Brian Englilsh
Patrick Angus (at home with In the Ramble)
B/W photo
10" x 8"

Theatre
By Robert Stuart

Patrick Angus’ painting, I Get Weak, is of The Prince, a theater on West St. between Perry and 11th. It is a theater I visited numerous times. The theater was closed 1999-2000 during Mayor Guliani’s crackdown on sex venues.

The scene Patrick paints is of men of varying age sitting in the theater watching a porn film. In vivid color on the screen, one naked youth sits on a chair while another naked young man lies on the floor licking the balls of the seated figure. To the left, in the shadows, almost silhouette, a man walks up the aisle facing forward, and another man with a cap is seated in a balcony behind the screen. Patrick’s signature Exit sign and the tip of one cigarette glow red.

It would appear that the several men are isolated from one another. In fact we may assume they do not know one another. There is that sense of solitary presence, the men seated in the theater riveted by the sex they observe on the screen, while the other two men are also alone.

I know from my experience at The Prince, along with other theaters I visited, that the men are not entirely alone. Perhaps existentially so and even that is conjecture because the viewer does to know these men personally. Nor did I know the men I sat with. But men have come to the theater by common purpose, or desire, or expectation, at least to share visually in the pleasure of seeing men on the screen doing what the viewer might enjoy himself. In that regard, the men are a community, however disparate their lives and fleeting their association. They are in the moment, themselves theater.

The Prince was theater to me. I went there to see a porn film, but that perhaps was the least of it. I went there in the expectation that I might connect with another man. The connection could be no more than a trading glance that went nowhere. It could be words exchanged in brief conversation. It could be a sexual encounter. I became part of the action otherwise cast onto the screen–not so vividly in color but in the shadowed catch of longing and in the satisfaction of desire fulfilled. No mystery, and I never fooled myself to think this kind of connection was my life. My life was broad and deep and rich outside, very much as the Hudson River opposite the theater was broad and deep and rich with the commerce of life.

Not seen by the viewer is a small gathering place immediately behind the screen. That enclosure and the balcony at the top of the stairs were the places where men had sex. I never saw men fucking. Perhaps that occurred late at night. I went there daytime or earlier evening. What I saw was oral sex and masturbation. Out of concern for my health I limited myself to mutual masturbation. I am speaking of the 1980s and 1990s, and my concern was for the transmission of HIV, also any other sexually transmitted infections which could compromise the immune system. I don’t wish to get clinical talking about a porn theater and sex, but contrary to what persons could think looking at paintings of gay male sex venues without direct experience themselves, men went to these theaters aware of who they were, self-assured, choosing a passing sexual pleasure. That is not to say some men did not trash themselves with indiscriminate sex. They did. But as in society at large, the composition of men in a gay sex theater was as varied as the permutations of sexual desire itself.

My first venture into a gay theater was in 1982. I had read an ad for The Gaiety, a male burlesque theater as advertised, on 46th just west of Broadway. I came out to myself in these years, in my 40s in age. I walked up the steps of The Gaiety with my heart pounding, and I am being intentionally melodramatic because that’s how I felt. Into the theater, where I sat down to watch a young man in white underpants, dancing. I was breathless, I was hard, I could not believe what I was seeing. Then the dancer left the stage and came out naked. I might have fallen over right there except I was held by the chair I was sitting in and riveted visually to the young man. In my peripheral vision I was aware of other men in the theater. While a second and then a third dancer were on stage, I was suddenly aware of a man sitting down next to me. He put his hand on my thigh and said, “Care for a private show?” It was the first dancer I had seen. His touch was electric. I was so startled I jumped, which he felt, and sensing my fright he left. I got up and left too.

I returned many times after that, to my more relaxed delight. I got so that I liked to sit toward the back of the theater on one side, illuminated by an arc of one light from the ceiling. I lowered my pants and touched myself through my own white briefs. To my immediate right, men stood looking over a partition separating the seating from the hallway entering the theater. They saw me. I saw them looking at me. The power of exhibition and voyeur. One or two of the men would come over then and sit either in the row ahead of me or directly beside me, and the man or men would touch me, and stroke my erection which I had taken from my pants until, at fever pitch, I came.

That is theater. That is what Patrick Angus captured so powerfully in his canvases of The Gaiety, or The Prince, and the other venues he painted, the bars and the baths. In his paintings, men watch the dancers. Dancers and men converse in the lounge. In those earlier years, sex was permitted. There is that human exchange that can not rightly be reduced to sex alone. Patrick was not painting sex even though his paintings show sex. He was insistent on making that point. He was painting a world, the gay demimonde. That place I call theater where men shared a common longing or pleasure, with humor or with strained seriousness, with overture in words and gesture or with guarded privacy. Some men sat very much to themselves, a business man perhaps holding his briefcase across his lap. Others were breezy, open, ready for something, or nothing. It was enough just to be there.

