Richard and I used to say we’d have to write the book about Gay Community News before anyone else did it and got it all wrong. But it was clear to me even then that Richard would never write a book. He barely read books, preferring to lug around a week’s worth of the New York Timeshis knapsack until he’d finished every word in every edition, except, naturally, the sports—and a couple of times I caught him glancing at that too. Which just proved it was the comfort of habit and not the content of the Times—he genially agreed it was right−wing twaddle—that kept him at it.
Actually, it’s hard to imagine how Richard and I thought we could write a book together when we disagreed so much. We debated for years, literally from dawn to dusk, as we worked together at the GCN office, went out afterward for dinner to the whole−wheat pizza place on Charles Street−where you could bring your own jug of red wine and where I more than once pretended I didn’t see a little gray mouse leap across the floor and disappear behind the baseboard−and called each other on the phone as soon as we got home.
It’s a curious thing about Richard: in any particular group, he’s always perceived as the voice of the establishment. This has nothing to do with what he says. Maybe it’s his height−six foot five. Or his booming voice. Some people are surprised when he tells them he sings bass, like they expect all gay men to be countertenors. Richard used to sing in the choir at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, and every year we’d have a major argument about his Christmas concert, which he insisted I attend even though he knew I was fed up with Christmas, probably because of my experience in elementary school, where it dominated the entire curriculum from September through New Year’s Day. The rabbi would tell us little Jews, "Don’t you sing those Christmas carols!" while my mother’s philosophy was, "You’re a child, you like to sing, enjoy yourself." My solution was to sing everything except the references to you−know−who: "Joy to the world/hmm−hmm has come." The minister at Richard’s Christmas concert was a wonderful old fag who could pronounce the word Mary with three or even, if he got particularly carried away, four syllables during the scripture reading, and afterward we were all invited to his lovely home for some holiday cheer. He would greet Richard and me with particular warmth−"Merry Christmas to you and your tribe"−even though at one party, overstimulated by the concert, the eggnog, the obnoxious blinking lights, and the cold but jolly pedestrians and their packages jamming Harvard Square, I had such a loud dispute with Richard about that morning’s staff meeting that the other guests fled the living room. Richard freshened our drinks, and we settled into the armchairs in front of the roaring fireplace, which we had gotten all to ourselves.
"Your homosexuality saved you," I used to tell him. I meant from becoming the corporate lawyer his parents wanted him to be, from settling down in the suburbs, from voting Republican, from drinking martinis, from a stifling oppressive middle−class existence. In those days Richard adored Christmas and weddings and graduations and birthday parties, any sort of elaborate social ritual where you got together with your family and smiled until your cheeks got twitchy and your jaw clenched−he absolutely refused to understand why a person might not want to go. He’s changed about this, and so have I; these days I’m the one who’s always running off to the Seder or my parents’ anniversary party, convinced they’ll love my homosexual self this time, while Richard tactfully makes his excuses.
I met Richard Burns in the fall of 1978, when I called the Gay Community News office to inquire about the features editor job they were advertising. Richard picked up the phone, and we immediately got into a fight. Explaining the $70−per−week salary, Richard said, "It’s hard to get used to being poor."
"No one gets used to being poor!" I corrected him.
He laughed, "I guess not, doll," and signed me up for an interview. He loved calling everyone doll, which he’d picked up from La Principessa Gregg Howe and Harry (Clara) Seng, the ad manager and managing editor, respectively, when Richard had first started working at the paper. They were Fort Hill Faggots for Freedom, living with about twenty other gay men in several frighteningly dilapidated houses in Roxbury, unappreciated by the African American neighbors they had so wanted to cultivate, who were already unhappy enough about the white Rasta commune that had moved in down the street. The faggots ran in and out of each other’s houses, half−naked or wearing dresses. They were notorious, actually, for wearing dresses, because of an incident in which they had put on their dresses and invaded Sporters, a seedy gay bar on Beacon Hill with boarded up windows and no sign−I never understood how anyone knew it was called Sporters. The Faggots and the GCN crowd and a number of hustlers and old men liked to hang out there, and the Faggots decided to protest what they believed was the bar’s insufficient welcome to women. And even though the serious political point of this attentat−as Emma Goldman, whose autobiography I was reading, would have called it−this zap, was no doubt obscure to the regulars, it must have worked, because later, when I was taken there, gathered up by a bunch of volunteers after GCN layout one Thursday night, everyone was perfectly charming to me, waving away the bills I pulled from my pocket to pay for my beer, and inviting me to dance.
