The Front Runner

pimp.
    There was something about the harshness of hustling that reminded me I was surviving, that the straights would not crush me. There was something of raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the way I said, "Eight inches." It was, in a way, my first gesture of gay pride.
    One of the reasons I stayed off the street was that it was more dangerous than ever now, and I wasn't looking to go to jail. On June 28, 1969, just after I arrived in the city, the New York City police started their now-famous crackdown on the gay bars. The first to be blitzed was the Stonewall. During the next twelve months, they raided and closed the Zoo, the Zodiac and about twenty others, mostly on Barrow Street. It was the watershed in gay history, and—in a way—it was my watershed too.
    The night the Stonewall was busted, I was in the neighborhood on business. Someone called my client and told him what was happening, and we got out of bed and ran over there to see, because we hadn't been able to believe our ears.
    The street was full of cops and flashing red lights. But what was more amazing, the street was full of hundreds of gays, and they were fighting the cops. For years "they had run, let themselves be shoved to the wall, submitted to harassments and arrest, because they felt in their hearts that it was their fate. But the night of the Stonewall, they made the instant visceral decision that they had had enough. They were throwing rocks and bottles, your "powderpuff pansies" were. They were fighting New York's Finest with their bare hands. They were daring the nightsticks to crunch on their bodies.
    I watched with growing anger and sorrow. I didn't drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could understand how precious they were to us. I had always believed in law and order, supported the police. But those cops were busting me, busting my entire lifetime of anguish. They were riding over me with their big horses, and shoving me into vans handcuffed.
    Then an amazing thing happened. I had a rock in my hand, and I threw it with all the deadly accuracy of a Marine throwing a grenade. Me, Harlan Brown, the pride of the Marines, I threw a rock at the cops. I punched a cop. I completely forgot that I might wind up in jail. I found myself against a wall, being beaten by two big cops. Then I was on the ground in the crush, being kicked and stomped. Somebody rode a horse over me.
    Somehow, in the confusion, I managed to get away, bleeding and battered, with three cracked ribs and a broken nose and a few hoofprints on me.
    Something cracked in my head that night, and in the heads of the gays. That night saw the coming out of the militant gay. After that they were fighting everybody in" sight, demanding human rights and fairer laws. I was not exactly ready for radical activism. But it had dawned on me that I was now a citizen of a nation where straight Americans did not permit the flag to fly.
    So I stuck to my hustling. It might be felt that if I'd really wanted to spare myself the degradation, I could have. Surely I could have found honest work. Or I
    could have done what some upright men do: starve first.
    The answer was that I didn't see it as degradation. Venal, perhaps. But I was earning my living like everybody else. The Protestant work ethic never shone forth in my life so clearly. Hustling, I could earn far more money than I had at Penn State. My ex-wife never failed to get the biweekly check. I even paid my income taxes down to the last cent. Most prostitutes don't, but I wasn't looking for trouble with the IRS. My earnings were on record through my ex-wife, and I was still patriotic enough to think it was my duty to pay.
    In fact, in my pain and anger, I was wallowing in my gayness a little, trying to get to the very bottom of it. There was the period when I liked parading around in macho paraphernalia. But sometimes I'd get a glimpse of myself in a mirror, in that black leather harness with gold studs and chains on it, and a cock-ring on, and that long whip in my hand, flailing hell out of some quivering delighted score, and something inside me would cry out: "This isn't me. I'm really a peaceful man." And I'd long for the simple eroticism of the jock strap.
    One of the gay celebrities I met through Steve Goodnight was filmmaker Gil Harkness. His name isn't a household word to most Americans, but to the gays he is an Ingmar Bergman or a John Ford. He made one of the first gay art