The Sexual Outlaw

by John Rechy

  More sirens infected the air. Red lights flashed like popping bulbs.

  Shirtless, lolling, a cluster of malehustlers gathered in tense good humor. Also heckling. Then a firecracker burst. Another. The cop sticks rose. Cops rushed the three hustlers. Handcuffs clicked tightly.

  “Pigs, pigs, pigs, shit pigs, pigs!”

  Barely inches away, I felt the inundating rage sweeping the street, and I had a vision of the inevitable gay apocalypse—of thousands of homosexuals rushing against the helmets and the sticks, the guns—thousands of gay men and women riding a tide of pent-up rage released at last. Abruptly that vision of apocalyptic violence stopped. Yes, that would be righteous—but was that indeed what the gay apocalpyse would be?

  Perhaps. Yes, perhaps.

  Suddenly I laughed aloud. But might it not be, instead, the ultimate, the liberating, public sex orgy?

  “Please, please, gay brothers and sisters, please disperse, this is your gay monitor, walk to other corners. Please, leave the street, leave the street peacefully, this is your gay parade monitor, please let's avoid any violence.”

  Someone laughed bitterly. It was over.

  For now.

  11:47 P.M. Selma.

  RESURRECTED OUT of the dread death, rejection—the vacant period ended—Jim still needs the further assurance which only hustling can give him. And it's Saturday night, the busiest night on Selma.

  There, a slow-moving squad car is flashing brash lights on the slowly scattering outlaws. Jim waits in his car. The cops leave. The outlaws return. Jim gets out.

  Now he waits by the steps of the Baptist Church, imagining his tanned body stark against the white columns.

  Pretty, street-hip, a youngwoman, 20—older, younger-glances at him, moves on, looks back, smiles, returns: “What's goin on?”

  Jim is friendly. “Getting along.” He recognizes her as one of that breed of straight girls attracted to malehustlers, making it from day to day, knowing—perhaps turned on by it—that their “old men”—the hustlers they often live with— sell their bodies to other men.

  “You know something?—you remind me of my old man,” she tells him. “Remember him? Called himself Reno, cause he got divorced there. He worked the streets about half a year ago. Hey, man, are you straight, bi, or gay?” she asks him bluntly.

  Jim only shrugs.

  “Shit,” she fills in for him, “I think you're whatever you're fucking at the time, yeah?”

  “Right,” he laughs.

  “I live just off the boulevard; come by, huh?” She writes down her address.

  As she walks away, he puts the address in his pocket, but he knows he won't call her.

  He walks along the street. At the corner, by an old house now apartments, he sees a familiar, lovely figure, a small, thin, blue-haired old woman, about seventy, her frame still youthfully erect, her gait friskily disguising what is probably a hurt knee. As usual, late at night, she's walking two leashed dogs—mongrels. “Hi, there,” she calls to Jim. He greets her warmly. “Cops out tonight,” she tells him. “A couple of squad cars just came by. And watch out for a late-model Plymouth, looks like vice to me.” Jim thanks her for her usual warnings. “Well, you take care of yourself, hear?” she tells him and tugs at the leashes and moves on.

  A car has stopped just ahead. A Plymouth—and the driver had not driven by before, didn't really look carefully at him. Jim turns away from the man now signaling him.

  A proud Mercedes, elegant, luxurious, stops, the driver waits for Jim to approach. Jim removes his vest, to challenge the car's arrogance with his own. The driver calls out: “Want to come to my place?”

  “It depends what for,” Jim says.

  “So I can really look at your fine body.”

  “Still depends on what for,” Jim draws him out.

  “What do you charge?” the man completes the ritual.

  Jim answers, the man agrees. But:

  “I'm sorry. I just remembered I promised to drive a friend somewhere,” Jim lies. “Sorry.” That was all he wanted, needed, the admiration, the offer of sexmoney. That he used the other for that, he regrets, yes; but— …

  VOICE OVER: Beyond the Fag Hag

  JUDY GARLAND BAPTIZED us in rainbow-colored tears. Not the fabulous performer, no, not her—but the symbol of the eternal, crushed, defeated—but-come-out-fighting—loser she became for the homosexual. Like her, he masochistically acquiesced; kick us and we'll hurt, but we'll come back singing for more with a sob in our voices, they said through her.

