Samuel R. Delany, writer

I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. I worked in my office at home, an eight-room walk-up on the Upper West Side. It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem — just starting to be gentrified. The apartment was big, but the hall was in very bad repair, or at least looked it. “Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den,” my daughter told me once. A “crack den” lined with books.

At 11 to 12, I’d had a nine-hour day. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. I’d go for two, three, four hours and have a fairly good time. There was a theater called the Capri that I went to a lot. There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. Some of them were open 24 hours a day, or they were closed maybe four hours a day for cleaning. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. A lot of it was crack. Before that it had been pot. These places were used largely by working-class men, white, black and Latino, people who thought of themselves as straight and gay, many of whom were amenable to sexual things. They could be stimulated by the heterosexual pornography that was on the screen. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You don’t barge in on other people, that’s all part of it. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. AIDS was a very strange situation; starting in ’82 you knew very little about it, and then a few years later you suddenly realized it was the largest killer among your personal friends. It cut down a great number of the people who were out there doing it, but at the same time, the ones who were left were much more intense about it. You weren’t afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up.

1:00 p.m.

Debbie Allen, actress

I held auditions for “Fame,” the TV show, on a Sunday at the New York School of Ballet because that’s where I trained, and Mr. Thomas [ballet dancer Richard Scott Thomas] was happy to give me a studio. I had been starring on Broadway in “West Side Story,” and I had done the movie “Ragtime,” which was also coming out, but dance has always been my heartbeat. So when they talked to me about playing the character Lydia Grant, the dance teacher, I said, “Yes, I would be so interested if I could also be responsible for the choreography.” Because by this time, I had been developing as a choreographer, working with the Henry Street Playhouse and the New York Shakespeare Festival, and I really loved doing it. And they said, “Yeah, you can have that” — they weren’t even thinking about it. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. We were shooting the pilot, and I was trying to find the best dancers I could. They were supposed to be 17 or 18. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I said, “To hell with it!” Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasn’t of age yet. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. She was the ultimate ballerina, and she became that on “Fame.” I was excited that I would be able to introduce this new band of gypsies to the Hollywood scene.

Image An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. Credit... Tom Bianchi

2:00 p.m.

Tom Bianchi, photographer

Columbia Pictures had given me this SX-70 camera at a conference, and I started documenting life in the Fire Island Pines [an area of Long Island known as a haven for gay life], which just seemed very important to me. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a boy like me didn’t know there was a place for him in the world like that. Very quickly, I realized it had potential to be a book. Two editors at Simon & Schuster thought it was terrific, but they said, “You have to produce this yourself, and we can possibly get you a distribution deal. We can’t put the money out for something this queer.” Then [writer and editor] Bob Colacello saw the project and said, “Andy Warhol has a three-book deal with Houghton Mifflin. He has one book but he doesn’t have the next two. Maybe he could do your book under that contract.” So I went to the Factory and stood at a tall table with Andy and Bob, and Andy went through the dummy. It was almost a surreal experience, because I had the feeling that this person is only vaguely here. As Andy turned the pages, he said things like “Oh, that’s nice,” “Oh, that could be larger,” “Oh … ” At the end of it, he said, “Yes, I think we should do your book. I’ve gotta go to something, Bob will call you.” I took the elevator down to the street and I saw a phone booth and the first thought that came to my mind was, “Do not call any of your friends and tell them Andy Warhol is doing your book because I don’t think that’s for real.” And sure enough, he didn’t.

3:00 p.m.

Thurston Moore, musician

I met Kim [Gordon] through a mutual friend. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci. It was all very small town-y. She knew I was in dire straits; [by 1979] my landlord was getting squirrelly. We decided to live together at her place, 84 Eldridge Street. It had a tub in the kitchen, a tiny little toilet bowl in a closet of a room, one narrow hallway room and a slightly bigger front room — maybe $210.

In ’80, I got a job at Todd’s Copy on Mott Street. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. It was the only Xerox machine below 14th Street, so every artist used it. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. It was sort of 11 to 7. [Kim] would work one day, and I’d work the next. It was a total nexus. You’d establish dialogue with great artists like Lawrence Weiner. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. I was like, “Oh cool, you’re doing art too?” Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere.