty minutes of crackling standup—I hatch the idea of approaching standup comedy as theater. For the only time in recorded history, Karen Durbin responds to a question with a single word: “Okay.” And for five or so years, my column “Laughing in the Dark” alternates with Cindy’s column “On Edge”—a delirious series of love letters to Downtown culture and the avant-garde. Separately and in tandem we promote brilliantly outrageous women, people of color, and queers.

How did I make my way to the place I most wanted to be at? It’s 1971, and the man I’m married to and I decide to split in the tell-all style of the times that leaves you stunned and vaguely horny for the other person because now you can miss them. Each month I hand a check for $200 to a friendly antiques dealer who owns the brownstone on Charles Street where I find a small place that also comes with water bugs and mice.

I’m working on a dissertation about Charlotte Brontë. I don’t want to write a dissertation about Charlotte Brontë. I’m earning just enough money for food and rent by teaching two courses at Hunter College, and the rest of the time I walk the streets of the Village. I’m in a consciousness-raising group and a women’s writing group, and I read the Voice. I read Howard Smith and Jonas Mekas and Joel Oppenheimer. I read Jill Johnston and I want to write like her. I want whatever captures my attention to become a subject and to layer my observations with personal associations that are so detailed they create a world the reader can sense. I want to write love letters that produce joy.

One night I meet a writer I slightly know at the Lion’s Head Inn. He’s twice my age with a handsome face and a world-weary lean to his body. He wants to have sex with me. I want to know how to get into life. He looks at me for a moment and says, “What do you want?” I can barely choke out the words. I say, “To write.” I have already turned him down for sex, but he’s generous and he says something I never forget. He says, “Get on with it, then. There’s not any time. There’s never any time. Do not think you have time.” I sit up, feeling something in me has turned a few degrees, like a combination lock. The doubt doesn’t go away, but in time I learn to ignore it.

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Prompty People

Something that ought too have remained hidden has come to light.

What's possible in twilight.

When the natural world and a form of shelter intrude on each other and become confused.

"I'm not really that interested in the before or after. I want the story to remain unresolved."--Gregory Crewdson (photo below)

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