by John Rechy
And I forgot to mention the silently symphonic, intricate, instinctively choreographed beauty of the promiscuous sexhunt.
1:09 A.M. The Lots and Alleys Near the Costume Bars.
JIM PARKS ACROSS the street from the Turf bar—one of several “costume” bars in an area of dark houses and closed commercial buildings. Outside the bars, the lots and alleys become the sexual arena throughout the night. Scouts are already hunting the terrain in preparation for the main bouts immediately before and after the bars' closing, when accumulated sex will flow outside. Now the preliminaries are occurring.
Jim waits in the lot. Grime-veiled streetlights intensify the sense of otherworldness. A car's brights enclose him slowly in a brilliant net. The car stops, the lights blink in signal. Jim moves past the passenger window of the car. The driver is handsome, blond. He leans over and opens the door for Jim.
Inside, the man goes down on Jim. Jim reaches for the other's cock, but the other eases his hand away; it's obvious that he does not want Jim to respond in any way. Jim leans back. Outside, another hunter circles the car slowly. A few feet away a man stands next to a van, another man squats before him. In the car, Jim raises his body, the other's tongue rims him. The man outside watches through the window. The exhibitionistic splendor is exciting Jim, he's close to coming, and he doesn't want to, not yet. He eases his body away. “Sorry, man, I can't come,” he lies. The man watching through the window replaces him in the car.
Jim stands within the dark doorway of a building for rent. A man in leather chaps stands before him. Soon each has pulled out his cock. Two warriors, sex weapons pointed at each other. Neither advances. Jim breaks the tie by moving away. Increasingly more outlaws linger in the lot's shadows.
A goodlooking man begins to cruise him. A third appears across the street. The first man crosses. Jim turns away quickly, not wanting to see them if they move toward each other, away from him; the wing of depression touches him again, a constant intrusive presence within his victories.
Guarded by a cluster of trees, a long partition between two darkened impassive buildings at the end of the parking lot provides a cramped place for encounters. A muscular man stands there. He and Jim glance at each other then instantly away. Both too similar, both instantly attracted to each other, that very attraction and similarity causes each to turn away, to show the other that, for him, the other doesn't exist. But both glance back at the same time, and again away. Certain the other has left, Jim returns to that strategic place. Soon, two men flank him. A frozen triangle. Jim is tempted to cross the street, apprehensive they may glide toward each other; but one of the two moves closer to him, and the other moves away. Dodging the low-hanging twigs and branches, Jim moves into the space between the two buildings. Following quickly, the other man licks Jim's nipples. Jim touches the other's hairy chest. The man blows Jim, then stands, Jim sucks him, then stands. They alternate. They separate.
Back to the lot. More outlaws leaving the bars.
At the back of a squat building is a three-walled indention, like an open cell. An overhead light is periodically smashed by the hunters; the jagged bulb looks out blindly as three men buttoning their pants emerge out of the enclosure. Jim moves into the cubicle. Waits. Again, that recurring awareness of strangeness, to stand, just stand waiting in the darkness. Again, the brushing depression—as figures lurk, pause, move on.
The man in leather chaps—who did not advance earlier—is here again. Jim is about to leave, not wanting to extend the waiting game. But the other gropes Jim's cock with one hand, the other guides Jim's hand to his back. Exploring, Jim's fingers discover that the man's pants have been cut out at the buttocks; the open chaps expose his naked ass. As the other sucks him cursorily, Jim's fingers part the buttocks.
The man in chaps pushes his bending body against Jim's erect cock. Instead, Jim shoves his middle finger in. The man jerks—“Oh, yes!” Jim pushes another finger. Both farther. The man whispers: “Oh, yeah, baby, fuck me big!”
Jim withdraws his fingers. The other pushes his ass forcefully against Jim's hard prick. Jim grasps him roughly by the shoulders, pushing him back and forth, allowing his cock to slide into the parted ass, its movements expertly matching the thrusting of Jim's. He feels the tight ass squeezing out his cum.
He pulls away. The man came too.
