The Sexual Outlaw

by John Rechy

  Occasionally a passing shadow cuts the light entering through the van's window from the street. Footsteps prowl, alerted instinctively to the scene inside.

  The man licks Jim's body, takes his cock in his mouth. Jim reaches for the other's cock. But the man rejects Jim's motion. “Just let me do everything,” he tells Jim. Jim leans back, hands under his head. He hardly moves, an adored statue which the man is licking all over from fingers to feet. A face stares in through the van's window. Inside, the man jerks off.

  Jim dresses. He walks out into the night. Once again, there is a momentary stasis in the hunt—like when the angry drunken youngman accosted him here earlier. The shadowy outlines stand unmoving against a gray sky.

  Seconds later—the recurring spell again crushed by movement—the shadows search through the gathering mist.

  2:08 A.M. A Deserted Part of the Beach.

  Impulsively Jim drove to the beach, speeding urgently along the almost empty freeway.

  Despite the fog invading the city, at the beach the night is paradoxically starlit, a childhood-remembered night. The foggy cloud is moving inland from the darkness. Jim walks beyond the parking lot, cars cruising—parking, moving, stopping; walks beyond the craggy rocks; past dark sex-hunting ghosts standing along the sandy rim of the ocean; like the traumatized birds that stare daily at the coming night. Slowly, male forms emerge in sexual outlines, others lie on the moist beach. But this time Jim walks on, farther, until he's reached a deserted part of the beach. He stands at the very edge of the ocean. The breeze is cool on his bare chest. He's aware of the mystery concealed within night and ocean. The breeze is even cooler on his chest, but he continues standing here.

  What secrets?

  He walks back to his car without joining the shadowy hunt here.

  VOICE OVER: The Sexual Outlaw

  THEREFORE:

  Promiscuous homosexuals (outlaws with dual identities—tomorrow they will go to offices and athletic fields, classrooms and construction sites) are the shock troops of the sexual revolution. The streets are the battleground, the revolution is the sexhunt, a radical statement is made each time a man has sex with another on a street.

  What is it to be a sexual outlaw?

  Archetypal outsider, he is a symbol of survival, living fully at the very edge, triumphant over the threats, repression, persecution, prosecution, attacks, denunciations, hatred that have tried powerfully to crush him from the beginning of “civilization”: Each night after the hunt, the outlaw knows he's won an ancestral battle—just because he's still alive and free.

  Only a tiny segment of the vast homosexual world, the outlaw world—secretly admired and envied but publicly put down by the majority of safe homosexuals cozy in heterosexual imitation—is not one easily chosen nor lived in, beautiful yet drenched in recurrent despair. Like the monastic life, it requires total commitment. It's a world one doesn't recruit for, must even warn against because of the dangers, risks, sacrifices the outlaw faces, takes, makes for his outlaw joy. One single encounter may bind him inextricably to the chain of insane repression—handcuffs, beatings, trials, jail. Daily, nightly, he confronts cops and maniacs.

  But once chosen, it's a world that carries him to the pinnacle of sexual freedom—the high that only outlaw sex can bring—as well as to the abyss of suicide.

  Because within the hunt is the core of the mystery. The search for what is not to be found. The search is the end. Not the answer—the riddle. The ultimate life-hunt, without object. Everything is found in nothing.

  In the sex moments pressurized into high intensity by life-crushing strictures challenged, the sexual outlaw experiences to the utmost the rush of soul, blood, cum through every channel of his being into the physical and psychical discharge of the fully awakened, living, defiant body.

  The greater the repression, the greater the defiance. Each time a mass sweep of outlaws occurs, promiscuous revolution increases across the very street raided. Board one place, we'll find two more. Block park roads into sexual arenas, and we'll discover better ones below. And we'll do it in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, El Paso, Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago—and Broumsville, MacAllen, Prairie Ridge, Waukegan, Morgan-field, Twenty-Nine Palms.

  Why is the amassing of money acceptable and not the amassing of sex experiences?—the first is hoarded, the latter shared.

  Why may semi-nude men attack each other's bodies to the approving roar of spectators but not press them together in sex?

  Why is the naked body forbidden?

