Show Notes
Here’s a transcript of the video: When I was a teenager, my best friend was a guy named Eddie Russell. My parents didn’t approve of him, and I always assumed that was because he was a Yankee. He’d come from elsewhere and had lived in Miami, so he was very suspect. But I didn’t fully understand until my mother pulled me aside one day and said,“I think you should hang out less with your friend Eddie… because he’s a little bit sissy, so people might get the wrong idea.” This is a theme in the South. People are always worried that somebody’s going to get the wrong idea about something. In Eddie’s case, I didn’t see the sissy part. I saw him as simply another boy who liked movies the way I did and loved to talk about them. Because of this Southern mentality, my mother never stopped worrying about how I appeared to the world. I had bad skin at the time, so she was always on a hunt for blackheads. She would creep up on me sometimes and say, “Let me get this one right here,” which was hideously embarrassing to me. And she knew that I walked funny—like a duck with my feet turned out. It’s the way I still walk, by the way. So she would constantly say, “Straight—turn your feet straight.” I remember going up to the mountains of Virginia once with her, and she had a chance to be with me all the time then. She would practically follow me as I walked and give me that instruction:“Straight. Go straight.” I read a Dear Abby article when I was sixteen where Abby said that a parent should be concerned if their sixteen-year-old child has not kissed a member of the opposite sex. So I made that my project. One evening I took a girl I knew just slightly—a sixteen-year-old girl—out to Roy’s Drive-In, and we kissed a bit. When I’d done it, I felt that I had completed a merit badge. It was an assignment that had been given to me by Abby, and I had come through with flying colors, because I could no longer be suspected of being gay. I was certain at the time that I was mentally ill, because I had read somewhere that homosexuality was a mental illness. I knew I needed to tell my parents if I was to be cured of this terrible thing. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I decided that the way to save myself from shame would be to become paralyzed from the waist down, so I couldn’t act on those desires. It’s hard to say this, really. I can’t believe that I ever thought that, but I did. I don’t know whether I even considered ways that I could become paralyzed that weren’t too bad—in a minor car accident, for instance. Also, if I became paralyzed, there wouldn’t be any expectations from my future wife that I was bound to have. I would have an excuse for not performing. The afternoon I realized that I was beyond saving, I took my grandmother—Mimi—to her beauty parlor to get her hair done. It was in the Old Carolina Hotel, which had a newsstand in the lobby. When I walked in there, I saw this magazine that leapt out at me. It had a man on the cover who was clearly there for me and me alone. I felt like he wanted me. It wasn’t like your standard bodybuilding magazine or anything else. This was a man who was—well, I thought—very desirable. He was sitting behind satin sheets in bed and giving me a look. Well, I didn’t have the nerve to pick up the magazine, which is ironic since the guy who ran the newsstand was a blind man. But I even worried that his other senses might be heightened because of his blindness. He might be able to hear where I had walked. I was completely paranoid about the whole thing, so I left it alone. The magazine was called Demigods, and that name was emblazoned in my head so much that it lasted for years. I would remember the name of that magazine. When I went back out to my car in the hot summer afternoon—a little red Volkswagen, my first car—a song came on the radio called “Walk on the Wild Side.” It wasn’t the Lou Reed version. It was another one used in connection with the movie of that name. It starred Jane Fonda, and she played a
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I encourage you to watch the video, as there are many more photos and archival footage. Plus, it’s always wonderful to hear Armistead tell his stories in his own voice. For those of you who prefer the written version, here’s a transcript of the video. (Note: This is a long post and may be truncated by some email providers.)When I ended my first tour of duty, came home from Naples and Malta, I finally lost my virginity. It’s such a quaint, old-fashioned way to put it, but I had sex with a man for the first time, or something approaching sex. It happened on the Battery in Charleston, on the spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. I’ve spoken about that on another episode, something called, appropriately enough, “The Summer of ’69.” It felt monumental to me at the time. I guess it still does. Until you give yourself permission to enjoy your sexuality, your life hasn’t started. In spite of that roll in the hay, I was still very much a frightened young conservative trying to please my father. And I think you can see something of that in this letter that I wrote home. I wrote this from the Grand Harbor in Valletta, Malta actually: “I have just finished reading The Caine Mutiny. The ensign who tells the story is RPS custodian and a comm officer, so I completely identified with his confusion. It is the most exciting book I have read in years, and yet, it depressed me too. I feel as if I have discovered the Second World War several decades late. All of the things that you used to tell me about Daddy, all of the stories about the YMS-195 and the South Pacific, seem so human and real now. What depresses me is the realization that this war of mine is pretty much of a fraud as wars go. I don’t mean that there isn’t a communist threat—I just mean that I don’t feel that I’m doing much about it. I have the completely uncharacteristic urge to be shot at, or maybe just frightened a little. There were certain times last year at OCS when I felt a very solid sort of contentment. I felt that way because I was in a cold, barren place far away from home and my future was as uncertain as it had ever been in my life. I guess that sounds pretty crazy, but I felt good about what I was doing. I used to take walks in the snow, in the evening during liberty hours, and look at the old temporary frame buildings and the drill field and the icy bay and feel comfortably desolate. I actually enjoyed the deprivation, because there was a direction to it and a funny sense of doing something that had been done before. So now I have to come to my war and it is all about “can-do” tenders and trumped-up church services and obligatory cocktail parties. I don’t pretend to hate all of it, but I won’t ever brag about it. Back in Charleston, the news came that Captain Tidd had been assigned to work at the Navy headquarters in Saigon. And so I wrote him and asked him if I could come be with him. I liked him that much. I trusted him that much. And I guess I kind of figured he wouldn’t get me killed. So I put in the request. And it wasn’t too long before I shipped out. “Shipped out” is probably the worst term for it. We left on a military charter on Braniff Airlines with stewardesses in hot pink Pucci dresses. What I remember about it was that a bunch of guys at Travis Air Force Base, before we took off, got s*******d. The problem with that was that at the same time there were people coming back from Vietnam who were filling everyone’s ears with how gruesome it had been. I remember them saying, “You f*****g have no f*****g idea, man. You have no idea.” And that rattled everybody and made them get drunker. And they were sobering up on this sixteen-hour flight to Saigon. When we finally did set down in Saigon, the stewardesses had this melodramatic way of saying, “We hope we’ll be able to take all of you back a year from now,” which is really a morbid thing to say because obviously some of those people might not be taken back a year later. The morbid tone continu
When I was 24 years old, I joined the Navy. It was during the Vietnam War, so part of the effort was to see that I wasn’t going to be on shore in a combat situation. I went to Officer Candidate School up in Newport, Rhode Island. The very first part of the tour was in Charleston, South Carolina, which was hot as hell and miserable. But then we heard with great excitement that the destroyer tender I was on, the USS Everglades, was going to Naples and Malta. A destroyer tender takes care of other destroyers. That’s why it’s called that. And so it means you’re mostly in port at the time. There was a wonderful opportunity to see Europe, and I jumped at it. I didn’t have much choice because that’s where we were going, but I was very excited about the fact that we were going to be going to these European ports. In Naples, when I first went ashore, it was to Santa Lucia, which is a famous fleshpot. The smell of pizza, charred pizza, was in the air. And sex—for me, I mean, you could sense that there was sex there. I was in the closet. I hadn’t had sex with anybody. So when we went ashore, some guy came up to me and said, “Hey, Joe, you want to buy flying cock and balls?” I was afraid that he’d clocked me, that he knew that I would love a flying cock and balls. But it turned out to be this little icon, a little thing you wore around your neck that was a cock and balls and had wings. The sailors loved them. My fellow sailors loved these things and bought them in great abundance. But I felt like having one around my neck would be like having a scarlet letter around