Across the street. Past other shadows in the lot. To the bathroom left open nightly in the garage at the corner. The sound of splashing water, as he soaps his cock, obscured— until he finished washing—the sexsighs coming from the lone cubicle.
Outside, Jim decides he'll go home—hours before the purgatory of violet dawn.
But as he walks through the thickening area—new hunters cruising, cars driving up and down frenetically—the nerve of his sexuality is re-awakened still again.
Whrrrrrrrrrr! Whrrrrrrrrrr!
The roar of the cop helicopter cuts the night. The wide shaft of its light pounces on the darkness. The outlaws move for cover, into areas sheltered by walls, into partitions between buildings, under trees—but even so, they move slowly, not violating the hypnotic quality of the hunt. Cold light floods the invaded area eerily, a threatened island of light in the dark. In the shadowed fringes, the hunt continues.
Captured momentarily by the helicopter's light, his shadow swirling strangely about him, Jim moves out of the round pool. Beyond the illumined circle, a man waits in a car for him. He's well-built, wearing no shirt. Challenged as always, Jim removes his vest.
The man gets out—he's more muscular than Jim thought at first. The helicopter's shifting light illumines both muscular bodies dramatically. Jim moves beyond the sidewalk, against sheltering trees bunched before a locked building. Following, the other stops within feet of him. The man flexes, clenched fist to forehead, biceps bulging in imitation of magazine poses. Challenged anew, Jim flexes back. Again, the brushing light of the helicopter accents their defined muscles. The man shifts into another pose, leg rigid at an angle, one arm tensed hard. Jim flexes back, but he's becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this scene. Is this all the man wants—the two posing for each other, here? The man keeps shifting from one pose to another, each time waiting for Jim to follow. But now Jim feels silly. Still, identifying narcissistically with the man, he doesn't want to walk away too fast and leave him flexing in the bushes in the middle of the night! But just this, exciting as it was as a short preliminary, is not enough for Jim; he has to break it. Slowly he moves out. He puts on his vest, walks away from the strange charade.
The helicopter is gone. The hunters who fled return, recharged. The bar has closed. Men wander in the dark, lean against vans, walls, stand before open car windows. The odor of amyl nitrite perfumes the night with sex.
Jim moves to a lighted corner. Several men pass by. All ignore each other pointedly, defensively. Two men drive by. “Wanna come to an orgy?” one calls out to Jim.
“Uh—just tell me where.”
The man tells him the address. The two drive off, stop before another idling man: “Wanna come to an orgy?”
Jim returns into the misty darkness of the lots.
2:17 A.M. The Garage on Oak Street.
In minutes the area outside the costume bars is deserted. Now the hunt will transfer to the sidewalks, the streets, and the garage near a jammed afterhours club. The quiet street is filled with cars—parking, driving. Men cruise the long blocks under tall trees. Stepping over the crushed barbed wire at its sides, figures are moving steadily to the back of the abandoned garage.
FLASHBACK: The Garage. A Year Ago.
The inside of the garage was the size of a large living room. Parched, cold cement for a floor. Walls crumbling into dusty patches. Its large sliding tin door was chained. One side door leading in was ripped open. When you entered, you saw nothing, heard only muffled sounds; you smelled amyl. Then your outlaw eyes adjusted; you saw tangled figures throughout. At times the bodies spilled out into the back, fusing outside among the dead brush.
Jim had just walked out of the garage; countless mouths and hands touched, grasped, and licked bodies in the dark. Only minutes later—safe by his car across the street—he looked back and saw the area of the garage ablaze in white lights; he heard even from this distance the chilling words:
“Vice officers! Everybody stay where you are!”
He saw outlaws running—some made it, some didn't, and those who didn't were thrust violently onto the sidewalk, faces pressed hard against the dirt, cops anxious to grope and mount in violence the bodies they dare not touch in sex. “Fucking goddam queers!” the threatened, desperate invaders roared. They lined the bloodied outlaws before the garage. Handcuffs clanged.
Jim felt the mixture of pain and rage.
Minutes later, with one of the escaped outlaws, he made it in his car parked around the corner from the site of the bloody battle.
2:21 A.M. Oak Street. The Garage. The Tunnels. The Shed. The Street.
