December 16, 1979 Major leap through time: I’m exactly where I had hoped to be over the last few months, first morning in my new Polk Street apartment, all my stuff moved in and put away, laundry going in the laundry room off the lobby downstairs so that I’ll have clean jeans to go meet Ben in tomorrow.
Ben: Last Monday, December 10, I went to Sutter’s Mill on break and sat down at a table with my legs stretched out, drinking a beer. Two weeks before, I’d been cruised by this cute young guy; we’d exchanged names and I’d gotten smashed that night on Castro because he’d said he might be there—but we missed each other. He’d said he comes to the city every Monday; I activated some slight self-control and didn’t race back to Sutter’s the following Monday, so as not to be haunting the place for him. (He says he was there looking for me.) So last Monday, just as I was about to give up hope and leave, there he was. I felt a sort of pure joy when I saw him again and he approached me, smiling broadly. He said he was aiming to do something really different this evening, maybe go to the baths (Or get laid, maybe? I thought). I asked if he’d like to meet me at Bonanza in fifteen minutes and go to dinner at Hong Kong Café, then check out punk night at the Stud.
A little later I was closing out my drawer and saw him browsing the gay section, smiling a conspirator’s smile, and I felt all true-romance-comics, “couldn’t take my eyes off him,” etc. He drove us to my old place on 16th Street in a tidy little Toyota and I changed my shirt and led him up to the roof to look at the sunset and smoke a joint. Then we were making out in earnest, kissing hard and rocking against each other, rubbing our hard-ons together through our jeans. When we broke and clambered back downstairs, both flushed and cocks protruding, we brushed past Eddie in the hall. I turned on the radio and we fell to tearing off each other’s clothes. He has a delicious body: hunky, pale, and very hairy, thick doorstop cock. I was very turned-on to his ass—dead-white plump cheeks and a tuft of dark hair at the crack—and fucked him greedily, twice, with intense flashes of tenderness and lust. My cock felt so good inside him: Holding his hairy legs back over his shoulders, I could push in slowly and pull almost all the way out again and feel his tight hole grabbing at my cockhead. I could just bend down and get the head of his fat, dripping dick in my mouth, staring back into his open eyes while he moaned and yelped. I fucked him slow and long, stopping whenever I was about to come and just panting and staring. I’m hard now thinking of it, and would beat off except I’d like to save it for when I’ll see him tomorrow.
He didn’t say until much later, after we’d gone to dinner, danced at the Stud, and come back to my bed to fuck again till the early hours, that it was his birthday: he’s twenty-two.
July 12, 1980 Just back from a three-day visit with Steve, my old pal and sometime-fuck-buddy from the bookstore, and Randy, with whom he’s been living since last fall, in Monterey.
On Wednesday, Steve drove us to the Dunes, a notorious cruising zone near Fort Ord. We climbed over a sandy hill covered with electric-orange ice plant and walked along an empty white beach; the sea was that incredible glittering aquamarine-indigo. Back over the hill, we walked through a shady forested area, soon passing several lone male strollers. A slender man in white gym shorts and sunglasses with a blue backpack said hi and held my gaze a moment. I looked back and he had stopped and was staring after me. “If I go with him for a while, will you wait for me?” I asked Steve. “Oh sure, I’ll be at the car,” he said, laughing. I walked toward the guy and followed him around a bend, wondering if it could really be this easy. He cut into the trees and then beckoned from a sort of natural shower-stall just off the trail, a roofless wigwam of branches and leaves. (Steve told me later that a deaf guy who regularly sucks people off there had constructed lots of these shelters.) My woodlander was handsome and tanned, with serious blue eyes. It was stifling hot even out of the sun beneath the trees; there was a soothing background roar of insects and the surf just over the hill. We didn’t say a word, just stood face to face, smiling, running our hands over each other’s chests and crotches. His hard-on was apparent and accessible in the loose terry shorts; I’d had a boner since turning back to see him staring at me. I knelt and sucked his cock a bit, opening my pants and stroking mine. Then we changed positions and he blew me while I looked out at the trees and the other occasional man passing by. He stood, entirely naked now (he’d only been wearing the trunks and the backpack to begin with), pulled something from his pack and greased his ass and my dick, then turned and presented his buttocks, obscenely pale beneath his tan line, bending slightly against a tree trunk. My legs were shaking as I shoved my dick into him and started pumping. I was quickly drenched with sweat, only my shirt unbuttoned and pants half-down; men walking by could see me from the chest up; some stopped to peer over the foliage and watch. A very sexy, shirtless, muscular young guy in green army pants leaned in, grabbed the back of my neck, and kissed me passionately, and I came thrusting into the first guy’s slick butt. He stood and began kissing our visitor without batting an eye, while I knelt and blew his swollen red cock till he shot down my throat, moaning in concert with the beefy army guy, who’d pulled out his dick and jacked off.
