by John Rechy
I answer: “For growth.” I tell him that in my non-sexual life I'm quite giving, and very loving with friends, but in a love-sexual sense I find it all difficult. The patterns I make for myself there are circular.
The interviewer asks me about my early life.
I sigh. “I was born in El Paso, Texas. My mother was a beautiful Mexican woman, whom I love more than anything else in the world and whose death is a constant sorrowful presence in my life now.” My mother.… She had the most beautiful green—really green—eyes, and a smile that haunted you instantly. I loved her—love her, because death has changed nothing, and she loved me, and I— … But that's for another time. Not now. “My father was Scotch—a very angry, brilliant man.” Driven, crushed by wrecked dreams. Sad…. I went to a local college on a
scholarship, I hurried through. I was in the army, a period that evaporates thankfully like a dream; I went in a private, came out a private. Then I went to New York and discovered Times Square, and then to other cities to discover Pershing Square, Main Street, Hollywood Boulevard, Selma, Market Street, Newberry Square, the French Quarter…. Much later I turned, very briefly, to drugs and was almost destroyed by LSD.
I move on to another subject: exhibitionism as art form—like dancing or writing, I uphold. Glorious to go to the beach, find a relatively secluded spot, and lie there naked, waiting for the perfect voyeur. I hate clumsy, tacky exhibitionism, though; it should be beautiful, motions rehearsed, the body carefully prepared to court the voyeur. I remember a man in an apartment building I lived in; he would stand—concealed, he thought, by trees—outside my window while I worked out with weights. He would appear regularly, like a faithful lover. I wore different trunks for him; I adjusted my workout apparatus to face the window. When we ran into each other outside, we each pretended the other didn't know. It was an elegant love affair. Then I moved away.
The interviewer asks me what direction I see my life taking.
I answer: “I would very much like to be completely free. Intellectually, I'm close to that in regard to sex. But I still play roles.”
We discuss promiscuity.
I put it in the context of revolution: “When a courageous black woman in the South refused to move to the back of the bus, that was a revolutionary act—breaking the law in public. When gay people fuck and suck in the streets, that too is a revolutionary act. That's where we confront ignorant sex laws.” Unfortunately I add: “I think it's a matter of style and taste. Most people wouldn't do it in the middle of a busy street in the daytime even if it became legal. Societal attitudes are strong enough to act as a deterrent; you don't need laws—that's the whole point. There's no law against painting yourself blue or yellow—but few people do it.”
I hate that postscript in that interview. I wish I had stopped with revolution.
The interviewer says: “There's a theory that much gay creativity has come from the pressures of the oppression of society from the outside and that if those pressures weren't there the creativity would dry up. I disagree very strongly.”
“I disagree strongly too,” I say. “That theory might end up justifying the pressures and persecution in order to allow art to flourish. It's true that the pressures have created a discernible gay sensibility; but with the lifting of those ugly pressures another, equally fine art would come, based more on joy than pressure.”
I go on to say that I see the sexhunt as an art form too. The beautiful abstract choreography, balletic, symphonic. … Enter the saboteur with his recurrent motif: “Though sometimes,” I hear myself add, “after a night of hustling and dark cruising alleys, I think of suicide.” I vanquish the saboteur: “But when I'm caught up in the beautiful hunt, I know it's the most exciting experience in the world—and at those times I wouldn't trade it for any other.”
12:35 A.M. Montana Street Hanson Avenue.
A SENSE OF loss, unshaped defeat because of the earlier lack of connection in his apartment pulled Jim back to the streets—and the youngman he was with is also here again. The cars in this area have increased. Jim is about to get out when he sees the cops flashing their lights at cruising cars. The hunters scatter. Two not quick enough are being hassled by the cops.
Jim drives into the park. No cars in the lot—the cops must have been through. But hunters who climbed the hill may be along the paths. Yes. There. Across the road and by the stone grotto stands a man, shirt open.