The outlaws endured—discovering in the area three new major underground sites—two semen-caked tunnels and a shed—and several minor ones—laundry rooms left open, sheltered garages, stairways. Soon the raided garage thrived again, though its entry was tightly blocked. The orgies shifted to the space behind, outside.
Though the night has cooled slightly, Jim removes his vest and walks shirtless along the sidewalk toward the garage. A very handsome makebelieve cowboy—wide hat, boots, western shirt, open—is moving toward him on the block. Cars are parked solidly flanking one side of the sidewalk; on the other, trees arch over it, bordering a long, empty, hilly lot. Immediately the electric signal of daring rashness is sent out between the two men. Jim stands near a street light. The “cowboy” squats before him. Not furtively, not hurriedly, not for only seconds—but slowly, defiantly, ritualistically, openly—the cowboy sucks Jim, while Jim lightly maneuvers the curly, bobbing head, cowboy hat sliding back. Now Jim's hands slide into the other's open shirt, touching the hair-matted chest.
Other hunters freeze watching. Cruising cars pause to stare at the beautifully defiant spectacle. The cowboy comes into his own hand—and in another moment Jim would have come too, gladly. To seal the liberating act between them, they kiss very, very long.
They separate slowly.
Jim walks into the area behind the garage.
Perhaps five men stand there. But nothing is happening. Everyone is waiting. All that is required will be one motion, and the orgy will spring. And it does: Almost simultaneously, a man cupped Jim's groin, and another touched another's. The sexual current flows. Bodies, hands, mouths connect. Soon other shadows are led here by the silent signals. In the clear night, they look like barely moving statues.
Without coming, Jim left the orgy. The interest was too diffuse, too indifferent. Along the block, a man in a van is cruising him. Jim stands by the window of the stopped van. The man reaches over and unlocks the passenger door. Jim walks in—the driver is attractive. He drives the van a few blocks, to another oblivious neighborhood.
In the back of the van, pants pulled down, the two lie on the carpeted floor. The other man wears a cock ring—a current fad, a ring of metal, like his, or of studded leather, around the base of the cock and balls, supposedly insuring harder hard-ons, better orgasms. They lick each other's balls, Jim feeling a curious arousal as he sees the other's ringed cock and balls. Jim doesn't want to come again. He withdraws his cock from the other's mouth and the other's from his—tempted very vaguely to take the cum but pulling away just as a tiny dot, just a dot, of creamy liquid crowned the other's cock.
The man dropped Jim off in the area of the garage. “I think we made it once before,” the man tells Jim.
“Uh—maybe.” Jim can't remember.
Still long before dawn. The street still thrives. New hunters have left the bar-turned-coffeehouse.
There are too many people by the area of the garage, and so Jim crosses the street to the tunnels.
Two tunnels across the street from each other; stairs rising connect the lower street to the upper thoroughfare. In the muffled light, a man squats on the landing of stairs. Jim walks up. Suddenly he stops, remembers the strange earlier rejection at Greenstone. And the empty infinite hours of terror. Footsteps from the upper-street level! Another hunter? The cops? Jim moves away—to the other tunnel across the street. There, one man is fucking another blowing a third. Jim retreats.
Beyond the cave of the tunnel he passes a forlorn old man, waiting, alone, ignored, wasted; waiting for anybody.
Jim moves toward the shed behind a commercial building. The door to the shed is open. Inside the dark room there's a water tank, a blacker presence in the darkness. Gardening tools. A curled hose. And the odor of amyl nitrite. The sex chemical lurking from earlier encounters? His practiced eyes adjust to the dark beyond the door. There are three men at the back of the shed; as he moves forward slightly, a hand attempts to pull him into the cluster. More than three outlaws are here. Again the dark anonymity sends him away. His body is too special for totally crushed darkness.
He moves up the stairs into the yellow tunnel again. Two men, startled, pull away. Jim retreats, not wanting to break them apart.
