It’s 1992, I’m in my early twenties (okay mid-twenties), and there’s this kind of club near where I live in the Village. I walk by it all the time. It’s at the edge of the Meatpacking District. You know how when you catch an episode from an early season of The Real Housewives and see how different their original faces were? That’s what the Meatpacking District was like then. No Soho House or Gansevoort Hotel or Apple Store or Starbucks Reserve. Just Florent, a French bistro open twenty-four hours a day that everyone went to and was fabulous in a way that nothing is anymore, a few leather bars, a bagel place, and actual meatpacking plants. And J’s Hangout.
J’s Hangout was as seedy as a club could be, and I had never been inside. It was not a sex club per se. It was more of a bar where the guys at some point in the evening all stood around and jerked off in front of each other. Usually in a circle. So, yeah, a bar where guys got into a circle jerk every night. I won’t lie, I was curious. I was never in a fraternity in college but I assumed that it was pretty much that. At this point in my young life I consider myself a writer (even though I don’t actually write), and anything I do I chalk up to “research.” For what, I don’t know, but research allows you to do a lot of things you wouldn’t normally do if, say, you weren’t a writer (which I’m technically not) doing research.
I never have the courage to go in, though. Truth be told I was not a sex club kind of person. I was more of a “let’s go see The Princess Bride and then you can walk me home and maybe I’ll show you my wrist” kind of person. A cocktease, if you must. I wanted to be romanced. Pursued. I don’t know where I got this idea, I’d never seen it in actual life. Yes, I wanted sex but more than that I wanted someone who would take me out to a fucking restaurant. If I could go back to 1992 I’d slap twenty-five-year-old Gary across the face hard and tell him to knock it off. But twenty-five-year-old Gary wanted to fall in love. He wanted to be swept off his feet. He wanted flowers. He wanted theater tickets. He wanted it all.
I’d moved to the city from Queens to go to graduate school at NYU but never finished. I wanted to write, but since I wasn’t writing in school, I figured I could just as well get a job and not write and save some money on tuition. I move to an apartment on the sixth floor of a walk-up on Christopher Street. The kind of place where the bathroom has no sink and the other tenants have lived there over fifty years. In a movie it would be charming. In real life it was just disgusting.
My gym, only a few blocks away. Your gym even more important than your apartment. There’s a boy there I like. I arrange my workouts to overlap with his. Imagining he’s my boyfriend and we just happen to be working out on opposite ends of the gym floor but will go home together and cook dinner and watch TV and he is mine. I observe every detail about him. “He’s growing his hair out”; “I’ve never seen that watch before”; “He hasn’t worn those shorts in a while.” Tall and muscular and quiet with sandy hair, I’ve already got us picking out mattresses and we’ve never even said “hello.” On days he’s not there I deflate. Spending my workout wondering where he is, what he’s doing, who he’s with. Then, the next time he reappears, I’m aloof. Oh, look who’s decided to come waltzing back, I think, clocking his every move. Watching him go through his workout unaware of the fight we’re having in my head. Only to be quickly forgiven the second he does something adorable, like wipe the sweat from his upper lip with the bottom of his T-shirt, revealing his perfect stomach. God, I fucking love him.
It wasn’t as easy to meet guys then as it is now, swiping through people like paint chips. In the ’90s we didn’t have Grindr, we had phone sex. Which was way less efficient and much more expensive. The phone bill an airline ticket to Europe each month. Some months Australia. And to add insult to injury I wasn’t even very good at it.
The numbers were advertised in all the free little magazines you’d get in bars—there was this one called HX (Homo Extra it stood for I believe, this passed for cleverness in the ’90s, take that Oscar Wilde) that was basically the gay bible. It had all the bars in the five boroughs, which night was which club, bookstores, restaurants, everything a gay person could possibly need to know. And it came out every week. Thursdays. I don’t know how I still remember this. I couldn’t tell you the plot of A Tale of Two Cities which I read last month, but HX magazine is still burned into my brain. And it had a section that I liked to think of as the society pages, where all the A-gays were photographed shirtless at the clubs and, in some cases, suited at charity events. I had never been to a charity event except as a cater waiter, and these men in these photos might as well have been Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine in Photoplay magazine. I couldn’t imagine having my picture in HX.
Sometimes I’d see these men out at the clubs and the bars and recognize them from the glossy pages and be too shy to approach them. These are HX magazine stars, gay royalty, I don’t travel in their circles. Summer shares in the Pines, brunches, dinner parties. Lives only to be glimpsed briefly once a week as I pick up my new issue, leaf through the pages, pausing at the perfect torsos, and then stuff into my pocket, to later bring back to my apartment to replace last week’s copy. If there was a gay apartment that didn’t have HX magazine in it, I’d never been inside.
The phone sex line was also relentlessly advertised on The Robin Byrd Show, a public access program that was basically The Tonight Show if The Tonight Show were hosted by a former porn star who, at the end of each episode, had her guests get naked and then pretended to poke her eye out with their genitalia. It was strangely much more wholesome than it sounds. With a Mickey and Judy “let’s put on a show” kind of pluck that you just don’t find anymore.
The way it worked was this, you called some 1–800 number and you’d get connected to someone in your area who would immediately ask your dick size. I preferred a bit of chitchat first. “Are you reading anything good?” “Where was your last vacation?” Click and I’d be on to the next caller. I was desperate to find one person with a sense of humor. Or who would at least answer one question that didn’t involve either the word top or bottom. I guess you don’t call a phone sex line for the witty banter.
