A Quote by Gregory Corso
Now, twenty years old, I come out and I go back to Greenwich Village. Now, of course, I'm a wealthy man.
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For years I taught in universities and high schools for classes of 30 or 35 students. Now I teach in very large venues with thousands of people in the audience. I used to have notes. Now I just let go and let God. I just allow it to come, and I didn't do that before. I never even used the word "God" for twenty or twenty-five years. Now it just rolls out of my mouth all the time.
I wanted out of the spotlight, so I subtracted myself for a few years. I just tried to do a couple producing projects. Of course, the problem is, in getting out of the spotlight to feel safe and invisible again, I overcompensated and went too far into the darkness. And now I come back and go, "Wait, I didn't mean to go that invisible. Hey, come on, I'm here, I want my voice to be heard."
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
The beauty of Broadway is that if I'm 60 or 70 years old, if they'll accept me back, I can go back. So I think for right now I'm going to focus on the music--it's the new baby--and see how it's going to work out, and then maybe in a few years maybe I'll go back.
When I was 12 years old, or however old I was when Bringing It All Back Home came out, I'd just skip back and forth endlessly between 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'It's Alright, Ma' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' and now my Bob Dylan roots are showing big time.
Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers.
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.
My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.
Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's president that he'll take on, and I quote, 'the old boys network in Washington.' Now I'm not making this up. This is somebody who's been in Congress for twenty-six years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he's the one who's gonna' to take on the old boys network. The old boys network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting. Come, on!
I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.
I had crashes when I was small and Gumby-like that would have killed me now. I would just fly off jumps and go 40 or 50 meters when I was 6 years old - break skis, smash my goggles and get a bloody nose and go crawl inside for a little while and then come back out and ski more in the afternoon.
We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.
Is it different to come out now than it was to come out thirty-five years ago? Sometimes. But if you come out now and you come from poverty and you come from racism, you come from the terror of communities that are immigrant communities or communities where you're already a moving target because of who you are, this is not a place where it's any easier to be LGBT even if there's a community center in every single borough.
There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from the age of fifteen to twenty with a man who was thirteen years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life, and he passed away when I was twenty years old.
Well, it is so difficult right now when you look out on the road and how fast people go and the more and more cars you see out there, for teenagers, you'd think a kid that literally, a few years before, was sitting back in a car seat in the back seat is now behind the wheel.
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