my neck. It was not something I wanted to advertise. There were also guys there at Santa Lucia advertising “exhibeesh,” which was a sexual show, basically, between a man and a woman, sometimes between a woman and a donkey. I never went to see them. I can only imagine what that was like. But again, it was sex all around me, but nothing I could partake in. I heard about them from my men when they returned to the ship late at night, and I could feel the Chianti breeze of their breath on my face as they told me about their exploits. Sometimes somebody would grab my knee for emphasis, and that sent me around the world, really. During that time, I wrote a lot of letters home. I was a pretty well-behaved young man. Everybody in my family got letters, including my grandmother. My mother saved them all, and they’re now in my archives at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. There’s an excerpt I want to read to you about one night I went ashore. It reveals what I liked to tell my parents and what I liked to hide from my parents. And the reason this is in all caps is that I had recently absconded with the communications typewriter, which types in all caps, so I don’t want you to think I’ve turned into Donald Trump. Cliff has been gone for about five days. The last night we frequented one of the white hat bars for the sheer laughs of it. This particular one was called the Cactus Club (pronounced “Cockatoose Cloob” by the lovelies who hang around the joint, à la Long Branch, to drum up trade). Two of these adorables plopped their pasta-stuffed buttocks in our laps as soon as we sat down. Dialogue: Lovely: Hey Joe, buy me drink. Me: I am very poor. I no can buy drink. Lovely: You reech. You offeece. Buy me drink. Me: They are too expensive. Lovely: Negats, Joe. Buy me drink. Me: Try somebody else. I am very poor. Lovely: Hey, Joe, I love you, no boolsheet! That was sort of the theme of Naples: “I love you, no boolsheet.” I am going to put in for Christmas leave now, so that I’ll have a stronger chance of getting off. I will get either Christmas or New Years off. That is, ten days or so in December or ten days in January. Since most of the officers live in Charleston and can go home every evening anyway, it seems only right and proper that I should get Christmas off. That remains to be seen I guess. I devour all the news from home. I miss you all so much and I love you, no boolsheet. Teddy Somet
Here’s a transcript of the video: When I signed up for Officer Candidate School for the Navy in the late ’60s, it’s a good thing that my mother filled out the form and not me, because it asked if I had had any “homosexual tendencies”. It was on the list of maladies that you needed to recognize before they let you in. So I didn’t have to lie about that, but I knew in my heart what was going on with me, who I was attracted to, all of that. It was a big dark secret that I hadn’t acted on at that point, but I knew what I wanted to act on. And fortunately, the Navy provided more inspiration in that regard, if not actual action on my part. I had been asked to appear on a television show, I think, to talk about the Navy. I don’t remember what. It was something in Charleston. It was my first time on TV, and I made every effort to make sure that I didn’t come off like a big sissy. I’m sure I did when I look back on it, but I put a little swagger in my step in order to pass. It’s hard to think about it now. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anybody to not know I was gay, but I didn’t at that point. I wrote a number of letters home, which my mother saved religiously. And those letters are now in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley as part of my archives. I’m very pleased that it’s there, by the way. I’d like to read you an excerpt from a letter that I wrote home to my family just a few days after I had reported on board the USS Everglades. I’d already made a joke about the ship being named after a swamp. The letter really captures what my mood was at that time. Here we go. Dear Mummie and Daddy, The last three days have been a real jolt to my system. For a while I felt so depressed and inept and frightened that I was eleven years old and back at Camp Seagull again, wondering what humiliation my uncoordination had in store for me that day. The captain, Tidd (it rhymes with Kidd ) nodded gravely when I told him of my lack of training in crypto and communications procedures and all I could see was Wyatt Taylor filling out a little green card reading… Wyatt Taylor was the big guy at camp. “Needs to improve ability to play various types of ball games.” That’s very much true about me then and now. I have no interest in various types of ball games. I was so awkward at camp, and I felt the same way really on board the