ESSAY Vito Russo’s Secret Papers Unsealed! MICHAEL SCHIAVI HEN I STARTED working on Vito secrets needed 25 years’ protection? I used to joke that the five Russo’s biography in 2007, I had home- boxes would reveal Russo as a transgender Nazi sympathizer. But town access to his papers at the New I also worried that they might reveal gaps in my knowledge of his York Public Library (NYPL). Arnie life that made it into my published biography. One day, I vowed, Kantrowitz, his best friend and literary I’d return to the NYPL for the full truth. executor, had deposited them there in W1995. Along with the 200 interviews I conducted of Russo’s sur- THAT DAY FINALLY ARRIVED in July 2016. Boxes 1 to 5 of the Vito viving friends and family, the NYPL archives would tell his full Russo Papers were now unsealed and available for public view. story. I hoped. But there was a problem. Russo’s will stipulated I opened Box 1 with trembling hands. The first letter, dated that five boxes of his papers would remain sealed until 25 years March 25, 1969, came from a friend bemoaning that the after his death, which would be November 7, 2015. What could “Stonewall is going to pieces”— three months before the famous be hidden in those boxes? Arnie kindly interceded for me with the Riots. This news is followed by chatty correspondence from Bette head of NYPL’s Manuscripts and Archives division. As Russo’s Midler, underground gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and gay ac- literary executor, could he request early cracking of the five seals? tivists Pete Fisher, Morris Kight, and John Paul Hudson, who at- “Absolutely not.” tacked anti-drag lesbian feminists for their “failure to realize Vito Russo (1946-1990) is a name that may be familiar to [that] the right to dress as we choose is the core of the struggle— most readers of this magazine. Russo was a pioneering gay rights and that we are all transvestites of one kind of another.” This was and AIDS activist and the author of The Celluloid Closet: Ho- a hot controversy in 1973, but why did it have to be buried until mosexuality in the 2015? One might Movies (1981; re- ask the same about vised, 1987), which a lovely note from became the founda- Lotte Lenya, who tional text of gay in June 1976 de- and lesbian media nounced a “recent studies and later the Supreme Court de- inspiration for a cision which makes much-praised docu- private gay consent- mentary, The Cellu- ing adults subject to loid Closet (1995). criminal prosecu- A co-founder of tion.” Lenya con- GLAAD and ACT UP, sidered the decision he was also the a “form of treason” posthumous star of against democracy his own documen- and granted Russo tary, Vito (2012). permission to read This film and my her comments at the biography, Cellu- upcoming Central loid Activist (2011), give his full history, so I won’t recount it Park Gay Pride Rally, which he was co-hosting. here. But back to the sealed archives and the secrets they revealed More understandable, perhaps, was his embargo on a post- upon their opening late last year. card from his buddy Arthur Bell, a Village Voice columnist who The dilemma I faced was this: could I really tell Russo’s life described Kris Kristofferson as “stoned out of his skull” at a story without access to all of his papers? This question grew more Star Is Born (1976) concert shoot. Russo may have feared legal perplexing as I plunged into the available archives, particularly action if it went public. Bell also quoted Stockard Channing’s Russo’s journals, where he painted his indefatigable sex life in claim that director James Bridges was in love with John Tra- Technicolor detail. He wasn’t afraid to trash contemporaries, dis- volta, and he blasted Bette Midler, whom gays had “created.” cuss his love of pot and Quaaludes, or dissect his romantic fail- Now, he carped, “[s]he’s rich. We’re poor. I think I’ll give the ures. Given these revelations, what more could there be? What whole thing up and tour the provinces in Mame.” Funny, mildly provocative, but actionable? Michael Schiavi, professor of English at New York Institute of Technol- Russo tangled with columnist Liz Smith, who, long before ac- ogy, is the author of Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo. knowledging relationships with women in her memoir, Natural November–December 2016 29.