People have moved primarily west to California, but Californians also move to New York. My family moved from New York and New Jersey to the Bay Area, in the early 1950’s, for better weather and a different life. Dad took a teaching job at San Jose State, and we settled in Los Gatos, a town at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains, west of San Jose and about 50 miles south of San Francisco. It was an attractive, comfortable and relatively affordable place with a nice older downtown, old houses, apartments, and newer subdivisions.
The suburban Bay Area was very different from the East and distinct from Los Angeles. Indoor and outdoor living were integrated, with relaxed social interaction, simpler and fresher eating, sports and exercise: a new way of living. Northern Californians were liberal, open, and low-key with a largely ahistorical and unstructured mindset. They had come from across the country and abroad, assimilating into a relatively homogeneous, classless and egalitarian life that downplayed religious and ethnic differences. In California they let go of the past to blend in, were free to become whomever they wanted to be, join whatever church they wanted to join, to be a hippie or a Buddhist. The transition was not easy—in the 1960’s, there were protests, violence and conflict. But the Bay Area was open minded, forward looking, tolerant.
The weather and the landscape were appealing, so most young people stayed. They went to college, enjoyed the weather, the beach, and a low key and not overtly competitive life. That changed later. Now it is wildly expensive and increasingly overheated.
This is a long introduction and background to my move to New York. My sister also moved; she had a family and a teaching career in Eastern Canada. We agree that our California was too homogenous, not quite interesting enough. Our parents came from elsewhere; we had lived abroad and known other places. We wanted more edge and stimulation and were looking to push ourselves a bit more or a bit differently—at least that is how we viewed it at the time.
My move to New York City was back and forth. I moved to Europe and then east and to New York for schools, then back to my parents’ and to San Francisco. Then I returned to New York again; I hadn’t finished with it. I was young and wasn’t interested in openness and ease, which at the time I took for granted. I wanted a life that was more urbane and demanding, more sophisticated, more tied to history, and more anonymous since I was gay.
Manhattan offered all of these. It encouraged me to push myself in my work and to be myself in ways that seemed impossible at home. New York had a greater reverence for education, for excellence, a greater respect for working, for knowing interesting people, for urbanity, for worldliness, for cosmopolitanism. It still offers these, I think, although the values of my generation have been replaced by more broadly based, obvious, definitions of accomplishment and success.
For gay men, New York offered a real life. Media attention focused on the Village and Chelsea, on our sexual and cultural freedom, hedonism or diseases, but in fact we were able to explore these things behind the protective “ordinary” advantages of college and graduate school degrees, theater, museums and music (for some, I was more of a reader), restaurants, and friends. We could get good jobs, where we succeeded by fitting in and working hard or smart. No one cared what we did outside the office. And so we pursued lovers and boyfriends, gay political and social events (summers at the beach, for some, trips to Europe for me), apartments and furniture, country-houses, travel.
Friends from San Francisco or childhood eventually followed. I began to see them, or their friends, in New York, relatively early. Some were taking annual trips for shows and museums, for energy and density, for interesting shopping and food, sometimes for business. Some bought New York apartments. Sometimes their children came for school, careers and work. But most of those in my generation kept the Bay Area as their base.
They are not really New Yorkers. Their outlook is too flexible, too egalitarian, except perhaps their respect for financial success. The Californian, more even than other Americans, has an open imprint and becomes whatever he or she wants to become. There are no fixed constraints from the past; background, cultural, and educational differences are not fundamental. At least that is how it was for us. September 18, 2023
A bad day and a good one.
Yesterday, for the second time since I returned to New York, I watched a fight on the subway. The first one was in July, on the number 1 train at Grand Central, when a man sitting next to me shouted and struck the passenger facing him as he was leaving the train. The passenger had eyed him disapprovingly as he shouted in the subway car. Today, it was a fist fight, next to me and near the door, again on the #1 train at 72nd Street. This one lasted through several punches, inside and on the platform outside the train, one pushing the other to the ground. One was angry at the way that the other was looking at him.
