THE LOWER MANHATTAN DORMITORY EFFECT
A Memoir of 1979 New York in Photographs and Lyric Prose Poetry
By George Haas, Essays by Vincent Virga, Linda Yablonsky, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jessica Rath
I am releasing my new book, The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, A Memoir of 1979 New York in Photographs and Lyric Prose Poetry with Essays by Vincent Virga, Linda Yablonsky, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jessica Rath on October 14, 2020 to commemorate the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Ten years after the Stonewall Riots, after Harvey Milk’s assassination, after many failed attempts, the scatterings of local LGBTQQI organizations shift consciousness, and come together for a coordinated, single issue demand for justice, for the most basic common decency.
Forty-one years ago, myself and three cohorts (if you read the book, not that “four of us”) got into a car and drove to Washington, D.C. for the first national gay rights demonstration in our nation’s history; also in mine. (I want to say, “We have made so much progress since then.” Then, I look out the window and we seem to be retrenching….)
As we approached Baltimore, the freeway became more and more crowded with buses heading to the march. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be in a private car, all the way until we got to Washington, and parking took two hours and a week’s pay, and there was no place to pee as far as the eye could see. Doing the “I can’t hold it very much longer” dance, I finally prevailed (read: begged), and one of the bus drivers to let me use the bathroom on the bus. (After that, I always took the bus to away demonstrations.)
I got used to demonstrating. Many of us have. Quite by accident, in the spring of 1965, running for the bus home across and up Elgin Road, through Oldberg Park, around the corner onto Sherman Avenue, from a music lesson in what is now the Music Administration Building on the Northwestern University campus (I played the tuba; I began with the flute, but after my father listened to my inability-to-form-my-lips-properly practice, decided my efforts were not worth the twelve dollar rental fee, and there was a scholarship for the rental fee for the tuba…I do not have good stories of childhood, so there will be the alternative in this book) I ran into my ex-girlfriend (don’t ask), Melanie Lohman and her father, Bill, in the crowd of a local-sized Civil Rights demonstration lapping downtown Evanston, Illinois. They said in unison, I remember this perfectly clearly, “Get in here, George.” Showing up home hours late, my mother, who on numerous occasions, in all seriousness and in a joking manner, says, “I am significantly to the right of Attila the Hun,” looks askance at my exuberant description of marching for racial justice (who knew you could do that). I am thinking, she is thinking, “What a petulant, ungrateful, disturbed, little child I have.” (Reviewing in my mind’s eye, The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, I may not have made much progress.)
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, is a recollection of downtown life in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflected from here…2020. In memoriam for my younger brother, Raoul Kevin, and for the young women and men who died from AIDS, from suicide, from heroin, from sex. It is a description of the downtown art scene, which at that time comingled with a vibrant club scene. It is gay. It is dyslexic. It is a portrait of a time in photographs of a group of friends, most of whom did not survive the period. It is a portrait of myself recovering from a childhood of sadistic abuse, a childhood and adolescence of drug and alcohol addiction, from Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is intended to be irreverent. To be funny (hopefully); infused with Buddhist philosophy. To be beautiful. An exact depiction of then from now.
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect
A Memoir of 1979 New York in Photographs and Lyric Prose Poetry
By George Haas
Essays by Vincent Virga, Linda Yablonsky, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and Jessica Rath
Copyright 2020
416 pages
ISBN 978-1-7334587-0-2
Published by Mettagroup