Fight, fight, fight, fight. A few thoughts on my role in Parting Glances, its actors and filmmakers, the health crisis that spawned it, and the permanently uncertain future of gay men and women.
Gorgeous. gorgeous. gorgeous. All of it. The way you so honestly describe your internal process when you're considering whether to risk being typecast as gay, without making excuses, and the way you didn't know what it would be like to later succeed in acting. The way you keep reminding us not to judge the milieu of this story by our 2024 standards (and I needed that). The way you cringe at your teenage self's probable lack of appropriate gratitude when you saw the director for the final time (and oh, I felt that).
I don't know how exactly you evoked it, but I saw and smelled and heard New York from visits made in my teenage years in the early 90s, when it was so much more colorful, and sharp, with lots of black shadows for contrast, and without all the sanitized, slick, glassy white surfaces of today. The grime and energy of it. How you reminded us Gen Xers what changes we pushed for. How things are materially better for folx now, though of course we still have a long ways to go. So good.
I really loved this piece. I lived in NYC during the early 1980s. The mythology of that period does not exactly map onto my lived experience. I wish that more people who were there would temper the narrative with some actual biographical accounts. Still, it is awesome to live long enough to see the past you lived through mythologized.
Thanks, Lynn. Yes, the whole thing is peculiar. It's the equivalent to mythologizing the 1930's for me. When I was young even the 1950s seemed like the distant past. In the 1940s the world was in black and white. I certainly didn't want to live anywhere else. You could barely get me out of town for the weekend because I'd feel like I was going to miss something. What exactly is hard to put my finger on. The energy is certainly addictive. I have that to this day -- although the city proper is too intense for me now. Brooklyn is just right. I like a nice balance between crime and shop owners that recognize you. (The 1980s were so crime-ridden the subways so filfthy, the homeless so mentally ill -- this is more my lived experience.) And yet.... when I think of the music that came out of the time, it strikes me now. There was a huge exhibit at the Museum of New York about the 1980s, and there was a Village Voice under glass opened to the local concerts page of who was coming to town. Unbelievable the artists in a single random week. What part of town were you in?
NYC in the 1980s was both addictive and intense for me. I forgot that anything existed outside of the city. I arranged to sublet an apartment from Sophie Hawkes (daughter of the author John Hawkes) on the Upper East Side without seeing it. As an English major and would-be author, this was huge. But the apartment turned out to be dark, somewhat macabre, and home to several hundred cockroaches. My Midwestern sensibilities could not handle it. So I found a place in the Village for a few months, then moved to an NYU law dorm room in the summer that overlooked Washington Square. Whenever I went out, I was prepared for anything to happen and just walking around was dangerous.
Late one afternoon, I went with one of the street artists who hung his paintings on the rails of Washington Square to see the copper ceiling in his apartment on Avenue B. We lost track of time and the sun went down. He said that we had to keep the lights turned off, not look out the windows, and not leave until morning. This was not an elaborate pick-up plan (even sex was dangerous). Shortly after, I heard people talking and banging around outside. He said that people were fencing stolen goods.
All of the artists and writers that I hung out with in NYC did not make it big. There were many things created at that time (and likely this is still the case) that did not match the mood or trend of the time. Or should I say that they were not picked up by the those with the power to make them the dominant mode of expression? This is the story that I think should be told or at least acknowledged.
Ooof! Such a good piece, Adam. This all came alive for me, like I was on the street watching you get offered the part, seeing a young Steve Buscemi’s star born.
And such a well-woven reminder of what gains have been made, what it was like back then, what has not yet been gained, and how much stands to be lost.
Thanks, Holly. This whole time in my life, the accidental acting career, all of it -- is fraught for me. It was really, really tough, and I did not see it coming. I've been writing this Actor series just to get my head around what happened back there. My life would have been very different at a number of junctures (like not having met the producer on the street.) I would probably have been writing for years (I'm thinking journalism not Great American Novels.) I was studying Russian. Really everything went a wild, unexpected direction. These essays, I think, are for me to face and bury it all. There were certainly positives (as this piece gets at,) but mostly a brutal psychic rollercoaster, not one I thought I was getting on at the time.
