For Context, below is a piece in a series of essays for a book I’ve been working on since November, 2024. Around that time, N’ganga Daizy not-so-gently asked me if I had a book in me. Something along the lines of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Phillyaw.
I smiled, I smirked, because about 10 feet behind me, over my shoulder, I had a copy of that book facing forward on my bookshelf. I jumped up from our Zoom call and grabbed it from that bookshelf like a 2nd grader doing ‘show & tell.’ It is one of my favorite literary works of recent times.
I find myself trying to put down and out a similar confessional of realities with what I write and how I do photography. I had to admit some realities about I’m not fully integrated, nor never will be, into the ‘Black Church’ where Deesha’s work lives. I live in the weird realities of where my place of birth, where I’ve lived, what aspirations people had for me and the conflict of my own desires for life live.
It’s been a year since I made the 2 week trek to the Mid-Atlantic to ‘feel’ out whether I was made to make a new home there. There’s things churning a year later that make me realize I’m getting ‘close’ to finishing whatever would be that first book.
Meanwhile, clearly I’ve workshopped ideas intellectually and visibly of what can be integrated there, or refined for future works on this substack. It might be a time for some of you that bother to pay attention to get a preview of what has been brewing for two years.
Here we go, and for context, language is at times explicitly about queer sex. If you don’t want to know, maybe don’t read ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I’ll be honest. The first time I really enjoyed sex was when I was 35.
It was Spring 2018. I probably was looking for anything that would salvage my disappointment with moving to Portland. All the moments thus far felt abortive; a series of unfortunate happenstance that seemingly curdled into an unfunny Netflix series. It was a few months before I was 36. Even then, sex was more a validation of I could do something ‘right.’ I was competent, maybe exemplary when I shed all the clothes and dared myself to slow down, explore and experience someone else’s body. Looking back it wasn’t as focused on my self discovery or what I need or want from sex as much as I think I hoped for at the time.
I can think of the many factors that went into play with this attitude I held for years. I’ve spent nearly a decade pondering what and why the round of regular, passionate yet affirming sex I had during April of 2018 had a different impact. I can also, with 20/20 hindsight see how I wasn’t fully present even then. I can see how I wasn’t really allowing myself to receive pleasure in return. I was, and to a degree, still afraid of the vulnerability of allowing others to make me ‘happy.’
I’m not prone to let anyone else see in some basic, clear ways what satisfaction looks like as their efforts beam from my face or radiate from my body. I know to another degree by being so proactive at pleasuring others, I was able to maintain a somewhat false sense of confidence and power, letting no one else control me. I’m only realizing these days, thanks to revisiting these acts in conversation that this minimizes and shuts out those that long to grow close to me.
“You’ve never cum for me.”
I’ve heard this often from multiple partners but that Spring it really hit and hurt. You look at someone actually sad that you’ve made them nut at least 2 times a night for a solid 3 weeks but you’ve never let them return the favor. You just kindly put on your clothes and pretended that what most love songs metaphorically describe as the greatest thing you can share with another is the same thing as making all the formulas work in an Excel spreadsheet. What I often have strived for was a good performance review, not connection to sexual partners. This society does teach one to look for a bonus or a raise for ‘rockstar performance.’ Forgive me for bringing the boardroom to the bedroom.
It hurt to hear that because it was from the mouth of someone that made the first move, quite bravely with a first kiss. It was made by someone that had taken their time to truly observe who I was, and understand who I was, who wanted to share in where we had in common. Pancake diners breakfast over bougie brunches, old cars that needed wrenching, the great outdoors, fingering butts, It’s a veritable greatest hits for me. He did so despite some vary hefty complications. I felt guilt for the sense of supporting someone stepping out of a commitment that was already dead before arrival at the altar. They had their ‘agreements’ for when they traveled. I wasn’t trying to make anyone re-evaluate their contract terms.
