I met with P two nights in a row, the second being tonight. I met him and two of his friends at a bar on Christopher Street called the Dugout. It was a truly chilly night, but hot as hell inside.
Normally it is a schoolnight for me, but we had a Christmas miracle. Our mighty ruler, the CEO, permitted us all to have the entire week off. Not just everyone but my department (that actually happened in 1994), but everyone PERIOD. So I have been off since Erev Chrachsmas and will be off until 4 January 1999. Tony has noted that I tend to misbehave on holidays and long weekends. Or at least I used to. I am not leading a Persephone existence, biding my time in Hell (work) waiting for smidgens of Heaven (evenings and weekends, and especially time off). But there has been that trends. Suddenly, there's a break in the routine and all heck breaks loose. So, off I go.
From 1994 to 1997, I was busy with Graduate school. Parents! If you want to kill libidinal urges in your children, send 'em to a Graduate program. So I spent a few sexless years mooning over a dreamy straight boy. There were virtually no gay men in the MLS program at Queens. That's right, very few Queens at Queens' MLS program. So where the hell do all these gay librarian's come from?
I digress...
So I met P at the Dugout, and it was packed. Now P is a bear lover and on certain nights, that bar caters to the Bear subset of the gay community. To those of you who are not in touch with this jargon... Bears are the heavier, hairier subset of the gay male world. On view was a sea of flannel, and goatees, and beards, and baseball hats.
What impressed me about the place, meaning, the impression I received, was that this is what the 1970s must've been like for gay men. The menin the bar were friendly. They talked to each other. They liked being around each other. They smiled at one another. Now I am no barfly, but since moving here to Manhattan in 1989, I have been to many a gay bar, and they usually have the ambiance of an Edgar Allan Poe novel. (I do not mean that in a good way.)
But here, it was so much, well, fun. And it's not like I even spoke to anyone, although someone did grope my bottom while I was at the urinal. I told him I would talk to him outside the men's room, but he disappeared.
Now of course, there was plenty of drinking in evidence, and probably drugs, and even some lewdness. The latter don't bother me none, but my alteregos were probably inflamed. Luckily, Cyrus and his grandmother stayed inside. Cyrus is busily working on his website, www.intolerance.com, and his grandmother, Victoria, says things like, "Don't say `leg' in public! It's VULGAR!" Cyrus is has a cousin, Cletus, who's a bit of a funloving yokel who don't understan much? But that okay, okay?
It was so crowded that I had to pop out of the back door and walk back up the front and wait for everyone out there. That's how crowded it was. Across the street is Bailey House, which may or may not be an AIDS hospice these days. I am not sure. I wondered about what this corner has seen in the past two decades. In 1978 Gay Lib was in full swing. By 1989, a lot of people were gone. A pall had been cast over gay life. Thousands of people dead, gone. And now. People are living longer. AIDS isn't a death sentence. The men at this bar now, like in 1978, are enjoying themselves. They are connecting. They are not hiding. Maybe other bars are returning to being a more loving community like they once were, but I know deep down that this bar is an anomoly.
I also thought of the route some men must have taken, from the bars on this street to that hospice. I wonder if there were men up there who looked down on their old lives while they waited to die,looking down while they were already ghosts of their former selves. I wonder who's up there now. I wonder how many men stood on these corners down here, and on those piers, as I have, and thought, "I feel like a God." All those gods walking around 20 years ago had no idea, in 1978, what was around the corner. I wonder if, someone told them what was coming up, what they would've said, what incredulous look they would give, what line of bull was being peddled. I wonder if anyone would have believed it, thought it possible, could have contemplated losing scores of friends, missing the men who haunted their favorite bars, burying their one true love, or thinking about settling their own affairs tomorrow because they'd be dead in a month.
And now people think that protease inhibitors and the prescence of 15-year HIV survivors will make us gods again.
I wonder if anyone remembers Daedelus and Icarus. I wonder. I. Wonder.
P's friends are both Indian, and to my knowledge, not sex maniacs. We went for Thai for dinner. The poor immigrants serving us dinner knew exactly five word of English, and they have nothing to do with figuring out what you ordered.
I is a dentist and lives in the burbs, and engaged us in a talk about the stock market. Of course, I don't play the stock market. I play the ATMs, very often, and to my detriment. But I read World Press Review and I can parrot economic news to great effect.
You see, my brain is just so big, I can talk about almost any topic. And you might never know how unimpressed or bored I am. Years and years of editing technical content have made my old brain very flexible. I can put up with almost any stupid topic for a passable amount of time.
I have been in Ty's, another bar on Christopher Street, exactly twice. Both times, I was kindly attacked by tall men who turned out to be very strange. The first time was New Year's Eve 1991-2. We walked in as a group from The Center's dance that night. Now you must know that while I am an Equal Opportunity man when it comes to men, a tall man will win me over a heck of a lot quicker. Must be some 1950s movie ethic stuck in my head from all those movies.
Our eyes met, we spoke, and we left. It was all down hill from there and I went home alone after all, but that still resulted in about ten calls the next day from The Grapevine, half of them starting with the words, "You slut."
Well, this time, M, a large man from the Lowlands, ambled over and sort of grabbed me. Not that I minded, and not that I didn't encourage it.
P went back down to the Dug Out to see if the Bear crowd was still there. That's when M started snogging me. It all seemed very sweet until I started to realize the 36-year-old man hovering six inches taller than me was just a little boy. Very sad. Very closeted. Very afraid. This might very well be the only gay thing he does in his life. Go to Ty's, hope to see the same people there next time, etc. You see, I can hear between the words, and that big old brain of mine, well, it fills in the gaps.
He was also a little rough. It was almost scary, when the groping got to be too much. I felt like I was with Frankenstein's creation. So full of life and love, but so untrained for it. Strangling the life out of new friends simply because it doesn't know how it's own strength.
When the snogging session ended, I was a bit shocked to find P not less than six inches away from me. No one likes getting caught with their pants down (not that I was in any way disrobed to any degree). So M left and P said something like, "Boy, that guy was really into you." I couldn't quite be sure, but my gut reaction was that P's edge on it was "Boy, that guy was really into you, and I cannot imagine why." But that's either my overactive brain or my low self-esteem talking. I thought I sent *both* of them packing on holiday for the week.
On the way home, I ran into M in front of the Korean deli's flower stand, at the corner of Bleecker and Christopher. So I said hello and we looked at the flowers, and he said, "Thank you for the love" in his clumsy, thick-tongued European accent. I told him, in his ear, that people are entitled to more love, more than just half-hour allotments. I hope he figures it out. He's 39. You can come out at any time, but I know, from meeting a lot of older guys in discussion groups, that there's a lot of regret when you wait to come out, and you look back later at all the things you denied yourself. That's the peril of the closet. That overriding fear taints everything. Everything. And one day you're standing in front of a flower stand and wondering why you are suddenly 70, and no one's ever bought you flowers, and you haven't bought flowers for anybody. Maybe you haven't even bought some for yourself.
You see, that's what being out is like. It's like taking the bulbs of fear and putting them into wll-watered soil, and suddenly, before you know it happened, the buds have opened, and the flowers are fully exposed, and they never looked better.
So why do people deny themselves this transformation? Why are they still afraid? And what can we do to make them bloom, and change fear into beauty?
I think I see a new persona developing: The Preacher Man.
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