No Church in the Wild

by Paine, Bacchus

  “What’s up? I mean… weltschmerz. I suppose,” I replied.

  They both shot me a quizzical look.

  “I just happened upon the word, but it is hugely appropriate. It means ‘Depression caused by recognition of the difference between reality and the ideal.’” Based on their faces I assumed they’d understood the implication – I didn’t really have a good reason to be depressed – but I don’t think I really got the implication myself at the time, that you could add ‘irrational’ to the beginning of the word’s definition.

  Ben looked down. “I’m familiar.”

  Jackson broke his silence now and looked pointedly at Ben, and he betrayed by his comment that I’d told him quite a bit about Ben already: “Your spot’s the toughest. It gets better. Have you told your parents?” Jackson and I had always made a habit of discussing the progress of those who were turning toward “gay.” It occurred to me suddenly that that very process, the process of “turning” gay, had the potential to answer the question I’d posed to myself the previous night. It was, after all, a process by which someone became acquainted with a new pleasure, a process through which they would come to understand something different and grapple with what that newness meant to them. I needed to understand that process more, I supposed.

  “No, I haven’t told them yet,” Ben mumbled, jerking me back into the moment I’d retreated from in my own head.

  “How do you think they’ll react?” Jackson looked straight into Ben’s eyes, and there was an immeasurable pause before Ben answered.

  “I really don’t know. I hesitate to tell them until… well until I have actually done something,” Ben said, self-criticism writhing in his voice, ripping himself from Jackson’s gaze to stare down at the table.

  “Why?” I asked. I must have interrupted Jackson, who stopped a word in his throat.

  “Well I mean if I start dating a girl, there’s no point,” Ben explained. Now his voice was more familiar – I daresay it was his work presentation voice. Well-rehearsed.

  Jackson and I looked at each other, briefly. The line began to inch forward, and we shuffled along with the boisterous crowd.

  As we approached the theater, I looked back to Ben and asked, “Is there a particular girl you’re into?”

  He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Then he said, “No not a particular one. But I do still like women. I have a very particular type. Of woman, I mean.” I’d only known Ben to sleep with one girl in our whole acquaintance, an Ethiopian beauty with a tiny waist and plump breasts. I’d been jealous.

  We offered our tickets to the usher and dug up three seats together, settling with Ben between Jackson and me.

  The theater was built in the early 20s, and the era still wafted inside. The venue spread on two separate levels, under ceilings flowering in Gaudian art deco swirls and a rich mauve color palette, reliefs of daring classical figures adorning either side of the stage.

  “What do you like about women?” I prompted Ben as we sat, looking upon mauve goddesses.

  Ben sat silent for a long moment before offering, “I like the grace of them, and the calm.”

  Jackson laughed out loud, which bordered on rude, and sarcastically chimed, “I feel the same way about Ella Fitzgerald.” Now I was giggling. Jackson, for his part, had long ago foresworn any lingering interest in women. We’d often joked that if he had any interest whatsoever, or if it were 1955, we’d be legally married – as opposed to philosophically married – already.

  The surrounding attendees looked up at our laughter, and Jackson looked at me. “So he hasn’t yet been the subject of your proselytization.”

  “Not really, he’s been far away for a while and has just recently hatched from the closet and all,” I explained.

  Ben sounded annoyed when he said, “I’m sorry, did you have some measure of enlightenment to offer?”

  Jackson sighed, “I hope you realize what kind of can of worms you’re opening right now.”

  I reached across Ben to smack the side of Jackson’s arm. “Bitch.” He smiled, as did I. “Ben, dearest friend. Where to begin? I suspect your interest in women is likely marginal, at best, or at least more aesthetic than romantic.”

  “And why would you think that?” Ben asked me.

  “Because you admit that you are attracted to men.”

  “I would think you of all people would understand an attraction to both,” Ben whined, calling me out.

