My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (7 page)

W
HEN
I
was growing up in the hills of Tennessee, all of my friends were listening to Wet Willie, Black Oak Arkansas, the Charlie Daniels Band, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. I could not bear that white trash, rock ’n’ roll music. When Charlie Daniels later started singing that awful song about the Devil coming down to Georgia, I would just turn the dial on the radio.

My theory was that the hippie ideals I longed to embrace had been lost along the way as they filtered out from San Francisco. The only ideals that reached the Deep South were growing your hair long, dropping out, and smoking dope.

I was above all that.

My tastes in music were a little more eclectic. I loved vintage country-and-western music, and the swing music of the 1940s, especially the Andrews Sisters, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne. I loved Dusty Springfield, especially her rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man,” which is found on one of the best albums ever recorded,
Dusty in Memphis
. Miss Springfield brought her smoky voice over from England, sat down with a bunch of Memphis blues musicians, and the rest is vinyl history.

I also loved the music black people were listening to. I secretly tuned into WFLI—the Black Spot on Your Dial! I would sneak down to the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Chattanooga to hear Wilson Pickett sing “In the Midnight Hour,” or Millie Jackson wail through “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right.” Miss Jackson had an album that came out years later called
Get It Out’cha System.
I had to hide that album under my bed because the lyrics were so nasty. They were certainly not fitting song lyrics to be heard by a (very reluctant) Young Royal Ambassador for Christ.

I was the only white boy in the whole auditorium. They used to call me the Blue-Eyed Soul Brother! I could do all the dances, too. The white kids laughed at the way I danced during the prom, but in reality, I was way ahead of them.

I’ve always been a good dancer. In junior high school PE class, we were given a choice: play dodgeball or take ballroom dancing lessons. Hmm, let’s see. Get creamed by a blood-red ball or whisk around the floor on my tippy-toes?

I was enthralled with ballroom dancing. The teacher was a German lady, Fräulein Something-or-Other, who tapped her stick in time to the music and barked orders as most of the kids stumbled around and around, stepping on each other’s toes.

But not me.

Oh no, no. I was light as a feather. I swirled around, and even added a few kicks and twirls here and there. I had no idea what interpretive dancing was, but I loved making it up as I went along. My red-faced, sweaty partner had no choice but to keep up as best she could. Poor thing. I had her in a vise-like grip.

All of a sudden, the Fräulein banged her stick and jabbed me on the shoulder, mid-twirl.

“Mr. Jordan, may I remind you that the young lady is the picture. You, my dear, are but the
frame.
”

Well, fuck that shit.

But those dancing lessons sowed the seeds. I loved keeping up with the latest dance crazes. There was this really cool black girl I went to school with named Blondell, who taught me a lot of my best moves. She used to call me “Itty-Bitty.”

“There goes Itty-Bitty, the Blue-Eyed Soul Brother!”

One time, she saved my life.

As far back as I can remember, the student body at my high school had been known as the Brainerd High Rebels. When our football team ran onto the field, a mascot dressed as a Rebel soldier and mounted on a Tennessee walking horse paraded around the field, holding a Confederate flag. Our school fight song was “Dixie”!

“I wish I was in the land of cotton. Old times there are not forgotten. Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.”

Well, there were a lot of people that thought the whole rigmarole was racist. So, in 1972, they tried to change the name to the Brainerd High Panthers, and race riots broke out. It even made the national news. I was caught in the middle because I had so many black friends, and that just wasn’t done back then.

Blondell saw me walking down the hall one day. She called me to the side and whispered, “Itty-Bitty, you know I love you, but you better get your little white ass out of this part of the school. We’re fixin’ to rumble.”

And with that, all hell broke loose.

Bricks started flying. Windows were broken. Students ran up and down the halls with bats. The National Guard was called in! A white boy from my church was dragged into a bathroom and beaten senseless, and hordes of rednecks in pickup trucks cruised the city looking for black people to kick the shit out of. I escaped through a window by the skin of my teeth—which, incidentally, has been the story of my life.

