Memories of New York summers as a lesbian teen.
I was 16. The air was thick with humidity and pollution, in the way only New York in August can pull off. The dead fish fought back on the streets of Chinatown, omitting a foul stench that seeped into every molecule of air, choking the sky. The city moved slightly out of focus in a haze, a little slower, a little wearier. Gone was the excitement that the beginning of the summer brought, and took with it the novelty of late days and warming sunlight. The sand at Coney Island was far too dirty at this point in the year to maintain the level of enjoyment from the start of a fresh beach season. People were more ornery. The train cars stunk like a medley of unwashed homeless person and wet dog.
There was electricity in the air, though, on Friday nights as I made my way west down Christopher Street to the piers on the Westside Highway. Hundreds of tough kids, largely black and Hispanic, had fought their way out of stifling high-rise project apartments with no air conditioners, no support, waiting on subway platforms with no circulating air to speak of, no air to breathe at all, down to the space where the buildings parted.
Down on the pier the sky opened up and you could really inhale. You could watch the entire sun, large and pulsating with the city’s energy and the ferocity of its own hot energy, as it dipped below the horizon, offering some relief to the long, hot day.
Down on the pier I felt free. Queers gathered there to get fresh air, to just be. We gathered there to be safe together. We gathered there to cruise. We gathered there to fuck. The cars zipping by on the Westside Highway separated us from the rest of Manhattan. We were segregated by choice and somehow protected. We came in droves and knew there was safety in numbers.
As the sun bade its farewell the rats became moving shadows and no longer the multi-dimensional animals they were by daylight on the decrepit wooden slates of the pier’s old boardwalk. The pier stretched all up and down the Westside of Manhattan, the now abandoned financial district to the south and elevated versions of us, the well to do queers in Chelsea to the north.
Once we had breathed in enough slightly cooler air (which couldn’t have been too clean given that we were wedged between the dirtiest river in the area and a highway) we regained our adolescent composure and prepared for the evening to come. The breeze from the river washed over our sweat-stained faces, lowering our core temperatures to reveal a hidden layer of energy. We were young. We were queer. We were in our element.
Drag queens rolled by on skates, swaying in rhythm to the hip-hop and rap that blared from the boom boxes folks brought and perched along the cement ledges next to the river. Fags danced along the pier, the hornier ones slinking off down to the ends of the decaying docks to receive blowjobs.
I usually joined a group of about ten women in their late teens, early twenties, mostly from the poorer neighborhoods around the city. Someone always handed me a bottle of something—a 40 of malt liquor, a fifth of whiskey, a thermos with rum and coke. Joints and blunts were passed around and coke and whip-its were shared and consumed. I was young and white and somewhat femme and therefore became an object of focus for cruising. Cruising was when a couple of dykes, usually butch women, walked slowly up and down the path on the pier, scoping out the femmes to see who they might swoop in on and pick up for nighttime follies. There was no wining and dining involved in this approach. Heck, there was no bed! A cute butch might pick me up and share her flask with me. We’d smoke and joke and she’d pick at my shirt and tug at my skirt and flirt with me. I’d bat my eyes and pretend I was hard to get and then let her lead me to a darker corner to lift my skirt and find my pleasure spot.
Thankfully none of these stories ended in lost property (less the one chick who stole $10 from me), arrest, or a shame-filled trip to the STD clinic. What I, along with my peers, didn’t survive was Mayor Giuliani’s reign. Friday nights of total queer abandon turned into fear-filled evenings where police raids would chase us away and worse, arrest some of us who were caught engaging in those less savory activities. It was part of the mafia mayor’s attempts to “clean up” the city, and we were considered trash.
Soon after, construction vehicles rolled in and blocked off the piers and pathways entirely. They kicked us out and paved over our safe spaces to make room for a sanitized promenade that quickly filled with heteronormative yuppies and their designer dogs and babies.
It’s hard to walk down Christopher Street these days and see the tour groups and the chain stores and rich, white, straight people who pay no homage to the queers who found refuge in the neighborhood for decades prior. If I squint, though, I can still make out the little rainbow flags hanging from the LGBTQ storefronts that have survived. And I can still hear the whooping of the queer kids as we made their way down the one street where we truly felt safe.