No Church in the Wild

by Paine, Bacchus

  Ben, Jackson, and I were effectively trapped in our seats.

  “I bet none of the men up there are at all interested in women,” Ben said.

  “Agreed,” Jackson said.

  “Not necessarily. Those guys up there probably stand to take much more shit than you if they told their drag friends they actually wanted to fuck women. Women with vaginas, I mean.”

  “I really don’t understand why she insists on presuming the majority of the population is into both. Other than to make herself feel better,” Jackson said to Ben.

  “I insist because you can’t possibly watch the number of women that I have, most of them all the while proclaiming heterosexuality, ‘try’ being with women or actually just switch back and forth to women, and still think exclusive attractions to men or women are the ‘norm.”

  “But Bacchus, you live in San Francisco. You know in Mississippi girls aren’t dabbling that way,” Jackson said.

  “No, I readily admit that San Francisco makes it easier, and that people in Mississippi are less likely to experiment – though they do. But this is the only place I’ve ever been where any man will introduce himself as ‘bi’ and actually want to make out with me.”

  “It’s not just that,” Ben said, “this city self-selects for counterculture. Of course there’s more experimentation, more switching, here.”

  “True,” I confessed, “but girls are still willing to experiment elsewhere. I’ve helped them.” I smiled at Jackson, who was present for such an instance once. “Now, admittedly, women are more likely to experiment in an environment like this, where everyone around them totally accepts experimentation as mere experimentation, as having no effect on their identity. But whether they live here or not, once you put the idea in someone’s head that everyone’s fine with them trying it, well, I’m just saying that there must be curiosity, interest, abounding, because once you put people in this kind of environment they seem willing to try ‘gay’ out much more often.”

  The gold bikini queen’s face dropped as she received minimum boos, particularly in relation to the two pre-teen girls who’d been introduced before her.

  “You’re not seriously telling me you think that the majority of the population would try sex with someone of the same sex just because they got a proposal in a welcoming climate,” Ben said.

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Provided that they are in a mental place to admit to themselves that they want it. It does take some getting used to, the practice of gay sex, even if you want it. It took me a while to drudge up the courage to go down on a woman the first time. But I do think they might just be interested in trying it out.”

  “I wish that were true,” Jackson said. “I love me some straight boys.”

  Peaches turned to interview the Hannibal Lecter, who muttered unintelligibly through his mask and received pitifully few boos. Eventually, she moved on.

  “See!” I said excitedly, “even Jackson ‘gay-or-straight’ Milgrim has dabbled with a boy who claims he’s straight.” A short, halfhearted round of boos rose.

  “Okay I’m confused now,” Ben said. “Are you claiming that people have this desire and don’t know it because they don’t have the right words for it, or are you saying that people have this desire and will express it in secret?”

  “Both,” I answered. “Of course, some people are more aware of it than others, and probably more likely to express it as a result. Sometimes they just need a little help.” I grinned at Jackson, who smiled and shook his head.

  “Booooooooo,” the crowd roared. The auditory jolt gave me an idea. Maybe it was the spirit of all of these amateur drag queens, or maybe it was my new recurring dream of Rome’s sexual options, or maybe it was just that I was bored and wanted something that I could look forward to, that put the idea in my head. “Like, sexual extraction.”

  “Extraction of what, their gay sauce?” Ben asked.

  Jackson laughed. “I like ‘Sauce,’” he said.

  “We can’t call it ‘gay sauce,’ I said. I told you, ‘gay’ is a misleading word.”

  “Fine, just ‘Sauce,’” Ben offered, drawing another smile from Jackson. “But I’d like to see you extract it.”

  He was kidding, but I appreciated the opportunity to take him seriously: “How appropriately wet. So, extract, like, by prowling the streets of the City searching for research subjects from whence to extract gayness? I will only bring forth the gay as a public service, my friend.”

  Jackson interjected, “Well, we couldn’t prowl these streets, could we? It’s not as though the walkers of the Castro are harboring latent sexual impulses. Maybe if we go to Pac Heights…”

  I looked at him. “We?”

  He shrugged. “This sort of extraction seems too enjoyable to miss…” And he drew his cheeks back into a mischievous, cherubic grin.

  “So say our mandate is to extract the Sauce. What would be our gameplan?”

  “We need prey. Where do we find the prey?” Jackson asked no one in particular, looking casually around the theater full of gays, mocking me.

  Ben apparently felt contentious, and, for once, ignored the opportunity for a joke. “If you assert that a majority of the population is susceptible to this sort of Saucing, how can you even ask? Shouldn’t they be everywhere?”

  “Unfair!” I said. “We opened this moment of philosophy noting that most of our majority faces a mental restriction against expressing the Sauce. We’d have to overcome the cerebral obstacles. This is no small task.”

  “Perhaps…” Jackson began, “well, between the two of us, certainly we have discussed a substantial portion of our friends and acquaintances who yearn to Sauce.”

  A queen in a black leather corset screamed at the crowd, seeking boos. They were not forthcoming. Mere drag failed to impress this audience, it seemed.

