The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached Twenty-First Street and Eleventh Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At five foot ten I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Spike and the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at Sixteenth Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defense — a fairly effective system. I thought back to the fifties when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not anymore. Now many of us were taking judo classes.
— from City Boy by Edmund White