![]() ![]() ![]() I don’t know his name, but already he’s in there with my hottest fetishes, and I know we belong together in some way. Odder still, I’m carrying a photo of him in my wallet, clipped from the SoHo Weekly News. ![]() Mark’s Church-In-The-Bowery, drifting up the aisle in a white wool cassock, with a shredded paperback of the novel Forever Amber strapped open across his forehead like an Orthodox Jew’s tefillin, its pages fluttering. I’d clocked the Apparition a month earlier at a Tibetan evening at St. He is on the arm of a mustachioed cowboy in black leather, and he’s performing this silent movie pantomime: sidle, shimmy, eyelash flutter, ogle. labels, and a pair of black evening pumps. He’s wearing a headdress of half-burnt wooden matches crowned by a souvenir matador and bull, a gown made of golden Seagram’s V.O. The Apparition is a bearded young man, lunar-white except for the lavender-and-pink eye makeup. The Easter Parade is winding down, when I spot Him. I thought it was my business to be solitary, a watcher, that that was what writers were. There was some damage in me that meant I found other people’s company exhausting. I did a lot of things by myself as a kid. Marks, to Truffaut movies at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, and to the Anthology Film Archives to see films by Jack Smith, who’d been a friend of my mother’s. I used to go to the movies a lot on my own-to Rogers and Astaire double bills at Theater 80 St. (The Paris, cater-corner to the Plaza Hotel, had a side entrance you could sneak through if the movie was R-rated.) I’m cutting across Fifth Avenue at 59th, a pale baby-faced adolescent dressed in a sailor’s peacoat and white canvas Keds, on my way home from seeing Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty at the Paris. My own Easter’s been-so far-pretty quiet. Rockefeller walking his family to church-to carnival kitsch: couples wearing Easter bonnets the size of grand pianos, Latina triplets in hot-pink lace tap-dancing outside St Patrick’s. By the 70s, the Easter Parade’s gone from being a society ritual-John D. ![]() It’s Easter Sunday, Fifth Avenue.The year is 1975. It’s taken me 40-odd years to be able to begin thinking about this friendship, which is also a story about Aids, genderqueer art, and a city that not so long ago offered possibilities of wild, unsurveilled freedom and experimentation. Now both he and they are being rediscovered, and the first museum show devoted to Stephen Varble’s work is opening in New York in September this year. He became a religious recluse, got AIDS, and died later he was forgotten because his art was so militantly ephemeral, and because most of the photographers who documented his performances also died of AIDS and were forgotten. I went away to college, and stopped answering Stephen’s letters. He called me “Nenna Fiction.” Fernanda Eberstadt and Stephen Varble. We charmed, wounded, infuriated each other, squabbled and made up, but even in our most exasperated moments, we each had this weird faith in our friendship as a kind of artistic endeavor: I interviewed Stephen about his work, recorded in my diary every conversation, every meeting we wrote poems about each other Stephen commissioned a photographer friend to make a film of the two of us, of which only two stills survive. For almost three years, we explored the seedier undersides of the city he introduced me to cocaine and kissing and to John Waters’ star Divine, and I provided him, grudgingly, with something approaching home. I was in the ninth grade at Brearley, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, and at that point Stephen was really the only boy I knew. When I was 14 years old and an aspiring writer, my best friend was a 28-year-old drag queen and performance artist named Stephen Varble. This is a story about New York in the 1970s. ![]()
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