Years later, I was working as a host at the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. One night, as I counted out the register money, this very chic black girl came sauntering in the front door.

“Are y’all still open?” she asked in a Southern drawl.

“Yes, we are, Miss Blondell.”

“Itty-Bitty!” she screamed. “The Blue-Eyed Soul Brother! Is it really you?”

We spent hours and hours catching up. She still knew all the best moves.

I
ONCE
stayed in a monastery built in the eighteenth century and rumored to have been used at one time as an insane asylum. It sat, like some great Victorian dowager, overlooking Lake Pantelimon on the outskirts of Bucharest, Romania. It had at some point been converted into a hotel called the Hotel Lebada. On the inside, the crumbling hotel looked like an overdone New Orleans whorehouse—with old marble, gold fixtures, and dusty, bloodred velvet drapes. I was shooting a low-budget independent horror movie called
Madhouse,
in what must have been the cells for the crazy people.

A tiny arm of land separated the hotel and lake from the Gypsy camps across the way. Gypsies, in this day and age? How exotic! The Romanian Gypsies still travel in brightly painted caravans pulled by pitifully skinny horses. They became my obsession, especially the dangerous-looking, long-haired men. But we had all been warned in no uncertain terms to stay away from the Gypsy camps.

We were shooting
Madhouse
in Romania as it was a whole lot cheaper than shooting in the States. I had been roped into this venture by my old friend Billy Butler, who had written the script and was also making his directorial debut. I was to play a nebbishy psychiatrist who gets his head chopped off. I had jumped at the chance. Years and years in sitcom hell had given me an insatiable hunger for film acting. All it took to get me on board for a feature film was two dollars a day and a hot meal.

Billy Butler and I had a history. Our friendship had survived all kinds of questionable behavior. One time we got into a drunken brawl after six very dirty martinis in a lovely French restaurant called La Poubelle. Back then, when I drank I was known as the Tiny Terror. I had a history of slapping people across the face. Sometimes, people whose faces I could barely reach.

Smack! “It’s not always about you!”

Smack! “Well, honey, it ain’t always about
you,
either!”

I must say, Billy certainly held his own in our little fracas. As I recall, we were thrown out into the street before we even had a chance to taste our escargots.

We had both ended up in desperate straits more times than I cared to remember. At our lowest point we were living in Koreatown with no electricity. But that is a whole other story. At the time of this rendezvous in Romania, each of us had cleaned up his act and gained a modicum of success.

My room at the Hotel Lebada had huge windows that opened out, overlooking the lake. I had packed my “location trunk,” which consisted of all the necessities a homosexual must have at his disposal: a European feather bed, high-thread-count sheets, down pillows, and soft toilet paper. I raided the rambling, overgrown gardens that surrounded the hotel for fresh-cut flowers and befriended the maids, who gave me lovely old cut-glass vases to display them in.

I had also brought wonderful-smelling candles, which I burned at night while hanging out the window like a damsel in distress, staring at the moon and wondering what those Gypsy wastrels were up to across the way. I could hear their music and drunken laughter beckoning. And if I squinted up my eyes and leaned out, I thought I could see the colorful skirts of the women whipping about as they danced by a bonfire in the moonlight.

I could not help but wonder what it would be like getting frisky in the woods with one of those Gypsy boys. They were on every street corner in Bucharest, begging, scamming, and fortune-telling. What might those young Lotharios be willing to do for a few extra dollars?

Bucharest lay nearby like the Forbidden City. It was recovering from its former communist regime, and danger still lurked around every corner. At night we were only allowed to go into the city with a car and driver, and we had at our disposal a fleet of ancient black Mercedes sedans with young, handsome, uniformed Romanian men to drive us about.

I was informed that the gay scene in Bucharest was very discreet. Homosexuality had been a punishable crime under the communist regime. We were told gay bars did indeed exist in Bucharest, but were warned to be careful in our quest to find them. It was all very wink-wink.

