markclindsey.com
follow me
  • HOME markclindsey.com
  • digital drawings
  • facesnewyork
  • blogblog
  • thisweekintheculture
  • info : contact

Savannah Gardens, Part One

10/28/2010

7 Comments

 
Picture
Art School In The Eighties


This essay was originally published in the Winter 2004 edition of Spunk Magazine.


    The Smiths, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Oscar Wilde, David Wojnarowicz, The NEA, gay bars and gay boys, the threat of AIDS and the culture of resistance: these were some of the ingredients for the stew that was The Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, Ga.) my freshman year in 1987. This was also the year of my coming out at 22, the year of the best gay bar of my life (The Who's Who, which eventually burned down) and the year I discovered that the sleepy coastal town I was born into was not the one I was about to re-enter at all. Growing up most of my life on the east side of town right outside of a low-income housing project called Savannah Gardens (which my friends called “Savannah Garbage”) I rarely had the chance to go downtown. Here were the famous squares with their colonial homes, moss riddled trees, River Street and the Telfair Museum. These would have been special occasions, moments for the genteel, the picturesque. Perhaps walking along these streets gave me another sense as well: darker forces operating within the city, ghosts and skeletons, a town where history was once made. If it did this feeling proved elusive. Savannah was as regular as rain. Seasons came and went. Every spring the azaleas would bloom as usual in a rich riot of colors all around the city. I was always surprised to find on closer inspection that they were such ugly flowers.


Was it spring when I first entered the low Victorian doorway of The Who's Who? I was so afraid I had to be dragged there kicking and screaming by my friend Paul. I thought I had a reputation to maintain but secretly I understood that I was ashamed and nervous and really green. (It is true that the bar stood wide open on Bay Street at the edge of downtown for all to see. It was a test of your mettle to open the door.) When I walked in to the strains of Madonna's “Open Your Heart” (the bar maybe a third full) all eyes turned to us. Maybe this was the first night I saw J, the bartender upon which all others should be modeled (a version of Fassbinder's Querelle), or Mother, a heavy middle aged man in drag who would greet everyone at the door with a fem “hey doll” (Mother knew absolutely everyone). As I approached a lit up 70s style dance floor blinking in near pitch black darkness I knew nothing would ever again be the same for me. I danced skittishly with boys; eventually I slept with them. Soon I was inside those forbidding old houses where the students rented rooms. My senses opened to the look and smell of mahogany, granite and marble, dark rooms with vaulted ceilings, and to the bohemian spirit with which these students inhabited them. I met painters, actors, drag queens and dilettantes, most of whom created their homes with a mattress and a boombox. It was wonderful to see these young gay boys take the town, one by one, its history and spaces, and make it over for themselves. Suddenly the alleyways, carriage houses and cobbled streets of the brochures had become a space for liberation. With this freedom came a new responsibility: a slow creeping sense of the political.


After my entrance into the bar I enrolled at SCAD. Everything was downtown – the school had bought up nine historic buildings for its campus. Inside these once formidable buildings I took my foundations courses: Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, Janson's History Of Art, and Johannes Itten's The Elements Of Color. I remember taking my first stabs at developing a sensibility: ciphering out the baby scratches of Cy Twombly, finding something deep in Warhol, and the electric thrill of Lautrec's cartoons. I will never forget the first rush of becoming fully involved in the process of making art, the energy and completeness of total immersion, and wincing as these works were discussed in a class critique. I remember the city, this new vision of the city, the disco, and the constant media coverage of the AIDS epidemic. I remember requesting Mapplethorpe's banned photography book at the library (studying what most people would still consider pornography) thrilled to the bone. I remember ACT UP. I remember the living death of artist David Wojnarowicz through his brilliant images and writings and his account of what was happening to us in the world at large. I remember The Smiths and The Pet Shop Boys and memorizing all of the lyrics (the first accurate mental picture I ever had of gay life). I remember reading Wilde for the first time: The Critic As Artist. Covered by a great green canopy of oak and Spanish moss, by good manners, by booze and hangovers, these were my first attempts to grasp the world. I was one of the true inhabitants of the streets of that city in that time, of dark nights and dark leanings of the heart. More than anything SCAD gave me a reason to be where I was. I pretended I would end up an artist, and I did, but not in the way I expected. In the era of WHAM! and Ronald Reagan mine was probably a sentimental education, and these experiences still inform the artwork I do today. But I think it was the gay bar, the place of everything illicit and forbidden, which informed me the most. It took me to art school and behind those pretty facades from a long past antebellum South. Those wonderful old houses provided a stage for me and all the boys back then. We were all visionaries, we were all secret sharers, we were all the future. We did a lot of it in the dark, where I am sure our forebears had done it before and I hope they are doing it now. From that little southern portal, a big world.
7 Comments
(Archived Comments)
3/4/2012 02:27:00 am

keely eastley

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:33:47 pm

The first time I went to a girl bar was in NYC. I was going alone and I remember standing across 7th Ave. South looking at the door, building courage for almost an hour. I had these visions of dykes in chains hanging from the ceiling waiting to pounce on little-ole-me. I finally said fuck it and walk across the street and opened the door. No chains, no pouncing just a bar of women interested in talking and meeting people (women) who they could relate to and some who they might want to sleep with. Another sterotype shattered. Thanks for your stories.