Jim gets out. Now both men stand looking at each other from across the road. Like cats, Jim thinks suddenly. Neither will cross to the other's quickly delineated turf. Now defiantly, Jim removes his vest, stands shirtless, challenging the other. The other removes his shirt, challenging Jim back. Still, neither crosses to the other's side. The memory of the dark youngman he just went home with is still too fresh on Jim's mind. Again feeling cheated by the deadlock, he drives away. The shirtless man stares after him.
12:47 A.M. Sutton Street.
Although it's past midnight, for Jim it's still Friday; the night will not end until he goes home to sleep. Before dawn.
Along lower Hollywood Boulevard, transvestites defy the threatening streets. Jim drives to a subway tunnel connecting one side of the street to the other; these underground tunnels recur throughout the city, for pedestrians to avoid heavy traffic.
A man stands like a dedicated sentry by the tunnel's mouth. His eyes search Jim's passing car. Seeing Jim park, the man hurries down the steps of the subway tunnel.
Jim walks to that corner, stands by the railing at the top of the tunnel. Glancing down, he sees the man in the fan of smothered light at the bottom of the steps. The man touches his own groin and runs his tongue over his lips. Jim descends into the murky tunnel; the faint odor of cum permeates the air. The man slides down against the wall. On it is engraved the crude drawing of a giant cumming cock.
Jim offers his cock, the other sucks it. Now chemical, electric signals go out into the street. Silently, another outlaw, alerted, enters the tunnel. In the stifled light, the man blowing Jim doesn't pause. The youngman entering already has his cock out. The squatting man reaches for it too, alternately sucking Jim's, alternately the other's, now taking both cocks in his straining mouth. The two standing lean toward each other over the man blowing them. Yes, the other is very attractive, and Jim allows their lips to come together. They ignore a fourth hunter, who merely stands closely watching in hypnotized fascination as Jim's cock and the other's push into the mouth of the kneeling man. Jim is aware of cum spurting. His? The other's? Both? He pulls his cock out. The other came, not he.
Footsteps. He uses that as an excuse to move on.
Outside, he walks past the dark corridor between two buildings on a side street. No one is there now. Then he hears it, a tapping, insistent, on glass. He looks around. Nothing. The tapping—a definite signal—increases. He glances across the street. In a second-story apartment, blinds and drapes open, an old, old man, ugly, shriveled body naked and skeletal, is signaling on his window.
Jim turns away.
He drives to Western. He looks toward the entrance to another tunnel, this one connecting the street to the bus stop on the freeway. No one there now either.
He parks on Western.
Here, one liberating night, just slightly after 11:00, he leaned against a fully lighted shop window—bicycles for sale all shiny chrome and slick spokes inside—while a man, who had just separated from a girl at the corner, blew him for oblivious seconds. The heavy Western Avenue traffic passed by noisily, blind.
1:15 A.M. The Street and Alley Outside the Hawk Bar.
He stands on the street across from a leather-oriented bar that attracts butch men. Soon it will be closing time, and the patrons will move into the lot, the street, the alley. Already, some are staking out their places.
Shirtless too, a man lingering in the alley sees Jim immediately; he moves even slower in the beginning choreography of the hunt. Slowly too—slower—Jim floats under a dark stairway leading to the upper story of an apar
tment house. The shirtless man glides after him. Under the stairs, the man is about to touch Jim's chest when a third man, unattractive, uncomfortable, hungry, interrupts the connection, perhaps deliberately to separate the two attractive, attracted men. Doggedly, he won't move. Impatient, Jim leaves, expecting the first man to follow him. But misinterpreting Jim's exit, the man drives away. The unattractive man remains abandoned under the stairs.
In the alley, in a recessed entrance to a building, the door boarded, two men are moaning softly. Jim is about to move away when the one being fucked reaches out toward his cock. Jim enters the enclosure. Now the man being fucked blows Jim.
Along the alley, a white, luminous crystal web of carlights entraps them threateningly.
The three bodies press against the boarded door, the connections unsevered. Not the cops.
