THE VARIETY PHOTOPLAYS

Recently we received a most interesting letter from Mr. William Dugan of Salem, Oregon. In the leter he talks about the now defunct Variety Photoplays movie house on Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. He writes that it ...was a haven for older gay and bisexual men. Perhaps the only one that ever was.

Needles to say, the gay community historically has detested the older man. Fat men, older men and ugly men are pariahs, still, in the gay community. I use the word loosely, as I am still not convinced that common sexual expression only, constitutes community.

As it happens, when I lived on Christopher Street in the sixties and seventies, and yes, I lived a block or so from the Stonewall, I was quite young. In my twenties. For reasons I still struggle to being to light, I obeyed a strong impluse to go far afield from Christopher Street over to the East Side to cruise. I went to the Variety. Morning, afternoon, and evening. Even though I lived above Ty's bar, just upstairs from heaven, I used to think of it, I felt an aversion to the young, conventionally attractive gay men. In retrospect, it sems it was this and only this that saved me from contracting the AIDS virus.

I was perhaps the youngest dirty old man among the Variety Photoplays regulars. Which place, although the clientele consisted to a large degree of disenfranchised older gay men, also had a large population of bixexual macho street types, winos, the occasional trucker, cops and hustlers. Interestingly, the hustlers were not there to hustle for money. And the cops stopped in for a bit to watch a movie and maybe get a quick blow job in the T room. They all came to play. The Variety was, in my experience, a dark, dirty and very friendly place.

I particularly remember a young, beautiful black man who frequented the Variety. He had a well developed work out body and an extremely handsome face. If you were young and attractive and reached out to touch his beautifuy hard body, he bristled and walked away or threatened violence. But if you were eighty, even ninety years old, he opened his arms and embraced you. Kissed you tenderly, passionately. All that he had was yours as you were his. He made out like a bandit. I thought of him as the fierce, dark and bright angel of the wizened.

I have done a series of drawings of the goings on at Variety Photoplays movie theater. Built in 1912 by Thomas Edison as the first movie house in the country if not the world., it has been for so long a part of the Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street landscape that the Variety had become nearly invisible. I remember the fist time I actually read the original marquee which says Variety Photoplays. Notice it did not say movies, or films but photoplays. What the hell were photoplays? Moving picture plays?

About five years ago the Variety was remodeled and made into a ligitimate theater. Nevertheless, it is the time before that which interests me and should interest all gay men everywhere. It will always shine in my memory as the finest achievement civilization has ever produced as a place for gay outcast sex. The Variety was so low one did not mention it in polite company. The Everard Baths were innocent and titilating by comparison. The Variety was so low that to half describe what went on there is impossibe without bordering on the pornographic. The obscene. Now it seems like fantacy stuff.

The drawings purposely are not beautiful and do not depict young beautiful things. The usual gay ideal is so plastic, so trivial, so trite, I can find no other way to convey the vanished beauty of the time I spent at the Variety and the profound humanity of its denizens. But then, I dare say, vanished beauty is a recurring theme of gay history.

Whereas so much of the population of places like The Mine Shaft was decimated, devastated by AIDS, I still see some of the people, the younger ones, now in their fifties, who frequented the Variety. Which was dirtier?

So, The Variety Photoplays. Nothing like it will ever appear again. One of the swan songs of the industrial age. Whether one likes it or not, The Variety is a chapter of gay history. Lose it, scorn it, whitewash it or even to say that it exists in memory only as an embarrassment and you will have lost one of the valuable indicators of the necessary ingredients for true community. An honorable place of the elders. Those who had the grace, the wisdom to survive the loose cannons of existence...

We concur with Mr. Dugan. And apologize for being so tardy in answering his letter. Perhaps this will make up for our neglect.

We apprecite letters from the community. We want to know what is going on out there and what you think about the Leslie-Lohman Gallery in general. We want to know if you are being served and how better to represent you. Please write and let us know. We also invite you to submit articles, scholerly, historical, or otherwise, pertinent to our purview. We want to make this publication a real journal of the lesbian and gay arts. Thanks.