The site is nycnotkansas.com, and it’s pretty incredible. The author is pictured at left, in the early ’60s. Here are some excerpts, beginning with one particular gay phenomenon that was born in the ’50s:

Almost immediately I learned about something very strange called "camping."  Reg, though the youngest and most recently out, was its most eager practitioner.  Camping as practiced by Reg was a demonstration of stop-time choreography.  First, he raised his eyebrows to his hairline while rolling his eyes heavenward.  Next, he flapped his hands in what looked like an imitation of the pterodactyl taking flight in Prehistoric Women.   Finally, in a rasping kind of mantric invocation (it was the voice Bette Davis, when it wasn’t Tallulah Bankhead, I learned later) he would utter, "Get-you-Ma-ry."   This it turned out was only camping’s essence – something like Om in other contexts, perhaps  – and this style could be applied to almost any put-down to increase it’s humor and sting.

At the YMCA:

I also got picked up in the cafeteria of the dorm I was eating in that fall by Ken, one of the grad student Resident Advisors in that dorm.  He invited me to his room, where we had nervous groping sessions.  (The first time it happened he was sitting in his underwear on the bed with a blanket pulled over his legs up to his waist.   When he took my hand and pulled it under the blanket, putting it on his erection, I was shocked out of my wits.  Not by what he did, but because I hadn’t had a clue in the world that human cocks were ever that huge!  I had encountered my first donkey dong.)

On foreskin:

"Oh, he has curtains," was a cautionary remark I overhead a few times.  I had already learned from the college gay crowd that I could be thankful for being "cut."  Having "curtains" (i.e., foreskin) was less of a drawback than having your nose sprouting from the middle of your forehead, but it was definitely not a plus…

On muscle queens:

In the early Sixties physical fitness was just beginning to creep into the public consciousness, and bodybuilding was still for weirdos only.  Even among gay men  gym memberships weren’t taking a bite out of many wallets yet, and when they did "the gym" was almost always just the Y and a routine of free weights.  The few worked out bodies at Riis Park were like a constellation of beach gods.  And to many gay men who spent their summers going to Riis Park, they were as immediately identifiably fully dressed on the streets of Manhattan as if they had been celebrities.  It was axiomatic though, "They’re only interested in each other."  It was also axiomatic that "they all have small cocks."  (Both statements were based on insufficient research, I later discovered.)

On sip-ins, which is when a group of gay men would storm a homophobic bar, declare themselves to be gay, and order a drink. The bartenders were legally obliged by the anti-gay city board to refuse. The ensuing lawsuits on constitutional grounds would in one fell swoop render gay bars legal:

The Mattachine Sip-in of 1966 [pictured below] probably had a more profound effect on the lives of gay men in NYC than any single event in the late Sixties.  Gay bars were the principal meeting places for gay men — not just for tricking, but for socializing.  Their suppression by the Wagner administration in the first half of the Sixties decade had made meeting people and establishing friendships very difficult for new arrivals on the New York scene — as I had found out.  With the State Liquor Authority retreat after the Sip-in from its policy of prohibiting the serving of homosexuals, and the subsequent finding of the courts that this policy was not constitutional, the legalization of gay bars had occurred.  Running a gay bar was no longer just a lucrative enterprise, it was a legal one.  This did not mean that all the criminal interests disappeared from the field, but it did mean that they were now running in competition with anyone who could raise the cash and meet the licensing requirements. 

But cops would continue to harrass and arrest gay men for congregating in bars until one night in the late ’60s:

Saturday, June 28th I’d just gotten back from vacation and New York seemed broiling hot.  Ken and I decided to go to the Village for dinner that night – probably to the Five Oaks, a small and popular downstairs place that got a mixture of straights and gays.  We came out of the IRT station at Sheridan Square somewhere between nine and ten p.m.  On the other side of Seventh Avenue, just a ways down Christopher Street, we saw a crowd that was big enough to be spilling off the sidewalk and into the street.  At first we were going to go over to check it out, but then realized that we were almost late for our reservations already and would probably end up standing in line if we took the time, so we went on.  When we left we’d forgotten about the crowd, and we walked further west, anyway, rather than back to the square.  Nothing seemed unusual for a Saturday night.  What we had seen, of course, was the beginning of the second night of the Stonewall riots.

Gay culture has gone from underground to sub to mainstream, and it is interesting that it takes a 70-year-old to remind us that even though we may be a little oppressed, it’s okay, because at least we’re still gay.

It is probably a measure of my own NYC brand of provincialism that as the Nineties wound to a close I was surprised at just how deeply the anti-gay hate of the Eighties had intimidated younger gay people.   By the beginning of the millennium many gay opinion-makers (most, it seemed)  – columnists, celebrities, academics, politicians and organizations – had experienced a dramatic sea change, and gay rights, though still wrapped in a tissue of liberal rhetoric, had become a desperately conservative, hetero-normative package.  Though the term "queer" had been reclaimed, politically many homosexuals were anything but that, rather they were ardently conformist, promoting themselves as we’re-almost-het-like-you to the American public.  Gay rights was about adopting traditional heterosexual values and patterns.  Sadly, the articulation of these goals on gay computer sites and Internet forums also reveals a surprising amount of internalized homophobia as part of the motivation.  There was a time when gay personals adverts that used the tag "straight-acting" were criticized; now it is the tag for merchandising gay rights to the general public. 

A whole lot more is here.
 

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