Twentieth Century Boy (5*)

I’m at the right place, at the right time, at the right age!  This is our music!

It's not often you get to read a vividly written account of the life you imagined living in your salad days.  That's a loaded statement mostly because Duncan Hannah's undeniable white privilege, coy heterosexuality, artistic talent and social climbing gave him carte blanche in the worlds I had begun reading about growing up as a hick in El Paso.  While I was mostly brooding about being gay, he operated on the Sylvia Miles principle by going to the opening of EVERY envelope in mid 70s New York and having a lot more fun.  We kept journals for similar reasons (I’m writing these journals to capture my youth. When I’m 50 in an easy chair in Scotland I can pull them out and relive my teendom. It’ll be in an archaic lingo) and my musical tastes mirrored his; at one point we even were neighbors.

In his preface, written several years before his death last June, Hannah identifies the qualitative difference between our journal keeping.  It nails why his are a lot more readable despite the copious amount of alcohol and other drugs he consumed relentlessly.  

I noticed at the time, that mostly it was girls who kept journals, and they generally wrote only when they were upset. I was determined not to do this. I tended to write from jubilation. I wrote these at night in bed (if I was in any kind of shape to write), or in the morning over coffee. I didn’t write every day and as life accelerated I would miss notating chunks of experience. Indeed 1979 hardly gets a look in at all.  I don’t know why.

My journal keeping didn't begin in earnest until 1980, mostly because doing so on assignment for an enriched English class in high school had nearly severed one of my closest friendships when a girl who stole mine didn't like what I had written about her.  Unlike Hannah, I  wrote for therapeutic reasons, which meant there was a lot more whining (and character assassination) than celebrating. 

There's also the fact that Hannah had a much better idea of who he wanted to be and how to get there.  Shyness or self-consciousness was never an impediment; nor did he do anything to discourage the attentions of gay men who wanted to jump his bones.  In  other words, he worked it, hard, while I never considered taking advantage of any opportunities that might have come my way because of a shared sexual orientation.  Hannah played his cards very well and for the most part he depicts the queens (including Danny Fields, Rene Ricard and David Hockney) who encouraged his writing and painting with generosity aside from an unpalatable anecdote about Lou Reed that left me hoping that Lou had been pulling his leg.

I had a couple of eerie moments reading Twentieth Century Boy.  Hannah describes the Roxy Music concert that I missed at the Academy of Music in February 1975 because of my mother's death.  And it turns out we had only a single degree of separation between us.  Hannah had a roommate who played in a band called Marbles; I knew Jim Clifford, the bassist who, like me, worked "student hours" in the tie department at Bloomingdale's and sported a page boy like Hannah's.  Jim eagerly handed out copies of the Marbles' new single one Saturday afternoon (he's on the left) and invited me to their show at CBGB's.  I didn't go because I'd never heard of them.

Harvey Fierstein recently told Marc Maron that he became successful by saying yes to everything.  Hannah probably would agree.

The internet provided a final example of my eerie synchronicity with Hannah.  I wasn't really familiar with  his painting but look what I found!

"Blue Car" (2013)

Munich (1956)