Thing of Beauty (8 page)

Kathleen, stunned, called her family doctor, who suggested Gia see some sort of counselor. It was, of course, impossible that Gia could be gay, as far as Kathleen was concerned. This was obviously a phase, clearly all tied in with Bowie and these kids she was hanging around with. Kathleen was certain that a therapist could help Gia get over it.

Still, Kathleen was deeply troubled by the prospect of her daughter being attracted to women. “It’s very difficult for me to relate to all that because I don’t have feelings or inclinations that way,” she said. “I can really say that I can accept a person no matter what their sexual preferences are, but I simply can’t identify with that. For another woman to turn on to me—that’s very scary. Actually, when I was married to Joe, this one situation came up. I bowled in a league with these four sisters, and then this other sister of theirs started showing up. I took an interest in her because the other sisters seemed to really have it together in a way this girl didn’t. She obviously needed a friend and pursued a friendship with me. She told me that she was attracted to me and she kissed me.

“I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in anything like that. But, I was so shaken by it, knowing that I had made her feel that way. I discussed it with the psychiatrist the first time I was in the hospital. He said I was attractive and it was normal that a woman would be attracted to me and I shouldn’t feel one way or the other about it. Actually, this all happened during the week I went into the hospital because of the trauma with Joe. But, it just happened to happen at the same time. I went into the hospital because of
Joe
.”

Gia’s friends never doubted that she had some personal problems. But they thought her sexual preference was one of the only things she
wasn’t
confused about. In a group where the sexual posing was becoming absurd—especially as people began actually having sex, which really complicated the issue—Gia had always been considered a beacon of clarity.
She had briefly dated a few effeminate, pretty boys, but she had soon realized that her real physical attraction was to women.

The feeling wasn’t as unusual as her response to it. At that age, it was uncommon even for those men and women who would one day live exclusively homosexual lives to act on their feelings. Even the Bowie boys who dressed like drag queens weren’t necessarily involved with men. But Gia was ready to act. She wanted a first love, and she wanted it to be a girl.

Most of Gia’s friends were doing their best to sneak into the city’s gay and mixed nightspots. But most of them went because gay bars always seemed to have the best music and, since they were often private, they stayed open later and checked ID’s less stringently. Gia was certainly at the gay bars to maximize her access to dance, drink and drugs. In fact, she often economized by taking a Quaalude on her way to the club (two dollars for a high that lasted all night) or by carrying a large aspirin bottle hand-filled with vodka or tequila or whatever anyone’s parents had around. But she was also at the clubs to meet women who wouldn’t be surprised when she flirted with them. And she always seemed wholly unconcerned about what others might think about her intentions.

“Gia was the purest lesbian I ever met,” recalled Ronnie Johnson. “It was the clearest thing about her. She was sending girls flowers when she was thirteen, and they would fall for her whether they were gay or not.”

“She was the most perfect woman, and the most perfect lesbian ever,” recalled Keith Gentile, a gay club habitué from South Philadelphia who met Gia and Ronnie at the first Center City gay club they all frequented, Steps. “She wasn’t masculine and she wasn’t feminine. Guys liked her because she wasn’t that prissy kind of woman, women liked her because she didn’t have the worst qualities of women or men. And she had that I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude and it wasn’t fake.”

That sophisticated androgyny led her to a new style of dressing. She had recently jettisoned her glitter clothes for a wardrobe of army fatigues and men’s pleated slacks, worn with a tee shirt or men’s oxford cloth shirt and army or
cowboy boots. And she never wore makeup, unlike all of the women, and many of the men, she knew. It was a fashion statement that nobody in Philadelphia—man, woman, straight or gay—had even
thought
of making.

