The Downtown Pop Underground

Joe Cino’s appetite for a good time was equaled by his warmth and generosity. If one of his starving young artists was actually starving, he would offer them bread or pastries, even when he couldn’t pay rent himself. His café offered a warm refuge for the poor, tired, huddled gay masses who increasingly congregated in the Village—like a young Agosto Machado, who met Joe in 1959. “I was on Cornelia Street, around Bleecker,” he recalled, “and it was still heavily an Italian neighborhood, and there were these young men who were so attractive, carrying things like panels of wood. I thought I was being discreet, but I just got overwhelmed by their handsomeness and I followed them as they went up Cornelia Street.” When this group of men walked through Caffe Cino’s doorway, Agosto peered in. “May I help you?” Joe asked. “Oh no,” he replied, “I was just wandering about the neighborhood.” The friendly coffee shop owner ushered him in. “This is a café, and you’re welcome here. We don’t sell alcohol. We sometimes have poetry readings and little presentations. There’s hot cider, or espresso, or some cookies.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The close proximity of underground theater venues and punk clubs created other social connections. The Mumps’ Kristian Hoffman lived right down the street from CBGB, and the first thing he did every evening was stop by the bar to see what was happening. “Then we’d go to Phebe’s and have a blueberry pie and ice cream,” he said, “then wait for friends to show up.” Located on the corner of Bowery and East Fourth Street, Phebe’s was known as the “Sardi’s of Off-Off-Broadway” (the Times Square hotspot Sardi’s drew an uptown Broadway crowd). “You needed a place to hang out,” Agosto Machado said, “and Phebe’s offered a safe refuge. Not every bar wanted theatrical people, because it was a conservative Eastern European neighborhood.”

From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“A lot of the Cino scene was camp,” Jim Fouratt recalled. “Just look at Dames at Sea. That was the embodiment of camp.” Caffe Cino’s biggest hit was a play­ful homage to old 1930s and 1940s Hollywood musicals and, in particular, the black-and-white films of Busby Berkeley. “I think what made us such a hit was we were doing this homage to Busby Berkeley films, which had hundreds of dancers,” said David Christmas, who starred opposite Bernadette Peters in the Cino production. “But there were only six of us recreating all of that stuff in this tiny storefront coffeehouse.” Joe Cino almost always restricted productions to two-week runs in order to make room for the next play, but he made an exception for Dames, an inventive DIY show that raked in the money. “It’s quite amazing when you look back at how much originality was happening,” said Agosto Machado. “The stage area was tiny, and they did so much with so little.” Joe Cino painted his tiny eight-by-eight-foot stage with high-gloss black paint sprinkled with glitter, and the costumes, lighting, and makeup were also staged entirely in black and white. The Dames at Sea set used reflective Mylar to create the cheap illusion that there were many more people onstage during the dance numbers, and the other side of the rotating wall panels was decorated to look like a ship during other scenes. Show composer Jim Wise often played piano at the Cino, though sometimes his substitute was Barry Man. Later known as Barry Manilow, he accompanied Bette Midler for her cabaret shows in gay bathhouses during the early 1970s, and Midler also passed through Caffe Cino and La MaMa after she arrived in New York. From Chapter 13 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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By the late 1960s, the streets were growing meaner. “The ‘Make Love Not War’ thing was big in the East Village,” Agosto Machado said, “but I’m painting it with rose-colored glasses. It was still iffy and dangerous in the late sixties and early seventies. If it was iffy, you had to walk in the street along the cars, or you had to zigzag to avoid certain blocks.” Ed Sanders lived in one of those iffy areas, on Avenue A, where he was attacked as he opened the door to his apartment in April 1969. “I was rushed from behind by two guys who tossed me to the floor and pushed a knife against my throat, chanting, ‘Where’s the amphetamine—where’s the amphetamine?’ with an insistence that portended arterial insert.” It was a case of mistaken identity in a drug deal gone wrong, but fortunately one of the guys stopped and said, “Hey, man, the guy that burned us didn’t have no red boots on.” Sanders’s rock ’n’ roll boots may very well have saved his life, but the incident convinced him to leave the neighborhood he had called home throughout the 1960s. The area had grown more grim thanks to a combination of spiraling poverty, decaying city infrastructures, harder drugs, and sleazy opportunists drawn into the counterculture. From Chapter 19 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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In addition to biological families, Greenwich Village offered informal kinship systems that welcomed people like Agosto Machado. He arrived there in the late fifties after growing up in some rough New York neighborhoods, such as Hell’s Kitchen, where he heard schoolyard taunts like “Ooh, you’re so queer you should go to Greenwich Village.” “People came from different parts of the city to express yourself in the Village,” Machado said. “I didn’t really feel I was part of the majority culture, which is why so many people who were trying to find themselves gravitated there.” Just being gay made one a criminal and an outsider. In the early 1960s, a man still could be arrested for wearing women’s clothes in public, so Machado and his friends would carry their drag finery in shopping bags and then change once they hit a critical mass. After the sun went down, they promenaded up and down the street—sometimes gathering by Gay Street, which intersected Christopher, down the street from where Harry Koutoukas lived at 87 Christopher. “Honey, where are we? Gay Street!” they’d all shout. It was safety in numbers. “The queens, all the way down Sheridan Square, would have an audience,” Machado said, “people walking by, people on the stoop. And as the evening wore on, they got a little louder and grander—showing their new fabric they got, or a new wig. It was a street society, and you could walk around and feel that your community would protect you.