is a video document­arian who lives on the Lower East Side.

"Since 1979 Clayton Patterson has dedicated his life to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness in New York City's Lower East Side, a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. Tra­vers­ing the outside edge he's recorded a dark and colorful society, from drag to hardcore, heroin, homelessness, political chaos and ultimately gentrification. His odyssey from voyeur to provocateur reveals that it can take losing everything you love to find your own significance." — synopsis from What sorts of things are you involved with here in the East Village? I'm involved with the Ninth Street Center across the street. We started out about fifteen years ago as a gay center, which was considered very radical and avante garde at the time. But we're more than that. We're a center where people come together and talk about their human problems, a community center for creative people who don't want the "support" of the professional therapeutic community. We don't feel that we need to be demeaned and discredited by condescension from the establishment. So this, then, is a self-help or support group? Yes. We have discussion groups. We have counseling. The format of it is very simple. We sit in a room and we talk to one another. There are no rules, no regulations.

We were very influenced by a man named Paul Rosenfels who was a good friend of mine and who wrote a number of books on human psychology that are sold down there and which we take pretty seriously. So you then deal with important issues of the day, like AIDS? We deal about AIDS, but we don't provide any kinds of social service support. We're willing to refer people to the appropriate agencies, but basically we're a "talking cure" shop. People talk about their problems. We think of it as pooling our knowledge about the important issues of life. And a lot of the same people have been there for years? Many of them, yes. About half of the people who are solid members have been there from day one. I've been there from day one. Half of them at any one time are relatively new people. Are you involved in any other community-type things? Not really, partly because the Center is something that I believe in a lot, and I have an important role to play there. I'm on the board of directors, I'm the secretary of the organization, I'm ... Are you a founding member? Yes. I was one of the people who started it. I publish the Ninth Street Center Journal. I just do a lot of stuff for the place. I think that people who want to be committed to a social cause or something external to themselves probably do better when they focus heavily on one thing than when they distribute themselves across a lot of issues. This is why I don't really get into dabbling with the local democratic club, or this issue and that issue. I'm interested in animal rights, for instance, but I don't do anything about it because I want to just focus on doing one thing well. In an era of increasing complexity, that could almost be a credo for modern man. And you're able to pay the rent for this space? That must be a commercial space. It is, but we only pay around a thousand dollars. That's good, because with commercial spaces there's no lease rights unless you have a long lease. I think there's something about non-profit organizations having some additional rights. So you're a corporation, then? We are a corporation, yes. We finally got incorporated about ten years after starting it. Is it open all the time? It used to be open seven days a week, but over the years although people continued using it as a resource it wasn't important any longer that it be open seven days a week. At the moment it's open only two nights a week, Tuesday and Saturday. And that seems to be enough for the moment. Does it have a changing membership? Yes. Over the last ten years, it has hovered between 30 and 35 members. Each member contributes a fixed amount a month, starting at five dollars. We have a contribution jar by the door. If they drop a dollar in when they're leaving, we're grateful. It's not required, though. There's no charge for anything except the books and monographs that we sell. The cookies and cakes and coffee and soda are free. If they find themselves coming more often and they want to just send us a check once a month, then we put them on the membership list. So it's self-supporting then? Yes. It's totally self-supporting. We get no grant money or foundation money or anything like that. People give between five and sixty dollars a month and that's the way we pay the rent. And we keep the expenses down, too. We don't have a lot of activities that are designed to either expend or generate revenue. We strictly do only two things well: counseling and talk groups. So it's streamlined enough so that it's almost self-sufficient and, now that it's going, it doesn't take too much maintenance. Exactly. We've set it up now so that any of us can just die. And that means something. A lot of organizations are based on just one guy or one woman who makes the thing work. And we're at the place now where we have a board of directors. That sounds conventional, but we only meet twice a year so it doesn't get in our way. In the past I started a co-op in this big old house with a small group of people who were going to school and things like that. Although the house eventually