Richard had moved to Boston right after graduating from his snooty men’s college, where he had been the only gay man for miles and miles−imagine him in all his unmistakable height shining like a beacon as he walks across the campus. He’d gone directly to GCN, where the men said "doll," and "my dear," and shamelessly waved their arms around, and had wild sex with each other without a thought of pretending that they were too drunk to know what they were doing. I picked it all up from Richard−the mannerisms, not so much the wild sex−once I started working at the paper, and he and I became friends.
First, though, I had to be interviewed. By the time I arrived, the GCN interview process had changed. No longer did the entire collective of staff, volunteers, board members, and hangers−on gather to interrogate potential editors about their views on drag; feminism; semicolons; the intersection of race, gender, and the American system of social and economic class; the nuclear family; whether they’d come out yet to mom; intergenerational sex; and the GCN advertising policy, which strictly forbade publishing ads that exploited the human body to sell things, although what constituted exploitation was a matter of perpetual debate. Why couldn’t a gay bar depict a humpy sailor, for example, when the customers’ hopes of meeting such a person were exactly the point? On the other hand, the odds of their actually encountering a sailor were not good. I was interviewed by a committee, a step away from pure democracy that some condemned as elitist but that was less likely to scare away the few applicants willing to attempt subsistence on a GCN salary.
As it turned out, that GCN hiring committee was not simply interviewing me for a job. It was nothing less than the mystical hiring committee for the rest of my life. Richard and Harry were on it. And Roberta Stone, although she and I wouldn’t get together for another ten years. (To be honest, I don’t exactly remember Roberta on the hiring committee, but she insisted again this morning over breakfast that she absolutely was, so I am putting her in.) And Eric Rofes, the outgoing features editor, who as such tried to be a sort of mentor to me−although when I took his advice and headlined the review of a book about male nudes in art, "Cheesecake through the Ages," it infuriated the reviewer, an art history professor who said it was trivializing and anyway should have been beefcake, a usage I had to admit I’d never heard before, thus totally embarrassing myself. Sometimes in the middle of the night I still wonder: What if they’d rejected me at that crucial moment? Where would I be now?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I was awestruck by my first experience of the GCN office. From the street you climbed up a steep flight of stairs and entered through the open door on your left, and there you were, right in the middle of it. It was like any newspaper office, in a way−toppling piles of back issues, magazines, papers, notepads, and strange hardcover books that no one would ever review much less read; banks of dented file cabinets; telephones ringing, typewriters chattering and dinging, staffers muttering and grumbling; a refrigerator full of half−eaten sandwiches and cans of Coke. But then there were the bullet holes in the front windows. And behind the long light tables of the art department in the back of the room, separated from the GCN office by a partition, the office of FagRag, an anarchist collective vaguely contiguous with the Fort Hill Faggots. At unpredictable intervals they would publish a journal that had somehow come to the attention of William Loeb, the infamously conservative publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader, who had termed it "the most loathsome publication in the English language"−a motto the FagRaggers gleefully pasted all over their masthead. The year they unfurled a gay pride banner that read, in black letters on pink taffeta, "PORNOGRAPHY, PROSTITUTION, PROMISCUITY, PEDERASTY!" their slogan so dismayed a large contingent in the GCN membership that a vote to terminate their sublease had nearly succeeded−although it’s not clear how this rule would have been enforced, since the FagRaggers had already vigorously demonstrated their scorn for legal documents such as subleases. During his speech at the 1977 gay pride march, FagRagger Charlie Shively had incinerated not only Leviticus 20:13 ("If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them"), which is the only thing most people remember, but also a stack of other symbolic documents−his Harvard PhD, his insurance policies, a dollar bill, and the Massachusetts Criminal Code, Chapter 272, section 35 ("Unnatural and Lascivious Acts"). As he touched match to paper, audience members began shouting: "Burn it! Burn it!" and "No, no, not the bible!" I’m sure the incident headlines right−wing fundraising letters to this day−"Homosexuals are Burning the Holy Book!"
