Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s

In this revealing memoir, Gooch (City Poet) reanimates the wild gay subculture in Manhattan during the 1970s and 1980s, which he calls the “golden age of promiscuity,” when “everything was sex and poetry and La Bohème for suburban American kids arriving to create their identities, and do drugs, and get laid.” The fine book contains many entertaining cameos by Andy Warhol, described as charming and flattering; William Burroughs, whose windowless and soundproofed residence, named the Bunker, was a meeting place for drug-fueled parties and dinners akin to “board meeting[s] out of A Clockwork Orange”; Susan Sontag, who was rumored to have snuck into an all-male sex club disguised as a man to “participate in its democratic voyeurism”; and Madonna, who sent Gooch’s longtime boyfriend, Howard Brookner, an early release of her album Like A Prayer when he was dying of AIDS. Gooch richly recollects his experiences as a model in Italy—describing his time in Milan as “feeling blindfolded and spun about three times”—and Paris, though the bulk of the narrative revolves around Gooch’s decade-long relationship with Brookner, a filmmaker. Citing letters and journals, the writer touchingly reconstructs Gooch’s loving and tumultuous life with Brookner, from their first date in 1978, to the summer they spent in an abandoned cottage on Fire Island, to their struggles with Brookner’s heroin addiction and Gooch’s resistance to monogamy, and finally Brookner’s death at the age of 34. This worthwhile account is a poetic meditation on an exceptional relationship and a stirring moment in New York’s cultural history. Photos. (Apr.)