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Interlude: Aniruth

              





INTERLUDE : ANIRUTH                                 

                                                                                                             

         Once we were established at the Other Side and our money got a little looser, I started taking the bus down to New York on our off nights.   This was just a few years after the Gay revolt at the Stonewall Tavern, and in the middle of the Rainbow Revolution, and so a new dance scene was created.  It was a combination of gay, black, and hippy dance styles mixing in free yet elegant ways.  The venues were not in the disco palaces of the future but in warehouses, the top floors of half-defunct businesses, and in the gay bathhouses, which were just starting to open as combination dance, diner, and romance rooms (Bette Midler and Barry Manilow got their start in one). 

            Some of the most fun dancing I ever had was in the third floor of an old wooden building in the East Village. People were mixed – all races, all cultures – and the result a combination of free but brilliantly patterned dance styles: I remember one black gentleman who developed a whole routine based on five steps sideways to the right;then five to the left; while his body twirled and spun in ever-varying patterns. 

            I was looking good  back in 1970 – 25 years old, muscular but definitely gay,  and from then until the mid-1980s I was hot.  I had no trouble finding beautiful partners for dancing or loving, and was always proud and high energy when I went into the dance halls and the baths.   Then one night I saw Aniruth, and was knocked out by  his gorgeous looks and amazing dance skills.  The attraction was mutual, and we soon left the baths for the small apartment he shared with his sister on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

            Aniruth was the beautiful young scion of an aristocratic Thai family, who after trying life as a Buddhist monk, moved to New York with his sister.  His sister had been in love with a Thai rock guitarist who idolized Jimi Hendrix, and when Hendrix died, the Thai guitarist died soon after.  Every night Aniruth’s sister would burn incense in front of a picture of Hendrix, while a record of his played and she prayed.   And when she finished, then Aniruth would always play ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’’ from Janis Joplin’s Pearl album – homage to two rock stars who died just months apart.    

            We were falling more and more in love when Aniruth put the question to me – would I still love him if he had sex change surgery?  Since it was just a year since I had left Carole, as the gay side of my bisexuality became more and more dominant, I was sure that this would not work.  Even though we were both in love, how long that would last as the gay side of my sexuality was increasing, while Aniruth wanted to be completely heterosexual after his operation.    

           Aniruth asked me if I could still be his lover if he had the sex change.  I had to honesty say probably not.  Aniruth went into his bedroom to cry briefly, then came out and we shared a sad goodbye.   When I returned to Boston Aniruth sent me some goodbye notes in beautiful calligraphy and sentiment – when I re-read them for this article, I really missed him/her – but I guess I was destined to wind up with Dr. Baldoz (if I had made the choice to stay with Aniruth in Manhattan, I might have been dead by now).   

            When I went back to Boston I wrote a piece for Aniruth, for his dancing, for those romantic mysterious nights in his Manhattan apartment – and for that wonderful early 70s urban dancing,   

            “Aniruth” is certainly one of the best pieces I have ever composed – and its total rejection by the composition teacher at the music college decided me to leave school when Frosty’s band went on an extended road trip meant had to choose one or the other. 

            A Grateful Dead spin-off band (New Riders of the Purple Sage) jammed on it when they played one night at the Fillmore East, and I have performed it in most of my performances over the last 40 years.   I put two versions on my Youtube site:  the first is a straight-ahead jazz fusion piece recorded at the Seattle ‘Boats Afloat” festival in 2004; the second I made in 2022 when I experimented with multiple synthesizer overdubbing recorded over an acoustic jazz version I had made back in Los Angeles in the 1980s.  The first version has some fine soloing by Brad Buck on guitar and Ben Roseth on saxophone.   The second tries to recreate the wild anything goes style of our early 1970s New York dancing, which do you prefer?  

 

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvjxQ9_u0rU – Seattle, c. 2004  

 

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFahWHexB4 – Los Angeles, 1980s; Mendez, 2022 

 

 

 

 

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