God, those decision points, right? How they can send us off in completely different directions, create whole new worlds we’d have never been a part of. I can relate. I’ve been reflecting lately on where I would have been if not for certain turns, what difficult periods I might not have passed through, where I might find myself now. I like this idea of writing to face and let go. May the process be infused with grace. And May it help that we readers get to enjoy pieces like this as a result
This pulled me back to visiting family in NYC as a kid in early 90s. The thunder of the Q train under my grandma’s apartment in Brooklyn and not being allowed to sit on any toilet seats (“you’ll catch AIDS”). Great piece. Want to go watch Parting Glances now..
Jill, I've been assuming for some reason that you were English. I need to go back and look for spellings like "colour" and see if I can get to the root of it. The early 90s were not such a hot time. I'd returned from LA for graduate school then, acting was shot, and, my God, every time I got back to my home and locked the door behind me there was a sigh of relief. Toilet seats were the least of my problems. And Brooklyn, then, was where you ended up if you fell asleep on, well, the Q train. Now it is my home (not Williamsburg where you had your NY adventure, but just south.) Not that you've inquired, but "F" train. Thanks for your note.
Ah I remember those persistent feelings of unease on the streets, emanating from my mom mostly (she’s born and raised Sheepshead Bay). I’m half NY half Dublin. Grew up the first twelve years upstate, then Dublin for the teens. My spellings are alllll over the shop...
So good, Adam. The 1980s were such a time for coming of age and all the rest. Here’s a fun coincidence -- I know Rita Kempley! I was in a yearlong writing workshop with her in 2016-2017. Isn’t that nuts? She’s a trip. I still remember the story she was working on.
Julie! I looked for a side channel text thing on the zoom call the other day to say hello properly, but there wasn't one that I could find. It was great to see -- and hear -- so many people that I only type away with. Strange that you know Rita Kempley. I do not know her except through that review, but if you see her, say hello, and pass my thanks along for the kind review. 😀
PS - from Rita Kempley: I'm so glad Adam was happy with the review, but it was his work that deserves the praise which I wouldn't have given if it weren't deserved.
I did! I will! Thanks to you, I now have a coffee date with her. I think Google Meet does have a chat but I was actually sort of glad that people weren’t using it. I usually join in on those but it was sweet to focus on everyone’s stories.
I find with writers I like that they let me live in the skin of other people, even if it’s only for a couple of paragraphs. This text had me both feeling anxious as a straight 18 yo boy who doesn’t want to be thought gay and also thinking how desperately an 18 yo gay boy would also not want to be thought gay.
That part where you write that you were insisting that your contract said you were “not going to do anything”; that part where you then write “I know, I know, I know” was heart breaking. So thank you for letting me feel like this today.
It's clear in hindsight that Reagan could have done more to help AIDS sufferers, but that's how hindsight works. Maybe he was as callous as you say. You might be right. But I wanted to add some additional data for the record.
The Advocate's largest point, something of a straw man, is that Reagan wasn't "a ferociously antigay zealot who believed that AIDS was a punishment brought down by God upon the gay community." I would argue that the AIDS crisis would have been better served by a ferociously antigay zealot who gave more than .006% of the federal budget in 1983 to support what was already known as the "gay plague." You can't redecorate the Lincoln Bedroom and refurbish the White House china for less than $44m.
I don't think Reagan was a cruel man, but his very binary moral approach to the world lent itself to "this is your problem, not 'our' problem" thinking. I bet you don't find it hard to see Reagan's moral cast of mind as supporting that point-of-view. We don't have his internal monologues, but we have a great deal else.
One of the most basic things is that we have the simple history of people that were there. I was there. The clamoring for the White House to say something went on for a long time. This isn't a revisionist complaint. The White House was AWOL. The screaming wasn't made up. There were strident calls to simply acknowledge it was happening. And by not acknowledging it he made the situation worse. Sometimes what you don't say is as devestating as what you do say.
And the AWOL leadership extended to the press room. I find the link below perfectly representative of the position. Flippant, contemptuous, nothing-to-do-with. This attitude comes from the top. Period. Full stop. If it didn't, then he should have been fired -- either because he was oblivious to a national health crisis or because he was the guy on the transcript.
