MEETING MICHAEL GULLAGE

                                            

Michael Gullage

 CH.4A - MEETING MICHAEL GULLAGE

 Once it was clear that Pavlov's Dogs was going to be the house band for a while at the Other Side, the reigning queens of the club had a discussion about which band member they would like to enjoy.  Everyone wanted Frosty, but only Joey P. had the nerve to try and pursue him, since everyone knew that he was straight. Joey was the classic young blonde fem:  rich, curly blonde hair, thick pink lips, a muscular body but with a thin layer of fat keeping it smooth and soft.  All in all, the most lushly feminine of the group while at the same time soft-spoken and demure - not like the screaming queens which some were.  Joey was the only one with the chance of getting a straight guy to pay a brief visit to the ‘other side’, but he failed with Frosty.  

            The rest of the band was too straight to be interesting, except for Lee the out-front gay.  And Lee was too intellectual - "but I'll grab him,' Michael Gullage said. "I always liked those intellectual boys."    

            Mickey (aka Michael) had a pretty big IQ himself.   He found himself hanging with intellectual types ever since high school, when he and the class 'reading nerd' hid behind the same big rock when fleeing the beatings to be handed out to 'fags and freaks' by the main gang of straight school bullies.  Most of the time, though, Mickey had no one to talk to.  For two years his only companion was a duck who swam in the same pond Mickey liked to swim in. For the rest of his life Mickey refused to eat duck. “That would be cannibalism!” he would say.

 

INTERLUDE - DEAD GAY BOYS (AND GIRLS) OF THE SEVENTIES

 

            Except for a couple of people, all of the gay boys I had met in the 1970s were dead ten years later. In the 1980s AIDS killed many, but before that the main causes of death were malnutrition, bad or no health care, or being beaten to death by straight teenagers.  I had a liking for young working-class queens, and these were the ones who really got it in the neck.   (Gays from wealthier homes usually died from alcoholism).

            I kept meeting late teen queens in San Francisco who had been thrown out of their homes, before graduating high school, had no job training, and no means of support other than prostitution, with the inevitable result of disease and death. Many might have survived with just standard home care, but they were barred from their homes for fear of bringing disgrace on the family with their gay or effeminate mannerisms.

            One teenage queen, by the time I had taken him from San Francisco back to my Berkeley home for a date, was clearly too sick for any type of romantic play.   He was from Philadelphia, and said he had been thrown out of the house a couple of years earlier because his effeminacy made the family look bad to the neighbors.  He gave me his home phone number, and I called to beg them to take him back to get some decent medical care and food.  His mother answered, very nervous when I told her I was calling about her son.   “Oh no,”, she said, that California sunshine is just what he needs,” “But he is very sick and coughing,” I started to say, when she hung up on me.   He was dead two weeks later.

            This type of family ostracism was no limited to whites.  Many young black queens found death on the streets.   Terry, a brilliant young waiter whom my originals combo met in the Los Angeles coffees shop where we worked, died of pneumonia a week after coming down with it. The Los Angeles hospital for the poor and uninsured was a joke. Terry should have been given a couple of days of bed rest and a lot of medicine at least, but was given a prescription for some standard drug that he could not afford to buy.  My combo had loved him and respected his criticism, and after he died wrote a memorial piece for him ‘Terry;’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxLg5Dihp0) 

            It was the more good-looking or effeminate gays who were the targets of the beatings.  In Boston in the early 1970s around one or two gays a year were murdered – again, not much of a racial difference in this intolerance:  two white lesbians who made the mistake of walking home late night through a black district had lighter fluid poured on them and were set on fire.  Most of the beatings came from the Boston Irish, though.   One kid was beaten and then drowned in a cesspool.  

            Another was beaten so badly that, although still alive, he had to be hospitalized.   I visited him there a couple of weeks before I was to move from Boston.   He was a small, thin, boy, but had been beaten so badly around the head that it was swollen to the size of a large pumpkin  -almost surreal to see-, that small skinny body with a HUGE head around two feet across!.  He barely looked human, with this huge round pumpkin planted on his stick-thin body,

            I was made aware of this street danger my second night in Boston.  After a rehearsal with Frosty, I was walking down the street with a gay friend I had just met – neither one of us dressed at all ‘fem’ – when from a group of young men from the other side of the street came a shout “Hey, they’re faggots!’ and we had to do some fast running to escape them.  I learned to be always alert and to run fast.                                              

 

 

We lived together off and on for ten years after Frosty married us.  Sometimes Michael would leave to live with friends in Provincetown or, later, in Hollywood.  But he would always return, often in time to save me with the rent money he got from his work as a dishwasher or takeout worker at a place like Chicken Out or McDonald’s, and once by extracting me from a circle of occult musicians who were heavily into amphetamines and whisking me off to his apartment in Provincetown.   And he almost always showed up at my gigs with Frosty.  From 1971 to 1976, our relationship went through continuous cycles of romance, break up. Mike moves out, then either Mike has to move back because he ran out of money, or Mike had to rescue me and moved back to our Beacon Hill apartment to help me with the rent or to save me from getting involved with some of the more evil groups in the Boston scene.    Then I would move to his new shared apartment in Boston or Provincetown.   (One of these P’town trips inspired my large-scale free jam with the Ben Petrucci group. “Cranberry Jam” = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAC6WtYx6s )

 

                        Michael had been the social leader of his classes in elementary school.  Always full of energy, always ready to start a song or a dancing march with his classmates, everything was fine until puberty came and the awareness of sexuality – and of how taboo gay sexuality was.   Michael fell suddenly from social leader to social outcast.   Aside from his elder brother, a tough football player (who later became an even tougher cop), Mike had no family support, and lived in virtual isolation until he dropped out of school when he was 16, and lived on the streets or in crash pads with fellow gay outcasts, who became close friends due to their undergoing the same social pressure.

            Mike was very intelligent and full of energy.   He was the leader of his social groups, blasting out Streisand and Motown on the record player (this was before CDs) or shouting out barbed witticisms at other people there. Also, he would suggest going to any parties he knew of. Mickey was usually the leader of a small group of gays, lesbians, and ‘fag hags’ (straight women attracted to gay men) that partied together and went on trips together.   This little group met first at my old band apartment, then in our basement and rooftop apartments described in the next section.           

            One of the most interesting trips we took was a midnight drive to the Singing Sands. This is a small section of beach in Manchester, Massachusetts, around an hour’s drive from Boston. This quarter-mile stretch of beach has the rare quality of producing a whistling, humming tone if you shuffle through the sand (normal walking produces just a barking sound).  Sliding our feet through the sands and hearing the different whistles was inspiring, especially as I was even more cannibalized than usual.   It was a magical night, so the next day I wrote a song about it, dedicated to Mickey and to Debussy, whose Preludes I was practicing at the time.  I recorded it 7 years later in LA, as one of the first Creation City home recordings (a duo, with Leigh Garner on flute and myself on piano).

            The Singing Sands - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_It4rhVPlo  

(see Appendix 1 in the back of the book)            

            The other piece inspired by Mickey was more personal.  Our favorite moments were lying together after sex, with one of us giving the other a slow, soft back scratching.  I recorded “Scratch My Back” several times – luckily the best version survived the ravages of time intact.   This version was recorded several years after Mike died in 2001, in Seattle, again a trio, but this was just piano, bass, and drums. Greg Korkowski on bass and Larry Rock on congas combined to give a slow, erotic beat.   I came up with words for the ending but no other  lyrics. If you want to try singing the ending, you can hear where these words go:  “Come on baby, lie down next to me and scratch my back.

      Scratch My Back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjhJjz5ZPU