After Watching “After Louie”
My mother was what could be called “a fag hag” in impolite company, the kind of company she kept through much of my life until she died. Gay men, and a few lesbians, were drawn to her — and she to them — for a number of reasons. First of all, being in the antique business in the heart of Washington DC in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s created a natural mutual attraction. Curious shoppers and committed seekers would flock to my mother’s shop and find rabbit warrens packed with unique items, from salvaged architectural pieces, 18th and 19th century tables, chairs, armoire, rugs, paintings, china, lighting fixtures, glassware and ensconced either in her corner captain’s chair behind a cluttered desk in the bay window or out front in warm weather, there she was six days a week without fail. She took checks or cash, no credit and kept her money pouch securely tucked in her bra. She knew where everything was, how much she’d paid for it, how much it was probably worth, and its asking price. If you tried to talk her down, she might suggest you shop instead at the Salvation Army.
The neighborhood, Capitol Hill, was an early haven for gay people who wanted to buy homes, live their lives and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Henry Yaffee, the founder of Mr. Henry’s Victorian Pub where Roberta Flack got her start; his friend William “Bill” Richards, who worked in advertising and was featured in a local newspaper as an “eligible bachelor;” Jim Hackley and Barney Nehring who lived at 7th and East Capitol Street and did well selling real estate — for years Barney made my eldest daughter’s birthday cakes; Charlie Verbeck, also a successful realtor and scholar of Asian art; Don King, a former Marine who always kept his buzz cut and owned several movie theaters throughout DC; August Specht who lived down the street from the shop and would often glide his vintage 60’s vehicle up to the corner to give “Miss Libby” a ride home — on her days off he could be counted on to drive her out to Southern Maryland to the home of one of her “pickers” or to Amish country where they knew how to cane seats and refinish furniture. These gay men were part of my extended family.
If you sat awhile outside the shop or in the available chair next to Libby’s desk, you’d find yourself telling her your life story. She was a master at inviting others into an easy intimacy, though she revealed less about herself. When I asked her what she thought she might have done if she’d gone to college, she said she imagined some area of psychology. Her natural curiosity and acceptance of others was fueled by her own escape from an oppressive orthodox Jewish father (her mother has always been painted as the loving, tolerant one)that led her to meet and eventually marry my father, a non-Jew, a goy, ten years her senior. When someone once asked her how she felt about her father disowning her, her retort was “what did he have to give me?” She left Williamsburg, Brooklyn for Greenwich Village and never looked back.
Although she and my father started the antiques business together, it wasn’t long before he became too ill to maintain a daily presence in the shop. In fact, he died the year after she bought the building that housed her business for the next twenty years. All the years of my father’s illness, my mother’s gay male friends formed the heart of her social life, along with her best friend Evelyn, also an antiques dealer, who lived across the street from us. These friends would stop by for breakfast before Libby opened her shop; stop by for dinner after driving her home (she never learned to drive); host Academy Award watch nights; movie nights to the various art theaters around town; dinners at favorite restaurants. In this way my mother could have a rich and warm social life that posed no threat to her life with my father. And I usually got to tag along, a precocious only child who never had a baby sitter but got to see Fellini and Bergman films, Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in “Splendor in the Grass” and sneak peeks at Henry’s porn supposedly hidden in his bedroom.
After watching “After Louie,” the story of an older gay man — Sam (played stunningly by Alan Cumming) — who was steeped in the gay activism of the 80’s and 90’s, and faces a painful reckoning through his relationship with a younger man, I went in search of a photo I knew I had tucked away. In Sam’s apartment there’s a poster of Joe Dallesandro, star of Andy Warhol’s “Flesh” and other films. And sure enough, just where I’d remembered it, was the photo of Joe holding a baby, autographed “For Libby, Joe 1971.” I believe he came to DC at that time and met my mother and several of her friends, possibly through Don, the theater owner. I was away at college at that time, but I have vague memories of coming home to stories of the inimitable Joe. The photograph, along with other possessions of my mother’s ended up in my hands.
In the days after watching the film, I felt as though the friendships, the lovers, the arguments, the deaths from AIDS, had just happened to me, in my life. It brought back memories of my friend Nick who drank himself to death when he found out he was HIV-positive. At one time he and his three best friends owned a glorious beach house in Rehoboth where my then-husband and my daughters and I would stay for a week each summer, as their guests. I haven’t been able to recapture those days or recreate what my mother had, what she gave me, through the gay men in our lives, many of whom had been ostracized by their own families and found a home with her. “After Louie” brought them all back to me.
