GLR January-February 2023

the art school with my sketchbook. At the time, I thought I might move to Chicago and join an antiwar SDS chapter, but fortunately that didn’t pan out. Having successfully defeated the plans of the US Army, I was on a mission to help other poten tial victims do the same. A year or so later, in the spring of 1968, on my second visit to Chicago, I was accompanied by my army deserter boyfriend Brian, whose streetwise Jersey City machismo and daunting beauty set the artist’s pens and pencils scribbling. Jimmy suc cessfully sweet-talked the ex-paratrooper into posing butt naked for an impromptu drawing session. Brian flexed and Jimmy sketched and I stood guard. All our friends knew that the FBI was looking to arrest Brian and me for any reason they could find. Later that year, Brian finally made it safely to Montréal and free dom. I joined him the following summer in western Canada, where I’ve been ever since. I lost touch with Jimmy Wright for a few decades since we were at opposite edges of the continent. § L ET ME ATTEMPT a rough sketch of the highly motivated, corn fed Kentuckian Jimmy Wright as I knew him in the ’60s and early ’70s. From a distance, the first thing you’d notice was this skinny, geeky, not-tall, pale young farm boy. If your gaydar was engaged, it would be registering an undeniable he’s-one-of-us vibe. If a laugh happened to erupt, you’d call it a cackle. His nasal Kentucky twang was textbook, and from what my ears tell me, it is ongoing. Back in the day, it appeared that every body liked Jimmy, and he returned the favor. This sociable trait would eventually serve him well in the rough-and-tumble art world of New York City in the ’70s. At grad school at Southern Illinois University in 1970, Jimmy lost virtually all of his early work in a disastrous studio fire. This hideous setback would have obliterated a less confident mortal, but Jimmy kept his focus and kept producing art, and he received his MFA. He also managed to accomplish one more vitally nec essary goal: successfully securing that all-important 4-F draft ex emption by out-maneuvering the government thugs who wanted to ship him off to Vietnam to murder people and/or die. After graduation Jimmy was awarded an SAIC (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) travel fellowship, which would take him overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and into Nepal and India. Works inspired by that epic trek would be shown later at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago. On the way east from the Windy City, Jimmy had stopped off in Man hattan, hooked up with a friend who’d moved there, and got in vited to go out dancing at the Stonewall Inn. This was before the bar became world famous and when the cops were still busting people for being queer. Jimmy had already experienced the club life and gritty incognito countercultural scenes in Chicago and the generic police-state, anti-gay oppression, but the bar culture he got to sample during that first encounter with New York was an eye-opener. Things appeared to be different in New York. Aspiring artists and writers who flock from everywhere to New York are looking for whatever it is (fame and fortune?). Only a few will find it. They mostly find each other. They clus ter together in tiny rentals, circulate socially, work temporary gigs, make art or write in their spare time (if any), and mostly chase rainbows. Jimmy’s first apartment in New York wasn’t in a doorman

Jimmy Wright. Anvil #1 , 1975. Whitney Museum.

building and it wasn’t in the West Village or the Upper East Side. Not one of his various roommates had timeshares on Fire Island or met friends after work in ritzy Russian bars. During the Arab oil embargo and the financial crisis of the early ’70s, it was a hand-to-mouth existence. Young people were pulling up stakes and leaving in droves, and hanging in there was a chal lenge that required grit and tenacity. Way-too-close contact with the foibles and domestic habits of roommates one barely knew could keep the tension cranked up and put a damper on one’s ability to find the time to write or paint. Nevertheless, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Jimmy spent those first two years had its perks. There were cheap delis and bakeries nearby, and there was access to trains rolling to venues in the City: thrift shops and knockoff stores with bar gains, Szechuan wontons to sample, and graffiti art everywhere you looked. In fact, Jimmy told me that teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat lived with his father and two sisters in an apartment across the street. Then there was the post-Stonewall underground queer nightlife of Manhattan. In their fictional and autobiographical works, queer writers like John Rechy, Harold Norse, Samuel R. Delaney, and Edmund White celebrated those fleeting joys and excesses. There are no photos documenting the nightly delibera tions at the Anvil, the Mine Shaft, the docks, or “the trucks.” Cameras were never allowed in those venues, and had a voyeur been foolhardy enough to ignite a flashbulb in the pitch dark in terior of a truck, he would have been throttled. Those 70s incog nito orgy venues were not unlike the speakeasies of Prohibition times, the Harlem “rent parties” of the Depression, or the ubiq uitous whorehouses that have always been around. You had to know where to find them, when they were happening, and what password would gain you access. The fabulists and chroniclers wrote down their various takes on that fleeting scene, but those narratives left much untold. The single most revealing insider glimpses into that emancipated

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