I staggered back to the car sweaty and trembling. “Jesus, you look like you need a drink!” Steve said as we sped away.
March 8, 1981
Steve and Randy came up from Monterey and spent a night and day last week. Monday night we took acid and walked to the Balcony in the rain; I’m vague on the rest of the night. I do recall laughing at two clones with little teddy bears in rat-traps sticking out of their back pockets. Next day, mine off, we ran around in the afternoon with Michael’s new lover, Gary—we took more acid and went to watch dirty movies in booths in the Tenderloin. Steve and Randy paired off, and Gary and I piled into a booth, fed quarters into a slot, and watched a flickering picture of some hunk pumping his cock into a skinny youth’s ass. What with the smut and the proximity, it wasn’t long before Gary freed his hard dick (had I seen it before now? Not erect, I don’t think) and was taking my hand and wrapping my fingers around his boner, grinning nervously. “I think I’m going to have to shoot my wad, Mr. Kevin,” he said, and soon I had mine out and we were jerking each other off in earnest, sweat pouring off us in the dank booth. Had I realized before how attracted I am to him? He’s Michael’s boyfriend, but they’re both vocal about their stormy and totally nonmonogamous relationship. The film faded out and we went on jacking each other’s cocks, our faces inches apart, almost kissing, but not. “That’s it, you’re gonna make me shoot,” he said, never breaking eye contact, and we both shot our wads onto the walls and floor. We fell out of the booth laughing and in disarray; Steve was smoking a cigarette out on the sidewalk and looking at me quizzically.
We continued partying on Castro Street, where Michael met up with us when he got off work at the copy shop. We laughed and drank beer and played pool, and hours later Steve and Randy dropped me off at home, where, when I’d gone up the stairs and shut my door, I threw myself on the green vinyl couch and cried till my nose ran and my head hurt. It had come to me as a total coup de coeur in that airless booth: I’m in love with Gary.
April 19, 1981
Report from out of the gap; the way I brag, oh yes, I’ve always kept journals here: big lie.
Today my under-lip’s raw from excessive kissing with Joey, a handsome waiter friend of Steve’s whom I met last June in Monterey. Steve called up on Thursday night and said, “Joey’s here, and he’s coming to the city Saturday morning. How’d you like to go out with him?” I’ve always asked after him: “Seen Joey lately?” And Steve always taunts me, shaking his head sadly, “It’s a shame, he’s so shy, he never tricks, and he’s always complaining of how horny and lonely he is….” This, about a six-foot-tall, former construction worker Italian stud with impressive biceps and olive skin. So I was like, whoa, it’s Christmastime in the city.
I was just getting out of the shower Saturday morning when he arrived, cold and wearing a big dorky ski jacket—it was cold and foggy out. Broad chest, nice ass, big thighs: When I opened the door I was almost struck dumb. He was shy; he just kept looking at me and smiling. Steve had said, “He’s bringing coke and mushrooms—” as if they were Green Stamps, and I felt fairly sure the expectation was that we’d be spending the night together, but it seemed too good to be true. We were both shy enough to spend five hours together before kissing.
Very shortly after he came in he’d put lines of coke on a plate, and soon my teeth and the roof of my mouth were numb and we were chatting away like old friends. We took a long walk, smoked some Thai-stick I had, and then drove in his car to Land’s End. Despite the cold misty drizzle and wind we walked way out on the path above the nude beach. You couldn’t even see the bridge. The moments when we stepped behind trees and lit bowls of Thai-stick were silent, very high, and sexually charged; he was leaning close into my face to light the pipe.
Back at the apartment we sat on the couch talking and sipping beers; he bent to kiss me and when our lips touched, pow! We were all over each other and clothes were flying. When we lay on the bed pressed together naked I was happy in the extreme. I couldn’t speak; I kept thinking the word joy. And I remember thinking, If my life ended at this very moment, I’d die filled with joy. Well, I was so high, and my heart pounding so violently, I felt as if that were a real possibility. My dick was hard and he was handling it and admiring it and then sucking it slowly and reverently. I pulled his muscular, hairy thighs around my neck and found my way to his big, hard ass. The crack was heavily furred; I pulled his cheeks apart and kissed the clean, pink, pursed hole as tenderly as I’d been kissing his lips. He rolled onto his stomach and I started thrusting my cock between his cheeks: This gentle stud who could bend me into a pretzel was going to let me fuck him! I couldn’t get it in with spit; I had to get up and find lube. His body was tensed and hard; I stared at the broad, sweat-slicked shoulders, stroked his big hot buttocks, and pushed straight up and in. He was so tight it almost hurt, as if I were trying to poke my dick through a knothole. He turned to kiss me and I pulled out and squeaked back in slowly till I squirted. We lay stuck together and I stayed inside him. After a dazed, dreamlike time passed, his ass started moving under me, flexing on my cock like a gripping fist. We started kissing and to my own amazement I was hard and fucking him again till I came, tingling and covered in goose bumps, my hair soaked.
We napped, got up and showered, snorted a line of coke each and ate some mushrooms, and headed over to Uncle Vito’s for pizza and wine. Afterward, we walked down Bush to Polk and over to the Giraffe, but we were much too high to keep it together long in a noisy Saturday-night bar. The noise of the disco and shouting patrons around us as we timidly sipped our beers was painful; when I began hallucinating little red light explosions like flashbulbs going off around me, I thought it wise to go.
At home again there were some weird moments; we were so much higher than when we left, and I was acutely aware of being with a stranger, however congenial. I spent a few minutes trying to adjust the rabbit ears on the TV set before realizing I couldn’t tell whether the picture was in or out of focus and my effort was pointless. We started kissing again, and it was different—slower, awkward, as if we were both sticking our tongues in another’s mouth for the first time. Stripped again, I was intensely conscious of his otherness, of not really knowing anything about him; the full weight of the “dirtyness” of our acts came over me in the most exciting way; all my Gay Is Good conditioning fell away and I felt the clumsy, nasty, forbidden nature of taking a hard, dripping cock in my mouth and making of myself a slave, a sucking machine with one goal: to make him shoot his load down my throat. His cock hadn’t always been hard earlier; now it was stiff and red and I couldn’t get enough of it. He came, thrashing and groaning; then I lay on my back with my hands behind my head while he blew me and took my load.
I slept happily against his broad, sweet body, and woke up horny and newly thrilled to find him there looking back at me in the light, bits of sleep-stuff in the corners of his eyes. Pure satisfaction of turning over into his arms and putting my mouth on his, our hard dicks rolling against each other. I crawled down and blew him in the bright, sober light of morning, and came twice, once fucking him, all of it so tender, as if we’d endured some crisis together. It was very nice stepping out of the shower and having him put his arms around me and say how good my hair smelled—to feel, however fleetingly, held dear, desired by someone so beautiful and kind.
