© 1990 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
Big Bad Bitch
Twenty something years ago Hollywood marketed a motion picture with the slogan, "the movie with something to offend everyone" (I'm referring, dear cinĂ©aste, to The Loved One). I now present the homosexual subculture's writer-ly analogue to that—a misanthrope with the charming, if not Polish-American name of T. R. Witomski.
I've known T. R. since I was crazy enough to edit a gay newspaper (a publication where everyone was crazy). Being crazy enough to feel "normal" brought a certain satisfaction if you were gay and alive in 1981 A.D., and one of the craziest scribes I met then was a curmudgeon, about my age (twentysomething), nicknamed to all his many churlish friends as "T. R."
Now, T. R. was no ordinary lunatic - he was a crackpot with a jeweler's eye for the absurd, the unspeakable, the erotically in[s]ane. A pornographer who loved opera, a blue collar Polak at home in the halls of Bloomingdale's and the Metropolitan Opera, T. R. was nobody's fool, and to read him was to take a whirligig ride through the outer rim of the homophile set.
Just as classical music has its Victor Borge (or P.D.Q. Bach) and cinema has its John Waters, it is well and good that gay journalism cultivates geniuses like T. R. Witomski - deranged wits who incinerate every aspect of "gay life, sparing no group, person, or trend as the object of playful scrutiny, offending all readers with his hilarious sarcasm."
I am grateful that Berkeley's Celestial Arts has brought into print Kvetch ($7.95/softcover), a conspectus of T. R. Witomski's best reveries on subjects like cruising the opera, the sanity of insanity, why ex-lovers are indispensable, and other, essential topics of A-Gay (and PC-Gay) cogitation. Our sick minds met recently, and the following passages record our divination (much as Saint Paul did in his letters to the Thessalonians):
Rich Grzesiak (RG): Why are you such a kvetch? Do you prefer being labeled a "kvetch" as opposed to "bitch"? Why the semantic of "kvetch" here?
T.R. Witomski (TR): Darling, you've been in the scribbling game long enough to realize that when an editor says, "I have a brilliant idea," you reply, "Oh, wow, what a brilliant idea!" Basically, that's how the title of Kvetch originated. But even the lowliest dyke in Toledo can be a bitch; it takes centuries at gay bars and a word processor to really kvetch.
RG: What is it about opera that makes it so popular among certain gay men?
TR: Opera is like a drag show, only more so. Gay men have pinned their hopes of integrating into mainstream society on promoting aesthetics. So it's not surprising that gay men are drawn to opera, certainly the grandest of the arts. Also, gay men are cultists, fond of their special tastes. Whatever else opera is, it's not ordinary. If you think of yourself as a member of the aesthetic elite (and what gay man doesn't?), where else do you go but to the opera?
RG: In a kinder gentler society, wouldn't civilized men turn on to more meditative, quieter music than the type composed by Strauss, Wagner, and Verdi?
TR: "More meditative, quieter music"? Like what? That New Age crap? The sounds of whales farting? Animal mating calls in the Amazon rain forest? That "Ave Maria" from Verdi's Otello should be meditative enough for everyone.
RG: Why are so many opera queens also heavily into leather sex?
TR: Why are so many of the straight men who go to Madonna's concerts into fucking pussy? The relationship between being into opera and being into S&M has long been speculated on. It makes for good copy, but, then again, all general statements are false. Some gay opera buffs like S&M; others don't. Many S&M'ers dislike opera. It shouldn't be surprising that if you have one special taste, you're likely to have another.
RG: Why is the life of a gay writer so similar to the Life of a Gay Masochist?
TR: I read once somewhere that sexual masochism is essentially a waiting game. As anyone who's ever tried to get paid from a publisher of gay material knows, so's writing.
RG: Why does T. R. Witomski offend so many people - writers Ethan Mordden and Felice Picano, lesbian-feminists, gay publishers and the like?
TR: I'm really a pussy cat. But if you can't take a joke made at your expense, you shouldn't be out there trying to get attention drawn to yourself or your cause. I didn't make Andrea Dworkin go on The Phil Donahue Show or make Felice Picano publish his dreadful books, but once they did so, they were fair game. The typical Johnny Carson monologue makes fun of George Bush, Dan Quayle, Vanna White, whoever's in the public eye. I joke about Dykes on Bykes (sic), ACT-UP, and George Stambolian. Same bar, different barstool.
RG: Why is writing of the type found in Kvetch so hard to find in the gay press these days? Is it a matter of editors and publishers being uninterested in alienating readers, or readers who are uninterested in being tantalized?
