The Gay Metropolis Read Free

she was beautiful in my eyes. My father was a pushcart peddler and made a few pennies a day. Her father was in construction, so he earned more money. All the lights went out and we were sitting in front of the stoop.” She laughed again: “I’m remembering it all!”
    â€œAnyway, it was black and dark, so I felt that I could put my arms around her. And oh! I was
so
happy. I was holding her in my arms. I never did that before. And I put my face in her hair, and I could smell her, and it was fantastic. I was never so open during the day when the light and everybody could see. I don’t know why, but I sensed that I shouldn’t display my affection for her. But in the dark, of course, I could do all that I wanted to do, and that’s what I wanted to do: just hold her and smell her.
    â€œI don’t even know if I was kissing her. It was just fondling—holding her in my arms—when all of a sudden the sirens came on, which was the end of the make-believe air raid. And all the lights went on, and there I was still holding her in my arms—when a neighbor turned around and looked at us.
    â€œAnd she said
that word
that I heard for the very first time in my life. She said, ‘Are you a lesbian?’
    â€œSo! I remembered the word. We didn’t have any dictionary at home—would you believe it? So the next day I ran to the library and I looked up the word
lesbian
. Oh boy. That’s when I
really
felt special. Because I remember reading about the Isle of Lesbos. So I said, ‘Well, I deserve!’ I confirmed my feelings of being special. So, unlike many other lesbians, I was always very proud—and I always felt very special. But at the same time I knew somehow that I shouldn’t tell everybody how I feel.
    â€œThat’s when I started to read the literature about it. And I remember having read
The Well of Loneliness
. They didn’t have it in the bookstore. I had to send away for it. I don’t know how I found out about it. Maybe I read about it in the library when I was looking up the word
lesbian
. I wrote away to the publisher just for
The Well of Loneliness
and
The Unlit Lamp
. I got them both at the same time. And I didn’t have to worry about receiving them at home because neither one of my parents could read English.They came from Russia—Russian-Jewish—and they never learned how to read English. Before I went to school, I only spoke Yiddish.
    â€œMinnie and I would walk together in the wintertime. I would have her hand in my pocket—we would hold hands in my pocket—and she loved it. And when we went to the movies, she always let me hold her hand.” Then Minnie went away to camp for the summer. “My heart was broken! I used to write her letters, and in my letters I would cut my finger and bleed on the letter.I would be falling in love all the time. And each one was a bone-crushing kind of love!”
    Kern laughed some more. “When I was very young, there was something strange going on with me. On the outside I was very tough. I was known as ‘The Terror.’ That was my nickname. I was the leader of the gang and I would beat up the tough guys and my territory was Amboy Street, and nobody could come onto Amboy if they lived someplace else. But inside I was afraid of people. And I was in love with all these women. And I would be composing all this music. My mother had this tall radio that stood on the floor. I would sit down on the floor and press my ear against the loudspeaker so I could feel
inside
the music. Inside it! Oh! And I would keep it very loud, and my mother would yell at me. But I was wild about the music.
    â€œThere was such a difference between how I was on the outside, compared to the way I was on the inside. I was in my secret world, which ran along with my real life. In my secret life I was a pianist-conductor-composer, and I wrote all this beautiful music and played all this wonderful music,