Posted by ChrisB | October 1, 2023
New Zealand playwright Robert Lord moved to New York in 1975. Although he imagined he’d end up in Sydney or London, he visited the US in 1974 and never quite left – although he hopped backwards and forwards between New York and New Zealand until the late 1980s. He took a small apartment at 250 West 85th Street, three blocks away from Central Park, which he leased out to other writers when he was away.
'Herself in bed watching Bob Newhart': Robert's apartment, June 1985.
These were heady years. Robert made friends with artists, students and socialites; according to fellow playwright Roger Hall, he ‘seemed to know everyone there: actors, directors, critics, agents’. He partied with celebrities, including Iggy Pop and David Bowie, and Meryl Streep took part in a reading of his play Dead and Never Called Me Mother. Robert's New York diaries read like Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin’s chronicle of gay San Francisco during the 1970s and ’80s. Lord's own New York companions were just as creative and passionate as Maupin’s; they partied frequently, hung out in cafés and clubs, and smoked hash in the streets in the early hours of the morning. Robert wandered aimlessly around the city, ‘shooting the breeze’ with friends ‘equally underemployed’, walked his beagle, Becky, and made soup for the sex workers who plied their trade in the streets around his apartment.
Robert Boykin, who often wandered New York's streets with Robert Lord, and Becky.
Robert Lord’s diaries tell of gossip, relationships and drunken infelicities. His friends’ complex emotional lives often went awry. ‘We are fortunately given to our immoderations at disparate times & do not all, except occasionally, go crazy at once’, he wrote about the group he referred to as ‘the family’:
Sunday and a beautiful day, I actually went up onto the roof and lay in the sun for an hour or three and was surprised by a man from the 15th floor who made a brief appearance but was startled off by my nakedness. So where did we leave off? Friday lunch as usual with Granny Lisz and a brief run over all the gossip and now I’ve decided to write a book called ‘September’ about everything that happens to me that month. And tie in all the members of the family and their fucked-up lives.
Gary Lisz at Fire Island. Photograph by Bobby Miller.
Groups of friends retreated to Fire Island, a ‘strip of sand’ and popular gay enclave off the coast of Long Island ‘hailed as America’s first gay and lesbian town’. For six months in 1981, while he recovered from a bout of hepatitis, Robert lived with others in a '3-bedroom shack' that, rumour had it, Ernest Hemingway once stayed in and called 'The Quest'. 'The shack where six, seven, eight, more often, had gathered on weekends & partied, got high, been frivolous, pointless.' A year later, friends hired 'a new 4-bed pool house which shook every time someone breathed & the pool, about 3’ deep at best, leaked. Lots of drugs & disco & a little sex, strange emotional vibrations as our lives intermingle’.
On a Fire Island rooftop, Robert on the right.
‘Sex, of course, is a major problem these days because one dreads having it’, he reported, ‘the plague being forever in the spotlight’. His 1980s diaries mention friends succumbing to the new ‘gay cancer’, and he recorded their deaths as the years wore on. They included Gary (‘Granny') Lisz, with whom Robert had lunch every Friday; Jay Funk, a lover from early years in New York and later a close friend; Peter Fonseca; John Dolf; Peter Buckley. Robert worried that AIDS would give rise to ‘a hideous backlash’ against gay men, and his light-hearted social commentary gave way to darker thoughts:
And my mood was not improved by learning that Bobby Christian had died of gay cancer & that Stuart White was back in hospital – all this is quite depressing & causes one to have healthy/unhealthy moments of introspection. It all came to a point last Friday night when Jack, Peter, myself, Sally & Donald went out for dinner & got too drunk & silly & complicated. So I had to take to my bed for Saturday & Sunday & did not answer a call. Everyone thinks I am weird. Which I am.
Left: Jay Funk in Robert's apartment. Right: John Dolf out shopping.
Peter Fonseca, soloist with the American Ballet Theatre.
What would his New Zealand family think of his life abroad? During one trip back home, relatives turned up at his parents’ house so he could be ‘inspected’. ‘Hideous! They will all ask what I do. How things are going. What sort of life I have. Am I going to tell them I dance my life away, that I’m a disco maven? That I’m a faggot slut?’ No, he resolved. ‘I will lie.’ But he kept coming home to oversee the production of his plays and work on several television series, and eventually he settled in Dunedin.
New Zealand and New York were so very different. New Zealand society was ‘small and self-contained’, as Robert later told an interviewer, but New York was the opposite. He criss-crossed vastly different worlds when he flew from America to the land of his birth and back again, and he contemplated the meaning of life as he sat in airport departure lounges and on planes high above the world. Robert Lord never wrote his ‘September’ book, but his diaries tell of an eventful expatriate life lived in-between here and there, queer and square – and the characters who gave it shape.
Robert and Dumbo at Disneyland in California.
Mason Wiley, a friend who lived in Robert's apartment building, also at Disneyland.
Sources:
Brickell, C., Manhire, V. and Rees, N. (eds) (2023) Robert Lord Diaries (Dunedin: Otago University Press).
Hall, R. (1992) ‘Robert Lord – Last Lines’, North and South, April, p. 15.
Thomson, T.J. (2018) ‘From the Closet to the Beach: A Photographer’s View of Gay Life on Fire Island from 1975 to 1983’, Visual Communication Quarterly, January-March, pp. 3-15.