New York Hasn't Lost Its "Voice"

 

When I got to New York in 1989 you had many newspapers to choose from: The New York Times, The Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Wall Street Journal...But every cool New Yorker read The Village Voice each week. I studied every page my first year there, looking for clues on how to join their ranks. 

The "Choices" section listed too many ideas on how to spend my time and money..."indie" films at the Angelika and the Waverly, museum exhibits and lots of art galleries in Soho. I loved all the music club ads for acts I used to play on my college radio show like The Mighty Lemon Drops and The Mission UK. 

The classifieds in the back hinted at how Young New York really lived. There were a lot of "Help Wanted" ads for telemarketers, waiters, and store clerks — more like "rent" gigs for creative types than wannabe yuppies like me. Not many posts for PR jobs. 

Finding an apartment in New York looked easy when you saw the sheer volume of "For Rent" listings. And most of them were in the cool neighborhoods downtown or on the west side. Yet all were beyond my budget. The "Apartments/Homes To Share" section offered some hope though. I circled several shares in the $400-$600 per month range, thinking optimistically about my future income. 

I also saw a super-sized listing for "The Gay Roommate Service" that both intrigued and terrified me. Having a gay roommate would help me ease into my new world. But would he try to sleep with me? 

The next pages offered a robust "Personals" section — including "Men Seeking Men." You basically read a guy's description, dialed the hotline, entered his specific code to hear his greeting and then left your message for him. Bold. No, scary. And I didn't know what all the terms and abbreviations in their listings meant. 

Example: ISO. What did ISO mean? I seek obedient...? Indoor sex only? BF. LTR. BDSM. I knew what S&M stood for, but what was the BD part? And was BF for Boyfriend? Or something with your butt? It was like someone spilled a bowl of Alpha-Bits across the page. 

The back pages of "The Voice" also ran big ads for sex hotline numbers. Almost as many gay ads as straight ones. 555-GAYS. 550-TOOL. "Male Call." All you needed was a credit card. Amazing. But I could never call. I would have been too worried about how much each minute was costing me. And I would have been just too, you know, nervous. 

The Village Voice shut down in 2018 after a long financial struggle similar to most print-bound publications. But I just heard the infamous alternative weekly has a new owner who has re-launched its website and promises quarterly print editions. Maybe New York hasn't lost its voice after all.