Everglades. It was 600 men, and it was just a big factory. It was in the stinky heart of North Charleston. It was pretty miserable, actually. There were mosquitoes, and it was a very hard time for me because I felt like I was not where I belonged at all. I was constantly getting lost. I couldn’t even find my own room sometimes. And it was embarrassing for an officer to ask an enlisted man if he knows the way to his room — especially if you call it a room. It was a cabin. I was just really a fish out of water, and Charleston didn’t make it easier on me. The ship itself was a destroyer tender that held 600 men. Its function was to sit in port and take care of other ships, other destroyers. That only got interesting when you went ashore, which is what we did eventually. But on board the ship, the captain sort of embraced me. I think he knew I was a doofus and wanted to help out. And he let me write the ship’s newsletter, which I named The Tenderloin, as in Destroyer Tender: Choice Cuts on the Chopping Block. I spent way too much time picking on the executive officer, who was very unpopular, a little martinet of a man. And I’m a little ashamed of that now when I think about it. I think he must have needed some friends, and he didn’t have any. I was a communications officer, which meant that I was in charge of the signal flags and the radio and a lot of other things that I had no clue about whatsoever. I soon learned that enlisted men do all the work on one of these big ships, and officers have to pretend that they are, so that’s what I did. I had something called a Cosmic Top Secret clearance, if you can believe that, which meant
Here’s a transcript of the video: Well, we owe you a bit of an apology, I think, because we haven’t been on here for a while. There are reasons for that, and I’ll explain some of them later, but we had a great time in France. Zeke had a great time in France. We couldn’t take the Eurostar because they have this ridiculous rule about dogs not travelling on the Eurostar. So we took a ferry and had him with us every inch of the way, and he loved it. He loved the stimulation of it. We loved having him around. It was great. It’s amazing when you have a dog and you can take them on adventures with you. It makes all the difference. I know we caught up with you in that wonderful medieval village of Sarlat, maybe our favourite place on the whole trip. Then we went on to Nice and Marseille, but we filmed less and less at that point because it was just so friggin’ hot. It was pretty unbearable. That’s really the reason we didn’t do more shooting, because it was just so f***ing hot. The last day we were in Paris, it was 102. I’ve never heard of such a thing in Paris, and it was unbearable. Anybody who is a Republican who still believes that global warming is a fantasy should talk to us—or anybody who lives in Europe. England is having a heatwave like it’s never seen before. So it was nice to be back, though. We stayed in the house. We kept the windows closed. The other reason that we’ve taken so long to get anything done is that I had cataract surgery. I’d had it before I actually met Chris, 22 years ago. So it must have been 23 or 24 years ago that I had cataract surgery. I was really impressed by what a minor operation it felt like and how well it improved my eyesight. It just gave me 20/20 vision suddenly. So I was expecting such a miracle this time. It’s been pretty great, I have to say. This eye is incredible. I still need surgery done on this eye, but I went to the NHS and, as usual, had a wonderful experience. They had to process a lot of people through there the day I was there, and a lot of them were having cataract surgery, I suppose. They were all sweet folks, and we kind of bonded in the waiting room. Chris was a real champ about all of this because he’s been putting drops in my eyes—I don’t know, what is it, six or seven times a day? Chris: Thirteen times a day. Thirteen times a day. And that’s what must be done until you go back for the next appointment. It has improved my eyesight considerably, even just operating with this eye. It’s amazing. Suddenly, I was seeing clarity that I hadn’t seen for a long time. So that’s a little miracle, and I’m happy for it. And I’m happy we have the NHS. If I had this operation in the States, it would have cost me $13,000, something like that. And it’s free, of course, under the NHS. The attention they pay you is really very gratifying and thorough. So things are looking up for me in that way. I can actually see things now. I’ve noticed details that I haven’t noticed in recent years because it kind of creeps up on you when you have a cataract. It becomes foggier in ways that you can’t really define, and it’s only when that’s lifted that you really feel the difference. So I’m very