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The neighborhood’s Ukrainian residents were suspicious of their first black neighbor, Ellen Stewart. “She was attractive, and they saw white young men going down to the basement, so they kept calling the police thinking that she was a prostitute,” Agosto Machado said. “They were unaware that she was trying to start a theater, and that the young men were gay men who were helping her, so they harassed her and harassed her and harassed her.” Nosy neighbors eventually called the health department to shut her down, but in a stroke of luck—one of dozens that kept La MaMa open over the years—the inspector had a history in theater and vaudeville. Instead of issuing a summons, he helped her obtain a restaurant license to avoid further legal complications. Stewart’s theater still had no name during the inspection, and she needed something for the restaurant license application. After one friend suggested “Mama,” they decided to fancy-it‑up by calling it “Café La MaMa.” After satisfying the health inspector, Stewart focused on winning over her neighbors. “Ellen had a very wonderful way of putting people at ease,” Paul Foster said. “She baked cookies, and gave them cookies. She ingratiated herself, and pretty soon, they became friends and we got them into the theater. It was maybe the first one that they had ever seen in their lives.” But Ellen’s charm offensive did little to protect the theater against a constant stream of citations from city officials throughout the 1960s. In April 1963, the city’s Buildings Department enforced a ban on theaters in the area and shut down Café La MaMa once again. Undaunted, Stewart moved her theater to a second-floor loft at 82 Second Avenue, and soon after was forced to move it farther down Second Avenue. Like a bureaucratic version of whack-a-mole, La MaMa then moved to St. Mark’s Place, and finally to its longtime home on East Fourth Street. From Chapter 6 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“La MaMa” referred both to Ellen Stewart herself—a warm but tough-as-nails maternal figure—and the theater she founded. With no theatrical experience, she established Café La MaMa in a basement location in the East Village back in 1961, not long after Joe Cino had turned his coffeehouse into an Off-Off-Broadway theater. “Ellen Stewart was La MaMa,” recalled Agosto Machado. “She gave care, attention, and nourishment for playwrights, directors, set designers, costumers, and others in her theater.” The details of Stewart’s early history are hazy. The only facts she ever verified were that she was born in Chicago and lived for a while in Louisiana—likely where she picked up her strong Geechee dialect and gave birth to her only son, Larry Hovell, 1943. After living for a while in Chicago, Ellen enrolled in New York’s Traphagen School of Design, one of the few fashion schools that accepted African Americans in 1950. Upon arriving at Grand Central Station, Stewart discovered that the apartment she was promised fell through, so she used the last of her savings on a Spanish Harlem hotel room. After a few days struggling to find a job, she lit a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and called on her faith to help her get back on her feet. As Ellen was leaving the church she noticed Saks Fifth Avenue across the street and, miraculously, was given an entry-level job working as a design assistant. It was like a plot ripped from a Hollywood film, and her long and winding story grew more cinematic and fantastical throughout the 1960s. From Chapter 6 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“Ellen Stewart took John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous under the umbrella of La MaMa, and she gave them a regular space to rehearse and perform,” recalled Agosto Machado. “They were her ‘babies,’ as she would say, and she always took care of them.” One of Stewart’s most notable babies was Jackie Curtis—born John Curtis Holder Jr.—who was about fourteen when they met in the early 1960s. “Jackie was just a boy when he came to La Mama,” she said. “I thought he was a genius. And he created many beautiful things. Jackie was a wonderful writer. And he said that being a drag queen brought him more fame, but he wished that his work as a playwright would establish him as a very great writer.” By the time Curtis was cast in the John Vaccaro-directed Cock-Strong in 1969, the gender-fluid playwright and performer had already written and staged two Off-Off-Broadway plays. “Ellen really treated Jackie like an honorary child,” said Machado, who appeared in Curtis’s Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned. Stewart generously let Curtis use La MaMa’s rehearsal space during the lead‑up to that show, a downtown hit that secured her status as an underground celebrity. From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Debbie Harry’s campy pre-Blondie group the Stilettoes were right at home performing at Club 82 on a bill with Wayne County. During the early 1950s and 1960s, when it was known as the 82 Club, this Lower East Side venue hosted nightclub revues that attracted A-list stars looking for edgier entertainment. Judy Garland frequented the basement venue and, according to a legendary showbiz rumor, movie star Errol Flynn once unzipped his pants and played the club’s piano with his penis. It had been one of the premier venues for drag queens—who were largely shielded from homophobia behind its closed doors. “I used to go to the 82 Club,” recalled Agosto Machado. “Gray Line Tours used to go down there, and they would advertise female impersonators there with a postcard of the showgirls in costume, which said, ‘Who’s No Lady?’ ” The drag queens who appeared at the 82 Club were relatively traditional—a far cry from the likes of Wayne County and Jackie Curtis, who never bothered passing as “real” women. After Stonewall, gay men no longer felt that they needed to hide behind the closed doors of Mafia-run bars; the crowds at the 82 Club thinned because drag queens could freely camp it up in the streets, and gay culture was also shifting away from a femme aesthetic. “There was a big difference between what had been gay in the fifties,” Tony Zanetta said, “and what gay life was in the late sixties, early seventies. The whole macho man thing emerged. Drag had a special place within gay culture, but after Stonewall it changed. The 82 Club had basically emptied out.” The neighborhood was also deteriorating; the cashier at the nearby corner bodega sat behind an inch of bulletproof Plexiglas, and on one occasion a man was gunned down in front of the 82 Club’s battered steel door. From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Haralambos Monroe “Harry” Koutoukas took a bus from his home in upstate New York to Greenwich Village just as the 1950s came to a close, in search of adventure. “When Koutoukas hit town, he was an Adonis, a Greek youth with abundant energy, personality, and natural wit. He was able to express himself in the vernacular of downtown—being free,” said Agosto Machado, a Chinese-Spanish Christopher Street queen and Zelig-like figure who witnessed the rise of the underground theater and film movements, the 1960s counterculture, gay liberation, and punk rock. Even in the Village, which was bursting with theatrical flourishes, this Greek American cut a striking figure. Entering a coffeehouse, Koutoukas might come swooshing in the door with a large swath of fabric flowing behind him—all while holding a cigarette high, for dramatic effect. “It was sort of grand,” Machado said, “but it wasn’t a pretentious-grand. It was a fun-grand.