by John Rechy
We accept your heterosexuality. Now accept our homosexuality, as equal. It is an acceptance that will enrich and free us all.
4:58 P.M. The Movie Theater.
HE DROVE TO his apartment. He took a shower, changed to fresh jeans, mixed more of the protein liquid. Still drenched in anger at the attack on Griffith Park, he drove to Greenstone Park. No one there. He remembered the strange man who spat, last night, when— …
He goes to a gay movie theater where he knows hunters congregate in the afternoons.
He enters a darkness so dense that not even an outline can be seen. But he's aware of presences in the roiling blackness. On the screen, a movie with unsynchronized sound and bleeding unreal colors is flickering; orange bodies grind on a green bed. Jim waits until his eyes adjust. Slowly, outlines emerge. Then forms. Now he sees men leaning against the back wall or idling in the space behind the back row, at least eight hunters in the small area. Perhaps a dozen more sit in the rows farthest back. Now definite bodies and faces emerge like flotsam from a black sea. Throughout the cavernous mouth which almost devours the screen, there is only a scattering of permanently occupied seats, mainly by older men watching the screen raptly. Others shift constantly from row to row. The concentration of hunters is now in the back—those who have come to make it, not to see the cheap movie.
Jim moves a few feet into the aisle, to be seen clearly; his torso is barely covered by a tight sleeveless T-shirt open in front. A man sitting at the end of the row near him leans into the aisle. Moving just slightly back, Jim allows his thigh to be brushed by the other's straining shoulder. The man opens Jim's pants and takes out his cock to suck. In the same row another man's head burrows into the lap of the man beside him.
Jim retreats to the back. A man tries to grope him randomly, but he's very unattractive, and Jim moves away, to the other side of the theater; twin sides flank the squat projection booth. Fewer people here.
He notices a handsome man a few rows ahead. Another sits next to him, but the first is clearly not interested in the second. Jim walks down the aisle, just slightly past the row the handsome man is in. The man looks at him. Now Jim stands at the end of that row. The man moves one seal over—separating himself farther from the other man on that row—and lowers the seat next to himself, inviting Jim. Jim sits. The man's hand floats over Jim's groin. Hands inside each other's flies feel warm growing cocks. Leaning over the seat, the man sucks Jim's cock. Then he straightens up His hand encourages Jim's head downward, to blow him Jim wants to, but not here. To move away, he uses the fact that another man has sat behind them. But he glances back hoping the man he sat next to will follow him elsewhere But he doesn't.
Toward the front of the theater and to the left, Jim notices, there is a concentration of forms for these minutes That signals activity; the few men who came to see the movie sit far apart from each other, deliberately isolated.
Propping his feet on the row before him, Jim sits toward the left-front of the theater in the circle of hunters, but still enough apart that it is he who will be approached. He glances cursorily at the movie, where a man leaning over a motorcycle is getting fucked with a huge dildo …. A tall figure approaches Jim, but instead of sitting next to him, he sits directly in front so that Jim's boots are virtually on the man's shoulders.
Turning his head, the tall man licks Jim's boots, hands drawing them closer to his head. Instantly, Jim feels the powerful rush of wayward excitement triggered disturbingly; the excitement aroused by another's total submission, implied. The man's tongue laps at the boots. Jim removes his feet from the back seat. The man slides down on the floor, and through a break in the rows of seats, like decaying teeth in the dark mouth, he crawls along the floor. His tongue bathes Jim's boots. One of the man's hands tries to raise one of the boots over his own groin. But Jim shifts his body on the seat. Now the man's tongue rises up on denim, to Jim's groin. The unwelcome excitement growing, Jim presses the other's head down—harder, harshly now. The other's teeth gnaw at the belt. Jim pushes the searching mouth roughly against his groin, forcing his cock in the others' throat, holding it there until the man gags; the man's hands grope Jim's boots, fingers sliding under the soles.
Glancing up again at the movie, to look away from the submitting cowering form squeezed before him, Jim sees a man dressed totally in leather flagellating a naked man tied at the wrists and feet. Immediately, Jim breaks this disturbing contact with the groveling man. Stifling the strong excitement, he moves to the back aisle. The handsome man he sat next to earlier is being sucked by another. Jim moves to the other side of the theater. A youngman with the back of his pants slit open is being fucked. On the screen the leathered man is burying his boot into the other's naked groin.
