Thanksgiving at Studio 54
You might think that of all the holidays throughout the year, Halloween would be the most exciting, most packed, most insane and over-the-top at Studio 54, but it wasn’t. Halloween was good fun, and full moon nights were crazy, sometimes dangerously so, but the most energy, the biggest celebrations, the busiest and funnest night at Studio was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. I came to believe that this was because the people who were dancing – and Thursday was gay night, after all – were celebrating having got that god-awful dinner with mom and dad and sister and brother (all them straight, or pretending to be so) TF over with, and now, let us shake off the bullshit and dance, dance, dance.
I felt that way too, elated, celebratory, shaking my twenty-something ass off in the coat room tucked away under the DJ booth, yet still on the dance floor. I worked that open, shout in my ear to be heard space all alone, which suited me to the ground. They filled me up first, opening the club between nine and ten p.m.; by ten thirty I was essentially done, free to watch, listen, and move, another willing slave to the rhythm.
I hadn’t gone home, gone upstate to the big dinner with three different types of stuffing for picky eaters of all kinds. I had stayed in the city, alone again, which also suited me. When I went home, it was a reminder of who I wasn’t anymore, a girl who never quite fit the rural setting and tight-lipped, look the other way mold of my childhood, as well as who I was becoming – a foul-mouthed New Yorker, a city girl who asked my mother to ‘pass the fucking sweet potatoes’. Occasionally too, early on, I chose the disorientating experience of sitting amidst another family, this time in New York City; their particular food choices and dysfunction were like visiting a foreign land, yet without the excuse of not knowing the language. Less charming, just as isolating.
1983 or ’84? Maybe ’85? Not ’82 for sure. There were whispers of what was to come, the ‘gay cancer’ that was killing young men and old in San Francisco, and elsewhere. I read the gray lady daily, and remember seeing the early headlines. Gay cancer? Young men? As a student I had the ability to pick the choicest bits and pieces of what mattered out of our texts, and the lectures given by teachers whose passion, if not burned out, quenched, squashed, or distracted by the messiness of their personal lives and choices, was at least softened, like a flaccid penis, used up for now; let’s try again later.
Then there were those instructors who were distracted in another way, thoughts of history and literature impinged upon by what must’ve seemed like a natural desire to fuck teenaged female students, especially the girls who played sports for real, finally, thanks to Title IX. ‘Hot pants’ were in that year, and that decade; the school board reluctantly provided crotch wedging short shorts as one-half part of new uniforms for all four sports the girls played. What’s a man to do, watching that?
How had I ever walked those marble New Deal halls, so happy-seeming, so involved, such a good student, if just a little too assertive, one might even say mouthy, for a girl? How had I ever sat at that dining table, silent but attuned to the undercurrents, the undertow: my sister starving herself or binging before another session with the porcelain god, my mother hating my grandfather with every cell in her body, doing the right thing hosting the old people even if it killed her, always a fucking martyr, my grandmother deaf and for a good reason, my dad enjoying it as if it were sport. Hell, at least no one was getting back-handed, slapped around, or punched by the old man, like when he was a kid in that same space. That, I think, was his point of view; it’s an improvement, right? Why would I go home to that, given the choice? Let me dance, let me move in the dark, let me be overtaken by music.
They were my people, those dancers, those party boys doing poppers in tight jeans and leatherette pants that made them sweat buckets. They too were lost and disjointed, didn’t fit in, weren’t what ‘mom and dad’ back in Rye, Stamford, Jersey or Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and all over Manhattan expected, wanted, demanded, required. They were there after enduring dinner with the folks and siblings and the roof might have been lifted off the place, the relief, the joy, the release was that palpable, that much of an outdrawn breath – volcanic in scope. We all screamed in relief, screamed. We were young and dumb and had no idea what was coming down the pike, even if those gay cancer stories persisted, even if my friends from college had odd rashes and strange health diagnoses monthly, daily, and, ultimately, by the hour.
They were my people and they were not, because they were soon, too soon, dying, and I was a woman, and straight, and not sweating every moment over who, what, when and how long, viral loads and T cells. T cells, which the AIDs pandemic led to be ‘discovered’, impacting many other illnesses. Still, I was among them, a witness, yet I wasn’t ‘of them’, just like those dinners in foreign families, people being nice by including me but – ultimately, no thanks, not that tribe, either. And I had enough on my plate, escaping and surviving the one I was born into, unable to not see what was going on, and be struck by it in all families, still the middle child, wanting everyone to get along or at least own it, own your jealousy, mom, own your illness, big sis, let’s fix it, isn’t that a good thing, opening my mouthy mouth? Better to stay away. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes on (and there are almost always Emperors, oftentimes several, in families) is not a happy undertaking.
We’re there, still, dancing in the dark under the lights, the machine-made fog hiding us from view, if anyone was looking, the bass notes lifting us off our feet, rumbling our bones, Sylvester or Madonna or whoever had the latest hit dance tune on the cat walk above our heads. The tips those nights of gratitude were off the charts, another sign of the relief and joy felt by the boys, the men, the women, too (not many), who came out after the football and turkey had been consumed to the extent found endurable. I can feel it in my marrow, that music, that joy, that deep releasing breath of familial social obligations met, let me be free, let my people come.