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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After Grandmother Is in the Strawberry Patch, Harry Koutoukas had another big row with Ellen Stewart. Both had strong personalities, and they clashed several times over the years, culminating in him sending her tumbling down a few stairs—though because this legendary incident had been embellished over the years, who knows exactly what happened. Real life often blended with fantasy, especially when highly theatrical people got involved. The story resonated because it reminded some on the scene of an over-the-top moment from the 1947 film noir classic Kiss of Death, in which Richard Widmark rolled a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs. “I was there the night Harry threw Ellen down the stairs of La MaMa,” playwright Robert Patrick recalled, “and she forgave him. Everybody forgave Harry for everything. He was the most extreme example of what we all were—dropouts, freaks, originals, or ‘gargoyles,’ as he would put it.” Koutoukas finally returned to the La MaMa fold on Christmas day 1975 for a presentation of his play Star Followers in an Ancient Land. Because Agosto Machado was friends with Koutoukas and had known Stewart from La MaMa’s early days in the basement of East Ninth Street, he was asked to help smooth things over. “Ellen was so pleased,” he said, “and Harry was so honored to be back at La MaMa, because it really was important to him.” Machado also performed in Star Followers, as did Koutoukas’s friend Bruce Eyster. “One day I was walking around,” he recalled, “and Harry came up to me and said, ‘You’re going to be in my Christmas show.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really? Well, okay.’ ” Eyster played a Heavenly Body, Machado was one of the Three Wise Men, and Koutoukas once again cast Mary Boylan, who was given lines from the Bible. “Harry, you didn’t write this,” she told him. “Well, no,” Harry replied, “but if you’re going to plagiarize, I believe you should plagiarize from the best.” From Chapter 29 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Harry Koutoukas likely picked up this flair for the dramatic while growing up outside of Binghamton, New York, in the “Magic City” of Endicott. His family ran a restaurant and entertainment establishment that booked “female impersonators,” though he was forbidden to see those shows when he was an adolescent. Undeterred, Koutoukas snuck in to see the outlandish performers (who were a bit taller than ordinary women, with large hands and an exaggerated sense of femininity). This planted a seed in Harry’s mind that a weirder world was within his reach, and through magazines and movies he discovered Greenwich Village. Ahh, Koutoukas thought, now there’s a place I’d like to go. “By the time Koutoukas came to the Village,” recalled Agosto Machado, “things were shifting. There was a ferment of sexual revolution, the beginnings of a youthquake.” Harry Koutoukas, who lived for fifty years at 87 Christopher Street, was one of many men and women who gravitated from other cities and countries to the Village, a catch-all term that included Greenwich Village, the East Village, and other surrounding neighborhoods. From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Being an Off-Off-Broadway playwright and performer certainly did not pay the bills, and Harry Koutoukas never held a real job, but he survived with a little help from his friends—and various patrons that he juggled. “More or less, they were women who had money who needed a walker,” Agosto Machado said. “You know, that term for a gay male who escorts a lady to functions, so she won’t be alone. They really thought he was so unique and unusual and talented.” Koutoukas also wrote many chamber plays that were performed in candlelight in the apartments of wealthy uptown patrons who were dazzled by his wit and wordplay. “Now and then, Yoko Ono might give him a call,” Machado continued, “but it didn’t mean automatically she’s going to help him out, though she often would.” Harry also had a patron, Angela Boone, who ran the restaurant Pennyfeathers near his apartment. After discovering he was a playwright, she set him up at a little round table and would introduce him as the house playwright. “Harry would always come in,” his friend Bruce Eyster recalled, “and he would have all this food and then say, ‘Oh, put it on my bill.’ Until Angela died, he sent me to go over there and say, ‘Harry needs two sandwiches, roast beef.’ And she’d say, ‘Okay,’ and she would make it and send it over.” Despite the speed demons and drug-fueled craziness that nearly killed him, Koutoukas beat the grim odds and lived into his seventies, spending a full half century in a building he called home—with his trusty deceased: return to sender stamp ready when the bills piled up in his mailbox. From Chapter 29 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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After Harry Koutoukas’s apartment caught fire in 1972, actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein wrote a show about his attempt to help clean up the mess, In Search of the Cobra Jewels. Fierstein played the Koutoukas character, mixing real details from the apartment (such as how Koutoukas partitioned his living space by tying together large scarves) with bawdy surrealism. He recited a poem about a lover as he cut a folded piece of paper with scissors—then opened it up to reveal a string of little paper men with penises, holding hands. The Cobra Jewels cast also included Agosto Machado, Ronald Tavel, Harvey Tavel, and the unpredictable Koutoukas himself, who began slicing his wrists with a razor onstage one night. “Take the razor out of Koutoukas’s hand!” people screamed as Ellen Stewart tried to stop him. “Take the razor out of his hand!” Machado recalled, “We all walked offstage, and Koutoukas—who is fabulous—he just said, ‘Oh, are you going to condemn me for getting blood on the stage?’ ” In Michael Smith’s Village Voice review, he reported that “the opening night blood-letting introduced too much reality onto the stage for my taste. I was sickened and horrified.”1 Stewart was also disturbed by the spectacle, and some time after she reminded him, “Harry, I actually saved your life, remember? You were onstage and you slit your wrists and then you started to cut your throat and I stopped you.” The stubborn playwright retorted, “Yes, but I still object to you stopping my performance, for censoring me. But I do thank you.” From Chapter 29 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The street scene on Christopher functioned like an extended family for those who had been rejected by their own relatives, an embracing place where social networks formed. “There was no internet,” Agosto Machado said, “so how do you find out what’s happening? You go out on the street and you can hang out in Sheridan Square, Washington Square Park, and you’d find out more or less what people were doing.” He likened it to street theater, with different people making an entrance—“Hi, girl! What are you doing?”—and putting on a show. Roller-Arena-Skates (also known as Rolla-Reena Skeets) glided around on cobblestone streets while wearing a soiled dress and holding a wand, looking like a shabby Glinda the Good Witch. Another street character named Bambi cruised Christopher Street with his little dog, day and night, until some queens found him frozen to death one winter evening. That night, Lisa Jane Persky huddled on the stoop with her neighbors Rosie and Ernestine as they watched the cops zip Bambi into the body bag. The next day, he was back in his spot sitting on the stoop across the street; it turned out Bambi had awakened in the morgue. “I don’t know who was more scared,” he told Lisa Jane Persky, “me or the guy who heard me scream.” Machado fondly remembered the vibrancy of Sheridan Square and Christopher Street, where people socialized and made connections. “Oh, I’m going to sing in the chorus at the Judson Church,” someone might tell him, “and why don’t you join?” Agosto added, “There was the Judson Church circle merging dance and Happenings, and Caffe Cino and La MaMa, plus other alternative groups, plus street theater. They were just hanging out, and you expressed yourself on the street, developed your own persona, and then figured out your own place in that world. You could reinvent yourself.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“We were raised in an America that hated art, sex, and intellect,” Robert Patrick recalled, “and sex was not the worst offense.” He was beaten up in grade school, junior high school, and high school not for being gay—which he was—but for carrying too many books. “Once we all left the small town to hit the big city, we were ready to explode. There were people at the Cino who were versed in every aspect of history, arts, science. Nobody beat you up for it there.” Patrick surrounded himself with creative, forward-looking people who were smart, friendly, and supportive. “Most of us had never been part of a group where we came from, so it was rather intoxicating to be in one.” Sitting around having coffee, they shared their frustrations and aspirations with each other, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for them to say, “Hey, let’s act this out—let’s put on a show!” Every night at Caffe Cino, Joe Cino walked from the espresso machine to his makeshift stage, rang chimes, and announced, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen, it’s magic time!” When the lights went down, a different reality materialized: “It was the magic and ingenuity of Off-Off-Broadway,” Agosto Machado said. “You had to suspend belief, because you wanted to, and you’re enjoying it. If you didn’t have money, you used your ingenuity. It was so magical, so special. It was a playhouse for yourself and the selective group of people who were seeing this.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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John Vaccaro, Diane di Prima, and their friends also helped Jack Smith with his 1963 film Normal Love, which was shot over the course of three days in Connecticut. It was a sharp contrast from the baroque black-and-white imagery of Flaming Creatures, his previous film. “Normal Love, blazing with gorgeous color, left no holds barred,” di Prima recalled. “So many sequins, lizards, rhinestones, pythons, so much stained glass, makeup, art, flesh, costume jewelry, papier-mâché, spray paint, had never before seduced the filmgoer’s eye.” When Vaccaro formed the Play-House of the Ridiculous in 1965, Smith helped design sets and costumes, which made the shows sparkle and glow. “There was no one person who invented glitter,” Agosto Machado said, “but it was Jack Smith who gave a sense of purpose to it. In the early 1960s, Jack was the first one who used it in a way that made it copyable. The Play-House of the Ridiculous loved to use glitter, and Hibiscus and the Cockettes also loved glitter.” Play-House performer Michael Arian concurred. “John always gave a tip of the hat to Jack Smith,” Arian said. “Jack was the original gay glitter freak, and John always acknowledged that he got a lot of his sensibilities from him.” From Chapter 16 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“Jack was a pure genius,” said Jack Smith’s friend Agosto Machado, “a visionary artist who had the strength and determination to carry out his vision with almost no money. Jack talked about going to the Middle East to shoot, but since he couldn’t afford to, he created that location in tenements or various places where he could create an illusion of that faraway place. You were in another dimension when you were with him because he didn’t have a storyboard. He’d just set up and say, like, ‘Oh, you’re walking through the swamp, and there’s a mysterious creature that’s going to do this, that, and the other.’ ” At first Tony Conrad didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he helped Smith set up one Saturday to film Flaming Creatures on the roof of the defunct Windsor Theater, a tiny movie house on the Lower East Side. It took three hours for everyone to apply makeup and costumes, all while the drug intake spiked. Something very weird is going on here, Conrad thought as he and others began cross-dressing. Geez. If my friends like La Monte could see me now, I would be so embarrassed, because this is like the weirdest shit. “Jack also shot some of the scenes in Prospect Park, which wasn’t as peopled or cleaned up during those years,” Machado said. “You could walk through sections of slummy areas and do a shoot, if you just minded your own business and you did your thing.” Playwright Ronald Tavel, who went on to write scenarios for Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s films, also worked on Flaming Creatures—dropping bits of plaster from a ladder onto the actors during the earthquake scene, among other tasks. From Chapter 10 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Vain Victory’s rehearsals at La MaMa’s practice space in the East Village were scheduled around I Love Lucy reruns, which Curtis watched twice each afternoon. (“I Love Lucy was a staple of Jackie’s life,” said Jayne County, who recalled that she would often act out scenes from the show in the apartment they shared.) These rehearsals started mid-afternoon and would sprawl into the evening—which made it accessible for people like Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner to drop by, along with others. “It was a gathering, and a continuation of an almost party-like atmosphere,” cast member Agosto Machado said. “From there, people could just stroll up to Max’s Kansas City, a little north of Union Square. As they say, ‘Location, location, location.’ Jackie would meet someone at Max’s Kansas City, and invite them, ‘Would you like to be in my play?’ ” Vain Victory morphed considerably as Jackie added and subtracted cast members over the course of the extended six-month rehearsal period. “During that time we departed from the original script,” Machado said, “because Jackie would see something on TV or heard something and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this.’ ” Tomlin recalled, “It was terribly imaginative, connected with all kinds of pop culture references that took on another angle the way Jackie used them.” Sometimes, lines from I Love Lucy would make their way into the play, or dialogue from an old film that Curtis saw on late-night television. “Jackie would put speed in her coffee,” County recalled, “and she’d sit there and write and write—sometimes outrageous things that made no sense at all, and sometimes it would be things from the telephone book, or things from TV Guide. She took a lot from TV Guide, because she loved old movies.” Curtis’s plays were among the first to heavily appropriate from popular culture, a pastiche-heavy style that would become associated with postmodernism (not that she thought of her plays in such highfalutin terms). From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Jackie Curtis was big, not at all femme, and looked like a man in a dress: a little stubble or a beard, torn stockings, trashed dresses, smeared makeup, and plenty of body odor. This tattered look came out of necessity because Curtis was constantly broke, though it was also deliberate—because if a rich patron gave her a brand-new designer dress, she didn’t think twice about shredding it. “They would get rips and things in them,” recalled her friend Jayne County, “and she really didn’t have the money to buy new ones, so she would just continue to wear them and they’d get more and more holes in them. Finally, they were just kind of rags on her legs. They became works of art. Sometimes she would put them together with safety pins, not because she was trying to be cute, but because she was really trying to keep the dress together. It became a style and a fashion, but she was the first person I ever saw to wear that style.” Curtis loved 1930s dresses, which could easily be found in thrift stores or by raiding Slugger Ann’s and Aunt Josie’s closets. One time, when a neighbor passed away, Jackie crawled through the window onto the building ledge and broke into the deceased woman’s apartment, bringing back an entire wardrobe of black Italian dresses, shoes, and accessories. “Jackie was blowing up the idea of gender,” actress Melba LaRose observed. “When he was a boy he liked to look really rough: saddle shoes or other big shoes, vest sweaters like a boy jock.” Agosto Machado recalled, “With Jackie, you never knew what she was going to wear or what she was going to do, but she had a force of personality.” From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Agosto Machado remembered Holly Woodlawn as a very open, childlike, and loving playmate and friend. “One of the things people noted was her vulnerability,” he said. “She didn’t have that protective armor, but Holly was so much fun and so good-spirited.” Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis were sometimes homeless and crashed where they could, making their destitute surroundings glamorous through sheer force of will. Sometimes they were allowed to stay in a place behind Slugger Ann’s, a little studio apartment with crumbling concrete steps that led to the door. Aside from a mattress for Curtis, it was filled with books, photos of movie stars tacked to the walls, and notebooks of Curtis’s writings. “I’m a loner,” Curtis said. “I hate hangouts! But I do haunt old bookshops and music stores, because you never know who or what you might find there.” Despite a very visible exhibitionist streak, Curtis remained fairly private while at home. “Jackie didn’t like to receive anybody if she wasn’t shaved or put together,” Machado recalled, “but for us, we’d all seen each other when we didn’t look our best or had slept over and our beards grew out.” Amid the crumpled bed sheets and pillows that were smeared with makeup, the friends would relax and dish about the previous night’s shenanigans. From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Soon after arriving, Harry Koutoukas befriended a gay coffeehouse proprietor named Joe Cino, who helped spark the underground theater revolution known as Off-Off-Broadway. “Caffe Cino encouraged creativity and no barriers,” Agosto Machado said. “You’d just say you’re a playwright, and then you would put on a play.” This storefront theater was located on Cornelia Street, a block-long side street that connects Bleecker with West Fourth Street and got little foot traffic. Cornelia was one of those charming little Village roads near Washington Square Park that could have easily appeared on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (that iconic album cover was shot on Jones Street, just one block to the north). Coffeehouses proliferated in Greenwich Village because the area had plenty of empty commercial spaces; these establishments were much cheaper to run than bars, which required the proper city licenses and Mafia protection rackets. Caffe Cino had six or eight little tables with wire-back chairs that were com­plemented by a hodgepodge of other furniture found in the street. Its stage was usually set in the center, among the tables, though this arrangement often changed from show to show. In the back of the Cino, to the left, was a counter with an espresso machine and a hallway that led to a tiny dressing room and a toilet. During its early days, the place was lit by Chinese lanterns and other little lights, though Caffe Cino grew more cluttered as time went on. From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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John Vaccaro was alternately