  “Indeed, I do, and I actually think that’s more common for people of both genders than their only having interest in one sex. I believe you have some attraction to women. If you were a woman, I’d be totally prepared to call you a ‘bisexual,’ much as I hate that word. But you grew up in an environment where the vast majority of the community believes that any attraction to men denotes exclusive attraction to men, an environment which, I daresay, criticizes exclusive attraction to men in some way. If, deep down, you believed that you could be happy with a woman, I don’t think you would have admitted any attraction to men. At least, probably not to anyone but me. With girls, admitting the attraction is less dangerous because it doesn’t necessarily quickly change your identity to “gay,” especially in San Francisco. But, I admit, if a woman socializes with lesbians all the time or, like, doesn’t partake more than once, that’s a pretty good indicator that she’s really only into men.”

  He sat quietly for a moment, then muttered in a weak voice, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the assertion that other men can be attracted to both genders but I am so obviously not into women just because I’m willing to come out. I’m not sure I’m, like, done with women. Are you with her on this?” he asked Jackson.

  Jackson replied, “No, I’m not, not entirely. I think she makes more of everyone’s experimentation than she should. Realistically, I find a woman sexually attractive every once in a while. But objectively the idea of pussy grosses me the fuck out. How do you feel about the sex organs?”

  “That’s always been the hard part,” Ben said, catching Jackson’s eye again and getting stuck there. Jackson looked back, unabashed.

  “So to speak!” I said, cackling. Try as I might, I could never ignore the opportunity for a juvenile, dirty joke.

  “Touché,” Ben said, “but I’m not buying. I get that you’re saying some sort of cultural sensory deprivation is at work here, and I know that sensory systems are continuously shaped by experience – like if you don’t use the sense in a way it will sort of atrophy, and so depriving someone of the use of their senses, well except for the sense of smell, will affect perception with that sense going forward.” Jackson’s eyes fixed a giddy, curious stare on Ben as he spoke, probably in awe that this banker spouted recent neurological studies, “but even given changes to a psyche that might result from depriving that psyche of something, some people are demonstrably totally gay, and some people are decidedly straight, and I think that comes from something immutable about them,” Ben said.

  “I agree!” I said, exasperated. I was used to Ben busting out a hugely relevant counterpoint, and it hadn’t phased me. “It’s just that –”

  Peaches Christ took this opportunity to interrupt us with the beginning of her Drag Review. The lighting in the theater darkened, and the applause rose. “To be continued,” I whispered to Ben as the Emcee in a black garter belt introduced the story and the players, urging Peaches Christ, who played Trannibal Lecter, out onto the stage, and together they introduced “the lesbian” Clarise, a professional-looking queen in a power suit, who accepted her introduction in a voice crafted with baritone and lisp to imitate Ms. Jodie Foster. Next came Madame Senator and her chubby drag daughter, and the introductions closed off with the announcement of Buffalo Jill, played by an up and coming drag personality made famous on reality TV via RuPaul’s Drag Race. Buffalo Jill was the lankiest of the bunch, though hardly the castmember with the most egregious stage makeup. A video of credits followed the live introduction, allowing each “lady” in the cast the opportunit
y to make another joke about herself and the cinema-inspired premise. Toward the end of the video, the Senator appeared giant on the screen, eye makeup facetiously suggesting that her eyebrows rose at the very top of her forehead, before Buffalo Jill was given accolades appropriate to her premiere.

  In the break of darkness that followed the video, while the bare sets were supplemented with the accouterments of an asylum, I began my response to Ben, not bothering to whisper: “I believe some people are only attracted to the opposite sex and some people are only attracted to the same sex, I just think those types of people are actually the minority, that most of the population has, like you do, some attraction to both.”

  “She just hopes that’s true of most straight girls, really,” Jackson added.

  “I guess I do hope that. Generally I just think women are more likely to admit an interest in both sexes when they have it, because for some reason people then think of them as extra-sexy, while if a guy admits to liking guys everyone is generally going to assume he is just totally gay. But I maintain that you’re more likely to find happiness with a man, now, Ben.”

  “Well, I’d agree with that, at least,” Ben conceded, “but I’m not sure I’m ready to buy that most of the population is attracted to both.” Something went awry onstage, and the darkness lingered longer than it should have.

