There, in the darkness of the night, Paul finds a few moments of release with his own kind. There, around a large, gnarled old tree-the “orgy tree”-there are little confessional-like spaces created by the untrimmed flora. Choosing one, he enters a grotto within a grotto.
Paul follows that path until he comes to a series of turnings. The iron bars have been bent back to allow easy access to a well-worn narrow dirt path among the bushes. Just a few feet beyond the stone wall that separates park from street, there is a break in the iron fence that seals off the bushes and trees from the roadway into the park. Yet, several times a month, Paul goes out into the dark of night, walks a few blocks from his home to the 81st Street entrance to Central Park. It was in the Ramble one night last week that I encountered Paul, a man of 56, successful in his Seventh Avenue garment business (he’s the owner, not the designer), who occupies a lovely duplex apartment on Central Park West with his wife of twenty years and their two sons. Theirs is a more terrible fear-fear of discovery. These men are there looking not for danger but for a point of contact, a moment of warmth and touching and comfort.
At that hour on that night most of the men appeared to be over 35, but what disturbed me was the smell of fear on these men. Of course, one doesn’t go to the Ramble at midnight for conversation. Most of the men I encountered that night wouldn’t talk. Without police protection, those shadowy fears can transform themselves into cold, clinical words that march across the admissions records of hospital emergency rooms. Without a moon, the unaccustomed eye turns every figure in those blackened byways into a potential assassin. I found, too, that the isolation from city street life which gives the Ramble its idyllic quality by day transforms it into a labyrinth of nameless terrors by night. Not many, perhaps twenty men, but still, there they were. Much to my surprise, there were actually people there. Just two nights after this latest act of human vandalism, I made my way into the Ramble at midnight. Five men were hospitalized with serious injuries-including Dick Button, a former ice-skating star and now sportscaster.
The dull thwack of bats hitting flesh and bone accompanied shouts of “faggot” from the all-white band of defenders of decency. The Ramble has been in the public eye ever since the assault July 5 by a gang of anti-gay toughs who, at 9:30, just a little after dusk that Wednesday, went wading in with baseball bats, bashing any men they thought were gay. The sun, the strolling, even the solitude, and the natural beauty of the park’s most bucolic copse-more than the opportunity for a casual sexual encounter in the bushes-are the magnets that for much of this century have made the Ramble the city’s best-known outdoor gathering place for gays. You don’t have to be doing anything except walking through the tangled darkness to be abused, shoved, threatened at knifepoint, kicked, and beaten.īut these shadowy dangers are in sharp contrast to the serenity of the sun-flecked arboreal mecca the Ramble becomes for thousands of gay men throughout each day. Gangs of toughs-teenagers and the macho middle-aged, usually drunk, occasionally including a couple of off-duty cops-roam the Ramble at night, engaging in an old American pastime: fag bashing. But though Central Park at night-any part of the park-is dangerous, the gay ghetto that is the Ramble is perhaps the section most fear-ridden. The west side of that 30-acre section of Central Park known as the Ramble had a reputation as a homosexual meeting ground long before Cole teased his friends at private parties with this suggestive lyric. Cole Porter’s “A Picture of Me Without You,” 1935.
Picture Central Park-without a sailor, Picture Mister Lord, minus Mister Taylor.