About that 1985 press conference. Shit had already broken wide open. 1985 was a big no hiding under a Rock Hudson year. Elton John's support for Ryan White was sympathetically in the national conversation. And -- most 100% critically -- the disease was no longer perceived to be a completely gay issue. You had little Ryan.
There was political cover now because famous people dropped (his close friend, Rock Hudson) and the public was nervous. It is possible to show up so late that you don't make the all star team. The bottom line is that the disease was cast, conveniently and out of the gate, in moral terms politically. If the disease had spread, I'll be blunt, via the vagina and not the rectum, I'm fairly certain we would have seen more than $300m by the end of 1985. There's no pretty way to paint it. No credit to dole out here.
This does not exclusively break down on party lines, but I wouldn't take the odds on a congressman in the Republican party rejecting funding for AIDS research particularly with Reagan's lead. I'd note also that the only way Clinton got through significant funding later on was by including a fairly repulsive provision on the AIDS package in the early 90s that there would be criminal prosecution for gay men trying to spread the disease. That was the air cover for the Republicans. No, it's all gross.
I think AIDS didn't fit into the world view of a man who needed things to be very tidy and simple. This framework served Reagan very, very well, and served the nation very well in a number of ways, but it did not serve mitigating the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. And, undoubtedly, and understandably he was politically frightened. It would have taken deep leadership to stand boldly here. But, even very quietly, he could have moved to clean up challenges with the blood supply.
And, again, I remember the cries to have AIDS recognized for the crisis it was. This was not an incidental issue. There was helpless panic underneath it. When I weigh up Reagan's response and the men in the streets, I don't think there's a lot of question marks left over.
So on this issue, I do think Reagan should have been ashamed.
Gorgeous. gorgeous. gorgeous. All of it. The way you so honestly describe your internal process when you're considering whether to risk being typecast as gay, without making excuses, and the way you didn't know what it would be like to later succeed in acting. The way you keep reminding us not to judge the milieu of this story by our 2024 standards (and I needed that). The way you cringe at your teenage self's probable lack of appropriate gratitude when you saw the director for the final time (and oh, I felt that).
I don't know how exactly you evoked it, but I saw and smelled and heard New York from visits made in my teenage years in the early 90s, when it was so much more colorful, and sharp, with lots of black shadows for contrast, and without all the sanitized, slick, glassy white surfaces of today. The grime and energy of it. How you reminded us Gen Xers what changes we pushed for. How things are materially better for folx now, though of course we still have a long ways to go. So good.
Thank you, Rebecca.
Wonderful writing! You should write a book.
Thank you, Greg. When I get five people with advance commitments to purchase it, then I'm all in. 😀
🙋🏻♀️
I really loved this piece. I lived in NYC during the early 1980s. The mythology of that period does not exactly map onto my lived experience. I wish that more people who were there would temper the narrative with some actual biographical accounts. Still, it is awesome to live long enough to see the past you lived through mythologized.
Thanks, Lynn. Yes, the whole thing is peculiar. It's the equivalent to mythologizing the 1930's for me. When I was young even the 1950s seemed like the distant past. In the 1940s the world was in black and white. I certainly didn't want to live anywhere else. You could barely get me out of town for the weekend because I'd feel like I was going to miss something. What exactly is hard to put my finger on. The energy is certainly addictive. I have that to this day -- although the city proper is too intense for me now. Brooklyn is just right. I like a nice balance between crime and shop owners that recognize you. (The 1980s were so crime-ridden the subways so filfthy, the homeless so mentally ill -- this is more my lived experience.) And yet.... when I think of the music that came out of the time, it strikes me now. There was a huge exhibit at the Museum of New York about the 1980s, and there was a Village Voice under glass opened to the local concerts page of who was coming to town. Unbelievable the artists in a single random week. What part of town were you in?
NYC in the 1980s was both addictive and intense for me. I forgot that anything existed outside of the city. I arranged to sublet an apartment from Sophie Hawkes (daughter of the author John Hawkes) on the Upper East Side without seeing it. As an English major and would-be author, this was huge. But the apartment turned out to be dark, somewhat macabre, and home to several hundred cockroaches. My Midwestern sensibilities could not handle it. So I found a place in the Village for a few months, then moved to an NYU law dorm room in the summer that overlooked Washington Square. Whenever I went out, I was prepared for anything to happen and just walking around was dangerous.
