No doubt it was the idea and the fantasy of New York that drew McDiarmid, like so many other artists and immigrants, to the city. ‘A city named in certain ways also becomes that city through the practices of people in response to the labels’, and they ‘perform the labels’, argue urban theorists Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift.^[10] Hal Foster also makes the observation in his catalogue essay for the 1982 exhibition Brand New York, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, that ‘New York is a projection as well as a place’.^[11] While that observation is true of many cities, New York holds a special place, especially for artists, as the ultimate modern city of the twentieth century. The idea of ‘America’, as I have said, was part of McDiarmid’s mobile sexual and creative identity formation. America represented the new, the culturally and sexually radical, the artistically innovative and avant-garde, the profligate, excessive and rich, the hip and the cool.

Richard Sennett, in his essay ‘Civic bodies: multi-cultural New York’, writes that before he came to New York for the first time in the 1970s, he had, as he puts it, ‘read his way into’ Greenwich Village, in the pages of Jane Jacobs’ influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.^[12] McDiarmid also ‘read his way into’ New York but in his case it was through the Village Voice, Andy Warhol’s Interview, gay periodicals such as Christopher Street, the work of the Beat writers William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and other gay male writers including James Baldwin, Edmund White, Gore Vidal and Samuel Delany.