What really got to me, though, were the newspapers on the walls. The cover of every issue GCN had ever published was displayed in rows starting at the ceiling and extending around the entire perimeter of the room. Who knows whose idea it had originally been? It probably just happened, the sudden inspiration of a volunteer with a staple gun in one hand and the week’s issue in the other. The cumulative effect was impressive. Once I started working at the paper, I would feel newly inspired each morning when I glanced around the office and saw all that that we had accomplished over the years. That is, when I didn’t feel completely disheartened. Photos and drawings were expensive, and budget aside, it was just hard to come up with a striking, relevant cover week after week. Covers were the sites of some of our worst mistakes: ugly, trivial, obnoxious. At staff meetings we regularly had terrible arguments about the cover, except when the art director succeeded in keeping it under wraps until Thursday night layout, when it was too late to change it. I doubt GCN ever published a cover that anyone was completely satisfied with, although sometimes you claimed to be, depending on the position you’d taken in the week’s debate. And there they all were, staring you in the face.
Maybe it was the cover display that gave rise to the practice of sticking anything whatever on the walls. Everyone who entered the office eventually participated in the unintentional, collective creation of the collage of clippings, doodles, quotes, snapshots, to−do lists, postcards, cartoons, typeset articles for the next issue, hate mail, love letters, long−lost telephone numbers, political leaflets, placards from demonstrations, plus photos from magazines gay and straight of buff guys in various postures, all without shirts, and an Elaine−Noble−for−State−Representative Styrofoam boater hat with a red, white, and blue band. Things were constantly being added, and no one ever bothered to take anything down, so that at eye−level, below the orderly rows of covers, was a chaos of layers upon layers of an ever−evolving Artwork of the People.
The trick question at my interview was about the picture on the latest FagRag cover. Just, you know, did I like it? The FagRaggers had submitted it as the illustration for an exchange ad they were placing in GCN and must have been at that very moment reveling in the predictable uproar among their landlords about whether the image was beautiful, vulgar, exploitative, oppressive to women, or a proud expression of gay male sexuality. I had some trouble making it out at first−and no, it was not my lesbian lack of familiarity, thank you. It’s some sort of figure/ground perceptual problem: I can’t see the bat in the Batman logo either. Eventually I made out a pen−and−ink drawing of a large, flaccid penis surrounded by a lot of confusing hair and excited brush strokes. Simultaneously I realized that the committee members ranged before me represented the various positions in the debate about it, and although I knew nothing about FagRag or their lease or the staff’s weekly acrimonious debates about covers and ads, I sensed that anything I said to satisfy one faction would alienate the rest.
"It wouldn’t sell me a magazine," I offered brightly.
This answer was apparently equivocal enough to appease most of the committee, and by the time I left we were all feeling so pleased with one another that when I got back to my apartment my phone was already ringing. It was Richard offering me the job.
"I have to think about it," I said, mostly because I had the idea that it was professional to make a show of playing hard to get, so I should not immediately jump at any job offer that came my way. "Can I call you back tomorrow morning?"
"What for?" said Richard. "Just say yes now. You know you want to." And as in so many things from that day to this he was right.