Jim crosses the street. More outlaws are leaving the closing bar. An attractive man begins to cruise him. Now another, equally attractive, glances at both, situating, himself in the middle. Jim walks away hurriedly; the possibility that they might prefer each other, not him, terrifies him. Even with all the night's conquests, one rejection might crush him…. He walks past an abandoned house—for sale as long as he can remember. In the shadows an unattractive man is jerking off; everyone walks by, ignoring him.
Jim moves to the other side of the house. Dried weeds crack brittlely under his feet. A blond man with a dark stubble of beard follows him into the velvet darkness. Jim waits. The man holds out a container of amyl nitrite to Jim; he inhales deeply. Instantly, the rushing blood crushes time and reality into sex, this moment, this sexual moment. Sex-senses pulse violently. Back to Jim, the man lowers his own pants, the naked ass squirms against Jim's quickly hard cock, the man guides it with his hand to the vaseline-prepared opening. Instead, in one movement, Jim pushes his middle finger into the oily opening, past the brushing hairs, into the knotted button giving way easily into soft, incredibly smooth flesh inside. Jim pushes another finger into the waiting ass. The bending man reaches back, holding the magic amyl for Jim to sniff again. He does—the sexual pulsing rush encloses him. The man's fingers cup Jim's balls.
Jim pushes a third finger into the crack.
Now in a frenzied whisper both softened and intensified by the pounding fume-stirred blood, the man begs: “Your whole fist! Shove your whole fucking fist up my ass!”
Jim pulls out his fingers, the asshole closes suddenly, the youngman moans.
The implied violence disturbing him at the same time that it arouses him, Jim moves away—replaced by another man pushing into the blond bending man.
At a faucet on the lawn, Jim wipes his hands with dirt and water—fiercely, fiercely.
As he moves along the overhanging branches sheltering the sidewalk, he passes a man sitting in his car, hand hanging out the window. He nods to Jim. But Jim walks on.
Back to the alley. The square passage before the boarded door is vacant. Jim waits there. Strange to stand there, alone. Strange to—… He stops those thoughts, which recur. An outlaw has joined him, and he's desirable. Pressed against each other and against the crossed, nailed boards, they kiss. A light plunges along the alley. The two lean their bodies more tightly against the wall. The light passes. It was a cop car!—but the cops didn't see them, are stopped across the street. Their whirling lights whip up the darkness crazily. Men scatter. The lights of the stopped cop car capture faces and bodies like a camera's flashbulb.
Jim and the other cross the alley, to the area under the stairs, a wooden cove. The swirling coplight across the street illumines their faces periodically, lighting their exposed flesh sexually as the two kiss, connect, explore.
Without coming, Jim and the other part. Beyond the stairs, the area is clear. The cops are gone. The quiet street is deserted.
VOICE OVER: Selective Sins and Exhortations
“THOU SHALT NOT KILL,” says the Bible.
In Kentucky, I and squads of other youngmen in infantry training were taken in ugly green trucks to dusty fields and taught by experts to attach a pointed bayonet to our rifles. Then we stood before a row of hanging dirt-bloated dummies, substitute enemy, and we learned to lunge at those “bodies” while we shouted, “Kill! Kill!” “Louder!” screamed our expert army teacher. “Louder! Kill! Kill!” Our bayonets stabbed over and over and then we twisted the butt of our rifles and pretended to smash a face and crush a skull. All in preparation for a time when the dummies would be human beings.
The same Book also says that to “lie with mankind, as with womankind” is an “abomination”—and because of that, generations have despised, incarcerated, and killed homosexuals. But what of people who eat fat? The same Book warns that even the soul of one who does so “shall be cut off from his people.” It also admonishes against another minority, those who eat rabbit. But that admonishment has not been converted into law.
Pull out the phrase warning against “leaving the natural use of the woman.” Hate homosexuals! Yet the same Book tells us that we “owe no man anything but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”
“Rebuke not an elder,” says the Bible.