Keely

Mark

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 3:41:14 pm

I think we all cross that boundary into the "other" world at some point so that we can grow up. Into the forest, so to speak.

Thanks for reading and commenting Keely!

Mark

Reply
Mar
6/18/2012 04:05:04 am

Mark,

Really enjoyed your blog, and it brought back a lot memories of time and place. I attended SCAD for one year (a few years before you did, 1983-84), and spent a lot of time at the Who's Who. In retrospect, I guess it was a bit of a dive, but I do have fond memories of the place, and am sad to learn that it later burned down. For a time, it actually became sort of "the" SCAD "hangout" (along with a terrific little club on River Street called the Night Flight -- I actually saw Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs play there, back before anyone even knew who they were...wild times...but that's another post!). But back to Who's Who, there was a bartender who worked there, an older gentleman -- well, early 40s, I guess, but older to us back then, as we were all around 19 or 20 -- named Henry, who was terribly funny and sweet, and whom we always looked forward to seeing. Suddenly he was no longer there, and we found out that he'd been admitted to the hospital, extremely ill, and he would ultimately prove to be the first AIDS fatality I would personally know. So sad, even now, and I still frequently think of him, and wonder if anyone else is left to remember him.

Seems like such a long time ago now. Back then, in 1983, the concept of "safe sex" didn't yet exist (many people were still unclear as to whether the virus was airborn), and HIV hadn't even been named yet, I think they may have still called the virus GRID (gay-related immune disease) at that time.

Anyway, I would pass through Savannah a few additional times after finishing up that year at SCAD, after which I transferred to Mass College of Art, but have not been back in many years (I was most recently there in 1986). So it was a treat to read your recollections of those times.

-Mar

Reply
Mark
6/18/2012 04:17:46 am

How wonderful that you read this Mar! I had no idea you knew of the website, or that you went to SCAD. The filter for this essay was gay life, but the mysteries of Savannah are certain wider than that, the gay life is just a part, a slice. The flavor we all experience is the same walking down those streets and into a strange present/past. It truly is unique. I appreciate now in a way I could not then. But I also appreciated it then in a way I cannot now. So there you have it.

I remember the Night Flight! I never went. I was in Charleston in my Senior year of high school in 83.

Best to you!!

xx m

Reply
kon hentai link
7/27/2012 06:32:23 pm

How old is this post?

Reply
Greg Sheppard
2/6/2013 01:56:11 pm

Mark, I just came across this wonderful piece and am amazed how your story mirrors my experience with the Who's Who..That was a magical place to me. Being born and raised in Savannah, I came out in 1984 and it was basically my home away from home during the latter half of the 80's. Thank you for sharing this story and sparking lost memories of that wonderful part of my life!

Reply
lee brannen
4/24/2015 07:33:31 am

I was leaving Savannah, re-establishing mtself in New Orleans about the time your story begins in 1987. Once you called Savannah Gardens "Savannah Garbage" and named the Who's Who, I was sucked into your writing and I am much better for having found it. I am back in Savannah now and you have given me a gift of what I might have missed in my years away. Thank you.

Reply
Mark
4/25/2015 03:45:03 am

Lee: thanks for saying so. I wrote this a while ago but it does pop up now and then with a reader's response which is so gratifying. Ahh The Who. A great bar. If you are interested in a more complete telling of my story please visit www.thisgaylife.net. It is a graphic novel in process on the web. And spread the word! Many thanks. Mark.

Reply



Leave a Reply.



    Author


    Mark Lindsey is an artist and writer formerly from the streets of New York City and now residing in the forests of Connect-icut.  He likes it there. 



    Archives

    June 2022
    January 2022
    July 2020
    August 2019
    January 2017
    December 2016
    June 2016
    January 2016
    January 2015
    March 2013
    July 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    October 2011
    August 2011
    May 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010



    Categories

    All
    Bazaar
    Blurring The Lines
    Bookish
    Certainty
    Cocktail Hour
    Connecticut R & R
    Early Glamour
    Exhale
    Facsimile
    Goo Goo Ga Ga
    I Hate Bling
    Keeping It Fresh
    Michael On The Radio
    My Bowie
    Rabbit Hole
    Savannah Gardens Part 1
    Savannah Gardens Part 2
    Sex And The Rerun
    Slob
    Slow
    Straighter Than Straight
    Tastes Like Summer
    The Middle Ages
    The Plush Moment
    The Rookie
    Unmarried
    Waiters

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.