  Why may one touch a hand, openly touch lips—but not genitals?

  Sex in the streets.

  Reality or shock proposal?

  On Hollywood Boulevard, Times Square, in the French Quarter, San Jacinto Plaza, Newberry Square, Market Street, throughout the country, throughout the world, at an appointed sun-bright time—let it be high noon—mass orgies! Televise it all, the kissing, the fucking, masturbating, sucking, rubbing, rimming, touching, licking, loving. Thousands of bodies stripped naked joined in a massive, loving orgy—and in Los Angeles, let it be on our boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard. Yes, and let it happen before the cops, right in front of them that we would fuck, with joy. Would the cops break ranks? Flee? Join?

  Not an outrageous suggestion—we have seen filmed orgies before. Dachau. My Lai. Others.

  Cum instead of blood. Satisfied bodies instead of dead ones. Death versus orgasm. Would they bust everyone? With cum-smeared tanks would they crush all?

  Release the heterosexual pressures on our world—convert the rage—and you release a creative energy to enrich two worlds. Pressurize the homosexual world further, and it may yet set your straight world on fire.

  And when the sexual revolution is won—if it is ever won—what of the fighters of that war? Doesn't a won revolution end the life of the revolutionary? What of the sexual outlaw?

  One will mourn his passing.

  2:42 A.M. The Orgy Room.

  A FILTHY HALO of murky light hangs over the entrance room. Beyond the smoky scrim and into other rooms, masses of shadows churn, breathing.

  Shirtless, Jim moves farther into the entrails of this one-story house—a “private club”: At the door you show a membership card to one of the gay baths, pay “dues,” sign another card, show I.D.

  The darkness of the converted house parts as Jim moves into it. Against one wall a row of men stand, some shirtless, some almost naked, others totally naked, some fully clothed, several in leather costume. Huddled before them are other bunched figures, moving hungrily from cock to cock. The odor of amyl nitrite bursts recurrently.

  Avoiding arbitrary hands inviting him into clustered bodies, Jim moves into another room. Figures float back and forth like somnambulists.

  In a smaller room, three men, pants to their knees, stand before a bending man, naked from the waist down. His mouth arcs from cock to cock, his head directed roughly by a hand, another, another. Glued to him from behind—hands clutching him by the waist pulling the exposed buttocks back and forth—a dark man pushes his cock in and out. To the side, other men, cocks in hands, wait to replace the thrusting cock, just as other cocks replace those lined before the man's frenziedly moving face. Still others watch coldly as if at a movie, cocks in their own or in others’ hands, cocks in others’ mouths.

  Tongues and hands surround Jim, who stands against another wall. He's not sure whether there are four or only three mouths shifting on his cock, balls, chest, under his arms, on his thighs, ass. Another mouth now. Even so, his cock will not harden. Has he come at all tonight? he wonders.

  He looks across the dirty dimness and sees another cluster almost identical to his. At its center is another muscular man, also shirtless, standing surrounded by groping hands and licking mouths. The two look at each other. For a moment it seems to Jim that that man, standing like him and staring at him, is being devoured in ritual sacrifice and is seeing him, Jim, the same.

  Jim pulls away. Bodies and mouths turn
to others. Almost at the same time, the other man broke away too from the devouring cluster about him. His and Jim's eyes continue locked. The two men drift toward each other—but bodies flow between them, forming new groups about each.

  Standing figures, kneeling figures. Entangled limbs. And the thick wordless silence. Jim swims through pools of flesh. Sucked. Rimmed. Sucked. Licked. The acts mechanical and cold, the sounds of frenzy almost forced, like sobs, not moans. He can no longer see the muscular man. A black-leathered man, no pants under his chaps, which are open in a circle in back, pushes his ass against Jim's cock; it's still soft. Instead of attempting to enter the ass, Jim directs the man's mouth to his groin. Blowing him, the man holds a vial of amyl for Jim to inhale. Not even the gathered rush of blood hardens his cock. He directs his soft cock into another mouth.