got sold, this went on for a number of years. And yeah, there is something that is really gratifying to know that something that you started, that works, that was a good idea, can continue on for years. And like you say, if one person dies or somebody gets tired or moves to Idaho, the organization now has a life of its own. It's what Paul and I always wanted. We feel that Paul Rosenfels did a remarkable job in his books of reformulating psychology in a way that creative people could make good use of. It's a long story and to get into his theories would take a long time. But he was afraid that his work was going to be lost to history because he was not accepted by commercial publishers. They found him too philosophical and abstract. So what we did was to set up a center where people who made use of these ideas in a real-world kind of way ... What would be an example of an "idea"? We use the idea of psychological polarity between introverts and extroverts quite a lot. Now that's not an idea that's original with Paul, but the way he worked it out is quite original. I could show you some of his books to give you the flavor of it but to really expand on the content to you in any clear and meaningful way would be time-consuming. So you're followers, then, of his psychological concepts? Yes, exactly. But we're not a cult. We don't say, "Before you come in you have to sign a statement pledging yourself to Rosenfelsian psychology." As far as we're concerned we're like members of a scientific and educational institutation who have just been lucky enough to be the first ones to hear about Newtonian mechanics. And when we talk about it, it's not just to sing its praises but too probe its weak points as well. So it's more than just a get-together, it's like a seminar then? It's like a serious colloqium, it's a round table of adults who get together to talk about serious issues. The people who have been there the longest and appreciate the profundity and wisdom that Paul offered will be spouting that kind of stuff. But it's not dogmatic, it's not cultish, it's not magical. We're not like a bunch of astrologers. It's like a humanist organization. Very much so. We are secular humanists and proud of it. We're against magic and all the various kinds of delusions by which people fail to confront their deepest aspirations. So it's sort of like taking people who have maybe not difficult psychological situations, but who are uncomfortable at different times in their lives, where it might involve depression or ... We claim that anybody who really cares about the state of the planet is going to have to be uncomfortable in this century. We're still living in the dark ages. We don't know very much about human nature yet. We know that people are capable of wonderful, amazing, beautiful things, but we don't really understand under what circumstances these things occur and how to engender them.

Our educational system is an utter disaster when it comes to generating people who are representative of the best that human nature has to offer. So for now and for the foreseeable future, the tradition of bringing real virtue into human life is going to be an underground movement and not represented by any official dogma or established system. Yes, that's very true. I taught high school for a year and it was very interesting. It's basically a socialization process — trying to get along, doing well. It's about remembering things and being socialized. That's right. Being socialized and accepting established version of truth. I would say you don't even deal with truth. You deal with memorization. That's one of the really fascinating things about New York. New York is this weird place that's filled with individuals, although I think it's changing. I think the East Village is still a creative community, but if you go to Soho, which used to be creative, now they have the Greene Street Block Association which wants white garbage cans. They have rules for the whole street. They've locked down the whole place. They lock down everything. Whereas the East Village is still a very creative place. Our center is trying to be a service organization for those creative people who want to live independently, who are "nobody's fool", but find that it's useful occasionally to meet with other like-minded people to discuss things. I don't think it's required that a creative person have to move to Alaska in absolute isolation from other people to write a great novel. I think that's a misrepresentation of what creativity is. I think that creativity, if it's worth a damn, can tolerate human contact. What we're trying to do is provide a context in which creative people can feel comfortable, where we're not dogmatic and we're not trying to brainwash them. All we do is offer information and interpretations to people. If they have other interpretations that seem to work and are interesting to us, then we learn as much from them as well. We're not afraid to learn at all. So it's basically a group of creative people. Exactly. That's the criterion in a very profound sense. If people come and say they just want to be sheep in a herd, we say, "Get the hell out." We kick plenty of psychologists and psychiatrists off the premises. We will not have their garbage poison our atmosphere. We believe that life is for the brave and the true and the heroic. If you don't have the guts to live a really