  It was all right, after “the man that got away” got away, because “over the rainbow” would be some illusive happiness—like heaven for the meek. With offerings of blood-red roses, homosexuals flocked to her performances, and loved her as a symbol in proportion to how much they hated themselves.

  Suicide attempts!

  Sleeping pills!

  Uppers and downers!

  Bouts with ugliness!

  Judy, we love you!

  They wept for her and she wept for them, and she laughed at them and they laughed at her. When she died, the fags would fly their flags half-mast, she joked to her daughter.

  And retreat they did when she did die.

  The old faction wept on Fire Island. Their lowered flags flapped bravely in the wind Somewhere, over the rainbow.

  In New York, the weekend of her funeral, the first gay riot occurred.

  “Over the rainbow” was not good enough. Here, now. That was the reality. The acquiescing hurt was fucked. During what ordinarily would have been a routine mass harassment of gays in a Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall, homosexuals resisted the cops for the first time. This time The Man didn't get away.

  Garland the symbol of gay oppression was truly dead.

  Victims themselves, fag hags are sad figures in the gay world. They range from the grand ones—ex-movie queens, the ghost of beauty barely clinging; to the frigid women, usually sexless by choice—brittle, smart, sophisticated, afraid of straight or sexual men, afraid of other women; to the tacky, shrill women rejected sexually.

  By converting men to bitchy children, all fag hags use homosexuals for substitute revenge: the dinosauric ex-movie queen, revenge for the men who used up her beauty and fled when youth fled too; the icy women, revenge for the children they'll never have; the loud ones, revenge for the men who will not touch them.

  And the gay men who “court” these queen bees? A very small but very visible, often chic group, happy to celebrate the ex-beauty's lost sexuality and to claim her “divine” happy for fused father-mother figures eternally virginal; with the undesirable women, sympathetic in mutual contempt. And for the fag-hag's castrating hatred, these men will pay them back by “adoring” them but never desiring them.

  What of other women—straight, sexual, not fag hags?— what of them in relation to gay men? (A sad fact of the gay world is that, with notable exceptions, there is little significant rapport between gay men and gay women.)

  That there is hostility from many straight women toward male homosexuals is as true as that there are homosexuals who despise all women—and who thus sadly cut themselves off from at least half the range of human experience. In women, there is the resentment stirred by the cultural shock at the realization of a competing gay man, ancestral societal attitudes suddenly violated by a man who desires not her but a man; the woman feels irrelevant, her sexual power denied. (This may account for the rush reportedly experienced by some women in competing sexually with a man for another man.)

  The gay man's resentment of women is also multi-faceted; it may come partly from resentment, at whatever stage of his homosexual awakening, at being taught—even forced—to respond sexually to someone he does not desire; and women who—without encouragement—attempt to “change,” or even “cure” or “save” him, certainly humiliate him.

  Emerging out of the women's consciousness movement is a new figure, neither fag hag nor surrogate mother nor hostile competitor. Abandoning arbitrarily ass
igned, restrictive, sexual role-playing—allowing the woman to be strong and to feel, the man to feel and to be strong—she frees the male from an equally restrictive, equally arbitrary opposite role. The same sexual evil that oppresses women oppresses homosexual men—and straight men.

  And will the new, freed woman produce more or less homosexuals? Neither. Just healthier ones.

  (Ironically, transvestites and transsexuals—still attired in fifties grandeur of short skirts, tight halters, sequins—may be the last of the repressed “women.” “The type of woman who turns me on is gone now,” a heterosexual writer lamented recently at a party. “Now when I want to feel macho, I pick up a transvestite.” And a downtown Los Angeles bar catering to transvestites and transsexuals refuses to serve real women!)

  A very special intimacy, respect, and true love can occur between a gay man and a straight woman secure in her own sexuality; a unique, uncluttered closeness that makes no sexual demands, does not use the other in vindictive substitution, and acknowledges—not denies— each other's humanity, individuality, and sexual choice—the special sexual beauty of a woman, the special sexual beauty of a man.

