SOMETIMES WE FREQUENTED the gay bars on the brightly lit Reguliersdwarsstraat between Singel and Herengracht and now and again in the more forbidding Warmoesstraat. But De Engel, the bar Oliver had taken me to early on, and where he had declared his homosexuality to me, was his local. It was a light, modern bar. The boys who went there were our age but other-worldly in their beauty. The sheer incongruity of their blondness or the pencil-sharp distinction of the features of the darker boys with their long charcoal hair, a fineness of build, all contrasted with the rougher, bulkier heft of men I had encountered in the claustrophobic, illicit, cordoned homosexual bars of Cape Town.
Here was an eroticised social ease. Oliver knew some of the regulars – Volker, Kees, Bart – and they conversed at the bar over beers, but their Dutch was too rapid and too strongly locally accented for me to follow. “Gay small talk”, Oliver called it.
Under a disco ball, boys danced to the High Energy beat. I’d watch them from the shadows at the edge of the dance floor, just one in a careless crowded press of bodies amidst a rising distinctively male smell – an intoxication of sweat, deodorant and smoke. One evening I watched Volker spinning by himself in the middle of the dance floor, T-shirt peeled off, his lustrous black hair flying about his bold head, his sleek body a taut concentration of sinew tuned to the beat of the music. As he came close to me, I gasped at the perfection of his honey-marbled skin and compacted tone in the pulse of the strobe lights. He was so close to me that my face caught the sweat flying from his torso. I ached at the brevity of the image and the flush of urgent desire that coursed through my veins.
I was never approached by any of these boys – perhaps they assumed I was Oliver’s, and indeed we were always together. I retreated instead into the pleasures of voyeurism. I marvelled at this untethered sexuality set free in the streets of the city, so seemingly accessible, so unjudged.
Afterwards that evening I asked Oliver about Volker. Perhaps detecting the rawness in my voice, the incredulity of his beauty making me stumble over my words, he was dismissive.
“He’s an airhead, Matthew. They all are.”
“Why do we go there then?” I asked.
“To admire them, of course.” He smiled. “It’s an entirely superficial pursuit, Matt. You aren’t meant to fall for them, silly boy.” He chucked me under the chin. I pulled away from him and sighed.
The warm bohemian bars on the Amstel near the Blauwbrug were the places the drag queens frequented. Here the dim interiors were lit by low lamps with tasselled ruby shades. The shelves of the bar counters that December were entwined with twinkling Christmas lights in the shapes of plastic roses and tulips. Behind were mirrors in rococo frames. Gold-painted plaster casts of Renaissance angels were fixed to walls as candle holders. I thought the drag queens strange nocturnal creatures. For me they were never convincingly women, betrayed always by large knuckles, uneven features, or deep voices husky from smoke. Or in the case of others, so extraordinarily beautiful – a perfectly turned calf, immaculately pert breasts, an exquisitely thin waist or such measured poise in a pair of high heels that they seemed an exaggeration of everyday femininity.
Initially, I felt uncomfortable in these places with their deliberately camp pastiche, the blowsy clothes of the queens, their ironic names – Veronica, Mathilde, Greetje – and the overwrought Dutch torch-songs and old accordion music. But Oliver loved them. He loved the drag queens’ self-referential irony, he said, and indeed they were friendlier than the patrons at De Engel, flirting brazenly with us and dissolving in mirth at our accented Dutch. So that was where we would most often go, treated as we were to beers, and for the warmth and the humour, which kept us whole.
Lastly, to complete his tour of the city’s gay demography, Oliver took me to the Cock Ring. This was one of a string of seedy cruise-bars in the Warmoesstraat. In these bars Oliver told me the agenda was sex; if you wanted to pick someone up, this was where you went. The walls of the Cock Ring were painted black. Running the full length of one of them was an enormous painting of a muscular naked man, his erect penis in profile and his face turned into the room with a challenging expression, an invitation more, it seemed, to a brawl than an expression of desire. There were other similar images in the room, photographs framed simply in black – some advertisements for other bars, others of naked men in repose or tumescent. Over the bar counter hung a random series of chains.
The room was bathed in a pale yellow light, except for one corner where the blue light of a television screen pulsed permanently with pornography. On the night Oliver and I went there two men on the screen were taking turns fucking one another over a pool table. The volume was turned down so that the images floated in the room, disembodied, unconnected to the background sound. I could not stop staring at the screen. I was mesmerised.
