New York's The Gaiety Goes Down
By Jack Mauro

I saw it online, on a website devoted to nastiness. The two sentences stood out in majestic relief from the listings of subway stops and hotel bathrooms still good for action in the city. The Gaiety Theatre, longstanding home of gay strip and hustle, is boarded up. An obituary for a legend, slipped in with the trash. Transit system hooking-up, then transit gloria mundi.

I’ve documented my past there and won’t do it again, I promise. I’m not even crying. What I am, though, is civically pissed off. Crusaders and preservationists who dedicate their lives to ensuring that the birthplaces of mediocre writers, and the latterday palaces of founders of industry as famous for establishing indifference-as-sadism in the workplace as for mass-producing the nylon stocking, give me a headache. I don’t want to join their indiscriminate ranks. Yet something in me hollers. A fist clenches. Where is the outcry for the Gaiety? Where are the powerful old ladies to protest, to demand that a measure of history be roped off in velvet, and given fresh paint and a brass plaque?

Probably marching around the brownstone of some relatively ineffectual feminist of the 1930’s.

As I won’t revisit my own Gaiety history, so too do I refrain from tossing out statistics and dates pertinent to the life of that institution. It’s enough to know that the Gaiety was around forever. It’s enough to know that, for decades, it was the grand old man of the gay scene in New York. Seedy, sometimes scary, but there, for the kid just off the bus and for the exec just out of the meeting. It outlived hundreds of bars, thousands of bathrooms, and all of the bathhouses. And, if longevity should count for anything when decisions are made as to what should be honored, it should impact most when the site in question is of the most precarious kind. That is, the here today, gone tomorrow real estate of thrills and sex.

Nor have I investigated what is to sit on its former pavement. It can’t be much of anything not already there, and there in spades. Another city-within-a-city, sterile and frighteningly capacious, hotel? A new theater for lousy revivals starring what twenty years ago were stars, underneath its own parking deck? Has the Mouse grown too large for its perverse conquering of 42nd Street, and has Disney chosen to annex 46th and Broadway as Goofy’s Little Corner? Or maybe Virgin Records wants the land as well as the horizon, to better blind the eyes of the throng.

It doesn’t matter. Because, even if the new whatever is of value – a sucker’s bet, to be sure – the crime remains. For the time-honored interests of pretense and societal denial, some square yards of Times Square are being disinfected. Nothing was there. Millions of men never stole thirty minutes before getting the train to Connecticut. No boy from Iowa ever left the Port Authority and got corrupted on and off any stage in that spot, fell into drugs and died, or made a lot of money and went back home. There was never anything like love, like the stupid and brief and false love that flickered for half an hour and saved the sanities of countless men who could never tell anyone anything.

But who, literally, cares? A net search reveals what you’d expect: a blog pays tribute to its thirty year history, another column wistfully echoes the sentiments. The names of Madonna and Andy Warhol are mentioned, as having been visitors to what undeniably was a New York institution. Former Gaiety strippers – alive and well – refer to it as a beloved alma mater. All of the articles relate the thief-in-the-night manner in which the closing occurred. No outcries, no hoopla.

No surprise. I imagine that many a gay coalition supported the shutdown of the Gaiety, if it was given any attention at all. The theatre was, after all, a product of repression, a retro glam house of a gayness distasteful to a modern gay sensibility. So too is it reasonable to conclude that nary a straight suit has issues with the demolition. At last, an embarrassment is razed. The busloads from Canada won’t have to pass by any more, uneasy and wondering, hands over the eyes of the Canadian kiddies. Commemorate the site? Are you kidding?

I’m not kidding. To determine landmark suitability by virtue of what mom can drive by without flinching is preposterous. The worst thing that we do to the past is morally edit it by the standards we find appropriate today. It is an arrogance on a scary scale. We eliminate what was, when what was was of questionable moral status. We erase it completely, regardless of its impact, and in the erasure we eviscerate history. And a disemboweled history is no history at all. It’s a lie, there is no point whatsoever in setting it down, and we lose the incalculable gift of being able to look back and see everything.

© Jack Mauro, All Rights Reserved. Article provided by GayLinkContent.com.