individual, creative life, you have the right to be on the same planet, but we won't lick your ass and support your cowardice. Don't creative people have problems in identifying with or fitting into the group? Right, but our group is not in any sense a group in which you're required to be like anybody else. If you come down there sometime, you'll see that everybody is funny, weird, different — it's just a completely strange amalgam of unusual types. And because it's like that, I think people really feel comfortable there. They don't have to slink away feeling, "Gee, I didn't realize this was only a group for WASP's." Or lesbians, or Republicans, or whatever. It really is a group for everybody who can think and everybody who can take responsibility for themselves. But it's basically a gay organization. Well, I didn't want to make it a ghettoized enclave — a club just for people who think they're gay — so I wrote into the bylaws that it's an organization for homosexuals and those exploring their homosexual potential. We take it as self-evident that homosexuality is probably something that to some degree is in everybody, something that we can all explore and something that's part of the human scene and that we needn't be afraid of. But I wanted the Center to be for everybody who has creative aspirations, who wants to leave something behind, who wants to add to the storehouse of human knowledge in some sense — anybody who has noble aspirations or some sense of dissatisfaction with the immorality and ignorance in the world. Creative dissatisfaction is the motivating force here. And I think this certainly includes people who have not yet perhaps explored their own homosexuality, and so I don't exclude those people. Many straight people come down to the Center and become a living part of what's going on. I'm not homosexual or have the desire to be or explore it, but obviously I have a lot of friends, being within a creative community, that are gay. It's not a problem for me. I think that what we mean by homosexuality is something a little broader than what most people mean. My homosexuality is not typical, for example. I remember when I was a kid that what I'm now calling my homosexuality expressed itself by my felt need to be important to other men. It wasn't sexual at all. I didn't want to have sex with men, I wanted to be loved by men. So it's almost a misnomer to use the word "homosexual". People have tried to introduce the word "homophilic" but that doesn't describe me either, since my interest has more to do with power relations. The four basic needs, according to Paul, are sex, love, celebration and power, so maybe we need to be talking about homocelebration and homodynamics in addition to homosexuality and homophilia. The one thing that sort of upsets me about the whole gay thing, is the whole emphasis on sex. I put together a pamphlet on AIDS with a lot of people from the Gay Men's Health Crisis and I guess the part that really annoyed me was that they had this really serious disease and their attitude was, "Hey, go out and fuck your brains out. Have as much sex as you want — only do it safely." It seemed absurd that they were dealing with all these people who were dying and yet still preaching this line. This is part of the negative fallout of the sexual revolution that we've been suffering from for all these years. People have tried to get much too much out of sex. Exactly. I think that's the point that I'm making. The conventional "Christopher Street" gay community is addicted to the idea that they have to be sexual active all the time. In order for mental-health professionals to help them, they have to accept their sex addiction as a given. But we don't. What we do at the Center is say, "Look, you're trying to get too much out of this. Homosexuality is more than sex." So it's more human-oriented rather than sex-oriented. Oh, for sure. What we mean by homosexuality is simply that you should accept no prior restraints in your freedom to relate to your own gender. That's all. Yes, it can include sex, and we have members who are sexually active. But for my money, all I mean and all I've ever meant is that I can get potentially involved with a man as much as I can with a woman. And I think that's very important. I don't think we should have prior restraints on what we mean to other people, because then you're just setting roadblocks in my own pathway. I want to be very important to other men, and that's why there are a lot of men in my life. And because I accept no roadblocks I'm called "gay". But I don't mind that because I think it's sometimes useful for creative people to be marginalized. There are often greater degrees of freedom in the margins of life than in the marketplace. One of the positive things about the term "gay" is to make people able to look at things differently. I think the reason many gay people are creative is because they know that they're different in some ways from what would be considered the social norm, so it's easier for them to explore a lot of alternative ideas or ways of living or ways of thinking. Yes, the straight world gets so locked into these ancient traditions and superstitions. Marriage is a good example of a convention that has outlived its usefulness. I've spoken to a lot of married straights who thought that getting married was some kind of magical transition or switch. Gay people