We went for a long drive, then stopped in the Castro for breakfast. I had the movie-musical delusion that people were stopping in their tracks to stare at us, and half expected the waiter to burst into song. When Joey dropped me back at 20 Monroe I stood on the sidewalk and watched him out of sight, and felt I’d made it all up by the time I hit the stairs.
July 15, 1981
Michael and Gary called up Sunday afternoon to see if I wanted to go to the End-Up and drink thirty-five-cent beer. I met them at Market and Powell. As we walked along South of Market, you could smell last week’s huge Folsom fire in the distance. The bar was crowded, lots of hot guys. As always, when they’re getting along, I enjoy Michael and Gary’s company immensely—sitting drinking and guiltily listening to Gary making fun of people, or dancing with Michael. They both took quarter hits of acid, but I steadfastly refused, figuring I’d just get self-conscious and stop enjoying myself so much.
We left at twilight, walking up seedy Sixth Street to Market, and caught a Haight bus to their place; I was invited for quiche. We were quite drunk. When we arrived, Michael went into the kitchen and started banging pots and pans around, while Gary filled the tub for a bubble bath. “Go ahead and have a bath with Gary, if you want to,” Michael said. “It’s OK.” I went into the steamy bathroom and took off my clothes and climbed in with Gary, and we sat facing each other in the long, claw-foot tub. We were laughing a lot and Gary was teasing me and then I had a raging hard-on and he got a more serious look on his face and started playing with it beneath the crackling bubble bath foam. We kept almost doing it, then I’d say, “Hey, Michael might be pissed”; then Michael would come in with a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder and sit on the toilet lid and smoke a cigarette and watch us bathing—then go back to his quiche. Gary pulled his legs up and I pointed my cock and it slipped halfway into him dry, and I started to fuck him and he was moaning and the water was sloshing over the sides of the tub. That was when I was most excited and wanted to come, and would have done, but Michael walked in wearing some pajama bottoms and announced we should all take acid and play together. I accepted a quarter hit, then knelt in the tub and sucked his modest, hard red dick, while Gary jerked my cock.
A little later, as I began to come on to the acid, we moved to the large walk-in closet that their pallet and sleeping bags were in, with candles, poppers, Crisco, and the redoubtable “Roy” (the giant, two-headed dildo Michael has named after the little butch straight shipping clerk at the bookstore). We sucked each other in various combinations, then Gary took a lot of the huge dildo, Michael wielding the other end; then Michael backed himself onto it while the opposite end was still in Gary, and I just sat back and stared, amazed. Partly there was that almost tangible acid crackling and popping in the air, but also I felt nearly jolted by the intensity of the sexual connection between them. It was as if I were invisible and watching something utterly private; at the same time, both of them looked at me and muttered shameless, smutty words: My watching cranked up their excitement. Of course their ultimate plan was for me to try it. Gary kissed me so romantically that my eyes welled with tears while Michael slowly pushed and twisted this fucking two-by-four cock in—but even with poppers, I literally couldn’t take it more than a tentative inch. Very stoned on the acid by now, I felt a rush of shame that I’d let them down; I wanted to have done the thing.
After a while—the green-glowing numbers on a clock radio alternately yawning to a halt and double-timing with the acid—we got cleaned up again, Michael put the quiche in the oven, and we went out flushed and wet-haired looking for a store open at twelve so we could snag a six-pack to ensure we’d get to sleep eventually. We had to walk, tripping, all the way to Market and Church Street, each stoplight taking long enough to write a novel before Walk, spooky thrums and waah-waahs pulsing from every passing car or neon sign. If a giant pterodactyl had swooped down on us screeching, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Back at the apartment, starved, we ate warm quiche and gulped malt liquors and several of Gary’s pain pills (he strained a finger last week making pizza at Marcello’s), watching The Maltese Falcon on TV. With typical tactlessness to Michael, Gary said, “I love you, Michael, but Kevin here’s the best kisser I’ve met up with.”
“Well, I’ll admit he’s a great cocksucker,” Michael said.
