O ROTTEN GOTHAM, HERE WE WENT AGAIN

it isn't that you forget what to say so much as that you forget how you used to know how to say it. the activist lawyer lives with a roommate in an apartment off of utica, but he has a fine, fine collection of shoes. he fucks without condoms. you take exception to most of what you see, but there's always an exception. the chinatown bus still drops off and picks up at the same storefront on canal street, but you can't say what excited or incensed you about the last time it dropped you off or picked you up. the last gay bookstore in manhattan found a way to manage a space on the lower east side, but it's the last gay bookstore in manhattan, and the manager has to apologize for charging sales tax on the sale of a three dollar "homo catz" zine. up allen street at bluestockings it's no future and the end of san francisco, and those, there, feel like the end of new york. but you feel like you forgot how to say so. the brooklyn museum is doing an exhibition on art and civil rights in the sixties, and you almost get there to see it a couple of times. (one of those times, granted, you didn't expect the museum to be closed.) "witness" it's called. but it's easy to be distracted by the lawyer -- and then by that somebody else. there should be much better things to do in the city than brunch, lunch, coffee, happy hour and dinner. you do them, bearing witness to the different state of things now. it's a first world country, they're grown men, and they have fine, fine shoe collections, but it's still sex tourism. and even though you've seen the statue of liberty now (from outside a restaurant in red hook), it all feels so much less free.