Being the most industrious of the gays in the crew, I set out to find a place where we could twist the night away among like-minded people. It took me a few weeks of nosing around, but I finally scored an address from a front desk clerk at another hotel, who batted his eyes and slipped me a hastily scribbled note. So that weekend a bunch of us piled into our chauffeured Mercedes sedans and took off, caravan-style, for the only gay bar in Bucharest.

When I was seventeen years old I decided that for my own sanity I needed to meet some queers. I had heard that somewhere in downtown Chattanooga was a gay bar called the Cross Keys Lounge. I called information with my heart beating frantically and got the address. It was down on Broad Street near the infamous Cadillac Club, in a very unseemly part of town.

I borrowed my mother’s red Monte Carlo and told her I was going to the public library one evening to do a research paper for school. Instead, I sat across the street from the dubious establishment for hours. I watched a few people go in and out, lost my nerve, and drove home.

A week later I was back, sitting in the Monte Carlo. This time, I gathered enough courage to get out of the car and walk to the corner. I longed to meet some queers! But once again, I chickened out and went home.

On my third attempt, I got out of the car and boldly strolled within a block of the front door. I was standing there hoping against all hope no one from my high school or church would drive by. My goodness gracious, I was in the honor society, was treasurer of the Spanish club, and had just been elected junior class president. Plus, in my church I was an active member of the Royal Ambassadors for Christ. The news would have spread like wildfire throughout the whole school and been whispered in every pew the following Sunday morning.

Scandalous!

While I was attempting to gather my courage to move toward the door, I saw something that will stay in my memory until the day I die. Two drag queens paraded down the street, arm in arm, in full regalia. I had no idea what a drag queen was, but I knew these two were men in dresses, makeup, and high wigs. Their feather boas whipped in the wind and they drunkenly teetered about on impossibly high stiletto-heeled shoes.

I stood frozen to the spot, both repulsed and deeply fascinated. They sailed closer and closer, looming before my eyes like the bow of an old pirate ship. One of the Creatures from the Hair Spray Lagoon stopped, cocked a hand on her hip, and eyed me up curiously from under at least three layers of false eyelashes.

“Well, I wish you’d look at this one, Miss Victoria. Idn’t it precious? No bigger than a wore-out bar of soap. What are you doing out on these mean streets, little mister?”

I couldn’t speak. I was so scared I thought I might start projectile vomiting.

“I think I know what this one is up to,” said the other one with a knowing wink.

I wanted to take off running but I could not get my legs to operate properly. I felt weak and shaky all over.

“Oh yes, Sister Sue, I know that look.” She leaned in toward me and whispered, “You’re trying to gather up the courage to go in that big, bad, gay bar, aren’t cha?”

“No I’m not!”

“You can’t hide it from us, honey. We’ve all been there! Now come to Mama. Come on and help me, Sister Sue. We’ve got to be good Samaritans and get this scared, helpless creature into his first gay bar!”

And with that, they got on either side of me, grabbed my arms, and waltzed me down the street and through the doors of the Cross Keys Lounge. I suppose in everyone’s life there is a defining moment, the moment when you realize that nothing will ever be the same again. For some it is standing at the altar with a beloved, saying “I do.” For others it is watching the miraculous birth of a child, or receiving a diploma from some prestigious university.

Mine was the moment I stepped across the threshold of the Cross Keys Lounge in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, in my junior year of high school.

I think I exhaled for the first time in my life.

I was no longer alone.

And my God, it was loud! “Lola” by the Kinks was blaring on the jukebox and I was struck by the cacophony. All sorts of folks—from lawyers in suits to men in dresses to butch women who resembled Elvis impersonators—were crammed into the tiny bar. The only thing they seemed to have in common and to be celebrating wildly was that they were all gay. Yippee!