  12:31 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  HE PARKED ON a side street. Now he's hitchhiking on a busy corner, limbo territory, both hustling and unpaid cruising. A van stops. The driver is very goodlooking. A hairy mat crowds the edge of his white T-shirt. Jim gets in. The man places his hand lightly on his own groin, a signal Jim answers by placing his on his own.

  12:38 A.M. A Side Street Near West Hollywood.

  There is a mattress in back of the van, parked now in a lot. Both men strip. They take each other's cock in their mouths simultaneously. Jim doesn't want to come, although he feels his cock preparing in the other's throat, the other's growing in his. At that very moment, Jim pulls his mouth away, the other's cum spills on the mattress.

  The man drives Jim back to the same corner. “My name's John. What's yours?” he asks Jim, to stamp an identity on the contact.

  “John, too,” Jim answers. At that moment he wishes he had come in the other's mouth and had taken the other's cum in his.

  12:51 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  As he stands hitchhiking vaguely, his thumb just barely held out at his thigh, he considers going back to his car and driving to the most popular of the glitterbars. Floor sprinkled with tiny silvery lights, colored strobes pounding to disco rock, it attracts a wide spectrum of the gay, bisexual, and, increasingly, the straight worlds. Beautiful boys and youngmen primp there; handsome masculine ones often in cutoffs and tanktops cruise. And gorgeous straight women, vaguely costumed, dance alone sometimes, sometimes with men, sometimes with women—men and men, men and women, women and women gyrating in graceful, studiedly orgasmic movements. But Jim decides against going there. Saturdays it's jammed, and there is only the mildest revolution there.

  Perhaps he'll drive to the beach. On warm evenings, hunters gather about the area of the shadowy pier.

  FLASHBACK: The Beach at Night A Week Ago.

  Shadows fused in the double darkness under the crumbling boards of the pier.

  Jim walked to the edge of the ocean, sprayed with silver foam. He is always aware of the mysterious darkness beyond the water—black; locking secrets. An outlaw followed him, now another, the three a shrinking triangle moving to the sensual sighing of the ocean.

  At the edge of the shore, Jim removed his clothes and lay on the still-warm sand. No fog tonight, the moon naked too.

  One of the two other outlaws stripped wordlessly next to him. For long, they lay side by side, touching. A few feet away the third man lay clothed on the sand watching them.

  12:55 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  But the beach is unpredictable, especially on weekends. He might drive for miles and find it deserted.

  A car stops to give him a ride, but he waves it away and returns to his own.

  VOICE OVER: The Gay Sensibility

  I'M SUPPOSED TO represent the “underground voice” in a program on Sensuality in the Arts. It's gone badly—two movie stars have read and posed too long, and one man has actually been hooted; I comfort myself by telling myself that he deserved it for being an asshole. The large audience, tacky, middleclass, predominantly straight, here mainly to see the movie stars, is noisy and restive. I'll be followed by a strutting harlequin of a man, who's pissed because the program is going on too long—he's right about that—and people are going to leave without hearing him. Why I agreed to be here, I suddenly don't know. I'm embarrassed, and I consider splitting. But my friends are here, and I've already been introduced.

  Fuck.

  In the first row a woman is knitting furiously. Madame DeFarge?

  I start my talk:

  For centuries homosexuals— …

  (The chattering subsides somewhat. Oh, oh, a queer.)

  … —have been prosecuted and persecuted. The law tells us we're criminals, and so we've become defiant outlaws. Psychiatrists demand we be sick, and so we've become obsessed with physical beauty. Religion insists we're sinners, and so we've become soulful sensualists. The result is the unique, sensual, feeling, elegant sensibility of the sexual outlaw.

  (The woman in the front row plunges a needle into her threads; she eyes me with one crazy and one normal eye.)

  What produces this sensibility?

  To survive in a heterosexual world, the homosexual plays roles as a child. He turns to his imagination to be himself; that imagination flows easily to the arts. In touch with his sexual persona, the gay artist produces work marked and expanded by its duality—its sensitivity and strength.

