CCNY (1973) Here I was and they were in the Harvard of the Prolelariat, all dressed up like bad copies of 1950’s matrons and grey suit and tie professors; some had patches on the back of the sleeves and had given up on wearing ties. There was also quite a few African Americans dressed up in colorful shirts, long skirt outfits from Western Africa. Three gays there were the most conservative looking ones; uptight middle age men. They looked like a lot of homos who were slowly coming out, but careful enough not to scare the polite world of academia. I was out, and had been a patron at the bar that started the crisis, and lived thru the Stone Wall disturbances, as a witness, and attended the first rally in Washington Square, moved later on to Union Square, until becoming the carnival is today; which went very well with my membership in a street theater company; my Situationist friends; and knew a lot of hard core Puerto Rican “independentistas” in town. I was not going to be the nice servicing, funny, agreeable gay man who plays a quasi passive/obedient role when working with liberal and conservative heteros. And still today, do not expect me to be passive in any situation in which I am participating. Growing up in a colony, dealing daily with the colonizers and their administrators, prepares the colonial citizen to be quite attentive to those trying to exercise power, be in the sugar cane plantation where my father worked or in academia. Add the sensation felt when observing the residues of the beatnik sub culture hanging out around Bleecker in the West Village, seen at closer range, and then, living fully the climate of the late sixties, making it part of the self, in order to understand why the CCNY world looked, sadly, very dated. Luckily, their sense of how power was played was quickly disappearing, following the beatniks.
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