Although she didn’t really want to, Gia went to see the therapist recommended to her mother. The male psychologist turned out to be more sympathetic than Gia could have ever dreamed. She did not tell him much about her life, and delighted in making up stories for him that she would later recount to her friends: at fourteen, Gia was already legendary for spinning seamless yarns that added years to her age and mature substance to her wild life. But the therapist was not totally unsupportive about her feelings toward women. Two years earlier, the organized mental health community had officially changed its mind about homosexuality, which previously had always been described in the literature as a “disease.” In 1971, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association announced that homosexual orientation was not, by definition, a mental illness. They identified something called “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—which described those patients who were deeply troubled about being gay. But homosexuality itself was no longer to be routinely discouraged or looked at as a condition requiring a cure. The counselor basically told Gia it was okay to be gay. So at the end of one of their sessions, Gia decided that the real problem was that she couldn’t confront her mother about her feelings.

By this time, Gia had any number of older male friends with cars who would take her places. It was one of the fringe benefits of being a pretty girl, a prerogative she was not about to give up just because she preferred women. She had arranged for one such young man—a classmate with a well-established crush on her—to pick her up after the session. Karen and another guy were with him in the car. Gia asked if they would all come back to her mother’s apartment. She was, once and for all, going to tell her mother she was gay, and she needed moral support. She cajoled them all into agreeing to do it, although none of them really believed she would go through with the plan.

The four walked into the apartment, sat down on the powder-blue velveteen sofa and love seat in the living room
and began to chat. Kathleen came in and joined the conversation. Suddenly, in the middle of a completely unrelated topic, Gia turned to Kathleen. “Mommy,” she said, “I have something I want to tell you.”

Karen and the two teenage boys immediately turned their eyes floorward, stiffening, staring at their shoes and mentally chanting “Ohmigod, ohmigod.”

“I like women,” Gia said. “I’m gay.”

Kathleen stared at Gia and started to cry, her runny mascara streaking her powdered cheeks. Then Gia started to cry and soon they were all crying. After a few weepy minutes, Karen managed a feeble, “Well, I think we better go now,” and they sneaked out the door. Once out of earshot of Kathleen’s living room, they hollered in disbelief over what they had just seen. Even in outrageous times,
that
was truly outrageous.

Kathleen and Henry had bought a cabin in the Poconos to get away and entertain friends—“a party house,” they called it. They learned the hard way what could happen if they went to the cabin for the weekend and left Gia by herself. One Saturday evening they called home at midnight to make sure Gia was in, and got no answer. Kathleen convinced Henry that they had to drive home immediately, and when they pulled up to their duplex two hours later, Gia was nowhere to be found. But some guy whom Gia had come home with from Oz—a Center City gay club with a Judy Garland theme—had just finished emptying their home of its valuables. The guy, a friendly Oz Quaalude connection in his mid-twenties, had apparently fallen victim to his own fare. Before getting away from the house with Kathleen’s jewelry and some rare coins, he had passed out on the front lawn—where he still was when the Sperrs, and then the police, arrived. When Gia returned home about five
A.M
. and saw her stepfather’s car, she took off.

Kathleen and Henry assumed that Gia ran away because she was afraid of getting into trouble. But Gia later confided to a friend that she had been very messed up on Quaaludes and the guy had “taken advantage of her.”

After that incident, Gia started coming along more often to the cabin. She could bring a friend, but she had to come.
Downtown Stroudsburg on a Saturday afternoon did not exactly hold the mystique of Sansom Village, but Gia would often invite Karen along and they would make the best of it: frightening the townspeople with their hair, smoking a couple of joints to make the day a little more amusing, eating whatever was edible in the pizza joints and diners and seeing whatever was at the one movie theater. When they returned to the cabin, they were often confronted with a scene that they might have considered wild and wonderful if it wasn’t populated by …
parents.
Everyone was drunk or getting there, grown men were groping grown women. The sexual revolution had reached the suburbs—wide sideburns, see-through blouses, leisure suits and medallions. And
they
complained that the Bowie kids looked weird.