  Jean Genet. Dual exile. Convict and homosexual. Drag queens and superhung studs. Strength and passivity, violence and tenderness. A stud becomes a queen, a queen a stud—easily in Genet's world.

  Michelangelo. The huge, fantastically muscular figures— and the gentle faces. Soulful angels and powerful men.

  Proust. The spiraling identities of his male-females and female-males allowed him to convey both the heterosexual and the homosexual experience—in one superb metaphor.

  Oscar Wilde. The often flippant wit of his plays coupled with the outlaw courage of his life, especially in his trial.

  Djuna Barnes. The somber vision and the lush, narcissistic prose.

  Pasolini. The religious communist.

  William Burroughs. The passivity of heroin and the frenzy of orgy.

  Tennessee Williams. Repression and liberation. Blanche Dubois, whore and poet.

  Gertrude Stein. The ostensibly flat, conversational prose disguising the poetic rhythms.

  Truman Capote. The “high-drag” style exploring violence.

  Shakespeare in the sonnets. The dark lady and the mysterious youngman.

  Carson McCullers. The tenderness within the grotesquerie.

  Visconti. The obsessions with inner disorder and madness and visual order and composition.

  (At least the audience is quiet. Maybe they don't know what I'm talking about. I glance at the knitting woman. Oh, God, her head is cocked, and the needle is poised!)

  I continue: Conversely, the avoidance of one aspect of sexuality and the extreme acceptance of the other has kept many artists from their full potential. Ronald Firbank produces a precious literary sundae. Andy Warhol creates lifeless grotesques.

  Then there are the screaming heterosexuals— …

  (Chuckles—thank God. Only from my friends?… I glance down. The needle darts!)

  … —the male impersonators.

  (More chuckles. All right! This time I don't look at the woman in the front row.)

  Hemingway, the hairy godfather of heterosexual writers; his suffocatingly heavy breathing stifling the tender part of himself. Significantly he came close to realizing a fusion in The Sun Also Rises—where he deals with a castrated hero.

  And take the Tarzan-howling of Norman Mailer.

  (Sorry, in a way, that there's a ri
pple, a very slight ripple, of applause, and some laughter. I like Norman Mailer, despite his bullish fuckups.)

  More intelligent than Hemingway—and a far better writer—…

  (I'm making up with Norman.)

  …—he faces the possibility of intellectual homosexuality. But that can be a greater subterfuge, doubly restricting him from his sensual potential.

  And Kerouac. Eternal jock buddy.

  No, the artist doesn't have to be homosexual to produce good art; and certainly not all homosexual artists are “good.” But the artist who represses either the male or female aspect of his or her being produces unfulfilled work. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Picasso, Flannery O'Connor, D. H. Lawrence, and many, many other finally heterosexual artists have accepted, often joyously, the female and the male sides of themselves.

  If only by the nature of the acute sensibility and sensuality he has brought so abundantly to art, the homosexual should be an object of admiration, not reprobation and hatred. Without him, the arts—and humanity—would be vastly diminished.

  (Good applause. Not wild, no, but not just polite either. I'm pleased, of course—but I am much more pleased because—Jesus Christ!—Madame DeFarge has set aside her needles and her threads and is clapping spiritedly!)

  Now there's to be one of those grim panel discussions “necessary” to make these programs an “educational experience.”

  But the program has dragged on so long—the man who followed me, quite fully recovering from his snit, talked forever—that there are more panelists than audience. (Hyperbole.) I jump off the stage and split.

  Later I wish I'd gone further in my speech, spoken outright about gay dominance in certain arts. Yes. Oh, and narcissism. “The gay sensibility, obsessed with appearance, produces beautiful bodies, people. The result in males ranges widely—from ballet dancers to bodybuilders.” Yes, narcissism as art form. And certainly bodybuilding as art form. Not that all bodybuilders are sexually gay, of course not, but the form is gay—the pursuit of the idealized grace of the “woman” and the idealized strength of the “man.”