April 19, 1991
I’m getting ready to take a disco nap when Suki, Tasha’s cat, starts to whine. I look at the clock: almost 6:30. She’s not fed till seven. I’ve gone out the past several Fridays (and most Saturdays, and a few Sundays) and the truth is I’m a little bored with the scene, though some new developments have made it more interesting. And I haven’t hung out in a while with CB, who’s driving in from Connecticut, so that’ll be nice. But it’s been a long day capping a long week, and I’m not going to do anything if I don’t get some sleep—and Suki, who can scream like she’s dying of feline leukemia, isn’t about to let that happen. “You win,” I tell her, coming out of my room. I dump some Science Diet for mature cats in her bowl, then head back to my futon.
CB buzzes at nine. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he tells the intercom. CB has this thing about cars: his last one was stolen (while he was having dinner with me, as it happens), and this one’s been broken into three times in six months, so maybe it’s justified.
Downstairs, I notice the absence of his current beau. “Where’s Jay?” I ask. “Jay’s at home,” CB tells me.
I met Jay at a birthday party a week ago. I’d heard about him for weeks—how he’d grown up on a ranch in Montana, how he met CB the first time he walked into a gay bar, how he’d been engaged to a woman who was now “back in Montana.” As a phenomenon Jay fascinated me: The Young Gay Man Upon First Coming Out. Though only twenty-two, a year younger than me, at the party Jay had seemed like a teenager, hanging his head, smiling a lot (but not talking), hiding behind CB. When he thought no one was looking he’d put his hand on the back of CB’s neck and let his fingers play over the skin. When I saw that, I remembered CB telling me that Jay had gone home with him without even a kiss first. I thought both actions stemmed from Jay’s nervousness about being gay (“Well actually,” he told me at the birthday party, “I don’t like to label myself.”), but then I remembered something else CB had said. At his house CB had tried to kiss Jay, and Jay had pushed him away. “How do you get AIDS?” he’d demanded. So instead of sex that first night, they’d had sex ed.
“Jay told me the other night that he’s definitely gay,” CB tells me as we drink Rolling Rocks and drive through the park. “But I don’t think he’s ready for this.” No, I have to agree, he’s probably not.
In 1984 HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, but despite this fact, and the concomitant discovery that transmission of the virus could be prevented through fairly simple modifications to sexual activity—i.e., safe sex—in 1985 Ed Koch closed New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and back rooms (heterosexual as well as homosexual, to be fair to Hizzoner) in the name of preventing the spread of HIV, and for the past six years public sex has been pretty much absent from New York. But David Dinkins defeated Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary, then defeated Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 general election, and almost as soon as he took office in 1990 things began to relax. Now Limelight, a Catholic church turned nightclub, has decided to test the waters by opening a back room at Mea Culpa, its Friday night party. The sex room is located in what used to be the friary, so people aren’t doing anything there that hasn’t been done before, except perhaps dancing.
As a college student in New Jersey I’d read Guy Trebay’s account in the Village Voice of the last days of the Mineshaft. I’d read Edmund White’s description of alfresco sex on the West Side piers in Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Andrew Holleran’s tales of hedonism in the Everard Baths in Dancer From the Dance and Larry Kramer’s debauched description of same in Faggots. It’s not that I wanted to visit a sex club: I felt compelled to. The gay identity I was adopting as both a man and a writer was epicurean, libertine, and quite possibly not good for me. In lieu of discrete acts of missionary monogamy, sex had become vertical, social, with innumerable partners coalescing and drifting apart in scenarios that could go on for hours, days even, though none of the players at the end might have been present at the beginning. And now, finally, I was getting a chance to find out what all the fuss was about.
Downstairs, some go-go boys are dancing atop the bar, and CB and I conduct a pseudointellectual discussion about the unsexiness of strippers so we can pretend our gawking is derisory rather than desirous. After a while that gets boring, so we dance. We drink. We separate. I find myself at the door of the sex room, which gapes at me like a big black mouth. The idea of anonymity is qualified as soon as I walk in and see CB. Unsure of the etiquette, I do my best to keep us in separate social circles, but, stealing a glance at his partner, I realize I know him too. I’m trying to remember if he and CB have ever met when someone puts his hand on my crotch and I forget about CB. It’s not as if my mind turns off or anything. If anything, I’m cerebrating even more than I did with the go-go boys—although, to be fair to myself, I should mention that I’d agreed before the fact to write about this experience, so I was primed to give it an intellectual frisson. No, that’s not quite right either. The truth is I’d heard about Mea Culpa’s back room weeks before but, despite five years of fantasizing about just this sort of thing, hadn’t worked up the nerve to check it out. But when an editor at OutWeek announced that the magazine was doing a feature on “a night in queer New York,” I immediately offered to cover Limelight. So I’m not just getting my rocks off: I’m working. But I’m also, you know, getting my rocks off, in the former friary of an old church filled with twenty or thirty men.
This is so seventies, I tell myself. I tell myself that queers have freed sex from quaint notions of commitment and meaning and consequence, but as I look around at the men in this room, many of whom are in their thirties and forties, I find myself wondering if any of them still thinks that, or remembers a time before AIDS when it might have actually been true. I wonder if they feel guilty now, or lucky, or afraid—but then some hairy-chested dude with poppers-glazed eyes pinches my nipple while someone else whose face I haven’t really seen applies his mouth to my cock, and for a moment the scene is reduced to its physical parameters. My body; his—and his, and his. There’s a dick in each of my hands. Wait, let me rephrase that: there’s a dick in each of my hands! One goes with the hairy chest, but I’m not sure what the other’s connected to. I wouldn’t mind doing a little sucking myself, but my lips are chapped and the bottom one might have a small cut, so no kissing for me, let alone sucking. (Jay’s voice in my head: “How do you get AIDS?”) I lid my eyes and try to impersonate poppers guy, who’s moaning porn aphorisms: “Yeah, baby, do it.” “Oh yeah, pull on that thing.” The guy’s hot, but the blankness of his expression is off-putting, and the words coming out of his mouth are a reminder that no experience is ever just physical. Somewhere along the line this guy learned to think of his drivel as erotic, and I find myself wondering who his performance is for: me, or himself? It’s all a bit much, and I close my eyes and pretend I’m masturbating with somebody else’s mouth. I come; I go.
On the drive home, I thank God for CB’s car: my idea of sexual denouement isn’t a subway ride. “How was Alex?” I ask. “Alex?” “My friend, Alex. That’s the guy you ended up with.” “Oh,” CB says. “He came on my shirt.” He shows me the spot, as innocuous as a water stain. We talk about how strange it must have been, in the days before the sex clubs were closed down, to have done this every weekend, every night even; in hindsight, I find it telling that we used the word “strange” rather than “exciting” or “addictive” or, I don’t know, “enervating.” CB drops me off and heads back to Connecticut, and Jay. It’s morbid, but I can’t help wondering how many gay men went out for a night as equivocal as the one I just had and died for it. Upstairs, my roommates are sleeping and the cat has this funny idea I’m going to feed her. I don’t though. I just brush my teeth and wash my hands—and then, remembering, my dick—and go to bed.