Uncle Charlie’s was practically a Yuppie hangout, with men donning Armani suits at after-work happy hours, and evening crowds with hordes of men dressed in tight polo shirts, blue jeans and sockless Topsiders. We were no longer hiding, let alone apologizing for who we were. UCDT was the first city gay bar with street front, floor-to-ceiling windows, evolved beyond the nondescript and shadowed entrances that had trademarked a history of gay establishments. Now there’s a beer and burger joint in its place. Maybe that’s true, but it’s a flimsy excuse.īack when Greenwich Village was the center of the gay social world, I regulared a bar called Uncle Charlies’ Downtown.
I write this somewhat defensively: I would never allow myself to get into these situations now. On the way, some adventures were explored where I behaved as if I was indestructible. But there was an inherited desire, at least in my case, to find the lifeline of a partner to grow old with.
Being a gay man in my twenties during that era, there was no considering marriage or having children. Sometime in the early 1980’s, before being razed by the ticking bomb of AIDS bleeding my community, I had a number of black-eye rendezvous while on the search for romantic compatibility.
