The 50th Anniversary Special: Essays

I arrived at The Village Voice in 1958 in urgent need of a wide-ranging forum because for years I had been typed by editors as only knowing about jazz.

Crusading and independent journalistic beacon that it is, The Village Voice seems like the kind of intransigent social rebel that simply, absolutely can’t be bought.

The Voice wasn’t born gay. But its queerness was certainly overdetermined.

The theater—the Downtown one, the only one that really means anything in New York’s cultural life—was born at roughly the same time as The Village Voice, and the two grew up together, two reckless runaway kids nurtured by the all-embracing foster mother, Manhattan.

I wanted to shout how crucial Voice music writing was from the git, but evidence was lacking.

In 1972, Karen Durbin showed some passages from her journal to a friend who was writing a book about the counter-culture and wanted to quote her on living in the age of radical feminism.

I began reading the Voice because of Stanley Crouch, who in 1977 was the epicenter of frontline jazz criticism in America at the most auspicious moment in the music’s progression since the early 1960s.

Not exactly trekking to the one-room schoolhouse six miles across the tundra but a schlep nonetheless for the Teenage Me to find the one newsstand in Flushing (and later, Binghamton, New York) that carried The Village Voice.

By the mid ’80s, the Big Apple had lost most of its shine, but I was still living large and loving it as a free-drink-ticket-holding, drag-queen-worshipping denizen of any nocturnal den available.

There’s something symmetrical about the conviction of yet another boss of the Brooklyn Democratic party and the nearly simultaneous celebration of the Voice‘s 50th anniversary.