Late one afternoon, I went with one of the street artists who hung his paintings on the rails of Washington Square to see the copper ceiling in his apartment on Avenue B. We lost track of time and the sun went down. He said that we had to keep the lights turned off, not look out the windows, and not leave until morning. This was not an elaborate pick-up plan (even sex was dangerous). Shortly after, I heard people talking and banging around outside. He said that people were fencing stolen goods.
All of the artists and writers that I hung out with in NYC did not make it big. There were many things created at that time (and likely this is still the case) that did not match the mood or trend of the time. Or should I say that they were not picked up by the those with the power to make them the dominant mode of expression? This is the story that I think should be told or at least acknowledged.
Ooof! Such a good piece, Adam. This all came alive for me, like I was on the street watching you get offered the part, seeing a young Steve Buscemi’s star born.
And such a well-woven reminder of what gains have been made, what it was like back then, what has not yet been gained, and how much stands to be lost.
Thanks, Holly. This whole time in my life, the accidental acting career, all of it -- is fraught for me. It was really, really tough, and I did not see it coming. I've been writing this Actor series just to get my head around what happened back there. My life would have been very different at a number of junctures (like not having met the producer on the street.) I would probably have been writing for years (I'm thinking journalism not Great American Novels.) I was studying Russian. Really everything went a wild, unexpected direction. These essays, I think, are for me to face and bury it all. There were certainly positives (as this piece gets at,) but mostly a brutal psychic rollercoaster, not one I thought I was getting on at the time.
God, those decision points, right? How they can send us off in completely different directions, create whole new worlds we’d have never been a part of. I can relate. I’ve been reflecting lately on where I would have been if not for certain turns, what difficult periods I might not have passed through, where I might find myself now. I like this idea of writing to face and let go. May the process be infused with grace. And May it help that we readers get to enjoy pieces like this as a result
This pulled me back to visiting family in NYC as a kid in early 90s. The thunder of the Q train under my grandma’s apartment in Brooklyn and not being allowed to sit on any toilet seats (“you’ll catch AIDS”). Great piece. Want to go watch Parting Glances now..
Jill, I've been assuming for some reason that you were English. I need to go back and look for spellings like "colour" and see if I can get to the root of it. The early 90s were not such a hot time. I'd returned from LA for graduate school then, acting was shot, and, my God, every time I got back to my home and locked the door behind me there was a sigh of relief. Toilet seats were the least of my problems. And Brooklyn, then, was where you ended up if you fell asleep on, well, the Q train. Now it is my home (not Williamsburg where you had your NY adventure, but just south.) Not that you've inquired, but "F" train. Thanks for your note.
Ah I remember those persistent feelings of unease on the streets, emanating from my mom mostly (she’s born and raised Sheepshead Bay). I’m half NY half Dublin. Grew up the first twelve years upstate, then Dublin for the teens. My spellings are alllll over the shop...
So good, Adam. The 1980s were such a time for coming of age and all the rest. Here’s a fun coincidence -- I know Rita Kempley! I was in a yearlong writing workshop with her in 2016-2017. Isn’t that nuts? She’s a trip. I still remember the story she was working on.
Julie! I looked for a side channel text thing on the zoom call the other day to say hello properly, but there wasn't one that I could find. It was great to see -- and hear -- so many people that I only type away with. Strange that you know Rita Kempley. I do not know her except through that review, but if you see her, say hello, and pass my thanks along for the kind review. 😀
PS - from Rita Kempley: I'm so glad Adam was happy with the review, but it was his work that deserves the praise which I wouldn't have given if it weren't deserved.
I did! I will! Thanks to you, I now have a coffee date with her. I think Google Meet does have a chat but I was actually sort of glad that people weren’t using it. I usually join in on those but it was sweet to focus on everyone’s stories.
I find with writers I like that they let me live in the skin of other people, even if it’s only for a couple of paragraphs. This text had me both feeling anxious as a straight 18 yo boy who doesn’t want to be thought gay and also thinking how desperately an 18 yo gay boy would also not want to be thought gay.