TR: "Light" writing is all over the place. Every gay paper I see has some sort of a humor column. At these prices, editors and publishers will go for damn near anything.
RG: I guess I asked you that last question because I've endured far too many bitter, politically correct gay editors whose attitude is a)we're all better off dead, and b)don't ever make a joke about our politics, or esteem gay anything unless it's politically related - otherwise, you're a bad person. Moving right along, do you find sex overrated?
TR: No.
RG: Really! Perhaps for you, passion is an effective substitute. Why do you go into conniptions whenever the names of Fran Lebowitz or 200 or so other people are mentioned?
TR: I like Fran Lebowitz very much. Your sources have misled you. My pet hate varies from day to day. Yesterday, I was on a rampage over dentists. Today, I'm back to being incredibly pissed off at Bettie Gershman of Knights Press. Tomorrow, who knows? The Post, my bank, former Drummer editor Tim Barrus, Burroughs-Wellcome.
RG: Complete the following sentences. "If I had only one live to live, I'd live as
TR: a very cute, very brainless twinkie. Intelligence is overrated."
RG: "If I ever became a contestant on Queen for A Day my story would be one of
TR: torment over having to think up answers to such questions."
RG: "I think I'd be ecstatic for a century if I had a chance to have sex with
TR: Mel Gibson (the answer of every loyal American)."
RG: "Leona Helmsley and Zsa Zsa Gabor seem like Shirley Temple compared to
TR: Bettie Gershman."
RG: "The five bitchiest gay movies are?
TR: All About Eve, The Women, The Boys in the Band, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and I'm No Angel."
RG: Darling, neither of us needs to reflect on this subject, but I'm curious: Your favorite cocktail is?
TR: Cocktails?!? Where have you been hiding yourself, sweetheart? NOBODY drinks anymore. All around you bars are closing, and many and varied are the schemes employed to get good seats at an A.A. meeting.
RG: My favorite movie star is?
TR: Who is this piece for? Modern Screen Legends? True, I'd suck the socks off Tom Cruise, but only if I didn't have to see Born on the Fourth of July again. There are no movie stars anymore anyway. Davis and Stanwyck were about the last.
RG: The only composer worth listening to is?
TR: Stevie Wonder. Jesus H. Christ, don't start.
RG: The worst gay book ever published is?
TR: Oh God, so many worthy of the title, so little space. Leaving out religious garbage (pardon the redundancy) on the order of The Evils of Homosexuality: How to Keep Your Child from Cock and on the Path to Jesus and psychobabble like The Psychoanalytic Theory of Taking It Up the Ass, we're still left with a plethora of notable entries, and I just don't want to upset anyone.
Say, for example, if I declare that the complete gay oeuvre of Ethan Mordden is the absolute pits, the day this copy of Edge hits the streets, David Leavitt will be on the phone whining to me, "What about my stuff? You used to loathe me above all others. Now another detestable idol has taken my place." And then there will be calls from Dan Curzon and Ed White and I just can't deal with the stress.
RG: If I could spend one moment or one hour with Andrea Dworkin, I'd say,
TR: "Lighten up, bitch."
RG: True or false: "The wounds of time are never healed, they just grow old with time itself."
TR: Say what? I thought we agreed to do this interview in English.
RG: Are you prepared for death (emotionally)?
TR: Nothing like a little light banter to make the time pass more pleasantly. Are you sure you didn't give me a Larry Kramer question by mistake? Darling, please, my HIV+ history is hardly the stuff of legend. Besides, there are still so many people I have to outlive.
RG: Whose death during the health crisis has been the hardest for you to bear?
TR: I'll answer if you tell me which one of the Holocaust victims you would have saved if you could.
RG: Are you crazier now than when you penned the essay "Cracking Up: How to Do It Right"?
TR: No, no, no. In fact, it isn't generally known (because I so dislike drawing attention to myself), but I was recently named the Mental Health Poster Boy for New Jersey. True, there wasn't much competition, but an honor is an honor.
RG: Is it still possible to cruise the Met[ropolitan Opera] with abandon?
TR: Yes, probably more so these days because so many cocksuckers have found God (or, at least, Sexaholics Anonymous meetings) and have stopped cruising. You'll make out real well wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "I still do it."
RG: Are there any new - 102nd, 103rd - things one can do (in addition to your 101 ideas in Kvetch) with a straight man?
TR: Oh why not? You can teach him how to put on a condom. But ask what size he takes. That always gets 'em.