At first I’d felt ambivalent about becoming friends with him, not being sure what, as a lesbian, I thought, or should think, about men; nor about the unwelcome power I imagined myself suddenly to have acquired as an editor of the national gay newspaper of record. But he persisted in inviting me to dinner. Finally I accepted, but showed up two hours late, probably the only time in my punctual life I’ve done such a thing, because I’d gotten a last−minute urge to work alongside the Friday Folders, the GCN proletariat, so to speak−the volunteers who stuffed the newspapers into plain brown envelopes every week, because if we’d mailed the paper to people’s homes with the word gay on the cover in all its glory, we would have had even fewer subscribers. Once we received a series of phone calls from a furious reader−all of our readers called us, we knew practically every one of them personally−during which he shrieked that he was going to have to sell his house and move to parts unknown, because his flap had come unstuck. He was sure his neighbors or at least his mailman had peeked in and learned his secret.
The volunteers were called the Friday Folders because the original GCN mailing routine had involved first folding the papers in half and then stuffing them into six−by−nine envelopes, until some circulation manager had the brilliant idea of ordering nine−bytwelves, thereby eliminating the folding step, although not its alliterative allure. The most improbable combinations of people would turn up, dyke separatists and A−list gay politicos, all looking for something useful to do on a slow weekend, or for a new friend and some free pizza and beer.
Richard loved inviting people to dinner. It was too bad he couldn’t cook. That eventually became my job. We’d run out to the particularly nasty A&P near his house−the produce was prehistoric−where he’d insist on scrutinizing the ingredients and assessing the price per pound of every box before allowing me to put it in the cart, like suddenly he was Betty Crocker. Dinner had to be a dish that didn’t require a lot of spices or pots, because he didn’t keep many supplies on hand beyond what I’d bought the last time, except the ingredients for Chicken Divan, his one specialty− chicken breasts, broccoli, a can of mushroom soup and a can of celery soup, grated cheese. It was out of this world; I don’t know why he never makes it anymore.
But he must truly have wanted to impress me that first night, because he cooked not Chicken Divan but steak−Italian style, with a little Ragu tomato sauce on top. Luckily, I’m not a vegetarian, not even a fowl vegetarian, as Eric once characterized himself. Richard, who’s never been on time for anything in his life, didn’t seem to notice my lateness, but poured me a glass of red wine, and we sat down at the table and spent the rest of the evening yelling and interrupting each other and waving our arms around, Richard refilling my glass, until nearly midnight. The last train from the South End, where he lived, to my neighborhood in Cambridge would leave at any minute. Richard leapt up when I did, and we threw on our coats and breathlessly sprinted the two blocks to the old Dover Street station, Richard chanting "Go, Aim, go!" when I faltered−he had the advantage in leg length−and practically pushing me up the two flights of stairs to the elevated tracks. He somehow gave me a quick hug and simultaneously a final shove through the door of the last car. Laughing and gasping for breath I slid down the long slippery bench as the doors closed and the train pulled out of the station, and I dimly saw Richard waving at me−goodbye, goodbye−through the scratched window.
Once that first dinner broke the ice, Richard and I became constant companions−work, dinner, movies, meetings, brunch. Sunday mornings he would sing in the choir and then run off from church to check out the action in the Harvard Science Center tearoom, pick up a Times in the Square, and show up at my house, ready for coffee and bagels. And when I had dinner at his apartment, rather than worry about catching the train, I often slept over on the couch in his living room. It was dark red leather, the kind of thing that must have come from his father’s study, and long enough for me, or Richard’s father, or even Richard to stretch out on. The pillows were soft and deep and should have given me a terrible backache, but I’d sink into them and pull Richard’s sleeping bag over my head. (It was the same notorious sleeping bag from which, a few years later, both Urvashi Vaid and I caught crabs, even though she and I had broken up at that point. We’d slept at Richard’s on successive nights, and he’d claimed he was cured and the sleeping bag was nit−free. I was so horrified to find such things infesting my person−and to have to point them out to the kindly lesbian doctor at the gay health clinic−that I not only washed myself and my hair many times over with the special carcinogenic soap she prescribed but also laundered all my clothing and every piece of fabric in my apartment including the curtains.) In those days I lived alone, and I wouldn’t have changed that−I’d proven too many times my terrible judgment when it came to choosing roommates whose dogs ran away whenever you cracked open the front door, or thought you could concoct a tasty dinner by combining all the leftovers in the refrigerator into one big casserole, or left it to me to haul out all the recycling week after week because they knew I wished to live lightly upon the earth. But it lifted my habitual insomnia to know Richard was out there somewhere, puttering around his darkened rooms.