Oliver went over to the bar to buy us beers, while I sank into a black leather banquette in a corner away from the bar where men conversed and smoked. There was a sort of uniform to the place, I realised as I looked around. Mostly this was blue jeans and tight-fitting white T-shirts, revealing toned biceps – the men were older and bulkier here than at De Engel – while others dressed in leather chaps and jackets and caps, like bikers. One such man, moustached and with boots outlining his calves, looked over at me through the haze and caught my gaze. He ran his tongue over his lips and shifted his stance so that he was facing me, legs astride. I looked down at my hands, feeling a beat of anxiety. At that moment Oliver came back. When I looked up again the man had turned to the bar.
“So what do you think?” Oliver asked.
“It’s lurid,” I replied, “almost menacing.”
Oliver laughed at me. “But sexy too, don’t you think, in a dark sort of way? Doesn’t it make you horny?”
I looked around the room, at the provocatively sexual images on the walls, then at the soundless TV, where a third man had now joined the fuck-fest of the prone figure on the pool table, the face in the camera’s frame wearing an expression of primal ecstasy. Over at the bar two men were kissing intensely, lips sliding over lips; another man was kissing a swarthy-featured man in the fold of his neck, while his companion ran his hands over his thighs and up between buttocks that were tautly outlined in rippling black leather. I groaned.
Oliver put his hand over my crotch. He laughed. “You see,” he said, “you’re hard!”
I pushed him away.
“It’s all artifice,” he explained, “part of a sexual game that ups the quotient of desire. You should go along with it.” Then he added, “I was picked up here once, when I first came to Amsterdam, when I had to finally get over the sex thing with men.”
I was startled from my reverie. I was so accustomed to Oliver’s asexuality that I had never imagined him with another man, aside, that is, from our chaste intimacies.
“Good God,” I responded, “in here? Wouldn’t De Engel be more like your look-out?”
He was offended. “Fuck you, Matthew! I know you regard yourself as the sexually experienced one, but coming here was liberating for me. I’m not sexless, you know! Anyhow, the pretty boys in De Engel only sleep with each other.”
I apologised and, pulling him over, kissed his forehead. “I’m a cad. Tell me what happened.”
“I sat at the bar and got pissed – Dutch courage! The guy who picked me up was dressed in leather but he was camp, in a butch sort of way. He was very sweet. Gentle and attentive. He made me pancakes with bacon and syrup for breakfast the next morning and there was a vase of tulips on his bedside table. He had a cat called Schatje, who joined us in bed. No motorbike in the hallway.”
I laughed. “Did you see him again?” I asked.
“No. It was enough to have slept with a man and for the first time to admit my homosexuality to myself.”
Oliver went to the bar again and ordered two more beers, with jenever chasers this time. The barman had changed the tape in the video machine. Now there was an extended scene of fellatio – a black man being sucked off by an Aryan blond whose lips could barely close over his improbably large penis. Oliver came back with our drinks and sat down beside me. I punched him gently in the shoulder. He shifted on the vinyl-covered banquette and laid his head in my lap.
“Don’t,” I said. “The beer’s gone to my bladder.” I lifted him and made my way through the gloom of the room towards the back where I could see a neon WC sign. I went down the passage and relieved myself in the single toilet bowl. The room stank of urine.
On my way back to the bar I passed a door that was slightly ajar. From behind it came the low pulse of soft disco music. I stopped. There was a faint violet light in the seam between the door and the jamb. I pushed the door open. It was quiet. Then I heard a low, base moaning, which I recognised instantly from my own coupling back in South Africa – the rhythm of sex – but there was a sharp chemical smell in the air that I could not place. I stepped into the room, hugging the wall. I could see nothing. Suddenly aroused, I stood leaning against the wall, listening to the grunting and the low moans.
Quite close to me someone was breathing in short truncated gasps. As my eyes got used to the gloom I discerned the indistinct shapes of men, just the barest outlines of limbs, the merest sheen of unclothed skin in the low light. They were fucking. I pulled back towards the door. In my haste I stumbled into a man who ran both his hands over my buttocks. I pushed past him and out of the door into the bar’s sudden relative brightness.
I slid back into the booth beside Oliver. “Let’s go,” I said.
Later he laughed at me. “Look at prissy you,” he said. “It’s back room. De rigueur in Amsterdam. The chemical smell is poppers. They heighten your desire and relax you while you are being penetrated.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Haven’t our roles been reversed? Now I am the sexual naïf.”
“Don’t worry,” Oliver said, “you’ll get there. And then you’ll become your usual superior self. You’ll probably practically live in the Cock Ring.”
“I doubt it,” I replied.
He put his arms around me and drew me close. “You’ll find someone, Matt. You’ve only been here a month. You need to start making friends.”
I looked at him. “How?” I asked.