AKA William

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Because the old school gay is fast becoming the new modern man, AKA William theater contributor Ben Rimalower will, every Thursday, document exactly how, when, and where everything old becomes new again.

Straddling the line between old school showbiz cheesiness and contemporary short attention span whateverness, Ben is the New Old Gay. He loves Patti LuPone.

Saturday night I went to see “wild-hearted demoness bad-girl bitch” performance artist Penny Arcade workshop her new show, Old Queen, at the Dixon Place Hot Festival.

Old Queen is an ode to the gay intelligentsia of New York and the national underground scene that brought Penny up as an artist and thinker in the 1960s. I had never seen Penny before and didn’t quite know what
to expect. She’s oddly reminiscent of Roseanne Barr – if Roseanne had played a beat poet in an Andy Warhol film.

Actually, Penny was in the Morrissey/Warhol Women In Revolt, among many experiences which helped not only form the foundation of that era’s counterculture, but indeed build the bedrock for much of our pop culture today. (So it’s not really fair to compare her to Roseanne since Penny came first.)

My favorite part of the performance was a series of monologues narrating her journey from small-town teenage runaway to Alphabet City druggie chick to Raconteur Revolutionary. Penny is, to say the very least, a colorful character, and her engaging salt-of-the-earth manner and spontaneous spit-fire spunk drew me deep into the digressions that make up her story. It’s hard to believe I saw a one-woman-show and not a widescreen epic, so transported was I to the exciting yesteryear Penny wistfully described, a civilization gone with the wind.

As Penny pointed out, one major wind that blew that world away was AIDS. Thunder crashing. Lights flashing. Factory whistle. Wicked witch cackle. That’s what you would I hear if this were my over-the-top version of a show like Old Queen (“New Old Queen?”). AIDS has always felt far more melodrama than reality to me.

I can count on my hands all the HIV positive people with whom I’ve ever been more than passing acquaintances, at least insofar as they’ve shared that information with me.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the generation of gay men before me, almost entirely wiped out by AIDS. I am old enough to remember that time, not as one who lost scores of loved ones, but that time in
general, when AIDS and gay seemed almost synonymous. The first time I remember being aware that there were gay people in the world was when Rock Hudson’s diagnosis was made public.

If AIDS and gay were synonyms, I learned AIDS first, and long before I was sexually active or even sexually conscious, I understood about safe sex. It used to bother me the way people would say, “There’s nothing wrong with being gay. As long as you’re safe,” as if protecting one’s own body from infectious disease were a question of morals. Or something.