described as a sort of gnome with an arched, monkey face, a scary owl with raised eyebrows, and a hunched-over troll. “He was very conscious of himself and his bizarre look,” Mary Woronov said. “He was not a handsome man.” But he had a grand sense of his own abilities as well as a maniacal drive, and that combination meant he was rarely easy on those working with him. “John Vaccaro loved to berate his actors and called them all kinds of names,” Caffe Cino playwright William Hoffman said. “Essentially, he loved them, but he didn’t hesitate to push them. He was really talented, although infuriating, because he could be very perverse.” Penny Arcade said, “I mean, Artaud—the Theatre of Cruelty—had nothing on Vaccaro. There would be a moment where John would, in the middle of the rehearsal, just start picking on somebody and would just torture them. I mean, super-psychological torturing, and the whole room would freeze.” During those maddening rehearsals, Vaccaro might lock his actors in a loft all night long or would scream, “If you make a mistake, DO IT AGAIN”—as in, do the entire play over, even if it was four in the morning. Woronov fondly described the director’s “homicidal” antics: “I say homicidal because whenever an actor was late he would close his eyes and say, ‘I killed him,’ ” she recalled. “Every night he hissed in my ear, ‘Do anything you like to them, I want fear in their eyes.’ ” Despite all the stories of Vaccaro throwing tantrums and locking his performers in a loft until sunrise, those around him remained extremely loyal. “With John Vaccaro,” Agosto Machado said, “no matter how difficult he was, we knew we were working with a great artist. I think he might have been more recognized if he was a little more accommodating, but he would have given up his artistry.” From Chapter 16 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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At the same time that these adventurous playwrights were presenting their work at Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa, an unlikely outlet opened its doors to Village artists of all kinds. “Judson Memorial Church was so pivotal to the foundation of downtown because they were so open to freedom of expression,” said Agosto Machado. “They encouraged expression and let so many people in all the art movements do their thing. They took away the pews. They had Happenings. There was dance, movement, song. Gender preferences did not matter to the church.” For example, Al Carmines, Judson’s openly gay minister (who was also a musician), staged material that could’ve gotten him arrested for obscenity elsewhere. “The painters, the sculptors, the actors, the playwrights,” director Larry Kornfeld said, “everybody at Judson were involved in exploring and extending mediums and the blending of them.” Kornfeld—who saw himself as “a sculptor of space”—was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham’s and John Cage’s spatial and temporal explorations. “Space was being explored by painters who were at the theater, people like Rauschenberg, who did sets for us. People were always at each other’s shows, recitals, performances. They were drinking together, screwing together. There was a vast interchange of information and activity. It was a community, an anarchic community.” From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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All shapes, sizes, genders, ages, and dispositions found a home in the Play-House of the Ridiculous. One kind of person John Vaccaro didn’t want was traditionally trained actors, and instead he recruited people who were creative forces of nature onstage. “Don’t be an ac-TOR,” the director would say, making fun of Method acting. When Ellen Stewart first brought Michael Arian to Vaccaro, he was suspicious because Arian had been to acting school. “John wasn’t sure that people with training could adjust to his style,” he said, “but I did really fast because I liked it. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.” Ruby Lynn Reyner added, “Michael Arian and everybody directed themselves, pretty much. John got people who were creative and didn’t need that kind of direction.” Vaccaro wanted his performers to be over the top, and used to say, “There’s a close‑up on you at all times! Louder, louder! I can’t hear you. Bigger, bigger! The spotlight is on you. SHINE!” Everyone fought to have their face in front, and because all the performers were doing it with energy and gusto it became quite cohesive, even if it was still rough around the edges. “With the Play-House, we were bigger than life all the time,” Agosto Machado said. “What made those shows a hit was that energy level, and all that wonderful glitter and sparkle and the madness of the script.” From Chapter 16 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Angels of Light shows were hallucinatory homages to 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals, a cinematic tap-dancing fantasy world in which Angel Jack and Hibiscus subbed for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Their first show was Studio M, a lovingly produced family affair that was performed on a small semicircular stage that ratcheted up the dazzle factor. For each show they put on, Hibiscus created elaborate storyboards, his sisters joined him onstage, and their mother composed the songs. “I wrote almost all the music for the Angels of Light,” Ann Harris said. “George would say, ‘Oh, I need a sheik scene, with a sheik in it,’ and then I would come up with a song.” The Angels of Light show Gossamer Wings featured a massive storybook whose pages turned, moving the action forward from the Ice Age to the 1970s. Many of their shows dealt with environmental disasters that were occurring with an alarming frequency during that decade. “Who cares if the birds don’t sing as long as the cash box rings?” they sang in “Disposable Everything.” Ironically, these shows indirectly benefitted from the consumer culture–driven economy of abundance, which produced the junk they used for their shows. “You could find plenty of things in New York that were beautiful, beautiful,” Ann Harris recalled. “That’s how people did those shows, with costumes from fabric found on the street.” When the family discovered that a factory was throwing out piles of feathers, for instance, Ann and the kids used them for another one of their productions, Birdie Follies (which featured their friend Agosto Machado). From Chapter 26 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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When the Holy Modal Rounders’ Peter Stampfel arrived on the Lower East Side in 1959, the midwesterner was a bit leery of living in a slum. Is it dangerous? he wondered. Is there trouble? Yes, it