  I let her voice die down before I answered, “Indeed, I’d daresay I know a fine contingent who truly need the Sauce poured out.”

  “Then we begin there,” Jackson said, adopting a pedantic, singsong tone all of a sudden, “from those we know to those they know, each in need of an education.” Ben was just staring at him, blank-faced, before he caught himself and turned his attention back to the contestants on stage.

  I, on the other hand, was becoming excited about this endeavor. What better way to understand why people sampled one gender or the other than to watch them up close? What better way to get at what I seem to keep missing? “So, I’ll… er… indicate boys with some Sauce to you,” I said to Jackson, “and you’ll suggest your best contingent of bi-curious ladies to me, and then we’ll discuss.”

  “Yes, and we will show them precisely what they’ve been missing,” he replied.

  “We will. We’ll be like superheroes, but instead of saving humanity from evil beings we’ll save our subjects from a life of sexual confusion.” The thought made me smile.

  “Permit me to play devil’s advocate,” Ben said, “but won’t you be creating a life of sexual confusion?”

  “You lose fifty points, Ben,” I chided. “Haven’t you been listening? The confusion arises from the chasm between what society tells them exists and what their genitalia respond to. If someone is truly only interested in the opposite sex, we could do nothing. We play only in the recesses between straight and gay, where folks are already feeling curious. I speak from personal experience when I say that you only stop being confused all the time once you realize what you feel for each. We’ll be saving these people from crippling sexual ambiguity.” The drag contest before me seemed suddenly ironic, but I reminded myself that the people on that stage were very clear on what they found enjoyable in life. This theater was full of the happiness that free sexuality conferred. I imagined spreading that happiness around the world, Tinkerbellesque.

  “Though it may take a while,” Jackson offered, implicitly acknowledging the challenge in finding persons to Sauce who were ready, willing, and able.

  I looked over at him. “I think we
need superhero costumes. I have to say my appearance hasn’t seemed terribly seductive lately. If I’m going to be trying to seduce the Sauce out of people I think I need to look a different part.”

  “Can there be a feather boa? There’s really nothing like a feather boa,” Jackson snarked, and a man three rows in front of us, wearing a yellow feather boa, turned to throw him an angry look. Ben chuckled.

  “I’ve never seen you wear a feather boa in your life,” I told him, pretending for the incensed gentleman that Jackson hadn’t been referencing him, and ignoring the fact that he was teasing me.

  At last, Peaches Christ selected three winners for her contest, then asked the audience to boo in confirmation. We braced ourselves.

  But Ben had taken Jackson’s boa joke to mean we were speaking wholly in jest. “Okay, I get it,” he said, “you’re not really going to do anything.” Ben almost sounded disappointed.

  “Realistically, dude, I don’t have anything other than this … investigation… going down right now, and I don’t have the energy for anything else. I can’t really care about anyone romantically, as far as I can tell, or I don’t want to. I’m just numb. So, if I can please them sexually and show them a new indulgence in life they might enjoy, that’s… that is, of course, assuming that I could pull it off… well… someone told me I should be doing that, recently.” I watched as Peaches crowned the two preteen girls co-winners.

  “Who?” Ben and Jackson asked, in unison.

  I considered for a moment how to explain to these two very reasonable men that I’d taken life advice from a bum wearing a billion different colors who was surprisingly insightful, and decided I couldn’t. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I will go on a quest for Sauce, happily, assuming Jackson will join me and we can help one another find targets.” We stood as the crowds finally released us from our seats.

  “Oh, I can’t fucking wait. I might have to start arranging some visits.” Jackson said. “Even if only to show you you’re off the mark on this whole ‘almost everybody’s bisexual’ business. You’ll see them switching permanently most of the time, I think.”

  We began to speculate about who we could try out, but my participation in the conversation dwindled as we poured out onto Castro street to find a bar and Ben and Jackson began to ask one another about their respective histories, comings out, tastes, favorite books, favorite Victorian playwrights, and all manner of personal characteristics, caught up in looking at one another, such that I left the Castro that night feeling distinctly like a third wheel.

  But, there, I had created an entertainment for myself, a new distraction, a new something to get excited about. I was going to create debauchery. In some way it seemed my only option. I’d sputtered around for weeks now unjustifiably idle, alcoholic, as though caught in the hole I dug myself. Of course, I didn’t see how unjustifiable my malaise was at the time. It was not until this game ran the course of the Roman sexual storybook recurring in my dreams that I was shown enlightenment, and the game was just beginning.

  Once more the challenger shouted her challenge into the microphone. And once again the response was boundless and indifferent silence.

  Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  Aufklärung[‡]

  It took over a month after Jackson and I decided to be this particular kind of superhero (villain) before an opportunity for humanity-saving presented itself.

  My boy Eric was rolling through town for two nights to attend some manner of professional conference. I’d introduced him to Jackson once before. Of course, he’d heard about Jackson plenty. Jackson and I had been in a committed relationship for more than a decade, since years before I even met Eric. So, it only made sense that Eric spent his evening in San Francisco joining me and Jackson out for drinks. Except not really.

