One of New York’s Most Unlikely Friendships
August 27, 2018 10:57 AM   Subscribe

 
I went away to college, and stopped answering Stephen’s letters. 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. 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. 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.
Heartbreaking, and lovely.

And if you're wondering, here's the referenced YouTube clip, "Night at Harrah" -- the description states "Partying with Tinkerbelle, Stephen Warble, Victor Hugo, Clarissa Rivers, Ethel Scull, Harold, Nina Gaydarova....1974. The legendary Harrah Disco. Bad sound by the end of the video."

A commenter, David Getsy, wrote:
This was shot on 29 March 1977, the opening night of Stephen Varble's one and only commercial gallery exhibition, at Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery. The after-party was at Hurrah (36 W. 62nd St). Varble is wearing his 1975 "Pearl Dress" (also known as "Swim Suit"). Varble was an adjunct professor at Richmond College (now the College of Staten Island) in 1974 and he stole the life preserver that is part of the costume on one of his trips on the ferry.
Varble has a Wikipedia page with some more information.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:14 AM on August 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


Amazing. What a relationship -- lined with razors on both sides. It should make a movie.

I was from the country myself, but I was able to go to school with people who were extremely from New York City -- who had the money, the effortless cool, the hint of tragedy far beyond their grade level, of drugs and makeup-streaked sex. If I had known Eberstadt then, I would have loved her, hated her, wanted to be her.

And I would have not handled this one bit as well as she did. I would have been madly in love with this terrible man. When I was fourteen, I too was obsessed with the flamboyance of queer men, and I wanted it for myself. Eberstadt had the good luck to be someone who brought out the best in him. He seemed to need her, but he did not take a chunk of her soul with him, as older men tend to do with teenage girls.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:12 PM on August 27, 2018 [9 favorites]


I feel like this is also substantially about how weird rich people in New York are:
"My parents were a curious mix: they hung out with underground filmmakers, but they were also Park Avenue society people..."

(on preview, what Countess Elena said!)
posted by ITheCosmos at 12:15 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Eberstadt had the good luck to be someone who brought out the best in him.

I question whether asking underage girls for blowjobs was the best, really.

Abstracting away a few details, the narrative is compelling and well-written--it could be the basis of a great novel--but, well, if you'd like to understand what could actually go wrong with the low-attention 70s/80s model of parenting, here it is. Her parents are quite lucky she wasn't hurt either by him (although, he "introduced" her to kissing and cocaine, so I don't know) or in his company in the middle of the night in the Meatpacking. Or that she didn't get picked up by someone more predatory and a little more interested in girls in his circle, since apparently the parents didn't necessarily feel compelled to meet the adult men their daughter was hanging out with.

Writing this makes me feel embarrassingly bourgeois, but, fourteen years old, Jesus. There's a line somewhere.

(Before anyone gets started, my problem is not that the guy was genderqueer, or gay, or a street artist. It's that he was a grown-ass man and one who took her to some very dangerous spots in the city.)
posted by praemunire at 12:54 PM on August 27, 2018 [9 favorites]


Well, the best in him, I mean -- which is to say that he only asked, and just the once.

This kind of parenting isn't what I would do, and it's surely not what I had. I remember being upset with my mother when I was about Eberhardt's age and had just met one of the few flamboyant, openly bisexual guys in Mississippi. She wouldn't let me answer his long, thoughtful letter, holding that a college dude was a college dude. I am grateful to her now for a good call, but I never did hear a bad word about the guy.

When I went away to boarding school, their hands-off in loco parentis style gave me access to a lot of choices I wouldn't have otherwise had, and some of them were risky. Sometimes it was just the clove-cigarette woods-lurking kind of risk; sometimes it was truly scary. I'm still processing some of the bad decisions I made because of guys that I met in those years. Some of those decisions involved hiding what was going on because I very badly did not want to be "protected" -- which is to say, cut off from the associated amazing scenes and stuck in my room without internet. I would bet that Eberhardt struggled with similar worries as well.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:30 PM on August 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, reading this as a 36-year-old woman and reading it as a former 14-year-old girl are two very different experiences. I think part of why I find it so beautiful is that it's compelling either way: as "[middle-aged lady voice] holy shit, here's when I very nearly fell over the edge into disaster" or as "[awestruck teenager voice] here's when my life opened up into something beautiful and perfect and real."
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:33 PM on August 27, 2018 [8 favorites]


Countess Elena, you are quite right about that risk-seeking/not wanting to be "protected" dynamic, and I think it's an important point of growing up--you can't just turn 18 or 21 and suddenly face All the Risks for the first time, which seems to be the goal of some contemporary parents. Unfortunately, I think many many of us former teenage girls have that Bad Story that comes from being a girl trying to explore a world full of predatory men (some boys, too, and maybe a boy in this scenario might have [not necessarily from the artist, but from that particular milieu], but fewer).

You just hope that the parents put up some kind of guardrails as the kid goes along. It seems like she wasn't really deceiving her parents as to the general nature of her activities.

Sorry, I don't want to turn this into a referendum on her parents' parenting, but I was surprised at how strongly I reacted--in a way that would have been much more muted had she been 17 or 18, or even if the relationship had been a little more regulated. I would be interested to know more about the dangerous experiences she did apparently have with/alongside the artist--the sexual exploration and the drugs, for instance--not to judge further, but rather to see, looking back, how she feels and thinks about them outside the constraints of a deliberately nostalgic narrative.
posted by praemunire at 2:28 PM on August 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


Heartbreaking indeed. It's staggering to think of the generation of artists we lost.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:58 PM on August 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


It's interesting that she mentions debased currency in a reference to Diogenes.
posted by ovvl at 6:32 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


It also seems to me a reminder of how much more sterile cities seem these days. I have no doubt that if I were a parent I wouldn't want my child wandering through the neighborhoods and social circles she talks about, but I still feel like we've lost something in this hyper-connected/recorded/sterilized future we've wandered into.

Obviously there are still places and people like this, and maybe it's just my own sheltered experience that doesn't expose me, but it feels to me like we've lost something.
posted by KirTakat at 6:46 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


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