The police were on top of it, in both cases there in a minute or two, but it was out of control. I would like to have asked, “Did he abuse your mother, your girlfriend or your wife? Steal all your money? Why do you care how he looks at you?” Instead I shouted “stop!”, urging an end to it, wanting the subway to move away as soon as possible. I have been away, and the craziness and resentment in New York look worse than before. These are not the 1970’s or 80’s, but I rarely saw this hostility when I lived here all the time.
Still, New York is a city with warm and friendly people. Last night I was invited to a Rosh Hashanah dinner, by “M” a friend from my morning swim group at Columbia. She is an amazing swimmer and also my first observant, Orthodox, friend. It is surprising that I have not had others, since I live in New York, but we live in bubbles. Yes, like all Jews, I am descended from the Orthodox, but the last were my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, even earlier on my father’s. My religious education ended when I was 13, and for much of my life, I held onto a Jewish identity while continuing and preferring to assimilate.
“M” has no need for that. She and her husband balance observance and openness; they have not given up one for the other. They live in their informed practice and belief and yet they know, work, and interact with many different kinds of people. And so I was at her holiday dinner where another guest’s vegan preference was entirely accommodated. M’s family is open minded, accomplished, conversational and warm. Yet her grandchildren will be going to Jewish day schools, and adult family members follow and participate in Hebrew reading and prayers before and after the meal.
This was not my life, nor the life of my parents, certainly not in the Bay Area. As a gay man, it was not a choice that I could easily have made. We have taken other directions, done and learned other things, and I am very grateful for the freedom I had and for the many places and people I have known and met. But in my immediate family a lot has been forgotten. I am single, and my sister intermarried; our Judaism may end in the next generation. A little more of “M” might have been good for us. September 16, 2023
A New York apartment
There is nothing like a New York apartment. This I write with great feeling, since I spent my entire working life in residential real estate, and have always loved beautiful, useable things, furniture, apartments and houses.
My apartment is a safe and quiet place. An expression of my individuality, tastes and relationships, perhaps excessively so since I never married. When I seek to define my identity, the apartment comes with it. It is where I established myself and reinforced my values, as something separate from the competitive and sometimes diminishing demands of money and work. When I felt at times that I was not terribly attractive, brilliant or significant, I withdrew to my apartment, where I was and remain, a prince if not a king.
For more than twenty years, my apartment was also my office. My desk sits at a large window in the living room, looking out on trees and townhouses that line the street. I spent thousands of hours there, at my laptop and on the phone, or reading on the couch or in a chair. It is a relatively quiet and light-filled place, my ideal spot for writing, thinking, moping, musing. . .
Manhattan apartments are expensive, although I bought mine many years ago. In addition to mortgage costs, monthly maintenance charges–that is my share of the building’s real estate taxes, debt and services–are about $1,500, a significant number, particularly in retirement. But housing is a critical good, and a nice apartment is an advantage in a big city, where the trains and streets are crowded and sandwiches now cost $10 to $16. When I was younger, going out was my preference, and I was commonly in restaurants three times a week. Now I go to overcrowded and overpriced grocery stores but have the peace and pleasure of a small but well organized kitchen, where I can prepare my own meals or share them with friends.
I am extremely lucky to have a very special apartment, renovated by my old boyfriend who helped me finish it even after we split up. (He is now married and lives upstairs.)
He is a talented designer, quite good with his head and his hands, and he transformed an old crummy place into something unusually beautiful, with a corner living room, dining room, small kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and entry hall. There is a lot of closet space and very good book shelves, and it faces outwards, into trees.