In the mornings I would invent errands to do on the way to the office so we wouldn’t arrive together, because who knows what everyone would have made of that, and I didn’t want to provide encouragement for the rumors of conspiracy that accrued around practically anything. The truth is, arguing aside, from the moment I was hired, Richard and I were always seen, correctly after all, as a bloc. The mystical committee, with unerring karmic instinct, had found me my niche.
I’d understood it from the first time I walked through the door: GCN was the center of the universe. Or at least, it felt like the center of the universe. If anything, though, it was merely the center of the gay universe, a mote so obscure that it was visible from the planet of the straight people only as an occasional, annoying twinkle. Still, the Village Voice−an establishment paper, compared to us− once magnanimously referred to GCN as "the gay movement’s newspaper of record"−although in what context I can’t imagine. I never actually saw the article but only heard it quoted by Richard at every possible opportunity, implying as it did that we were in the same category as the New York Times.
For example, there was the time he and I went to Provincetown for the weekend. Richard said we could crash with his Aunt Suzanne, who lived several towns down−Cape, so we took our bicycles on the ferry from Boston, which arrived in Province−town at around noon. Overruling my nagging anxieties about the length of the bike ride ahead of us and the traffic on Route 6, Richard insisted that we spend a great afternoon cruising around Commercial Street, dropping in at the Boatslip Tea Dance, and then, after I thought we’d finally gotten started on the trip to Aunt Suzanne’s, making a detour in Truro to Head of the Meadow Beach to look at the ocean. By the time we arrived at the back roads of Orleans, the sun had been down for hours, and we couldn’t see each other or the road in front of us. You forget how dark it gets in the country. To help me keep track of him, Richard called back to me over and over the text of the paper’s subscription form, so that like the crumbs scattered on the ground by lost children, his words marked an ephemeral trail: "Founded in 1973 . . . lesbians and gay men . . . fifty−two weeks, $15 . . . no−peek envelope . . . newspaper of record!"
And it’s true that when all the illegal phone extensions in the office started ringing at once, or you glanced up and noticed the bullet holes in the front windows, you certainly felt at the center of something. The phone extensions were illegal because in those monopolistic days, having each one hooked up by the telephone company would have cost extra. So we paid for two phone lines, one for the advertising manager, so advertisers would never be discouraged by a busy signal, and the other for the rest of us. David Peterson, member of the original GCN collective, MIT graduate, and phone freak, came down to the office with a shopping bag full of handsets, adapters, and cables, and installed the extensions. David collected jars, rope, screws, beach hats, broken but possibly fixable typewriters, a majestic antique brass cash register, chairs and tables with missing legs, filing cabinets (the four−drawer in the GCN office labeled homo−file was his donation, as was the pun) mattresses, bridesmaid’s dresses, and shopping bags, handsets, adapters, and cables. He owned a Victorian building of oddly laid out little apartments in Cambridge, and he later became my landlord, so I became familiar with his basement and front hallway collections. I imagined that his stuff would accumulate until it reached my apartment on the top floor, when I’d have to move out.
Each of us had two or three phones on her desk−princesses, wall units, basic black dial instruments. The phones rang constantly, and when they didn’t, anyone who wanted to make me laugh could grab all of his at once, hold them to his ears and yell, "Buy! Sell!" like a Hollywood tycoon, or pick one up and bark, "City desk!" like Lou Grant on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary was a kind of touchstone. At staff meetings, you could successfully resolve an argument by citing her: "They had a problem just like this on Mary once, and this is what she did. . . ."