  “I’d certainly give you that most of the population that is attracted to both doesn’t admit it,” I said, defensively, “but if you’re blindfolded and some unnamed person starts doing a great job of blowing you, you’re going to ejaculate regardless of whether the mouth happens to belong to a man or a woman.” The stranger to my left looked pointedly at me, but I continued, slightly more hushed, “the mistake I think people make is assuming that the response to sexual stimulation is physically dependent upon a partner’s gender. It’s not. It’s more dependent upon your perception of that person’s sex and how that perception fits into your worldview, shaped by your upbringing. And of course your perception of whether that person’s sex should turn you on. So if you think someone shouldn’t turn you on for whatever reason, you may not ‘feel’ attracted even if you have the biological backings for attraction.”

  Jackson cut me off. “Bacchus, you can’t deny that perceiving someone you find beautiful, of a gender you find beautiful, plays a part in arousal.”

  “No, I won’t deny that,” I said. “I just think what you respond to is partly a consequence of your upbringing. Imagine your parents had insisted throughout your childhood that any man who dressed as a woman was Satan – could you enjoy this show as much?”

  The Emcee interrupted us as the stage lights rose. S/he called out Clarise, who began meandering through the staged asylum, making her way toward Trannibal Lecter’s voluminous bright-orange hair. As Clarise conversed in euphemisms with Trannibal, another inmate whipped her dick out of her straightjacket and started to wag it at Clarise.

  A brief change of scene brought Buffalo Jill tricking the Senator’s chubby daughter into a van. When the scene closed, the lights dimmed and restarted quickly, bringing us into the lair of the infamous Buffalo Jill, a lair that appeared strikingly similar to the asylum.

  But now, roasting spits fit for a luau were perched at each corner of the stage, loaded with some unidentifiable pieces of plastic. Whited-out mannequins peppered the display, and on the floor lay bloody, obese corpses. As I leaned over to ask Ben what was on the spits, the production answered my question with a song.

  If the song had a title, it must have been “Delectable Buttocks.” Twenty or so chorus queens filed out onto the stage and joined Buffalo Jill in singing the praises of buttocks, asses, glutes. Delicious, they were. Scrumptious. Delectable. The actors began to mime chopping off one another’s glutes with stage cleavers. As it occurred to me that the spits were roasting plastic bubble-butt insertions for pants, the chorus queens fell en masse onto their backs and held legs in the air, shaking their asses to the crowd, singing “delectable buttocks” over and over again.

  When the lights rose for a break, Ben said, “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Indeed,” replied Jackson.

  “Speaking of perception supporting stimulation…” I began.

  “Oh I’d hardly disagree that perception plays a role in arousal,” Ben said. “This does not arouse me.”

  “Thank god,” Jackson said.

  “But there are aroused people here! What I’m trying to say is that perception is malleable too. I think even Jackson will agree with me on that.”

  “I suppose I will agree with her on part of this: your perceptions, the very world you see around you when you open your eyes, is shaped by the environment you were raised in and the descriptors you’ve been given. For example: In Namibia, there are only five words for colors. There’s one word that means both green and blue. And when anthropologists show a Namibian a bunch of green blocks and one blue block, shaped the same, and ask the Namibian to tell them which block is different, they really can’t. They stare and stare and after a very long time they might identify something different about the blue block. Point is, in some sense you can’t even see what your environment doesn’t give you words for.”

  “Right, exactly,” I stuttered excitedly. “Like, in Rome, there were no words for ‘gay’ or ‘straight.’ There were, however, specific verbs for every act of penetration that indicated a particular gender, penetrating organ, and orifice. The Romans only thought of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms of actions, active or passive actions, and reacted to those. There was no such thing as an ‘orientation.’ And good luck finding a Latin word for ‘drag queen,’ even though there was plenty of cross-dressing.”

  There had been a time when I made such speeches proudly, full of self-assurance. Years of study had generated a compulsion to call out Rome in my everyday conversations, often to the chagrin of my companions. But the progression of Claire to Jamal had me wondering at the inefficacy with which my theories seemed to apply to my world. I was undoubtedly overly dependent on the lessons of Roman ideology. I hoped that I was at least presenting these harebrained theories of mine convincingly to Ben.

