The Barnaby Goodge Incident

My friend Louis Rispoli sent me this reminiscence of a Gay Pride March the other day, and after reading it I  felt compelled to share it here:

When I had just come back to New York from Chapel Hill I immediately got involved in gay politics and started going to gay rights rallies and meetings and the like.  But I did not perceive myself to be someone who carried a sign.  I went to the marches and marched alongside others carrying signs, but never carried one myself. 

Then in 1977, when Anita Bryant helped topple the Dade County gay rights ordinance, there was an increase of energy in the community as it prepared for the annual march. Everybody felt it.  I decided I would make a sign.  I thought and thought and thought.  I finally came up with a design:  against a background of painted bricks I made a perfect Punnett's Square where the top headings were M and F and the side headings were also were M and F and the combinations therefore were MM, MF, MF, and FF.  Underneath that I wrote: "It's so simple."  Which I thought was all too elegant.  And I spent the night painting it and glueing it to a cardboard pole.  And was so proud of myself.  On Gay Pride Day, I emerged from my building with my sign held high.  But didn't get far.

On the steps, I encountered a young actor activist I knew, with the improbable name of Barnaby Goodge.  He looked at my sign, flew into an incredible rage, yanked it from my hands, tore it to shreds, threw it on the floor, and stomped and kicked at it as if it were an alien that had to be smashed to smithereens, screaming and shouting at me all the while.  I mean foam from the mouth.

It took a moment or two for me to realize what had happened--I had been paralyzed with astonishment from the sheer brutality of the attack, physical and verbal.  And that's when I replayed the tape of his rant in my head, and heard him saying "I hate you fucking intellectuals.  So fucking smart with your sign.  Who the fuck is going to care about that .  Nobody. Except maybe a few more of your schoolboy buddies.  Get the fuck out of my sight.  Next time, carry a sign that says 'Gas Anita.'  That means something."  And he stomped off. 

After a few days--my feelings deeply hurt besides my beautiful hand-painted sign ruined and never seen--I decided he was absolutely right. I WAS too interested in being perceived clever.  It's what I had been taught to want my whole life from well-intentioned people who lived their lives in books and through books.  But activism--not the armchair or discursive sort but the real sort-- involves provoking change by strong actions.  (I would argue good art does too.)  In the end, as in all things, I saw the Barnaby
Goodge incident as a lesson I needed to know. 

In my life and in my art--all the poems I've written in all the years since I was a kid--I attempt to say something I mean or feel strongly.   I don't' fake organisms or feign transports (Virgil Thomson's criticism of Leonard Bernstein as a conductor).

All the same, I'm still beset even at this late stage in my life by too deep an admiration for stylistic flourish or any elegance, but at least I try use these to create some effect achieved through directness which can't be achieved without it.  An imperative compellingness to exist.  I believe in art that is so informed, and when I'm feeling I need to be opinionated, disdain art that is not.  I especially disdain empty intellectualism divorced from lived life.  A gilded fake is still just a fake.  And I want to reserve my admiration for the real thing.  In all so literal a way.

I took the photo above that very year in front of the New York Public Library at 40th street and 5th Avenue as I marched by in the pride parade. I think that man's message was better than Goodge's "Gas Anita," but I can't disagree with the point of the story.

And as for the name Barnaby Goodge, as near as I can tell it was the name of a 16th Century English scholar. So that actor who took that obscure name for memorability at casting calls actually was doing the same thing he accused Lou of doing. So 30 years later, take that B. Goodge!