09/07/2025
We saw a beautiful film on Gert McMullin.
Check out this video from this search, documentary about the founder of the Gert https://share.google/iIYup86rhgoIodiAV
🇺🇸 “I first caught sight of John Savage Outlaw (1956 - 1993) at the New York Health and Racquet club in 1979. It took me nearly a year to find the courage to talk to him. I didn’t want anyone to know I was gay, even the people I wanted to sleep with. We finally met, sharing a Nautilus Machine. Turns out he used to be a busboy at Studio 54. This was such astonishing news to my very button-down Westport Conn roots. He was everything that was cool about NYC. He knew people like Danny Fields, the manager of the Ramones, he hung out at the Ninth Circle, a gay bar where Andy Warhol’s crew might be found drinking. I went with him one night. We smoked ci******es at a table outside. Lou Reed or Andy never showed up, but it still felt like an underground album cover to just be there with John. He took me to hear Patty Smith; he knew her piano player, so afterwards we went backstage. He knew Linda Stein who lived across the street from her gay ex-husband Seymour Stein, the record executive, on CPW. John took me to Linda’s once and Elton John showed up. He knew people that lived at the Chelsea Hotel, clothing designers, drag queens, people that cut hair, drug dealers, hustlers, he went to CBGB’s. He’d been to the Mine Shaft, where he said he saw Lee Radziwill. He turned me on to The Cars, The Clash. I was at his apartment when MTV first went on the air.
He was an actor in lots of commercials. He’d get residual checks in the mailbox of his 22nd street walk up. He lived check to check, sitting on the front stoop with one of those old school to-go coffee cups from the Greek diner. Not that it was necessarily easy, but it was okay to be broke in NYC back then. Being rich wasn’t the point. Being yourself was. He was living in an era I wanted to be a part of. The end of an era really... What I didn’t know was from the day I met him, he was almost certainly already infected with HIV. His obituary in 1993 noted that he was one of the longest known survivors of AIDS. He had experienced early-stage symptoms even before medical authorities recognized AIDS as an illness.
He never gave up, he fought for his health and for his place in the word. He started a band, The John Outlaw Project. Google “Down at the Drugstore.” From his early twenties, he lived a life filled with enormous fear and suffering, but also hope and love. He was my first sort of boyfriend, although no one in my life knew about him until later. I wish I wasn't so afraid back then.
What I saw in him that first day at the New York Health and Racquet Club, was what I saw in him, till his death at St Vincent's Hospital at the age of thirty-seven: His beauty, his smile that never left him, his kindness, bravery, and a feeling he always had, that got him all the way from Salem New Hampshire to NYC, a feeling that the world wasn’t what they said it was in school and on TV. It was so much more than that. It was filled with wonder and joy. John was taken from us way too soon, he ended up seeing more of life than he bargained for, but he always inspired me to live an authentic life, he still does.” 📖 by David Marshall Grant