  “So what?” Ben asked. “The words for ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’ are derived from German?”

  “Ha, no. Well, sort of. They were coined by a German about a hundred and fifty years ago. I know of no references to ‘sexuality’ as a personality trait before that, and, believe me, I’ve looked.”

  “In Rome?” Ben asked.

  “I’ve looked well beyond Rome on that one. No, the first reference to ‘homosexuality’ is thought to be in an 1869 German pamphlet that advocated the repeal of sodomy laws, ironically.” As soon as you name a thing you shape its existence forever…

  “That I believe,” Jackson said, “I think she’s been obsessed with looking at that question for a while now.”

  I felt defensive. “I just refuse to believe that any necessary characteristic of humans goes without a word for the first several hundred thousand years of human language, so I don’t think we’re on the right track using those words now. I find them grossly inadequate.” The man to my left was staring unabashedly at me now, and I was saved from acknowledging him when the lights dimmed and rose again.

  Back in Buffalo Jill’s lair, the Senator’s daughter had been unceremoniously dumped into a huge metallic cylinder, nervously cuddling Buffalo Jill’s fluffy, white, human-sized drag dog as she cowered. Buffalo Jill began a song of triumph, of hunger, of narcissism, posing seductively for a video camera whose feed displayed above the stage, wrapped now only in a light, silk, flowery robe. As she sang, she teased the crowd with flashes of the alabaster form beneath it, which was strikingly feminine when shown in profile, ass cheek and all, to the audience. We watched awestruck as she met the crescendo of this particular musical number by reaching down to tuck her dick between her legs and turned to the audience, opening the robe. Gasps escaped even this open-minded audience, and I was forced to admit that, seeing just the little tuft of
black hair above the crotch, this skinny-ass queen appeared to have the body of a flat-chested chick. The crowd roared.

  “I can’t believe they just did that,” Ben said as the lights dimmed.

  “Neither can I. But I’m glad to hear the cheering,” I replied, and the lights quickly rose again.

  Clarise was on the hunt, having made her way into Buffalo Jill’s corpse-laden lair, and she poked around with limp wrists, turning her head to look for Buffalo Jill. Jill jumped out from behind the sets, attacking her, but the attack was halfhearted at best and resulted in Jill lumbering over Clarise and demanding that she “lip sync for her life” to the tune of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

  Naturally, Clarise accepted. Luckily, the corpses and mannequins rose from the dead in inanimate in support of Clarise’s musical number, a drag ballad of the highest order, dripping with double entendre, and, somehow, singing the praises of dick.

  Apparently, Clarise had adequately lip-sung for her life, and she was spared as the show concluded.

  We sat clapping in stunned silence as the curtain call lingered on. The Drag starlets were, not shockingly, prima donnas, and each one took five times as long as a superstar opera soprano to absorb her applause – even Buffalo Jill’s human-sized fluffy white dog. Buffalo Jill took a full five minutes, partly to profusely thank the boyfriend and parents that sat in the audience to watch her, partly to regale the audience with memories of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and partly to hear herself talk, I supposed.

  As the three of us stood to exit, Peaches Christ sat us back down. As with all of her productions, she announced, the audience was encouraged to appear in costume, and she asked that the costumed queens make their way to the stage to compete for the “best serial killer costume” award.

  As they began to gather on stage, Jackson noted that the closest any had gotten to looking like a serial killer was the one who just dressed like Hannibal Lecter in his straight jacket. Otherwise, the twenty or so contestants included a man in a leather speedo and a black wrestling mask, several “standard” Drag Queens in prissy heels, one towering Drag Queen in a leafy gold bikini, and two preteen girls wearing school outfits. Peaches and Buffalo Jill chatted with each contestant, asking the audience to boo their favorite. Why boo, I did not know. Maybe they had communally internalized past boos and hisses and repurposed them, the way the gay community has repurposed the word “queer.”