Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago’s LGBTQ Community, 1977-1997 Jon-Henri Damski, John Vore, editor; Albert Williams and Owen Keehnen, coeditors (Firetrap Press)
Damski’s final column, published a few days before he died, was about how great sex is.
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“Yes, there are cops who would like to put down their blue armor. Would like to have a young man lie next to him; and bring out of them something their wives can’t do as well: bring out the young man still inside them to have and to hold. Hercules should, now and then, sleep with Narcissus: for the sanity of both.”
Damski engaged the barroom crowd in a running meditation on who they were and how they ticked. “There is a great and undeserved premium, in the gay world, placed on being a boy, or looking like a boy,” he wrote in 1977. “Boys have been worshiped from Narcissus to Dorian Gray. Gays seem to want, or want to be, the perpetual boy. . . . A lot of gay men hate themselves, because they look like men, and are in fact men.”
As for Bridges, by now Damski seemed sure he had him cold: “When Danny told his roommate, ‘I know Larry (Eyler) and I can handle him,’ he was boasting about himself. He was a top guy in his world; he had cops, journalists and well-connected professional men all willing to kiss his ass for his favors. With all his clout, I am sure, Eyler didn’t scare him. He must have thought he had Eyler by the balls. Word from him could send Larry back to jail.”
Johnston flew to Oakland. “I didn’t know what I’d find,” Johnston tells me. He found the entire Damski archive, which he promptly secured by paying the locker people $255 for two months’ back rent plus a month more. Vore insisted to Johnston that he was finally capable of buckling down. “He’d been thinking about it for years,” says Johnston. “He says, ‘Art, I think I’m ready. If you put me up for four weeks, I can finish the book.’” It took seven; Williams pitched in on the copyediting. His wind up, Vore also put together three volumes of Damski’s poetry: Fresh Frozen, Eat My Words, and My Blue Monk. Carrying the imprint of Vore’s Firetrap Press, but printed by an outside press that will run off copies as orders come in, they were all done in time to be offered for sale Sunday, November 1, at the Gerber/Hart Library at a program held in Damski’s honor on the anniversary of his death.
Someone else would have muttered that not everyone has to be a parent, then put in a good word for gays as adoptive parents. Damski allowed that “many homosexuals . . . feel very ashamed” that they don’t have children.