I worried about what would happen when a phone broke, or we decided we needed an additional legal line. David would have to dismantle the whole system before we could call in a repairman. David himself probably wouldn’t have minded, since he was as interested in repairmen as all the other gay men in our office: repairmen are always humpy, they explained to me. UPS delivery−men, in their brown uniforms, even more so. They also claimed that in certain professions the practitioners were more often gay than not−they weren’t talking about obvious ones like hair−dresser or airline steward but about the more than statistically likely number of men they claimed to have encountered in the bushes and tearooms who were anesthesiologists, Episcopal priests, and timpanists.
As for the bullet holes, some people, like Neil Miller, don’t believe in them. He told me he never saw them, that they were another wild rumor, or at most caused by a more benign mishap− small rocks, perhaps? Of course, he hadn’t been managing editor for a couple of years by the time I showed up in October 1978, so maybe the holes weren’t there in his day. I remember them clearly, although thanks to Neil, I also wonder if I made them up.
Let’s say the bullet holes were real, yet symbolic. After they appeared, most of the staff resignedly pushed their desks into the back of the office except Jim Marko, the news editor, whose role as office contrarian and sex symbol somehow demanded that he rearrange his squarely in front, with his Beckett quote tacked up on the wall beside him: "I can’t go on. I’ll go on." Although the shooting had been perpetrated against a dark, empty space in the middle of the night−luckily no one had decided to work late or sneak back in after hours with a trick−the bullet holes reminded us every day that some people hated us. Really hated us.
My life hadn’t prepared me for that. I was a nice girl, a good girl, a bat−mitzvah girl from the New Jersey suburbs−not the high−class suburbs, just an okay−enough place with houses and backyards and sidewalks and a miserable school system. In French class, after we finished Le Petit Prince, Mlle. Gradstein−my accent has never sounded like anything but New Jersey−assigned us a story about a priest or some sort of religious person who adopts a blind girl and decides, since she has no choice but to trust his account of the world around them, not to tell her about the existence of evil. She grows up, falls in love, finds out the true nature of things, and drowns herself. I wasn’t about to drown myself, but in the mid−1970s, when everybody in the women’s movement began talking about rape, incest, and battering, it all seemed so terrible and essentially incroyable, unbelievable, I knew how she felt. And then I landed at the paper, with its bullet holes, break−ins, Krazyglue in the door lock, bomb threats. Still, vandalism was the least of it−scary, but in the end, the office was just stuff.
At GCN, people got seriously hurt. Some died. My friends and comrades, people I loved, or didn’t, but I knew them, were gay−bashed, murdered, committed suicide. Then: AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.
You can view the epidemic as discontinuous, for which nothing that came before could have prepared us−and you would not be wrong. But you can also view it as an escalation, the logical next step. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that almost immediately, we knew what to do: Yell and scream. Care for our sick. Bury our dead. No one else would do it. Across the way, in the big, straight universe, they mostly seemed unaware that anything unusual was going on, although some had seen the epidemic on TV. No one would come near us. Even the police were afraid to arrest us unless they were practically wearing HAZMAT suits, or at least protective gloves. We’d become MAZMAT, or maybe had always been.
GCN’s typesetter, David Stryker, was the first to go. The first I knew.
Stryker was in his sixties? Fifties? By the time I got to the paper no one knew much about who he was or where he’d come from. To me, he was a troublesome old geezer with an appalling reddish toupée, coke−bottle−thick aviator glasses, twin adolescent sons, and a nasty interest in boys not much older than the twins.