Feeling an aroused agitation, Jim leaves the theater. He takes off his sweaty shirt.
The man who licked his boots has followed him out.
Jim walks hurriedly away from him.
6:06 P.M. The Afternoon and Early-Evening Bar. Another Bar. The Turf Bar.
A bar in West Hollywood thrives on Sunday afternoons and into early evening. Like Jim, many others here are shirtless, naked torsos, some smooth, some hairy, some tattooed, muscular or slim, oiled. Proud of his muscular chest, Jim squeezes through pressing bodies. Hands clutch at anyone. Occasionally a form slides down surreptitiously to blow random cocks of indifferent men who continue to drink without looking down. Paired too arbitrarily here by the churning bodies, Jim feels devoured within a mass of flesh. He leaves. The agitation is increasing. He keeps remembering the raid in the park, the youngman he was with. And, suddenly, Danny, the years-ago image destroyed yesterday. And he keeps thinking of the groveling man in the theater.
In another bar: Again the bare torsos. Suddenly Jim sees the bodybuilder he left flexing in the bushes last night. Spotting Jim, he again adopts his favorite pose, face set, clenched fist at his forehead; clearly he expects Jim to answer him with a similar pose. “Oh, fuck,” Jim says aloud.
He drives to the Turf Bar, a bar he has often cruised outside of but never been inside, knowing what it's like. Inside now, he regrets immediately that he came. The bar is deliberately meant to suggest a torture dungeon—chains, manacles, boots hang on the walls, ceilings. Most of the men, even in the hot, hot afternoon, are in heavy leather— or military costumes. Many of them are goodlooking; all determined, with varying degrees of success, to be masculine; some are ugly, absurdly wrong in the rigid uniforms. There is too much of charade in the ramrod poses, the forced low voices—an embarrassing veering toward male impersonation, especially among the most heavily leathered or militaristic; a feeling created of male drag—the studded instead of sequined belts; the tight leather pants, instead of tight vinyl skirts, both almost silky in their sheen.
There is an electrified ugliness in this bar, of the rotting of fantasy.
Jim turns to leave. Near the door he's intercepted by a man wearing a full cop uniform—glasses, helmet, even handcuffs. A heavy ring of keys dangles on his right side. A lowered voice out of the fake uniform offers to buy Jim a drink. Jim ignores him, reacting immediately negatively to the costume. “I make a good slave,” the cop-costumed figure offers. “Fuck you and your cop uniform,” Jim reacts angrily to the man's charade of the enemy. As Jim pushes the door to exit, two men in Nazi brown-shirt uniforms strut in.
Why did I come here? Jim wonders in disgust, knowing he will never enter that bar again. Outside, he remembers Steve and Tony. Not the Steve he exchanged numbers with last night—no, another Steve. A memory which both excites and shames him.
FLASHBACK: Somewhere in Los Angeles. Last Summer.
The youngman, wiry, sexy, dark, moodily Italian with a boxer's tight body, had cruised him curiously from a distance all afternoon in Griffith Park. Finally, in the late afternoon, he approached him; would Jim come home with him?—he had a roommate…. Jim went.
So began one or two or even three blurred days of drugs and sex and hatred. The dark youngman was Tony; his ro
ommate was Steve, a wild-looking muscular blond man-very handsome—who greeted them at the door in brief shorts. Looking at Jim, “You got us a gorgeous body,” he said to Tony.
Electronic sounds and images charged the house. The stereo throbbed. Deliberately distorted, the television flashed colored acid shapes. The radio shot rock sounds. Naked, the three smoked hash, snorted cocaine, inhaled amyl, ate uppers—even downers. Their heads drummed with the amplified sound, flashing images, rushing drugs.
Then the ugly orgies began. Barking, Steve commanded Tony to do whatever he was ordered: to Jim first, then to Steve, often to both. “Suck him, lick his ass!” Steve ordered Tony. “Now mine, fag!”
Drowning in churning waves of warring dope, they floated for hours or days from orgy to orgy, dope to more dope. Steve used Tony's body, tongue, mouth, ass, as they used the dope throughout that miasmic blurred time. Periodically Jim wanted to pull away, yes, but, he tells himself, the dope and the electric excitement forced him to stay. And, yes, the hint of a subtle struggle between him and Steve, a struggle not recognized fully until the whole thing erupted.
