"Dykes and Fags Want Everything"
Ferd Eggan's essay in the forthcoming revised and updated edition of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimiliation entitled "Dykes and Fags Want Everything" is excerpted at The November 3rd Club... (FYI, November 3rd is "an online literary journal seeking to 'up the ante' of literary political writing"...)
Queers didn’t always salivate at the sound of a wedding bell. I know, because I was there. Well, the truth is that I was around the corner from Christopher Street on the nights of the Stonewall Riots, but I was too afraid to join in. Rioting did not daunt me: I’d been beaten before in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. No, I was scared of the brash and noisy queens who reigned in Sheridan Square. Back then, my gay life was hidden underground. Not well-hidden—I had gotten caught only a month before while having sex in a subway bathroom on the Lexington Ave line of the IRT. I worked as a subway messenger boy for a film company that made Twinkies commercials. The kindly young officer let me off with a warning, since I was cute and ingenuous (and white). But I could not muster the self-acceptance to play a part in the very un-hidden urban theater of fierce fairy boys and muscular dykes. Additional terror loomed two blocks away on Cornelia, where leftist friends shared an apartment; if they saw me fraternizing with the fags and the drags, wouldn’t they reject me? Many an evening that summer I visited the lefties, purloined a novel like Nausea out of the bookstore and read on a bench in the Square. I’d walk over from my apartment-hovel on E 6th Street after my day job and my psychedelic gig doing light shows at the Fillmore East. I wasn’t like the street queens; I saw myself as an artist, exploring higher states of consciousness; needless to say, my acid trips lacked a certain panache—I was strapped in tight to avoid blurting out my queer desires.