  Jim moves into a smaller room. Red lights transform the shadows into fiery outlines—but within a cold, cold fire. In quick succession, several mouths take his cock, take others’. Now one mouth sucks his cock and another's simultaneously. But both cocks, pressed together in the hot mouth, are soft.

  Leaving that room, moving back into one not as crowded, Jim sees the shirtless muscular man again. Again their eyes meet across the sexual battlefield. Again the two men move toward each other, are almost together—and again dark forms crouch before each—as if taking sides. Looking at each other, Jim and the other muscular man reach out slowly and touch hands. Jim feels his cock begin to harden. Their hands lock more firmly over the bobbing heads, the sucking mouths, the licking tongues.

  Slowly, Jim breaks away, wanting the man to do so too, to follow him outside. Yes, he wants to leave, to go home-but not alone. Instantly Jim realizes he miscalculated; the man he wanted and who clearly wanted him has misinterpreted the severed contact as rejection. Not looking back, he moved away abruptly into another room. Jim is tempted to go to the same room—no, not to follow, no, but just to indicate that he didn't leave. But he knows the contact has been irrevocably cut.

  Jim stands amid the churning, moaning, carnivorous mass. In an open restroom, a man—head leaning back on a toilet seat, mouth stretched widely—receives the piss of two men straddling him.

  On the table in the main room, a skinny man lies totally naked with an inhaler of amyl glued to his nose. His thin legs are being held spread out widely by two leathered men; a third man, an ugly pock-faced figure in black gleaming leather, and wearing dark goggles and a vizored black cap, is methodically pushing his fist into the naked-man's ass. The straining arm pushes. Farther in. A portion of the wrist slides into the stretching hole. Farther. A portion of the lower forearm. The naked man is wet with sweat. Rapt, intent, others watch silently as if around an operating table. The wrist disappears. The naked man on the table lets out a howl of ecstatic pain.

  Jim feels a sweeping disgust.

  Outside, totally alone, he breathes the air purified by the earlier breeze. Recurring, the breeze rustles the palmtrees.

  3:44 A.M. Selma. Greenstone Park. Montana Street. Hanson Avenue.

  Selma. In the cooling night, still shirtless, Jim walked away from a man who thought he was hustling. He's not here to hustle; he's here because he knows that very late after the night's long hunt this street is cruised by those looking for only one person.

  A goodlooking youngman in a sports car keeps circling the block and looking back at Jim; but the car only pauses, as if the driver is reticent to stop, afraid of the cops who just drove by, perhaps, or perhaps thinking that Jim is hustling. Impatient, Jim gets in his car and leaves this street. At Highland Avenue transvestites lean toward passing cars.

  Jim goes to the area of Greenstone. A few cars circle the block. As he drives into the park, he notices that the youngman who cruised him earlier on Selma is driving in too. Jim continues into the park—he doesn't stop on the concrete arc, where other cars are. He drives instead around the circle and parks below the playground. He gets out. The sports car parks near him. Jim can see the driver more clearly now. Yes, he'll go home with him.

  The youngman reaches out, groping Jim through the rolled-down window. “Not here,” Jim offers his vague invitation to go elsewhere. Home. “Yeah,” the other insists. “Let's do it here.” He blows Jim through the window.

  Pulling away after a few moments, Jim stands by his car, alone. He looks up at the skeletal playground on the sloping hill across the road.

  A car approaches, lights bathing Jim momentarily. The car moves on. Now another. It too drives on. The tip of the questioning terror brushes Jim. But the first car returns, stops.

  “You hustling?” a goodlooking man wearing a cowboy hat asks Jim.

  “No—there's no hustling in this park!” There's a growing note of urgency in Jim's voice. He wants to end the night.

  “Wanna make it at home?”

  “Yes,” Jim says. “I live nearby, follow me.” His tense body relaxes.

  “Just one thing,” the “cowboy” calls out, “you don't mind a four-way, do you? I'm with a couple of friends down the road. We'll all make it.”

  “No, not into that now,” Jim says. He doesn't want an orgy, not now. The man drives away. Jim walks across the road and up the hill to the playground. The skeletal merry-go-round looks dead.

  Back on the road, he gets into his car and leaves the park. In the area below, cars are circling the blocks.