At one such weekend party, Gia was introduced to a client of Henry’s, a bachelor lawyer named Meyer Siegel. He said that Gia looked like she might be able to model. That was high praise, because Meyer had a reputation for always dating pretty models and stewardesses. He suggested that Kathleen have some pictures taken of Gia and recommended Joe Petrellis, a well-known commercial photographer in Center City. Petrellis shared Siegel’s interest in “magnificent women.” They had been bachelor buddies for years until Meyer sent the photographer a girl named Patty Herron, whom he not only photographed but eventually married—ending his single life at the age of forty-six.

Petrellis was a heavyset, handsome man with a studio decorated with antiques he had personally and painstakingly refinished. Fashion photography was what he loved doing best, but the demand for it had dwindled. The local department stores started doing their own work in-house. The city had just a handful of major clothing manufacturers and only one magazine,
Philadelphia
, that published the low-paid editorial fashion pictures that helped photographers get more lucrative display advertising and catalog work. And there were always newer, younger, cheaper photographers vying for those jobs. Petrellis didn’t want to move to New York, where most of the better national jobs were: he had worked to become an above-average fish in America’s fourth- or fifth-largest pond, and he wasn’t interested in starting from scratch. So he began taking pictures of accident scenes for
local law firms that billed the costs of the massive enlargements to their clients. And he was doing model portfolios for cash.

Petrellis rarely did free test shootings with prospective models anymore. That was how very young or very successful photographers, each with a continual need for fresh faces, found new girls and experimented with new techniques. The photographers were paid in loyalty and other more personal tokens of a model’s gratitude, an occasional model agency finders’ fee, and, once in a while, a terrific picture; the girls got shots for their portfolios that made them look sort of like models. But Petrellis could no longer afford to do free tests, for both professional and personal reasons—his time was too valuable and the temptations too great. Now he charged $850 for a session and eight finished photographs. Beauty was suggested, but not required. Once in a while he came across a girl worth recommending to an agency. But, as he would bitterly point out, as soon as anyone he “discovered” found any measure of success, she promptly forgot that she was from Philadelphia and had ever known a Joe Petrellis. Meyer Siegel arranged for Gia to be photographed as a favor to him. “I think Meyer sent me a few hundred dollars as a present,” Petrellis recalled. “He didn’t have to.”

The night before the session, Gia and some friends spent the evening at Oz and came home on the El a little after three
A.M
. “I remember she called her mom when we got off the train and said she was sleeping at my house,” recalled one friend. “She said she had to go get pictures taken at nine-thirty the next morning. I said, ‘Why don’t you just go later,’ and she said her mom had paid for the pictures. What I found unusual about it was that she had left this little bottle of pink L’Oréal Color-Wash at my house. She
never
wore makeup like that, not the Gia I knew.”

The sessions, one indoors and one outside, produced dozens of uninspired and uninspiring photos of a gangly fourteen-year-old with a forced smile and a hairstyle that, no matter how skillfully manipulated, would never pass for ladylike. Gia looked presentable if uncomfortable in women’s clothes, and her awkwardly posed bikini shots revealed spindly arms, small breasts, chubby thighs and a broad bottom: a typical
model’s figure only from the waist up. Nothing about the pictures was reminiscent of the shots in the
Vogues
and
Harper’s Bazaars
that filled her mother’s coffee tables, except they were of a girl and they were in the kind of sharp focus that only professional cameras and lighting could consistently produce.

But the process of being photographed interested Gia. Mostly, she liked cameras, and was fascinated by the technical aspects of what was going on. She also didn’t mind the attention being focused on her. She liked that Petrellis told her she was pretty good at modeling. Even under the raccoonlike makeup job, there was a little something in her eyes that was catching the camera’s attention.

And in nearly every shot, her eyes were wide open. She already knew not to flinch when exposed to the harsh light.

W
hen the announcement came over WMMR-FM, word spread through the Bowie community like a batch of bad hair dye. The T. Rex show scheduled for the Tower Theater was canceled. Ticket holders could get a refund at the box office or, for an extra dollar, could trade in the tickets for the same seats to see David Bowie, who was coming out of retirement to support a new record.