Gay Voluntary Associations in New York. Moshe Shokeid
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it to his new friend to drive them around. Together they saw the sights outside New York. But Sam’s happiness was short-lived. A few weeks later he was deep in trouble. His handsome friend had disappeared with the car, and Sam was accountable for its loss. He now discovered that his dream boy had already ripped off others, men and women alike, who were victims of his charms. Sometime later, after the man turned himself in to the police and was awaiting trial for a long list of other felonies, Sam told us his heart was hurting. He wished he could have him released from jail. He had enjoyed so much opening his heart to the young man, who gratified him with affection, calling him “Dad.” His listeners reacted with a mixture of amazement and empathy.
Irving, a sixty-year-old university history professor, a regular, prominent not for his physical bearing but for his sagacity, humor, and sharp analyses of his colleagues’ behavior, seemed less sympathetic to Sam’s plight. In a critical tone he told Sam he should have exerted more self-control against this irrational and destructive attraction. Sam reacted angrily to Irving’s reprimand: “You should allow people to show their feelings and let others listen to them.” Paul defended Sam, referring to the themes of irrationality, chaos, and the incompatibility of reason and emotion in his own musical compositions. For myself, I was ambivalent. I was appalled by Sam’s self-inflicted injury but felt empathy for his predicament. I offered support for Sam, likening his compulsive attraction to a charming heterosexual—and a crook at that—to the aging professor’s pathetic attraction to the handsome young boy in Death in Venice.
From their interaction at the meeting, I assumed Irving and Sam represented two fundamentally contradictory personalities with little to breach their contrasting temperaments. Yet I soon had an opportunity to discover I was wrong. As we walked together after the meeting to the nearby diner we saw a group of transsexuals who had just left the Center. I was surprised to overhear Irving joke with Sam about the miyeskeyts (Yiddish for “uglies”). Cooling off from their heated exchange, they enjoyed a campy conversation that made use of a shared ethnic vocabulary. Sam and Irving, in fact, had a far warmer relationship than I first assumed. At the diner following the meetings, they often entertained the crowd with their campy impersonations of Carmen Miranda and other gay icons.
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