  Jim is stopped at an intersection. Then he sees him: a strange, almost-hallucinatory figure in the darkness: an old, bent man—with dark sunglasses, color-tipped white cane tap-tap-tapping on the dry sidewalk. Is he really blind? If so, what is he doing outside at this hour? Tap, tap, tap, tap. The cane on the sidewalk begins to beat angrily. Tap! Tap! Suddenly Jim realizes that the strange night creature is advancing toward his car with the cane flailing fiercely.

  Jim puts his car in reverse, U-turns, and drives away.

  4:15 A.M. The Garage on Oak Street The Tunnels. The Garage. Greenstone Park. Montana Street. Hanson Avenue. The Garage.

  There are several cars parked near the abandoned garage. Jim's headlights illuminate one of the stirring figures behind it. Not that. Not now.

  Jim drives to the tunnels. A few men—leaving the after-hours bar nearby—are walking into the deserted street. Jim waits for long minutes in his car for the drifting attention to settle. Now he walks past the dark-yellow maw of one of the tunnels. He hears someone whisper to him, a hissing sound. He moves away. He returns to his car, drives back to Greenstone Park. Shadows linger along the trail. He doesn't want to join them. He drives out of the park, circles the block. No one. He returns to the area of the garage on Oak Street. He gets out. A goodlooking man stops his car a few feet away. As Jim approaches, the man opens the car door. Jim gets in. He looks at his watch—then at the driver of the car. Yes.

  Jim says hurriedly: “I'm on my way home, I live just a few minutes away.” Again he looks at his watch.

  “You want some company?”

  “Sure.” The tension releases Jim's body. “My car's across the street.”

  “I'll follow you,” the man says.

  Jim breathes easily. And so the night will end softly.

  Jim is opening the door to go to his car when the man says: “Can you get into heavy stuff?”

  “Like what?”

  The man's voice quavers. “Real heavy. You can get as rough as you like. You can— …”

  Jim gets out of the car. “Sorry,” he says, “I'm not into that.” For the first time ever, he notices the sound a car door makes as it closes.

  He looks at the sky. The darkness barely lingers. He drives back to the garage. Even the stirring figures behind it are gone. Two cars are driving away. Another. Now another. Jim gets out. The street is deserted.

  He stands before the garage.

  A vague arc of light is illuminating the horizon. Now dawn lifts the night's shadows. All the hunters are gone, the streets are empty. He's alone. The dawning light increases. Sounds of traffic grow on the main boulevard two blo
cks away. The sun wipes away the dawn. Palmtree leaves lie yellow on the sidewalk. In the neighborhood across the street a door opens. A car starts. Voices.

  Jim sees a truck stop along the block. An old man gets out. He gathers the fallen palmtree leaves and puts them in his truck.

  Daylight bathes the garage behind Jim. Beyond, the roar of morning traffic increases. The sun is fully out.

  Still shirtless from the night's hunt, Jim stares at the garage. At the crumbling walls, the peeling boards, the discarded cans, the broken bottles, the cluttered dry weeds, the tangled barbed wire.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WITHOUT IN ANY way indicating that they agree or disagree with any or all of the points of view expressed in this book, I would like to thank the following:

  Evelyn Hooker, for having waged “the fight” years ago, when it was truly dangerous to do so.

  The publishers of One Magazine, the organizers of The Mattachine Society, and all the other courageous “old fighters” (now often sadly ignored) of the advance guard—and the “new fighters” of Stonewall.

  The National Endowment for the Arts, for their grant during, but not specifically for, the writing of this book.

  Glenna Luschei, for her encouragement and for years-long friendship.

  Albert L. Gordon, for his strong opinions, which often conflicted with mine but always elicited constructive consideration.

  Bill Regan, for sharing his definite points of view.

  Barry Copilow, and many others, for important data, and trust.

  Don Allen, editor of my first four books, for his belief in me throughout the years.

  Floriano Vecchi, for so much friendship, and affection.

  Melodie Johnson, for her invaluable opinions—and a sustaining, uniquely warm friendship.

  And Marsha Kinder, for her encouragement and creative criticism—and for a very special loving friendship.