I watch television newsclips of an old-age home. The living dead with stringy, spidery, silky—beautiful—hair and carved cheeks; with quivering hands as if all life is finally rushing in indignation to those fingertips; the desperate alive eyes in the tossed-out bodies scream…. “Rebuke not an elder.” And worthy citizens draw up a successful petition to commit an old, old woman—shriveled body still fierce with pride and anger—in order to get her uncomfortable presence out of their tidy neighborhood; her property, pieces of her life, tossed out for careless sale, “Rebuke not an elder,” says the Book.
Are women who bear boys filthy for seven days?— longer, if they bear girls? Is a man dirty until evening after fucking his wife? Are we contaminated by touching a menstruating woman?
In the morning I look out, and I see the atmosphere like a wired cage, a poisonous presence.
Punish adultery by death! Stone disobedient children!
Are there laws against women wearing gold or pearls “or costly array”? The same Book forbids it. And it states categorically that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”
But how can that be? Our lawyers and judges and police chiefs aren't so bad off. And look at some of our cardinals and preachers.
Certainly God didn't mean that—so forget all that crap about “the love of money.” Move on to more important matters. Sodom and Gomorrah! Yes!
“And there came two angels to Sodom.”
And the Sodomites insisted that Lot bring them out that they might “know them.” Lot offered instead his virgin daughters! “And do ye to them as is good in your eyes,” he told the Sodomites. But the same Bible tells us that even to look “on a woman to lust after her” is to commit adultery, and adulterers shall be put to death! Well, to offer one's virgin daughters— … Maybe that was the real sin….
The solution to those conflicts is clear: Accept the implications of the first part of the story of Sodom and ignore the latter.
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment.” But what about a law against wearing wool and linen together? It's forbidden equally by the same Book that tells us: “Make three fringes upon the quarter of thy vesture, wherewith thou covereth thyself.”
If a man dies childless, must his brother marry the widow? Do we—despite our lavish barbarities—forbid the following to come “nigh unto the altar”?—a blind or a lame man? One with a “blemish in his eye”? One with a broken foot or a broken hand? Are there laws to that effect? Shall we make everyone who breaks a hand, register with the police, and shall we incarcerate those who break a foot?
And how can justice be bought by “the root of all evil”?
Of course peacemakers are “the children of God”—but that had better not mean that government and church officials can't justify any w
ar, all wars!
“Louder!” screamed our expert army teacher. “Louder! Kill! Kill!”
2:22 A.M. The Alley and Streets Near the Target Bar.
JIM KNOWS WHERE the hunt will shift now, and minutes later he's there. A limbo area: The glittering, slender, decorated youngmen from the dance bar and the surly-posing masculine men from the leather and western bar a block away share overlapping areas for a few minutes. Waiting men line a side street and an alley, stand mutely while cruising cars circle the drowsy streets.
Removing his vest, Jim walks slowly along the block. His eyes connect with a desirable tall man he wants. That was his purpose, to display himself here, connect, then to be followed across the street, where he is now, away from the dense area; he walks into the alley, moving toward the back of a vacant house.
Jim and the outlaw who followed him climb the stairless platform. Never completed, the structure has begun to age, a dank odor clings to the naked boards. Stepping carefully to avoid exposed areas on the floor, they move into what would have been an inner room. Skeletal boards randomly dissect the moonless, cloudless sky. An old mattress lies on the patched floor; a mattress brought here by whom? In the gutless house, they remove all their clothes, they lie on the cast-off mattress, head to feet, cock to mouth, mouth to cock.
Jim feels the gathering sperm at his balls; the rushing feeling spreads, his hips thrust into the other's mouth, which receives the jetting liquid. The other's cock, abandoned at that moment by Jim's mouth, shoots into the warm air.
2:51 A.M. Outside Andy's.
Although he just came, the outlaw excitement still rages. Jim drives past Andy's, the all-hours coffeeshop. Leathermen, glitterers, hustlers, queens, all are here, milling outside. Jim gets out at the corner, intending to “hitchhike”—but a man wearing a cowboy hat just circled the block, looking back at him.
Moments later, they sit in the car parked on a dim street. The man licks Jim's torso, the tongue nestling under his armpits, pulling at the hairs there.
