The Sexiness and Sophistication That Was the 1968-1983 NYC Magazine "After Dark"
Not only did I get a chance to photograph a massive collection of the rag where gay culture and eros collided in 1970s Gotham...I talked to one of its longest-serving editors!
Happy November, Caftan readers! Actually as I write this, it's a gorgeous NYC Saturday in late October, but it'll be November by the time you read this, because this month's post is going to take some time to put together and I'm also going to Amsterdam (for the first time!) the first week of November.
As I write this, I am very angry and worried about extreme death and suffering in a certain part of the world. Who knows what the situation will look like by the time you read this in a few weeks? (Nov. 11 update: Not good.) But for the moment, I'll stay focused on matters Caftan, which includes a few quick items/shout-outs before I get to the heart of this post.
The first is that, in early October, I had the great thrill and honor of being invited by Bravo poobah Andy Cohen (who was a big fan of my prior novel Christodora) to come on his talk show “Watch What Happens Live” to be the “bartender” (lol) to promote my new novel Speech Team, which is about four 1980s high school queer and/or misfit friends who reunite 25 years later to track down the teacher and speech coach who was both their mentor and tormentor.
It was a very fun experience. (No, you don’t really have to bartend—but the drinks are real).) And I’ll be honest—I’ve already finished a spicy new novel that I am so excited about, but Speech Team needs to sell more copies before my current publisher, Viking, will be open to picking it up. So, please—if you haven’t already bought a copy (and if you have…THANK YOU!), consider buying just one (the hardcover is only $22.49 right now on Amazon), perhaps as a holiday gift for yourself or others. It’s a great Gen X read, esp. if you survived being a gay kid or teen in that era. Your purchase will help me so much. And if you like it, by all means tell folks about it via social media or good old word of mouth. Because in a world where mainstream media rarely covers novels by gay men, that helps a lot, too. It’ll truly mean the world to me.
My second rec is that you check out (and consider supporting) the Substack of my friend Tomik Dash.
I was really blown away by his recent guide to visiting or living (which he did) in Puerto Vallarta, which is incredibly comprehensive and detailed. (I've still never been to PV!)
I also want to shout-out Bonds and Boundaries, the new short story collection from my friend Dale Corvino.
I haven't read the collection yet but Dale was in a little private writing workshop I ran last year and I really like his writing; he used to be a sex worker and those experiences, some of them quite funny, inform his writing.
Finally, I'm linking to this interview I just did with queer scholar Lucas Hilderbrand, who has a really readable new book of LGBTQ history out called The Bars Are Ours, a fascinating history of gay bars and clubs in several (not quite all) U.S. cities from the 1960s to recent years. One great gift of this book is the visual memorabilia—a treasure trove of old bar fliers, matchbooks, photographs and more. They are so clever and naughty, like the ones below. Another plus is that it focuses not just on iconic venues like Chicago's The Gold Coast (often considered the first leather bar) and NYC's The Saint and The Paradise Garage, but lesser-known venues like Houston's now-defunct Mary's, which served as an incredible hub of gay and HIV/AIDS activism and memorializing, and Kansas City's also now defunct Jewel Box Lounge, a showcase for local female impersonators and drag queens. Get a copy—I promise you it's a good read. Here are but two of the ads featured in the book:
And now we get to the heart of this Caftan, which is a look at After Dark, the crypto (or maybe not-so-crypto)-gay magazine of entertainment and culture published out of NYC from May 1968 to January 1983, which more or less makes it an almost perfect archive of urbane gay sexual and artistic life in a gloriously run-down NYC spanning a year before Stonewall until just before AIDS gained steam and dramatically changed gay life
I've been obsessed with After Dark since I was in my twenties in the 1990s; every chance I got back then, I'd buy old copies, often from the late, great flea markets that filled empty Chelsea lots every weekend for years. For me, they were a portal into a libertine and sophisticated world that, in the 1990s, had already long since disappeared—the kind of world where, on a Saturday night, you might hear Marilyn Horne at the opera or watch the Merce Cunningham or Paul Taylor dancers, then dance yourself til four at Flamingo, then hit the Continental Baths, then meet friends for brunch at David's Pot Belly in the Village before you went home and finally passed out.
I also loved the design of the magazine, especially in its first years—minimal and stark, with its wiggly title logo, sans-serif type and incredible photography.
Sadly, I only have about two copies of my own left. However, my friend Jay Blotcher, a freelance book editor who once did PR for ACT UP, has an enormous collection of copies in his upstate New York home. When he posted recently that he was looking to sell them off (and he still is. Interested? Email him at jblotcher@hvc.rr.com), I asked if I could drive up for an afternoon and photograph them. He graciously said yes, and even greeted me with a bag of Hudson Valley autumnal cider donuts, which he knows I adore.
Then I took all the photos of his copies tha you will see here, and a few you won’t see, while we chatted about the mag. I could have pored through the issues well into the night, but I didn’t want to abuse Jay’s hospitality.
"Collecting After Darks was an act of wish fulfillment," said Jay. "I wasn't around as an adult gay man in the early-mid 1970s, so I'll always be chasing after that experience I never had. [The 1970s in gay NYC] were a zenith of creativity and risk-taking that burned out fast like a supernova. I moved to the city right out of college in 1982, which culturally was still the late 1970s. AIDS hadn't yet devastated the community, as it would within the year."
He'd first seen the magazine in the office of the gay student group at Syracuse University in the late 1970s. "It was slick and forbidding—the men, the clothes and the lifestyle were all beautiful—and expensive. Was it a world I would find myself in? Not really."