RG: You write about [p. 96] "gays who hated their sexuality." Is the revival of this vogue-ish stance, particularly among gays who like to evangelize about the unhealthiness of sex, something we need to be concerned about? Why, after 20 years of gay liberation, do so many gay men still hate themselves for being gay?
TR: Because it gives them something to do. Some gay men used to hate themselves for going to the baths. Now that many of them are closed, people can hate themselves for wanting to go.
RG: Have gay books gotten any better since your essay contended that they were so bad?
TR: Not so's you notice. There certainly seems to be more of them. Publishing is one business that doesn't understand that less is more, so we've been getting seemingly endless variations on a few themes. Every queen with the minimum necessary amount of literacy is writing an AIDS novel, and publishers aren't saying no to these books as often as they perhaps should. It was easy for publishers to nix a Fire Island novel about fags carrying on shamelessly cause it would make straight people in Utah puke. Now we have Fire Island novels where fags carry on shamelessly and they all die. Such books are thought to have the potential to play in Peoria.
More gay and lesbian writers are starting to get better contracts. Not enough writers and the contracts aren't all that great, but it's a start. We're also just beginning to see post-AIDS writing. Young writers who grew up with AIDS as a fact of life have a different and, in many ways, fresher perspective than the old guard who are still largely caught up in the good old days and the AIDS tragedy many writers believe was caused by all that fucking and sucking and drug taking and God-knows-what-else in the good old days.
RG: How would you revise [1990] your "compleat A-Gay, or the social caste system in Gay America"? Why is being "politically correct" (PC) still such an estimable commodity among so many - or not so very many - people?
A-Gays aren't PC. A-Gays are in a time warp. You can see them on Fire Island still singing along to "The Man That Got Away." They didn't notice that in some ways the eighties were like the seventies because their mindset had never gotten out of the fifties in the first place.
TR: PC-Gays are a whole other category. Very sixties but with newer drugs. AZT instead of LSD; zovirax instead of peyote. But lots and lots of meetings, more so than in the sixties. Between Monday's ACT-UP meeting, Tuesday's HIV+ support group, Wednesday's A.A. meeting, these PC-Gays are very busy - they don't have time to be A-Gays.
But I shouldn't pick on the A-Gays because they've been having a real rough time lately. The threat of Bloomingdale's closing or, even worse, turning into a Sears bargain basement sent not a few A-Gays to treatment centers from where, with the proper therapy, they may emerge as PC-Gays.
đŸ–‡ More About T.R. Witomski
What was T.R. really like?
There are many people I worked with in the gay press in the seventies and eighties who are no longer with us—and one of the ones I miss the very most is the guy whose handsome mug you see gazing at you here.
T.R. Witomski was perhaps one of the most prolific people working in gay print media in the late seventies and 1980's and even into the nineties. At the time of his death, T.R. was also venturing into edge sex on video, and his company—Katsam Productions—picked up where the late, depraved Christopher Rage left off.
From his basement offices in glamorous Toms River, New Jersey, T.R. essentially ruled the world—his world, his video titles lending a sort of financial edge to what was, at best, even on a good, good day, very difficult life.
For T.R was anything but gracious in his views of the gay subculture, gay press and gay literary establishment. He used his prolific and frequently caustic gifts to rail regularly about how the gay press trashed part of our community in the act of embracing other components—and he spared no one in terms of the wrath he thought justly deserved by publishers who refused to pay (him) on time—or at all—and publishing impresarios who allocated reams of space to their friends—but royally avoided exposure for him.
T.R.'s was a great gift—one mangled by his inability to be more political let alone diplomatic, or to curb the savage nature of his often acerbic pen. His journalism, collected in the now out of print Kvetch, was truly unique in a gay subculture obsessed with appearances, being politically savvy, and avoiding what The Average Jane or Joe Doe wanted to read about (several of the pieces collected in that book were specifically commissioned by me as then Features Editor of the Philadelphia Gay News).
I can still remember where I was when I read about T.R.'s death, from AIDS complications, in 1992. Suddenly I knew in one moment how much gay journalism, gay writing, and the gay subculture had lost due to the AIDS pandemic.
I'll never forgot T.R.: his kindness, his rapier wit, his unrivaled ability to make people laugh and connect with a powerful prose rarely duplicated since (I'm sorry, I equate Larry Kramer's literature with the late Grace Metalious of Peyton Place fame—and I have so told The Advocate, which printed this comment in a piece penned by Brandon Judell in the 1980's).
I miss you, T.R.: brother, buddy, pen pal, comrade.