Now retired, I am rarely there. This summer I was upstate, at a house in the country. Most of the time I am in Europe, exploring family and other history and interests. I have wanted another home, in Vienna or Paris, or somewhere else, but I’m unable to replace my New York apartment. It’s too much work and too much money, too much history, too many friends in the building and in town, too much love. I cannot replace it. So I’ve kept it, turning up from time to time to touch base with home, thinking perhaps that I’ll be there as a very old man, if I get that far, remembering the past and looking into the trees. September 25, 2023
Homosexuality and my lovers
Homosexuality is now widely tolerated, but that was less so forty years ago.
New York and San Francisco were magnets for gay boys and men; there were perhaps others, but these were the major havens and the cities I knew well. I lived in both but eventually chose New York because, as I have written, it was the city where I could explore my sexual and romantic life in anonymity. I did not live in a gay neighborhood or dress differently. I had a professional career, like everyone else. I benefited from being far away from home, but nevertheless in the city where I was born.
Of course there were more constraints to these freedoms than I admitted at that time. I gave up the dream of working in the Foreign Service for more than one reason, but I knew that it did not work for openly gay men. I turned down an offer from Corning Glass in upstate New York, because I could not imagine one or two years as an assistant controller at a factory in Kentucky. I chose residential real estate because houses were a primary interest—and because it was a friendly business to gay men. All of these choices were made, even before I came out.
I did not have romantic relationships with women but otherwise lived my life as most of us did, with both gay and straight friends and a wide variety of clients. No one at work was interested in my sexual preference. It was not a topic of conversation, and I discretely sheltered it behind the conventional expectations of privilege.
But in the evenings, and on the weekends, I went out. I moved to Manhattan, or rather I returned to it in 1985, in my 30’s, and only then was I sexually and romantically active. I had, I thought, broken through all my previous attractions to unavailable men, yet most of the men I met were never really available. But the attractions were powerful and the pursuits tantalizingly close.
In the years before the internet, we met in bars; my favorite was on the Upper West Side where I lived, on Columbus Avenue at 81st Street. I went frequently in the evenings to look for men, for eye contact, an expression of sexual interest, never approaching a man who had not returned my gaze. I met many men this way, and was frequently deflected or rejected.
It was on Columbus Avenue that I met “S”, another westerner, from Seattle. He was a thin, fashionable architect, interesting, talented, intense, hardworking, full of feelings. We moved in together, bought an apartment. Then after five years, we split; he found other boyfriends, and I became endlessly single. I have never entirely let go of him—I love him too much. And then years later at another bar, in the East 50’s, I met “K”, a tall lanky black man, elusive, tied to his family and his church, honest and loving, a saint. We were never a couple, but we were lovers for nearly ten years. “K” was compelling, real, his heart, his skin; I trusted him. White men were washed out and vapid. But we couldn’t communicate. Neither of us wanted the other enough; the differences in everything were too great. But I loved him. September 2023
My Years at Princeton
I cannot write about New York without revisiting my years at Princeton, since Princeton, had so much to do with how I lived here. A prestige education is about learning, but it also signaled intelligence and intellectual training. It had social advantages, conferring some privilege even without much money. This was most certainly the case in New York where status matters.
In California, my parents were unusual in emphasizing a rather strict morality and education. By education they meant reading, some knowledge of our religion and the arts, and a sensitivity to ethics and the importance of politics and history, since our father spoke of these frequently and read extensively. I resisted listening to him, unfortunately in retrospect, but do not doubt his impact. At a very early age, my mother took us to the library, and I devoured books, mostly history and became a serious student. College was expected and not just any college. My sister and I were encouraged to work and reach for the best schools possible, and we did. Eventually, in 1973, I was accepted to Princeton as a junior year transfer student, then a fairly remarkable accomplishment, although not unique in my parents’ circle.