have known for centuries that this was just a bit of ceremonial magic, just a signature on a piece of paper. It's asking the feudal lord for permission to make love to your girlfriend. People should be ashamed to grovel like that in the 20th century. I think it talks about committment. But committment has to be psychological and not just a formality. Yes, that's true. I don't object to people getting married if they really want to. It can be fun, it can entertain the in-laws, whatever. But unless there's a psychological basis for that committment, no amount of paper signing is going to help. Oh, no, the paper signing doesn't change anything. I've lived with the same person for 17 years, and there are difficult times and better times for any couple. This is not really a gay or straight issue, but I think in modern times people don't commit enough. People have become easily disposable commodities. I agree with you, but I think that the only legitimate reason and motivation for sticking it out and staying with the same person is that you know that psychologically it's in your interest to do so, and not because there's pressure coming from outside. So I'm always on the side of inner-directedness. What I teach people is that there are usually very, very good reasons for staying with a relationship. Right. I think one of the disadvantages of being gay, at least for some people, is that it's a "me, me, me" concentration. That's the one drawback I see. I used to photograph a lot of drag queens at The Pyramid, for example ... A lot of drag queens are straight, by the way. Yes, that's right, but not these. But they'd have this thing of not needing to live with anybody or be with anybody. It's sometimes hard for them to get beyond themselves. You asked why the Center exists. The Center exists to help people get beyond themselves, to help people really care about one another and to grow up. There's an awful lot of social immaturity in the gay community — silliness, not really taking oneself seriously, not really believing that one can make positive change in the world. I consider this a pathology, a serious failure of development.

We tell people that if you have the benefit of a radically new orientation that you find comfortable, you shouldn't just be selfish about it. You should try to teach other people what it means for you to have this freedom, you should become one of the educators of the world. The world is suffering from massive ignorance, impoverishment and immorality and we all have to take a part in changing it. I think gay people are uniquely qualified — some of them, many of them — to take a very good look at society's norms and customs and conventions — seeing what is bullshit here and what is legitimate there — asking what we need to throw out and what we need to take seriously. I think that's true. As far as the gay thing goes, the group that I'm most appreciate of or sensitive to would be the fags. Like Quentin Crisp, for example. I mean he's obviously gay. There's absolutely no question about it. And those people sometimes have a much more difficult time. I don't personally have a need to make everyone know that I'm into an alternative lifestyle. I'm very selective. People call the Center "elitist", but I think that's just name-calling. It's using a ugly word for an approach that turns out to be quite practical.

Look, everybody has special interests, special talents, special things that they excel at and look into further. You're an artist, for example. You know a lot of stuff that I know nothing about. When you're in a mood to learn more about that stuff you're not likely to get together with someone like me to pick my brain. You want to get together with people who are of like mind and of similar background, and pool your knowledge with theirs. The Center is like a podiatry convention, except that instead of talking about podiatry we're there to talk about creative living in the twentieth century. This format, the fact that we choose one another on such a basis, is what people have been doing for fifty thousand years now. Selecting the right people is what makes it easier for the thing to work. The organization in a sense is more important than any one individual. The rise of psychotherapy in the twentieth century has done an awful lot to weaken people, to relieve them of the burden of personal responsibility and encourage them to feel that they can't control their own destinies. We get a lot of people who are victims of the psychotherapeutic establishment, who do nothing but suck their thumbs and feel sorry for themselves and complain about what happened twenty years ago. We tell these people, "Look, we don't care what happened to you twenty years ago. What we care about is what's going to happen to you tomorrow. And if you listen to what we tell you and participate in this process that we facilitate, you may be able to deal with tomorrow a hell of a lot better than you seem to be dealing with it today." We give them a challenge, we give them stress, and it might rub them the wrong way a little bit. But the ones who can say to themselves, "Well, I haven't heard this idea before, but maybe this is what I need to hear," come back and they usually grow up a little. They stop feeling sorry for themselves. They see that maybe they too can contribute something to the other people at the center and the world at large.