Naturally, Stryker himself had a different perspective. In GCN’s July 1978 fifth−anniversary issue, he wrote about how proud he was of his accomplishments at the paper. For its first few issues, the collective members had typed everything onto stencils and cranked it all out on a mimeograph machine, a messy and exhausting process that took days and left them covered in ink. Then Stryker, who had worked on newspapers all his life, came around, and persuaded them that it would be easier to send the paper out to be offset−although I can just hear the grumbling about how this contravened the collective principle, wherein everyone shared all tasks and no one’s labor was exploited, not even that of the kids working the counter at Gnomon Copy in Harvard Square. Stryker says he went out and bought an IBM Composer−a big black contraption that looked like an oversized electric typewriter and printed the articles on roles of shiny paper, giving a somewhat sharper impression than a regular typewriter−which he set up in his living room. Ever seeking better quality, though, Stryker immediately began lobbying for a move to a bigger press, and upgraded his own equipment from the composer to a fancy phototypesetting machine. With GCN as his main client he started a quixotic, doomed business−Xanadu Graphics. The day GCN came out printed on newsprint like a real newspaper, with justified margins and proportional spacing, was a proud one for Stryker.
He wasn’t an easy man to work with. We’d hand him the week’s manuscripts, and he’d hold them up an inch from his face and out to the side, squinting furiously. He had cataracts; it figures that GCN employed a blind typesetter. Blind and opinionated−he refused to set our articles as written. He admits in his anniversary article that one of the reasons he had wanted the paper to move beyond the "typewriter−and−mimeograph phase" was that being the typesetter would give him "full rein to fix up the spelling and grammar and syntax, because once the copy was set in type, it was difficult to make changes. Sneaky, huh?" The staff naturally saw Stryker’s mangling of what he gleefully called our "deathless prose" rather differently. Some weeks we got around him by persuading one of his twins or Xanadu Graphics’ ever−changing assistants to set our copy on the sly, but they began to enjoy changing it too, and like their employer started calling us on the phone to berate us about typos and ideological stupidities. On Thursday nights Stryker would show up in the middle of layout to deliver the last of the galleys and collect his check, which it eventually became my responsibility to write. He said the problem was his commitment and excessive generosity. For what we paid and the lateness of our payments, any other typesetter would refuse to work for us. But, I thought during these tirades, here he was every week, also refusing. Apart from his tirades he was a man of few words, and those few he mumbled. His mouth was peculiarly formed; like a dolphin’s, it went up at the corners and made him look like he was always smiling, so I’d smile back. But he wasn’t.
Eventually we decided it would be easier to typeset the paper ourselves. The father of Tom Huth, of the Thursday−night layout crew, died, leaving Tom a small legacy, some of which he used to buy GCN a typesetting machine. So we fired Stryker, but after that, every typesetter we hired behaved exactly like him, as though he had cursed us. In fact, having the typesetters in−house was an even worse situation, because as fellow staff members, they could call emergency meetings, stamp their feet, cry, and accuse the editors of undermining all that was good and beautiful and just, forever and ever.
Richard would moan, "Why can’t the art department be replaced by a computer?" which actually was a pretty visionary thing to say, in the days before Quark software, when we laid out the paper by hand, slicing up the long rolls of copy with exacto knives and fixing it down on the boards with sticky wax. To correct typos, our proofreading volunteer, Gordon Gottlieb−who showed up reliably every Wednesday afternoon for years, in jacket and Windsor−knotted tie, right from his office−cut out individual letters from the previous week’s leftover copy, impaling the tiny a’s and b’s on exacto−knife point and assembling them crookedly into words. Richard loved men in ties and would always greet Gordon with an enveloping hug, which Gordon tolerated. He had a neat beard and an exquisite, deadpan sense of humor. Once, watching Gordon squirm in Richard’s embrace, I said, with lesbian contentiousness, "What are ties for, anyway? They have no purpose."
"They’re because we can’t wear our penises outside of our clothes," said Gordon. Much of the time, his painstaking corrections fell off the boards before they got to the printer.
By 1983, when Stryker went into the hospital, there was no one left on the staff who knew him. No one from GCN visited him, and his death was a rumor. It was said to have been AIDS. It was said to have been swift−as AIDS deaths were at first, beautiful gay boys shriveling up before the eyes of their baffled doctors, who in Stryker’s case were deceived, perhaps by his age, into thinking his crisis was something they understood.