I sometimes lament the diversification of the gay community. It’s wonderful that we’re now spread far and wide, straddling all socioeconomic lines, color barriers, and age divisions. But today young gay people not only have to find their tribe, they must also find their tribe within the tribe.

Should one embrace the circuit party set? Or the leather scene? How about the Log Cabin Republicans? There’s always the drag queen culture or the Twinkie go-go boys. Like motorcycles? How about Dykes on Bikes? Almost all major cities now have gay choruses, and there’s also a whole gay culture surrounding live theatre. To be or not to be an opera queen? For older queers there is even a gay senior citizens’ center in Palm Springs, California, that has thousands of members. And if you’re angry about the ways gays are treated, you can embrace activism and start rah-rahing with the Human Rights Campaign.

The choices are limitless. I’ve heard of a gay bar out in Venice, California, called the Rooster Fish that caters to young surfers. I once attended a gay roller-skating party in Grand Prairie, Texas, and saw young farm boys (who I thought could not possibly be gay) cavorting wildly around the rink holding hands and kissing. Some of them even had on silly skating skirts over their blue jeans and were skating backwards under the disco lights to the throbbing beat of the music.

We are not a glum lot, that’s for sure. We are everywhere and it is just wonderful. But I still sometimes miss the feeling that I got in my first gay bar. It was the early 1970s and we were all bunched together, and there was a strong feeling of “us” and “them.” We even confiscated the Pink Floyd song “Us and Them” as our anthem. It was on the jukebox and we played it over and over.

Back in Bucharest, we all piled out of our Mercedes and flooded into the only gay bar in town. Once again, I was struck with the feeling of “us” and “them.” Romanians from all walks of life were crammed into the tiny space celebrating their gayness. Yippee!

It quickly became evident that somehow I had been chosen as the Belle of Bucharest. I was getting an enormous amount of attention. The young, good-looking American gay boys were being passed over in lieu of little old me. At one point I felt like a gay Hugh Hefner with seven silly blond Romanians giggling and crawling all over me.

It was as if I had won the lottery.

At first I thought maybe they knew me from television, but that was not the case. Apparently, most gay boys in Romania want a sugar daddy to get them out of the country. With my wandering blue eyes, gray hair, and chauffeur-driven car waiting outside, I must have had “American Sugar Daddy” written all over me.

Well, I am always one to take advantage of a winning situation.

All of a sudden, the door opened and in walked the prettiest boy I have ever seen in my life. He was six feet tall and skinny as a rail, and he moved like a gazelle. He would have been right at home strutting the runway in Milan with his long flowing hair, piercing green eyes, and patrician-looking features. I swear I could not catch my breath.

He assessed the crowd and immediately took notice. He gave me a smile that pierced my heart, and then he winked at me. I almost fainted. I kid you not. It was like something out of a movie. I felt like a young Catherine Denueve.

It did not take this young man long to move in for the thrill. And off we went into the dark Bucharest night.

The next morning, as my young Adonis slept, I went downstairs for coffee and sweet rolls. I practically skipped along, whistling a merry tune. Suddenly, the head of hotel security loomed in my path, crooked his finger at me, and roughly paraded me into the hotel office.

I was told to sit, like a kid being reprimanded in the principal’s office. He eyed me up and down. “I understand you have a young man in your room.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. I told him that I did indeed have a young man in my room and I huffily asked if there was a problem.

He said yes. The young man I had in my room was not a registered guest of the hotel.

I almost flew off the handle. I told him that this young man was
my
guest. I told him that the actress across the hall had her husband visiting for weeks and he was not a registered guest. Another actor had his manager staying with him and the manager was not registered. Why was I being singled out for having someone not registered staying overnight in my room?

I puffed up and asked him if this was a “gay” thing.

“No,” he replied, “the problem has nothing to do with…that. The problem is that your young man looks…
Gypsy.
”

The word hung in the air like a bad smell.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, Gypsies are thieves. So I am telling you for your own good to watch your wallet, your passport, and anything else you do not want to turn up missing!”