That part where you write that you were insisting that your contract said you were “not going to do anything”; that part where you then write “I know, I know, I know” was heart breaking. So thank you for letting me feel like this today.
Great piece, Adam.
Pretty harsh on Reagan though! Here's an opinion piece from The Advocate which weighs the president's record a little more sparingly. https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/06/05/op-ed-gay-truth-about-ronald-reagan
Also helpful, I think, is this article from the NYT about the Sept, 1985 press conference in which Reagan addressed the AIDS crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends-financing-for-aids.html
Also useful, a study about Federal AIDS funding in the years between 1981 and 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs745/
FY 1983: $44m
FY 1984: $103m
FY 1985: $205m
FY 1986: $508m
FY 1987: $922m
FY 1988: $1,615m
FY 1989: $2,322m
It's clear in hindsight that Reagan could have done more to help AIDS sufferers, but that's how hindsight works. Maybe he was as callous as you say. You might be right. But I wanted to add some additional data for the record.
The Advocate's largest point, something of a straw man, is that Reagan wasn't "a ferociously antigay zealot who believed that AIDS was a punishment brought down by God upon the gay community." I would argue that the AIDS crisis would have been better served by a ferociously antigay zealot who gave more than .006% of the federal budget in 1983 to support what was already known as the "gay plague." You can't redecorate the Lincoln Bedroom and refurbish the White House china for less than $44m.
I don't think Reagan was a cruel man, but his very binary moral approach to the world lent itself to "this is your problem, not 'our' problem" thinking. I bet you don't find it hard to see Reagan's moral cast of mind as supporting that point-of-view. We don't have his internal monologues, but we have a great deal else.
One of the most basic things is that we have the simple history of people that were there. I was there. The clamoring for the White House to say something went on for a long time. This isn't a revisionist complaint. The White House was AWOL. The screaming wasn't made up. There were strident calls to simply acknowledge it was happening. And by not acknowledging it he made the situation worse. Sometimes what you don't say is as devestating as what you do say.
And the AWOL leadership extended to the press room. I find the link below perfectly representative of the position. Flippant, contemptuous, nothing-to-do-with. This attitude comes from the top. Period. Full stop. If it didn't, then he should have been fired -- either because he was oblivious to a national health crisis or because he was the guy on the transcript.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
About that 1985 press conference. Shit had already broken wide open. 1985 was a big no hiding under a Rock Hudson year. Elton John's support for Ryan White was sympathetically in the national conversation. And -- most 100% critically -- the disease was no longer perceived to be a completely gay issue. You had little Ryan.
There was political cover now because famous people dropped (his close friend, Rock Hudson) and the public was nervous. It is possible to show up so late that you don't make the all star team. The bottom line is that the disease was cast, conveniently and out of the gate, in moral terms politically. If the disease had spread, I'll be blunt, via the vagina and not the rectum, I'm fairly certain we would have seen more than $300m by the end of 1985. There's no pretty way to paint it. No credit to dole out here.
This does not exclusively break down on party lines, but I wouldn't take the odds on a congressman in the Republican party rejecting funding for AIDS research particularly with Reagan's lead. I'd note also that the only way Clinton got through significant funding later on was by including a fairly repulsive provision on the AIDS package in the early 90s that there would be criminal prosecution for gay men trying to spread the disease. That was the air cover for the Republicans. No, it's all gross.
I think AIDS didn't fit into the world view of a man who needed things to be very tidy and simple. This framework served Reagan very, very well, and served the nation very well in a number of ways, but it did not serve mitigating the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. And, undoubtedly, and understandably he was politically frightened. It would have taken deep leadership to stand boldly here. But, even very quietly, he could have moved to clean up challenges with the blood supply.
And, again, I remember the cries to have AIDS recognized for the crisis it was. This was not an incidental issue. There was helpless panic underneath it. When I weigh up Reagan's response and the men in the streets, I don't think there's a lot of question marks left over.
So on this issue, I do think Reagan should have been ashamed.
Thanks, Adam. I see your point.
Thanks, Lynn. Backstage is still around online surprisingly.
You have an amazing profile pic btw, and you are now the only newsletter baroness that I (sort of) know. 😂