They had a brief skirmish over who’d sleep in the middle, and Michael got up and watched TV a little longer, drinking another malt and burping noisily, before he crawled back into bed. Then, ten minutes or two hours later, while I lay silent and vibrating alongside, Gary rolled onto Michael, nudged his legs apart, and fucked him vigorously, only the sound of his cock wetly moving in and out and his pelvis thudding against Michael’s ass and the sharp intakes of breath when he came. Then everyone pretended to go to sleep, and then it was stuffy and brighter and eight-thirty and I had to crawl out feeling like an acid zombie, shower, and take a bus to the bookstore and stand in the creaking register box ringing up copies of the latest Danielle Steel for a parade of elderly women in headscarves.
August 30, 1981
Busy seeing Sam or wondering when I’ll see him next. I’m living in a heightened state (and not just when I’m taking MDA with him, which is every weekend); the phrase desperately happy may best apply. We had one of those little necessary what’s-going-on-here discussions last weekend, and decided to agree we’re “in like,” and not to worry about it again for a long time, but I was lying through my chattering teeth.
Last Friday night when I got over to his place he pulled me into his cramped bedroom and we started making out, with the other three roommates talking and laughing in the distance at the kitchen table. He stopped and pulled something wrapped in a piece of foil from the bottom of his sock drawer. “Pull down your pants.” I did as I was told. Kissing me again and stroking my cock, he wet his finger and pushed it up my butt. “Let’s go back out and visit awhile.” Then, as we sat chatting and drinking beers, and he smoked cigarette after cigarette, I suddenly found myself getting very high. He looked over at me sometime after I’d fallen out of the conversation: “C’mon.” Back to the bedroom, where he pulled off my clothes and then stripped off his own while I lay on the bed reeling and throbbing with the MDA he’d put up my ass. He looked stern, deliberate; we kissed a long while, then he pushed me onto my stomach, spread my legs wide apart, and proceeded to fuck me, on and off, for an hour, and I came twice without touching my dick.
May 9, 1982
I just noticed, stretching out my arm to write here, that the inside of my wrist is sown with tiny splinters from the encounter with a stranger I had on the roof today—a work Saturday—at the bookstore. I didn’t get to take lunch till 2: 30. “Isn’t the wind too cool up there?” I asked Franz, the ditsy, permed-blond new clerk, who’d taken his sandwich up earlier. I was tired, and tempted to ditch “hunk school” (as John and I call our springtime tanning and exercise efforts) for the day and just eat at my desk with a book. “No, it felt great, you really should go up!” Franz said.
I grabbed a sandwich and went next door to take the elevator to the Bonanza deck (actually accessed through the old office building next door). Shit, I thought as I pushed the door open and started across the roof—there was some guy stripped down to a tiny yellow Speedo lying on his stomach on one of the ancient wooden benches, probably one of the drones from W. H. Freeman (the science publisher in the adjoining building) that I ignore up there on weekdays. I hadn’t brought my book, so I’d be doomed to some boring conversation. As I clomped up on the noisy deck, he turned over, sat up, and stared at me as though I were some visiting angel. I was happily taken aback: He was cute, with graying blond beard and hair, slim, muscular, nice ass and shoulders, big friendly grin, and, I now saw, a cock that was obviously large and outgrowing his suit even before I’d pulled my T-shirt off. “Handsome man…,” he said, with a hick Texas accent that went straight to my heart and cock.
We chatted for a moment, then I fell to eating my now-leaden sandwich. He went on staring at me and smiling, making no attempt to hide the boner tenting the front of his Speedo. After the last week of frustrated horniness, the summery weather, the lust heavy in the air everywhere lately, shyness couldn’t impede me. I put the other half of my sandwich down, turned around on the bench to face him, stared at his hard-on, and said, “You want to play, or what?” “Wah, ah’d love to,” he said. I walked over as he stood, I crouched and pulled his dick out—big, sweaty, with a fat mushroom head—and started sucking it without so much as a thought of the hundreds of glaring windows on the surrounding skyscrapers, or who else might be working on this sunny Saturday.
