An excerpt from writer and photography critic Philip Gefter‘s
diary, which he kept from 1970-2008.
September 1, 1979
My life is in a pleasant shambles. I took a quaalude for Tea Dance. At midnight, I took half a tab of mescaline and at 4:00 AM, another quaalude. Escaping my life is precisely what I am doing, but, on the other hand, it probably teaches me about real life in a way I would otherwise never conceive possible. Pure sensate experience: The Ice Palace was fabulous. It was like a jungle. It smelled like a kennel. Bodies were writhing. I felt great. I reached meta levels of lifting off the ground. At 4:30, there was total harmony on the dance floor. Bodies moved together perfectly, collective energy and emotion. This is really a microcosm of our times. The Ice Palace at 4:30 AM on a Saturday night should be fossilized, to be discovered in 500 or 1000 years. How will they ever assess our culture, the pure sensation of it? I felt truly at one with myself and the cosmos, a feeling that reveals what life is about. Pure experience, experience of the moment. Like the days this summer with the waves crashing against my tingling nerve endings under a resplendent, clear blue sky. Those were perfect moments, too, the essence of what life is about.
Today, the Ricard party at Utopia, a house on the Bay, in the afternoon. Very hot. Four hand gliders were released from airplanes and dropped right into the pool. A highlight and very well choreographed, though one wonders why such things are so entertaining, but they are. I met Jeffrey, a Jewish sexual Adonis. We flirted, danced, made out, bought some “ludes” from him, took a walk, got teased by his most spectacular buns.
All this partying and lunacy and quest for truth and ecstasy and fun — just fun! Life is so damn hard, so complicated. It’s real work to stay alive, at least the way I want to be alive. We’re entitled to our little recompenses, a night of sex, drugs, and disco is my idea of a reward. The Ice Palace last night was so hot, a pulsating inferno, the lower circles in the inferno, close to the devil, to the darker temptations.
Labor Day, September 3, 1979
Today is a recuperative day. I went to sleep last night at 10:00 PM after not sleeping at all the night before. I guess it all started with the Ricard party. That was the party at Utopia where the four parachutists landed into the swimming pool. Well, that was till about 6:00 PM on Saturday. I met Jeffrey there, with the taught little body and buns. Went back to Jeffrey’s to buy some quaaludes and fuck. Then to tea dance, which was simply the Utopia party transferred to the Botel, times 30. Another “movable pool deck.” Back to Valmaré [the name of our house] for dinner, a hilarious dinner since half of our professional, respectable house was drugged. The conversation inevitably devolved to dicks and ass. Took a two-hour nap. Then, I took mescaline. David took acid. Jack E took mescaline. Andy and Scot were on quaaludes. Perhaps there were other drugs, who knows? We went to the Peach party, but weren’t let in. OK, so on to the Ice Palace, again, which was the most intense experience I think I’ve ever had. It was like a macrocosmic vision of all the intensity, sexuality, and sophistication of our culture in a perfectly honed balance of high cultural ritual and the most primitive tribal dance imaginable. I was flying. The Ice Palace could have lifted off the ground with the energy and heat, a pulsating, writhing oven of several thousand gay men in resolute, libidinous heat. I stayed until 7:00 AM, danced and danced, fondled bodies and cocks, took another quaalude at 4:00 AM to slow down a bit. Then at 7:00 AM, I went to an after IP [Ice Palace] party at a house on Bass Walk. It started out slow, laid back, peaches were on trays all around the pool; people were lying around in groups; marijuana and papers were in bowls located about the deck. I stayed an hour, came home to start writing in here. Arthur had just woken up. We talked about life and art. Then went back to the party on Bass Walk at 10AM. It had picked up considerably — about 150 people dancing on the deck. I figure these parties are given because people are so drugged from the I.P. that they can’t go to sleep yet, and these parties are simply an activity, a diversion, until the drugs wear off. Stayed an hour or so, and back to Valmaré, where the rest of the house had awakened. We bantered for a bit, then went to Len Stewart’s party. That was a truly wonderful party. The food was superb, the ambiance divine, the surface of the water in the pool mirroring the ocean beyond it. It was sexy and friendly. I played with about 5 erections just sitting and talking with people. Regine, of Regine’s, was there. Calvin Klein was there. I played with Marty Starr’s cock in the bathroom. Then to a party on Pine Walk — great food — stayed about 15 minutes since we thought we were being led to a party on Shore Walk and ended up at this party. Our leader was someone who called himself “the Lagunatic.” He was wearing white gloves. Finally we arrived at the Shore Walk party on the Bay. It was gorgeous — twilight and the sunset and giant purple and pink balloons lined the edge of the deck, and the colors were resplendent against the sky. So many people. Each of these parties present the same people in a different context. Again, the movable pool deck. I met Tinkerbell, a woman with shocking white hair worn in a crew cut. She was so exotic and odd-looking, truly feline, as if a creature from the future. She is a harbinger of things and fashions to come. A man followed me into the bathroom and whipped out his immense member after locking the door. I sucked it, such perfect proportion, size and shape, and I asked him to fuck me. He said he’d love to, but he was there with his lover and couldn’t stay in the bathroom long enough without arousing suspicion. The party lasted till about 8:30, when some of us returned to Valmaré. This is about 30 hours after the first party of the weekend and I think I have had it. We had dinner — it was the kind of dinner conversation that we all swore we’d never have — trashy, more dicks and ass, witty in a funny dumb way. Valmaré has become a fallen house. I slept 12 hours. Today is cloudy and it’s just what I need to recover from this total lunacy.
Photo of Philip Gefter by Bob Howard
Philip Gefter is the author of Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; What Becomes A Legend Most, the biography of Richard Avedon; and Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, the biography of Sam Wagstaff, for which he received the 2014 Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing. He was on staff at The New York Times for over fifteen years, where he wrote regularly about photography. He produced the 2011 documentary film, Bill Cunningham New York. He recommends The New Life by Tom Crewe, an elegantly written fictional imagining of the repressive gay closet in fin de siècle Britain in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde trial.