Moody silences. Then the sex bouts resumed. The stereo, the TV, the radio—they pounded out smashed sounds and wiped colors. At Steve's command, Tony's tongue crawled over Jim's body, Steve's, and he groveled at their feet. Steve would shove Tony around roughly, even spitting on him, pissing on him.
They both fucked Tony throughout that time. Once they attempted to do it simultaneously. Jim would retreat, despising what he was doing, but, yes, aroused—and, yes (he reminds himself of this constantly when the memory recurs), waiting to—this was the word he conjured— “conquer” Steve. Yes, that—and the dope (he has to rationalize at least partly for his aroused excitement) kept him there.
Into this there flowed at least one more person— sometimes Jim thinks there were two—Steve's sex client or clients. The client, older, would watch; if he joined in, Steve would treat him the way he did Tony—laughing contemptuously. Jim asked for and got half the money, a matter suddenly of major importance to him. They popped dozens of poppers, the sex-triggering odor erupting in the rooms.
Sulkiness again—they would retreat from each other. The sex bouts resumed with Steve's harsh commands at Tony.
Then Steve ordered Tony merely to watch while he made it with Jim. Jim wishes this hadn't happened, but it did: Because physically—and only physically, he emphasizes—Steve turned him on, and he obviously turned Steve on equally—they kissed, licked each other's body, sucked each other before Tony's hurt eyes. Steve wanted to fuck Jim, but Jim wouldn't allow it. Instead, Jim kept fingering Steve's ass—and Steve resisted. Deliberately Jim broke another popper, held the ampule relentlessly to Steve's nose; Steve inhaled anxiously, inhaled longer, inhaled. Suddenly, looking at Tony as if whatever would happen now would be at least in part to torture him further, Steve spread his own legs in a wide V, as if to allow Jim to fuck him. Tony turned away. “Watch, you goddam queer!” Steve demanded. Jim lunged at Steve's asshole. Laughing loudly, Steve pulled away. Then he lay waiting again, his legs still spread, his eyes nailed on Tony. Again Jim pushed his cock at Steve's ass and entered it fully. “Oh, baby, yeah,” Steve moaned.
Suddenly Jim pulled his cock out. He glanced at Tony; Tony was crying. Steve's legs still waited open, his hands holding the buttocks apart. Then a strange smile slashed his face as if he knew, already, what would happen—and was perverse enough to enjoy even that: Jim looked down at Steve, and with contempt said:
“I don't want to fuck your goddamn ass!”
Steve laughed hoarsely.
Jim dressed, feeling as if the pulsing room were imploding in his head. He wanted desperately to breathe fresh air. He didn't know if it was day or not, or exactly where in Los Angeles he was.
Steve still lay in bed, snorting what was left of the cocaine. Jim said: “I'm sorry I came here.”
“Bullshit,” Steve said.
Jim turned to Tony: “How can you stand that sick motherfucker?”
Standing up fiercely, Tony exploded: “Don't you say anything about him! I don't want to hear you say anything about Steve!” Then, through tears: “I love him.”
“Bullshit,” Steve repeated. He was still laughing when Jim left.
Outside. It was morning. Standing in the white sun of Los Angeles, Jim thought the palmtreed city would explode before he reached his car.
VOICE OVER: The Ugly Gay World
AT ITS BEST, the gay experience is liberating, adventurous, righteously daring, revolutionary, and beautiful in its sexual abundance. At its worst it is a stark vision of hell
Stunning in its choreography, giving in its promiscuity, the hunt can turn brutal and raw. The elegant artistic sensibility can slide into bitchiness and bitter cruelty. The glamor can become grotesque. The beauty a haunted parody. Instant love, instant hate.
Every indictment of the gay world is a stronger indictment of the straight. The heterosexual norm—marriage, children, home, property—is ingrained into homosexuals as the only possible means of happiness. Homosexuals are taught—by heterosexuals—to expect and even yearn for what, given societal attitudes, is impossible under a different lifestyle. Warring attempts to fuse heterosexual expectations with homosexual needs and realities create the contradictions in the gay world.
No criticism of the gay world can be made outside that context; that the straight world has shaped the homosexual with threats of hideous “cures,” insane laws, and “moral” admonitions—attempting deliberately to transform him into a “sick, criminal sinner.”