A family emphasis on education was not unusual in Jewish families, and in addition there was my father’s academic career and his liberalism. Knowledge and contribution were supreme in his mind. With these values he had a great deal of influence on my mother and on his children. He did not tell me—he knew but did not fully understand what it meant—that Princeton was not only a school that educated, but also a place that formed and socialized an elite, including many children of the existing elite. This elite was conscious of its history (if it had one), its wealth (if it had any) and its position, and it expected interesting careers and some command of things (although I never really ran much of anything). It was impressive and sometimes socially and intellectually sophisticated. These were goals to reach for, and I reached, but sophistication is a limited accomplishment, and New Yorkers valued other goals. October 2023
Working in New York
This is about my work in New York, since I am no authority on the work of others. My work was not a career, surprisingly since I was seemingly prepared for one, more a discipline, a function of my interests and concerns. It gave me, eventually, safety and independence, some authority but limited success, but for many years I did not care or understand this.
After college, I worked briefly, then entered Columbia Business School, not because I was interested in business, although I thought of international business, but because I felt I needed another degree and had resisted my father’s encouragement to go to law school. Law school was a conventional ambition, I thought. Academia was something that I wanted to avoid—too sheltered for me, I thought. Choosing business was a rebellion, but only against my parents. I did not see how limited and conventional it could be.
Only when I graduated did I see how poor the fit was. I left business school without a job, turned down the one job that was offered to me, and moved back to my parents’ house in California. Eventually I chose residential real estate, because housing personally interested me, whereas money as a commodity didn’t interest me much. I started as a real estate broker in San Francisco, in a friendly and civilized market, and then after five reasonably successful years, moved again to Manhattan, which was larger and much more competitive.
New York was the big deal. I wasn’t done with it. San Francisco was small—everybody knew everybody. I wanted scale and anonymity. I had bigger ambitions, and so I returned, and then after a few years was back on track. Since I was a reader and a writer, I focused on appraisal and market analysis in Manhattan. It was a specialty field, catering to the needs of a small number of very wealthy clients, but I became one of the few who was very good at it. I focused on lengthy detailed reports, used by attorneys in dispute resolution and litigation support, and I was able to see and write about markets and interesting and beautiful things. I developed the independence that I wanted and believed that I was doing something for my clients. But I served a very narrow and status-and-money-oriented world; I never had the courage or the ability to engage in topics or issues of broader importance. October 1, 2023
Museums, Theater, Medical Appointments and People
New York is a city of theater, and museums, art, music and great restaurants, and I rarely go. I occasionally meet friends for an exhibit or a play, but it has typically been at their suggestion. I am not one that follows these things.
How can it be that I have lived for so many years in a major cultural center and taken so little advantage of it? As a child, I saw so much with my parents in Asia, where we lived, and in Europe, museums and palaces, temples and churches. I was less motivated to see these as an adult. My biggest interest was domestic architecture, and I was able to see so a lot of it in my work. Otherwise, I enjoyed being at home, cooking (later in life), reading and being with people. I enjoy talking, hearing stories and sharing mine. People are what makes a city great for me, and New York is filled with interesting people, backgrounds, problems and personalities.
While I am a Californian, I have lived in New York since 1985, longer than anywhere else. My mother was a refugee and an immigrant, but I am also a fourth generation New Yorker, with great grandparents on both sides, here before World War I. I don’t see the past around me—New York is not like that—but I’m aware that it is here.
I am in New York for much of the month of September. It is an old man’s visit—I am 70—with medical appointments: that is cataract surgeries, ophthalmology appointments, the optician, the cardiologist, an artery scan at Mt. Sinai, and a colonoscopy. My body is being checked and rebuilt, hopefully for its remaining twenty years. I’ve been told to lose more weight and cut back on sugars. I am willing to work at it, not so much to live longer as to maintain my quality of life. There is a vanity in it and a continued desire to live, even as I feel the weakening.
But there has been much more to this visit. I was away most of this past year and so have been seeing people, old friends, neighbors, and cousins. I’ve had guests for brunch and dinner, have seen or will visit older friends, and will be at a funeral this weekend. It is the people I know that hold me here.
But for anyone who wants to know about the most interesting exhibits and the best plays or restaurants, I am not a good source.
October 1, 2023
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