May 27, 1982
Now that I’ve been made to understand that Lee’s ardor has nothing to do with romance, I cold-bloodedly agreed to come by his place on Sunday morning for a recreational three-way. His lover Ralph’s odd-looking, slightly walleyed;the bulgy crotch and thirty keys affixed to his back left pocket were, as I’d imagined, false lights. Lee and I went into the bedroom first (“Jes’ relax, honey…”). We were naked and kissing when Ralph came in, pulled off his clothes, and began to blow me. His dick was tiny and didn’t get hard. Lee got very excited watching me fucking Ralph’s face; when I was close to coming, he climbed behind me and shoved his big dick into me dry and started pumping hard, and I came, shooting copiously down Ralph’s throat—he moaned at each jet, pulling on my balls. We all lay still and breathing heavily for a few minutes, my dick still in Ralph’s mouth—then, as Lee crawled up and brought his rock-hard cock to my lips, my dick sprang up and Ralph went back to work, relieving me of a second load while Lee jerked off over my face.
When I got home, Michael was calling with an interesting story. He’d tricked with the muscular hunk he met at Café Flore a few days ago, the one who works Sunday evenings at the Eagle, and he turned out to be quite strange. Michael brought him back to the apartment while Gary was at work; the guy kept claiming he wasn’t human, and could read Michael’s thoughts by putting his hand on his head. When he left, Michael went to the window to watch, but he never saw him leave the building. I told Michael I thought an alien would have better things to do than infiltrate the homosexual community and serve beers in a leather vest at the Eagle.
September 6, 1982
I ran into Gary and Michael leaving the Castro early Sunday evening. We headed for their place to get some of Gary’s new Thai-stick. As we passed Guerrero, Michael saw a light on up at his friend Mark’s. “You go ahead with Gary and get the pot while I see if Mark’s home,” Michael told me, rushing off. This undoubtedly meant that he wanted Gary out of the way so that he could tell Mark about whoever he’d tricked with the night before.
I had a pretty good idea what would happen next. Gary and I went on to his and Michael’s apartment on Haight. We both had to pee badly as we came through the door. He couldn’t wait for me to finish, so he pulled his dick out and peed in the sink, half erect as usual. I finished and went in the other room and sat down on the bed, picked up a porn magazine, and flipped the pages, as if I was in a doctor’s waiting room. He walked out of the bathroom with his dick sticking straight out in front of him. “I don’t think I can get my dick back in my pants like this,” he said, my Romeo. “Maybe you’d like to put your lips around it?”
As always, no kissing, almost no eye contact unless I forced it. I unbuttoned my fly and let my hard-on pop out, crouched on the hardwood floor, and started sucking on his uncut dick, which has a plastic reek, like a new shower curtain. He pulled away periodically and beat off while I licked his balls—all in the near dark, only the silenced TV on for light.
“Stand up and pull your pants down around your ankles,” he said, and I did so, fast, then squatted again. I had my hands on his firm asscheeks while he pumped into my mouth. He yanked away and wanked himself briskly a minute while I jerked off in front of him, looking up at his red dick. He moaned and shot one white jet that hit my shoulder. “False cum!” he said, continuing to stroke with one hand and grabbing the back of my head with the other; then, “OK, OK, here it is!” and he pushed it back in my mouth and came in a bitter flood. I kept sucking and came seconds later, leaning back and ejaculating with an audible crack, panting as if I’d run a race. Impossible to explain the awful love I feel for him, indistinguishable from the lust, while all this is occurring. A few seconds of silent breathing, and then he’s all practicality. “Hey, we should get moving!”
“You’d better not feel superior about this!” I said as we hurried down the two flights of stairs and out onto the twilit street.
“Oh, you bet I do,” he said, laughing nastily; then, “No, I won’t think of it at all!”—lest I try to make some Prince Charming story out of it.