Beyond that important context—which must constantly be emphasized—what of the gay world itself? How is the inner revolution being waged?
Gay liberation. Yes. But even that may be used as subterfuge for lack of interior awareness. The necessary exploration of self—alone, isolated—may be dissipated by protection within the club; static rhetoric substituted for active individual responsibility.
Increasingly easy on campuses and within other enclosed groups to announce openly that one is gay. The shock is gone. Safe in sympathetic numbers, propped by encounter-type jargon, homosexuals may even put down gays in small towns who “don't come out” (ignoring the vast difference between, say, womb-y glitterbars and dusty, queer-hating hick towns).
It is equally easy to say “gayisbeautiful—gayisproud.” Almost one word, meaning obscured. But are homosexuals discovering their particular and varied beauty? Prom that of the transvestite to that of the bodybuilder? The young to the old? The effeminate to the masculine? The athletic to the intellectual? Gay must be allowed variations. It is gay fascism to decree that one must perform this sex act, and must allow that one, in order to be gay; it is gay fascism to deny genuine bisexuality, or to suspect all heterosexuals.
Within the gay world, gays still refer to each other as “she"—a putdown of women and homosexuals. Still say “queer” and “faggot.” Still hear without protest brutal “straight” jokes about “fruits.” Still contribute to the breathy excitement at the discovery that a celebrity is gay, as if to be gay is to be naughty. Masculine homosexuals still heckle queens, who are true hero-heroines of our time, exhibiting more courage for walking one single block in drag than a straight-looking gay to “come out” on a comfy campus. She—and she prefers “she"—hurts our image, we say. What she may hurt most is our symbolic lack of courage; she might just more easily take on a threatening bully or a vice cop than a black-leathered gay might!
I spoke once to a group of young homosexuals, so unaware, so unconcerned, and so conservative despite their youth, that I have come to think of them as “Nephew Toms.” They sipped punch and nibbled crumbly sugar cookies—and expressed a murderous complacency. As long as they could go to dance bars and hold hands on campus, hey, well, ah, everything was okay, they kept repeating.
As in all minorities, there is no uglier figure than that which preys on his own. Publishers of gay books and magazines, owners of gay bars, restaurants, clothes
shops— these often raise their prices, exploiting a certain—inevitable—gay-ghetto mentality. Crank gay psychologists and psychiatrists (not to mention crank straight psychologists and psychiatrists dealing with homosexuals) and vulturous gay lawyers—who occasionally own interest in frequently busted bars that provide them clients—drain homosexuals and notoriously put nothing back into gay causes. Those who do commit their time and money—often providing free aid—are left by richer prospective clients to struggle alone financially.
Similarly, powerful gays who could afford to be daring remain in silence. The quiet rich, the closeted politicians, uncommitted gay movie directors, cowardly producers, clowning gay writers. And the often politically reactionary gay middleclass threatened by the prospect of having to see the prosecution of homosexuals in the context of all other minority prosecution; they cringe—these uptight middleclass homosexuals—in stylishly décored, ferned homes— at the thought of street sex (which nevertheless gives them a closet hard-on). Soothed by the now-reactionary soft lisps of the largest-circulation gay newspaper— The Advocate (whose editorials seem to be written by a gay William Buckley but whose money-bringing classified advertisements balk at nothing)—they forget, the silent rich, the cozy students, the “quiet” couples—that the outlaw absorbs the hatred that would otherwise swallow them.
Complacency and indifference about our own are among the ugliest aspects of the gay world. Two cops invade a gay area to bust two men—and other gays often watch as if at a circus—making no protest. We read deliciously the details of gay busts. And savage, sexually repressed criminals raid gay areas. So what?—we weren't there…. Not this time. A sad commentary, that the minority that could be among the most powerful ever has no organization to thwart violence in our sex-hunting areas—we squander our rage in rituals of self-hatred. We reduce “gaypride” to a matter of holding hands in public.
After the cleansing rebellion of the Stonewall riot came a few activist lawyers, small radical groups of proud fighters and daring revolutionaries—and more sexual outlaws—but not enough, not nearly enough. And there came as well too many tacky parades of bickering contingents, “gay leaders” riding like grand marshals on limousines flanked by acolytes. On sweet floats, coy boys posed in loincloths.