I called so often I started recognizing the voices. “You wanna suck my big cock?” Oh, her again. “No thank you, dear.” Next caller, please. Occasionally, I could keep someone on the phone for a few minutes, just chatting about nothing much. A tiny connection. Our dull conversation at least twenty dollars. (Was I the sad john from every movie who goes to the hooker just to talk?) We didn’t give our phone number freely then. Now you give it more easily than a smile, but in the ’90s we protected them like the nuclear codes. I have no idea why. But the thought that I’d give my number to someone on the phone sex line was as unimaginable as giving them my house keys. It just wasn’t done.
What’s funny is I don’t even remember ever having had actual phone sex. I’m sure I must have, it was pretty much another rent’s worth of calls a month. I do remember saying “I’m never going to call that again,” after hanging up a lot. What I was looking for I’m not sure. Something. Anything.
I did hook up once with a man I’d met on the phone sex line (for some reason a home address was given more freely than a number). I showed up at his apartment, heart beating out of my chest, “research” I repeat like a mantra, waiting for the door to open, and when it does he’s gorgeous and my first thought is, I should have been doing this ages ago. And the apartment is nice. Real furniture. A dining room. Art. HX magazine on the table. What was more wondrous than a gay upper-middle-class apartment? We start kissing and our clothes are off and I feel freer than I have ever felt in my life, until we hear a key in the door and he jumps off me like a cartoon cat and yells “Quick, hide!” shoving me naked into the bathroom. I listen to his older boyfriend enter the apartment and the subsequent unraveling of their relationship. The younger boyfriend folding like a house of cards when the older one instantly notices something is amiss. “He’s in the bathroom!”
Apparently older boyfriend has come home early from a business trip (managing to be at once both glamorous and hackneyed) and I’m relegated to the role of “some random slut” as older boyfriend refers to me. A part I secretly like since it’s not one I’d ever cast myself in. “How dare he?” I whisper offended to no one as I crouch naked on their toilet seat. There’s no way I can exit this bathroom without my clothes and it’s not like anyone had a cell phone then. I can’t even remember my life without a phone. How vulnerable we all were all the time. Out in the world alone. Anything could happen. And it just did! I’d been in this apartment no more than five minutes before all hell broke loose. It’s not fair. How long will I have to stay in here? Will the older boyfriend come in and kill me? Fortunately, gay men usually don’t commit crimes of passion, they’re more likely to just join in. I suddenly hear the young boyfriend start crying. From what I can glean through the door this has happened many times before. “He’s the slut!” I say, again to no one. A few more minutes go by until silence and then the young boyfriend knocks lightly on the door. Which seems overly polite, considering our circumstances. I open it a crack and he hands me my clothes and says “sorry” and I say “oh, no, that’s okay,” as if this happens to me all the time. “Would you mind hurrying up?” “No, I’d like to spend as long as possible in here.”
A second later I’m fully dressed and now have to walk through the apartment as the older boyfriend sits on the sofa glaring at me. The length of the room expanding endlessly like the hallway in Poltergeist. My first walk of shame and I didn’t even get to do the fun part, just a disproportionate amount of the shame part. The younger boyfriend walks me the final way to the door, which I appreciate. In my mind I’m now pretending I only stopped by to visit this couple for a drink, not to put the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Erasing the humiliation of the evening with each step that takes me closer to freedom. “This didn’t happen, this didn’t happen.”
I never meet anyone again through the phone sex line. I meet guys mostly at the gym, I guess, the hotel where I work as a bellman, sometimes there. But never anyone that I cook dinner with, never anyone whose arms I fall asleep in and wake up in. Never that.
One night, one day, one summer, I’m walking past J’s Hangout. (Or am I not walking past it, like a murder—is it premeditated, did I know I was going in there from the very first time I heard about it? “Circle jerks, you say? In a bar?” Files away for later.)
And now I’m there. At the door. In shorts and an NYU tank top. And I go in. More “research.” And it’s thrilling and gross in equal measure (most truly thrilling things are). It’s an open space, not as dimly lit as you would expect, and the term no-frills would be an understatement. If sticky could be a room, it would be this. There are several men standing at the bar, a few walking around, and then toward the back (I mean barely toward the back, like a few feet away) guys stand in a circle jerking off. I saunter around with my beer (I don’t drink beer, I never know what to order) like it’s the most natural thing on earth. How provincial one would have to be to think that this was in any way unusual. I play it cool. Glancing over at the circle as if it’s a conversation I’m considering joining, maybe later. Truth be told I’m not certain of the proper etiquette at a circle jerk bar. I don’t want to stare and yet I’m not sure if it’s something you just join in on, or, not unlike a deli counter, take a number and wait your turn.
As I’m doing a lap of the room, I see him. My gym boyfriend. He stands alone, nursing a drink. My first thought is shame, I don’t want him to see me here, but then I realize he’s here, too. I walk by him and we catch eyes. He smiles at me, I smile back and make a face that implies I’m trying to figure out where I know him from. He says, “The gym, right?” and I say something like, “Oh, my God, of course, hi, nice to see you,” and suddenly it’s like being at an office holiday party except the floor is covered in ejaculate.
“So what do you do?” I say, pretending men aren’t orgasming three feet away from us. That this is any normal “meet cute.” A story to tell our friends and eventually our children.
And even though we are standing in a bar I ask him if he’d like to go out for a drink sometime. He says, “Sure,” and we exchange numbers (this is a circumstance where you do give your number out). And I wish we could’ve met anyplace else. And then he says, “Well, it was nice seeing you.”
“Oh, God, so nice seeing you, too. I’ll call you.”
“I’d like that,” he says. And I’m thinking, Well, I can’t join the circle jerk NOW! THAT can’t be our first date! We haven’t even kissed! But he’s not leaving. So I say good night and I walk home. Grabbing the new HX from the open doorway of a bar as I go by.