On the corner a lightly but definitely muscled young-man stands; perhaps twenty years old. He's obviously proud of his beginning muscles, which he flexes. As Jim passes, the youngman nods. Jim stops a few feet ahead. The youngman joins him. “How long you been working out?” he asks Jim, quickly establishing a bond. The words, so friendly, so easily spoken, challenge the anonymous silence.
Jim answers.
A squad car passes them, backs up threateningly. But the two don't move.
“You got a beautiful body,” the youngman says. He clearly waits for Jim to comment on his. But right now Jim can't.
Motor running, the cops still stare at them from across the street.
“You got a place?” the youngman asks.
“Yeah—a few minutes away.”
Suddenly the cops flash lights on them.
“Where's your car?” the youngman asks.
Jim points it out.
“I'll follow you,” the youngman says.
They separate within the glaring lights, to their cars.
The cops move away, motor growling.
As he drives to his apartment—the youngman following in his car—Jim glances at his watch. Before long, dawn will come in a blue arc. Jim has a sense of—… Of having survived the night.
On the street, the outlaws scattered by the cops wait in their cars. The lone old man still stands anxiously by the tunnel.
VOICE OVER: The Gay Threat
“WHAT IS THE REAL GAY THREAT?” I've asked the mixed audience I'm addressing. Earlier, in balking at an overt call for sexual revolution on the streets, I backed off. But I know only too well the commitment, the dangers, the sacrifices. You don't recruit.
I go on:
Since we are not child molesters, nor seducers of the straight—but a stop-gap against overpopulation—and since it is very possible that we are more law-abiding (dismissing sex laws) than the straight population, and since we have abundantly enriched humanity, how then are homosexuals a threat?
Biblical arguments do not hold. Scriptural admonitions are used entirely selectively. That route is clearly subterfuge.
There are, in fact, two very real threats that the gay world poses to straight society. One is of course psychic— the fear of being what religion, laws, doctors have wrongfully branded, condemned, persecuted, prosecuted, punished, forbidden.
The second is that an acceptance of homosexuality-including, importantly, its tendency toward promiscuity-would result in a traumatic questioning of what, in the extreme, becomes oppressive within the heterosexual norm.
Why one wife? One husband? Why not lovers?
Why marriage?
Why sex with only one person?
Why not open sex? (Even the mere knowledge of it threatens, since gay promiscuity is invisible to all but the participants and
voyeuristic cops.)
Why only relationships?
Why, necessarily, children?
The heterosexual would thus be questioning, not hetero-sexuality itself, no, but the stagnant conformity of much of his tribal society.
4:08 A.M. The Apartment.
“You GOT WEIGHTS HERE?” the youngman asks enthusiastically inside Jim's apartment.
“Yeah, this is where I work out” Jim leads him to that room. He draws heavy drapes against the sky which will soon lighten.
They begin tossing the weights about—not in a strict workout but only to heighten their awareness of their own and the other's special bodies. Jim is very proud of his much more muscular body. He pumps his muscles easily, wallowing in the obvious admiration of the youngman. Yet, with an unwelcome stab of hurt, Jim can't help noticing … that the other's body … though just beginning to sprout muscles … has a luminous velvet smoothness … that only … the very young… possess. Jim thinks: He looks like me when I was—… Turning away from the youngman, Jim pumps his body frenziedly, fully.
Soon they're both flushed. They stand before each other.
“You really do have a beautiful body,” the youngman tells Jim again—and waits again.
This time Jim can say: “So do you.”
The youngman smiles, Jim smiles back at him. But neither commits himself to advancing first. For moments Jim thinks it will not happen, that both will be trapped in their rigidity. He touches his own chest, a signal. Now the youngman's hand rests lightly on Jim's bare shoulder. For seconds Jim doesn't touch him back—wanting symbolic acknowledgment of his own muscular superiority. Fearing that Jim will not reciprocate, the youngman withdraws his hand. Now Jim touches him back, on the shoulder. The other's hand returns easily, moves down Jim's stomach, slowly, to make sure Jim's moves down on his—and it does. Bodies inch closer. Lips touch. And now the two men begin a game—the acute attraction tinged with competition: Wherever the youngman touches Jim—tentatively at first-Jim touches the other. The tentative movements firm.