If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was certainly fascination. I spotted him one afternoon in the East Village. Pale-skinned and thin, in an oversized trenchcoat tightly cinched at the waist, he looked like no beauty I’d seen before. His large eyes were lined with kohl, and his lips were painted a moist pink. His shoulder-length hair, straight and full, was dyed a kind of ash blond (he let the darker roots show). And as I watched him walk past Gem Spa, where newspapers and egg creams were sold—this was in the early nineteen-eighties—I didn’t think Bowie genderfuck so much as I thought Sue Lyon—not as Kubrick’s Lolita but as the wild, lovesick girl in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” staunch and a little spoiled. As I followed him down Second Avenue to Third Street, where, as it turned out, we both lived, he was even more alluring to me than Sue Lyon, in part because I couldn’t determine his sex right away, and I loved how that made me feel.
This story is from the April 15, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the April 15, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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