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From NEW YORK: This is sure to ruffle some feathers.
| “There’s not any cruising in here at all!” my friend Alphonse complains, looking around. He’s right. The predominantly queer crowd of ACT UP members stuffed into Revolution Books on Avenue B in New York’s East Village is rigid, alert, and crisp with conversation and debate. The group’s usual Monday-night meeting at Cooper Union was moved at the last minute to this makeshift location, via last-minute flyers and ACT UP’s “phone tree.” The cramped quarters heighten the intensity. |
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“Che Guevara was the racist!” screams Kathleen Greaves, 23, towering in dreadlocks and John Fluevogs, on her turn at the mic. She yells the word “Guevara” with an excruciatingly correct accent and a straight face.
“Oh, she thinks she’s a diva! Thinks, darling! Thinks!” Alphonse whispers in my ear. I’ve brought my friend Alphonse to show him firsthand what he’s been telling me for years is “wrong with the fags in New York City these days,” as he puts it. We’re witnessing the New Gay Seriousness. Alphonse is a veteran of the decadent heyday of Gay New York circa the late 1960s and 70s... even earlier. He was born in 1932, before many of ACT UP’s members’ parents were even alive, and lived in downtown New York City when the first gay bars in Greenwich Village were mere speakeasies run by the Mafia. He’s now 62 “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” Alphonse adds, rolling his eyes.
The meeting’s agenda had started with a debate on how to tactfully disrupt the Stonewall 25th-Anniversary March in downtown NYC, coinciding with the official Gay Games bombarding the city this week, but has temporarily veered off course into a heated discussion concerning Che Guevara’s supposedly secret homophobic and racist past. The initial group that brought up the subject of Guevara’s homophobia—and whether queers should be wearing his image with pride on the buttons of their leather jackets—is now being labeled racist by other members of ACT UP, particularly members of color.
Gregory Wolens, a 25-year-old gay activist by night who works for the New York City Coalition for the Homeless by day, is this evening’s hapless meeting facilitator. “Tonight’s gonna boil over,” he says, sitting next to Alphonse and me, in between scolding people for speaking out of turn. According to Wolens, discussions about anything at ACT UP (and often Queer Nation) meetings often derail into this type of unresolvable, high-minded argument. “My job is to make sure they don’t break out into fistfights,” he says, half-joking.
Wolens and Greaves speak to Alphonse and me after the meeting. When I ask them about the subject of “political correctness,” Greaves proudly tells me she’s a founding member of the Pink Panthers, an often-armed, Guardian Angels-style group who patrol areas of New York where assaults on gays and lesbians are commonly reported, to offer support and a queer show of force. Her t-shirt—a bright pink paw print—reads “Bash Back.”
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