could be a bit sketchy, but this was counterbalanced by the incredibly cheap rents. Bibbe Hansen—who lived at 609 East Sixth Street, between Avenues C and D—recalled that it was an extremely poor neighborhood. “It was more about poverty than anything else,” she said. “There were artists living around where I was living, but mostly because we were poor. There are so many important people that were part of the everyday landscape that are now these monumental, awesome giants of alternative culture and experimental art.” Agosto Machado had always found the West Village to be a little expensive, so he mostly lived on the East Side. “Now, we’re talking thirty-, forty-, fifty-, sixty-dollar-a-month apartments,” Agosto Machado said. “That allowed a generation of people to come to New York City and spend, like, three-quarters of their time being an artist and a quarter of their time doing some sort of pickup day work to pay for your rent.” By the mid-1960s, the social and economic dynamics in the neighborhood were shifting—as was the Lower East Side’s name. “The landlords changed the name to the East Village so they could make a little more rent,” recalled Peter Crowley. “That began in the early sixties, and by the mid to late sixties it was like a gold rush.” Richard Meyers was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and landed on the Lower East Side in late 1966; within a few years he had reinvented himself as Richard Hell. As a child, he and his mother had visited his grandmother in the West Village every three or four years, so he already had an impression of the city. “The West Village was—in terms of New York—deceptively quaint and peaceful and beautiful,” Hell said. “It wasn’t until I actually came here that I got exposed to Fourteenth Street and Forty-Second Street and the East Village—the real New York, which is much more squalid than this isolated Village where my grandmother lived.” From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The Dolls first threw rent parties at their downtown loft on 119 Chrystie Street before hitting the DIY concert circuit. With Jackie Curtis as the opening act, they played their first proper show in early 1972 in the Hotel Diplomat. The group also had a short residency at a gay bathhouse, the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler regularly performed with Barry Manilow (who sometimes blended in with the patrons by wearing nothing but a white towel). Underground rock, Off-Off-Broadway, and the cabaret scenes converged in the early 1970s, cross-pollinating each other. Midler, for example, had appeared at La MaMa in Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets before she leveraged her act at the Continental Baths into pop stardom. Roberta Bayley, who later worked the door at CBGB, noted that the Dolls’ glittery, feminine clothes stood in sharp contrast to their masculine swagger. “That’s what was interesting,” Bayley said, “because these real guy-guys were wearing off-the-shoulder blouses and being very confident in their heterosexuality.” The Dolls had several ties to the fashion world; guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, for instance, was a designer who had a successful clothing company called Truth and Soul. “There were lots of people who wore colorful clothes or scarves or what have you,” said Agosto Machado. “It wasn’t unusual to see a more masculine man with a pink scarf, or have a few of their nails painted different colors.” Lisa Jane Persky added, “Growing up in the Village, everybody already dressed like the New York Dolls. And everybody was dressing like that in theater.” From Chapter 27 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Andy Warhol used an Auricon camera for his first sync sound film, Harlot, which was shot in December 1964. Gerard Malanga had been taking Warhol to Wednesday night poetry readings at Café Le Metro, where the writing of Jack Smith’s friend Ronald Tavel caught the artist’s attention. Warhol hired Tavel to write some “scenarios” for Harlot, and they soon began working together on Warhol’s other film projects. These sorts of collaborations happened often because the mimeo poetry zine scene frequently overlapped with the audiences for underground movies; Beat poet and Fugs cofounder Tuli Kupferberg, for example, could be seen selling his own mimeo publications at Mekas’s screening events. Harlot starred drag queen Mario Montez, who had previously appeared in Flaming Creatures and was named after Smith’s favorite 1940s starlet, Maria Montez. Warhol’s film depicts Gerard Malanga in a tuxedo blowing a puff of smoke at Montez, who is suggestively eating bananas. The only audio is Tavel and Billy Name having a conversation off-screen, perversely defeating the point of using a sync sound camera. “Mario maintained a wonderful duality,” said Montez’s friend Agosto Machado. “If you saw him in the neighborhood, you would pass him on the street and he was an attractive Puerto Rican man. But you would not know that he could transform himself into a goddess as Mario Montez, this goddess muse of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol.” He also appeared in several other Warhol films: Banana, Batman/ Dracula, Camp, Chelsea Girls, Lupe, and 1966’s Hedy, the last of which was part of Warhol’s “Hollywood trilogy” (a series of odd biopics that also included Harlot). From Chapter 10 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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St. Mark’s Place was a street that functioned as a major pedestrian thoroughfare to the West Village (it turns into Eighth Street after crossing Third Avenue). The print shop that published the Realist was near Sheridan Square, and Paul Krassner regularly walked there from his loft on Avenue A. “It was just a great feeling to walk along St. Mark’s Place,” he said, “and then Eighth Street to Sheridan Square to deliver stuff to the printer—going back and forth. There was a lot of smoking of marijuana on the streets. It was just a very friendly atmosphere and people would walk along and smile.” Krassner also used to watch the Fugs perform free concerts at the shell stage in Tompkins Square Park, where St. Mark’s Place terminated to the east. Future punk singer Joey Ramone and his younger brother Mickey Leigh (then known as Jeffrey and Mitchel Lee Hyman) occasionally came from Queens to hang out. Off-Off-Broadway performer Agosto Machado would take acid trips with people in that park, where he sometimes slept. “Suburban kids—or ‘weekend hippies,’ that was the new term—populated the area after Bill Graham opened Fillmore East,” Machado said. “That’s when the media and suburban people came and overwhelmed the East Village and Tompkins Square Park. They would say, ‘You are so free. You can live your life the way you want but we can’t.’ They were already branded and enslaved by the ideals of their family, and yet they could admire us, the homeless, who didn’t have anything, because we could do what we want. They thought our struggles were glamorous.” From Chapter 19 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Bars and clubs that catered to gay crowds were subject to periodic police raids up through the end of the 1960s. This harassment intensified in the lead‑up to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when city officials cleaned up the streets to make it seem more family friendly. “You’d have the police clear the sidewalks and the streets,” Agosto Machado said, “so where could you go? Into mafia bars, or after-hour clubs. Conveniently, Stonewall was just down the street from where a lot of people hung out on Christopher Street.” In the years before the 1969 uprising at the famed gay bar, one part of Jim Fouratt’s experiences of being gay was going to those establishments. He was one of the handful of people who witnessed the start of the Stonewall rebellion in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 (many more would join over the next few evenings, and even more would claim to be there after the fact). As he was walking down Christopher Street on his way back from a nightcap at Max’s Kansas City, Fouratt saw a police car parked in front of Stonewall, after which the doors flew open. “Out comes what you would call a bull dyke,” he said. “The nice term of that period was called a ‘passing woman.’ She passed as a man. She was like, Rr-rr-rr, like being as butch as she could be, and the police officer puts her in the car.” (She was arrested for not wearing three pieces of clothing “appropriate to one’s gender,” as was mandated by a New York statute.) About fifty people watched outside the bar as the woman began rocking side to side until the car door popped open. She got out and began throwing her weight against the police cruiser, which nearly tipped over. “There’s a moment—which is, to me, the critical moment—where the crowd screams,” Fouratt recalled. “It’s the moment of, to me, liberation. It is the moment when all of that stuffed-down feeling, all of that oppression that every gay person had ever had, gets released, in that crowd.” The growing crowd began fighting back, with Christopher Street regular Marsha P. Johnson flinging debris at the cops. “It was fun, almost,” Fouratt added, “and the police had no clue what to do because gay people never acted like this before.” From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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 Vain Victory brought in rich people who were trying to “slum it” downtown, sometimes inviting Jackie and the rest of the cast to their fancy uptown residences. Agosto Machado said it was like inviting a sideshow performer to dinner for your friends to gawk at, something that Lily Tomlin also found troubling. “You just felt that someone was bringing them to be amused,” she said, “or be hip or to rub elbows with that culture—but not really take it in or embrace it totally. I just felt that it was kind of exploitative.” “The Ridiculous people—and Jackie, Holly, and Candy—were always getting invited to these big uptown parties,” Tony Zanetta said. “They were kind of like toys of the rich people, these little social freaks.” Despite the patronizing attitudes, Machado and his friends made the most of it. “It was such a novelty for many of us, being invited uptown. You could tell they were from different classes because they had nice teeth and could afford dentists. People who were like us, we didn’t have manicures.” The last time Robert Patrick saw Candy Darling, he was cruising around Times Square with friends in a baby-blue Thunderbird convertible when they saw her on the sidewalk looking distraught. “We stopped and said, ‘What’s wrong, Candy?’ She said, ‘Well, I’m supposed to go to this party and I get $500 for going to a party now, but my ride hasn’t come.’ ” When they offered to take Candy, she hopped in the back of the convertible with the grace and poise of a beauty pageant winner. “She sat up on the backseat,” Patrick said, “and waved at people like Miss America as we drove her to a party.” From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Jackie Curtis wrote the underground hit Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned. “La MaMa to me was an acknowledgment that we kind of made it,” recalled Tony Zanetta. “It was very respectable. So if Jackie Curtis did Vain Victory there, it was taken seriously, even though it was a total mess.” The show featured Curtis alongside a star-studded downtown cast that included Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Taylor Mead, Mario Montez, and Agosto Machado, among many others. Vain Victory was Machado’s first Off-Off-Broadway show, even though he had been hanging around the scene throughout the 1960s. “It never occurred to me that I would cross the footlights, but with the encouragement of Jackie Curtis I suddenly was on the other side, and people were so welcoming,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why, because I don’t sing, dance, or act—and yet it was like, ‘Be part of our show!’ ” Eric Emerson and his band the Magic Tramps played Vain Victory’s backing music, and the glitter-slathered frontman had his own solo number as a naked cowboy, wearing little more than chaps. “There was glitter all over his pubic hair and what have you,” Machado said. “He was not self-conscious about nudity because he had done that in Warhol films.” Darling performed as a wheelchair-bound mermaid who was sad about having a tail but no legs (Woodlawn took that role after Darling left Vain Victory, accidentally rolling over the edge of the stage and into the audience during her first night as the mermaid). From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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After Vain Victory sold out at La MaMa, it moved to the much larger WPA Theatre on the Bowery and ran a total of sixty-six performances. “Jackie Curtis’s beloved aunt—Josephine Preston, who helped raise her—joined the cast of Vain Victory at the WPA Theatre,” Agosto Machado recalled. “She used to dance in the dance halls of Times Square, and when she joined Vain Victory, she said, ‘Oh, what you kids are doing, you should have seen what we did back in my day!’ And she showed off some of her old moves. She really had personality.” Only Machado and Curtis performed in every show, until it finally petered out. “There was only a few of us left by the end of Vain Victory,” Machado said, “just six of us onstage.” From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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