grateful for that, and I’m so grateful for the NHS once again. I hope that I’m not grateful to them many times more, but they’re there to take care of you when you need it. And that’s made a difference in my life. So anyway, it’s wonderful to be back. We really do enjoy making these videos. We get a lot of fun out of it. And again, I apologise that it’s been so long, because we know that you’d like to keep up on a regular basis, and we’re going to try to do that for you. Next time, we plan to do some stuff on my time in the Navy in Vietnam. We’ve had requests about that, oddly enough, so I’ve got a few stories to tell you about that, and I hope you enjoy them. Anyway, thank you for coming along. Thank you for sticking with us. We’ll be back, and we’ll have plenty to say. So, lots of love. Bye-bye. correction: Armis
Here’s a transcript of the video: My dear old friend David Hockney—we just lost him, and we wanted to find a way to celebrate his life. It seemed that we were already in the perfect place for it: in the South of France, beside a swimming pool. It’s as if his ghost is here. I knew David Hockney for many years because my friend Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy introduced me to him. One of the first things they said was, “Oh, you’ve got to meet David.” Part of that was about our shared early queerness, but they also knew that I would like the man he was. He was like a child in many ways. He had a wonderful childlike passion about the world, about art in general, and he loved to share it. Whenever we went over to his house, he had some new stunt, some new gimmick—most of which was lost on me. It was there that I saw him experimenting with all sorts of technology: fax machines and other things I didn’t even understand. But he had this wonderful energy that made him want to share everything with the world. It was also there that he took me on what he called the “Wagner Drive.” It took you through Santa Monica Canyon and out to the Pacific Coast Highway. The entire route was timed to the music of Wagner. Every twist and turn in the road was dictated by Wagner’s music. I was terrified most of the time. He would wheel around one corner and you’d end up—I don’t know where. It was utterly terrifying. But it was thrilling too, of course. Another memorable occasion was going to his house for a Hogmanay celebration—the Scottish New Year. Vincent Price and his wife, Coral Browne, were there. They were dear friends of David’s. Vincent once told David that Coral was out of town for the week and wondered if David had any recommendations for good pornography. David told him, “Catalina is the way to go,” and recommended a particular title he enjoyed called The Young and the Hung. I think I remember that one, actually. That became Vincent’s entertainment while his wife was away. Vincent was gay, by the way. Just listen to his old movies and you’ll hear that voice. He was also one of the sweetest men I’d ever met—so kind. That evening at Hogmanay, I found myself standing next to him, and he reached out and held my hand because he was old and quite feeble and needed someone to steady him while the pipers were going by. So I gladly held the hand of this horror-movie legend as the pipers passed. I don’t know why it spoke to me so deeply at the time, but there was something moving about holding the hand of this very spooky man while the year was changing. I was thrilled. I really enjoyed it. David was an activist in the truest sense of the word. Some things really bugged him, and he spoke out about them. When he was in art school, I believe, he was openly gay and had a photograph of some famous pop star on the wall of his locker. And he continued living openly for the rest of his life. I wasn’t very happy with his stance on smoking, which was that he was all for it. But it wasn’t my place to tell him otherwise. We posed once with a sign that said, “Thank you for pot smoking,” because that was one thing we could both agree on. We both loved weed. David was his own man. He believed what he believed. Sometimes he could hold forth rather angrily about cigarette smoking restrictions, saying that his homosexuality was less of a violation in California than his cigarette smoking. But anyway, I knew David for over four decades, and he was always such a kind person and so much fun. He shared everything with his friends. On one of my first visits to London years ago, he let us stay in his house in West London, where I could walk to Earl’s Court. He didn’t think twice about it. He simply told people we were coming, and that was that. There are many other examples of his generosity I could mention, but those are the ones that stick in my mind most strongly. I loved him as a human being. I don’t want to claim him, because the world wants to claim