Angus got that. He was part of that theater himself. He went to the places he painted. He painted at home but his depiction of scene is so sharp, so vivid, it is as though he is still in the theater. I expect him to get up from the canvas, turn, and smile at me. A knowing smile shared, complicit. He and I went to The Gaiety once for their late show, twelve dancers and “the grand finale.” It was great fun.

I also went to The David, a porn theater whose “back room” was upstairs on a second floor, which patrons reached by climbing a narrow spiral staircase. The Adonis on 8th Avenue was a cavernous old theater, and the 55th St. Playhouse was another old theater whose more private sex room was upstairs at the back of the theater. There was also a place to stand behind the seats, looking over a low wall onto the sweep of the theater toward the screen and film. One time I was sitting on the back row, some of the men just behind me on the other side of that wall. I was watching the film but aware of everything else, as one is in a theater. A young man sat down next to me and asked directly to “see” me. For some reason I wasn’t in the mood, though he was attractive enough. He actually said, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” I declined politely. “What’s going on here,” he said, “nobody’s showing.”

There was the Bijou on 3rd Ave. near 13th Street, and #82 4th Street. At the Bijou, you walked toward the front of the theater to get to a stairway that took you downstairs to the cruising area, or you could take stairs off the foyer to where the bathrooms were, and there in the small anteroom a closed door, when opened, led you into a dark corridor toward the back room area. Men pressed themselves against one another in the corridor.

All of this is now gone. The Prince closed, forced to close, also The Adonis, The David, The Bijou and #82 4th St. show Hollywood films as in any other theater, though the booths are still there in the back areas, and The Gaiety remains open. But these remaining public theaters employ monitors to patrol the premises, to make sure there is no open sex. In The Gaiety, you are not permitted even to touch yourself, let alone anyone else. There is no sex on the premises. You can not touch any of the dancers, even so much as to put a dollar bill in a sock or jock strap. You place your money on the stage floor for the dancers to pick up.

Gay male theater has become more isolating in that respect. It is still theater, but something has been taken away, and I don’t mean the obvious reference to sex. The sense of play is gone, the pleasure of shared company is diminished, no longer the abandon of care or worry, because now you might get caught at something so innocuous as touching your own body.

I think of virtual sex on the Internet through web cam sites. While men can hook up by this means, much of the experience is the individual alone or with friends in a room of a house chatting with other men alone or with friends in their rooms. Through small screens instead of seated together in an actual theater. In Patrick’s painting, I Get Weak, everyone is sharing an open space, looking up at a large screen. On the Internet everything is visually reduced, so too the sense of community.

Private sex clubs take up some of that loss, retain the immediate human exchange because people are actually together in one place. The sex clubs are private, however, defined by very specific requirements–professional men 18-45, muscular men of color, and so forth.

The theater Patrick painted was public. Anyone who paid the entrance fee and walked through the turnstile was in. From there you connected or not according to your desire, or sat quietly in a seat watching the film. The screen itself was often large. There was something grand about this theater, which the screen represented. The viewer saw a film, not a video. Or that was true in the earlier years. Patrick got the grandeur of this kind of theater, the sweep literally true for his large Gaiety paintings.

I know–things change with time. Today it is in the private club, the Internet, and the remnant of the freer, more open porn and dance theater. I do not intend these words as a lament, though I do lament the loss of what Patrick portrays. What I celebrate is what Patrick celebrated in his work, the open, albeit with shadow, safe place where men could sit to see a show, cruise, touch themselves or one another without fear, tease with humor as Patrick teases with whimsical titles taken from pop songs, and just plain have fun. That Patrick is no longer with us is fitting to the scenes he painted, which are no longer with us either in their free spirit.
I re-enter the Prince. I sit in a chair alongside one of the men. I see two young men on the screen having sex. I get weak. The man next to me turns to smile at me. I smile back.

We touch each other pleasurably as we continue to watch the film. Other men sit down or get up. Some walk along the aisle to the back of the theater. They will be going upstairs. I may go there myself after a bit. This is my world, or that part of it that is my shadow side, which I acknowledge and love as I do myself.
As I turn again in my chair I see a younger man wearing a wool cap pulled over his head. He is slight in build. He seems guarded. He too watches the film, and is observant of other men in the theater. It impresses me that he is taking mental notes. I catch his glance. I recognize him. He is Patrick.