  Really, it was just that if anyone I’d ever met needed to be made aware of his fluid sexuality, it was Eric. Most of his behavior was textbook, in my mind, for a “bisexual.” There was one exception: he was tolerant enough to kiss a man, under assignment, and say it was okay, but, of course, he didn’t feel anything. Normally the repressed bisexual man would say that was too gross to even try.

  But, over time, other signs had proven too strong to be denied. Eric loved women’s bodies – he told everyone so all the time. He loved pussy. He loved eating pussy. Loved it. Which is why he could admit he felt attracted to certain men – you know, the Brad Pitts of the world. Maybe James Franco. Russell Crowe. Or rather, he could admit that they were attractive, objectively speaking, that is, not that he was attracted to them. He wasn’t attracted to them.

  Instead, he was attracted to ungodly striking beautiful women. And that was it. Normal women seemed to do nothing for him. He was not particularly svelte, but had zero tolerance for a woman with 25% body fat. I maintained unreasonably high, narcissistic standards, I confess, but out in a bar where I could identify five or ten attractive women he’d say everyone in the place was a dog. The women he demanded would have demanded the Pitt, the Franco, the Crowe.

  He hid a timid, apprehensive soul under a boisterous façade, and I’d always seen right through it. Not everyone did, and it was easy to tell the folks who’d seen through from the folks who hadn’t; the former loved the kid almost immediately and the latter thought him a prick. His gnawing self-doubt was yet another indicator of some chink is his sexuality, of course.

  And, finally, there was the fact that many, if not most, of the people who met him assumed he was gay. It wasn’t like he designed wallpaper for a living. He had a perfectly straight job, if you were willing to define jobs as particularly “gay” or “straight.” Other than an occasional accent piece I’d catch him ragging about, he didn’t have any sort of traditional gay wardrobe. His pants hung loose and East Coast. And yet, when people met him, their initial assumption was quite frequently that he was gay.

  He’d dated women, though relatively few, and had been in a long relationship with one. I believed that he was attracted to women. He would have vomited up his stomach from all of that cunnilingus if he didn’t find something reassuring about it. I myself had grown up believing that if you were attracted to the opposite sex you couldn’t be attracted to the same sex, that it was a zero-sum, black and white calculus. Life had eventually taught me otherwise, but it would be awfully hard for a boy to learn the lesson from life the way I had. Boys didn’t generally go cuddling their friends until it developed into more, as I had. But I suppose most childhood girl friends don’t cuddle nearly so much as I did.

  Eric had a room at some hotel in the Financial District. I saw no reason to go out there. After business hours the District was half closed, and all the restaurants were designed for lunching businessmen. I’d therefore convinced him to start our Wednesday evening in the ‘Stro, at the Lookout, where we could sit outside and drink cheap, strong drinks and people watch. I’d even weaseled my way out of work early. I’d had to start at 5AM to do it, and I was admittedly a little loopy by happy hour. But loopy wasn’t stopping me from getting started drinking during daylight these days. Even loopy I wanted to disappear from my own life, and as yet the little game of being present when people meant to sample same sex sex had given me no distractions from that alcoholism.

  As I walked over my hill toward the bar, I spotted my first familiar face of the day, smoldering behind a pipe that nearly hid his nose on someone’s doorstep. He wore different clothes, but had the same smattering of inconsistent, bright colors I remembered from our last encounter.

  “Hello, Grot,” I said calmly. “How are you today?”

  He looked up at me quizzically for a moment, then suddenly said, “Magiccock!”

  I smiled at him as deviously as I could manage. “You might say.”

  “Helluva day for December, isn’t it?” It was. It was about 68 degrees and the sun was still bright, even as it set.

  “Helluva day for any time of year, weather-wise,” I replied.

  “And otherwise?”

/>   “Otherwise, I’m forced to admit my life is better than most people’s lives, but I’m not particularly enjoying it,” I tried not to implicate him with my eyes. “But that hasn’t really changed since we last met, although I’m engaged in a new entertainment lately, kind of thanks to you. How about you?”

  “Ah. And what’s your entertainment?”

  I considered him for a moment. He’d twice slithered out of talking about himself. “You had a bit to do with my entertainment, if you’d believe it. I’m making debauchery for other people, like you said Bacchus should do.”

  “What sort of debauchery?”

  “The sort that’s only really debauchery when someone calls it that.”

  “Psshaw,” he snorted at me, “that’s all the kinds o’ debauchery.”

  I tried to look into him. “Grot. How did you come to be here?” He simply never sounded like he was crazy, or disabled, or even poor and uneducated. At least not in the four or so minutes I’d spent talking to him.

  He greeted my question with head-tilting laughter. “Same ways any ones of us get ta be anywhere, I s’pose. Someone else decided what I was, and then everybody else seems ta have started ta agree, and then I became that.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m staunchly opposed to anyone deciding what some other person is.”

  “Oh Magiccock, that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Everyone is only what everyone else decides they are.”

  “Not to themselves.”

  “To themselves too, unless they wanna fight the whole world theys whole life.”

  “I want to fight.”