Fingering and fucking weren’t on the menu for this penultimate time we had sex. It was at the end of a day long date out to the Columbia Gorge with a hike, a midday meal and none of the realities of preparation for end of a Sunday set of buttsex. I was ashamed to admit, to go with the reality that the next easiest way for me to orgasm with a partner is frottage if he wanted to be involved. Sure I could to the exhibitionist thing and jerk off in front of him, but that might also prompt my performance anxiety. Frottage provides the warmth then the eventual slickness of development of sweat from the friction none too dissimilar from penetrative sex.
There’s the heady ability to make out or stare into each others eyes, the odd surface full body enjoyment that just seems like another culmination of a slow dance. That penultimate time was one of the few occasions I actually overcame my anxiety and went at it. However I wasn’t able to fully submit to the thrill of it, afraid that it wasn’t comfortable, that this closeness was not pleasurable for him. Was he doing the same people pleasing and appeasement that I had done for weeks?
Seven years on, we’ve rekindled a friendship that has a level of the old warmth, with a touch of bittersweetness that looks towards me with a worry that I’m still stuck. There’s a genuine concern that I’m still beholden to living in a project managers mindset of cultivating intimacy from an outline of progress instead at least leading from the chest. Sometimes it’s really painful to be perceived, to be seen, especially when there’s a hint of hope that you’d stop and step into something greater than some baseline metrics that meet with approval.
As I write this all this time later, I’m still afraid to ask whether those moments cemented back in time what is becoming another era of adulthood was enjoyable or not. Typical for me it’s easier to write about it instead of ask about it. I still sit with confidence that I did show up in that once upon a time. I had been given the time and grace to fuck it up in the process of becoming a little bit more of myself in front of him. It’s all I ever want from sexual intimacy as I continue to learn and grow into myself as my body changes. There’s a little bit more to share in there, given the time and space, possibilities and agreed to lack of constraints.
The queer elder millennial cohort is a strange one.
We stepped into the adult world whacked over the head with no overarching “how to” guides developed into prescribed courting and mating rituals like our supposed heterosexual peers. At best there was AOL chat rooms, and for me at least, a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex in the Menlo Park Library back in 1998. At the same time, we were being whacked over the head with the push for marriage equality and conformity by Gen X Gays & Lesbians happy to see themselves first represented in that damned “Dah-Dah-Dah” Volkswagen Golf commercial 30 some years ago.
Who were we to question this as we arrived to a non-existent job market with student loans to pay off? We had bigger existential dilemmas beyond developing our still adolescent desire natures. One can see how easily susceptible we could be to marginal at best guidance from a moderately distant past we had no direct connection to. Alongside the awkwardness of Radical Faerie culture being problematically close with NAMBLA, there’s also the woefully worn out at the seams legacy of cruising, bathhouses and leather culture.
The only rebellion against that was our half present access to queer boomers still rightfully lamenting how many of their compatriots had passed during the AIDS epidemic. That pandemic, much as we don’t want to admit is similar to the one we are also ignoring in real time, put a halt to certain behaviors and social situations that we look back to with rose tinted glasses despite their limitations. I try to be forgiving of collective nostalgia. Regardless, I have my own I need to reframe history of queer intimacy appropriately.
Bachelors Quarters was at 1934 University Avenue. The matchbook that I’ve seen with the address lies that it was in Palo Alto proper. Instead it was in unincorporated East Palo Alto, I’m guessing until shortly before or after my birth as AIDS started to shutter such establishments in the early days of The Reagan administration. Whiskey Gulch was more or less Stanford’s red light district; in another county, in a hodge podge of a place eventually to become a city, and a city that was quick and seemingly more than happy to erase any connection to outcasts such as homosexuals fucking in a crowded bathhouse in the dark.
It has been a strange journey over the last few years to realize I was being raised in the exhaust fumes of all of those interlocking pieces. As my mother’s hair was put under a hair dryer, out of her hearing, Miss Capuchine would dish about various men she’d had her way with in those good old days in the Bachelors Quarters with Miss Nicole. Memory serves me that I didn’t, especially with Miss Nicole, is that I didn’t see either them as Trans then. I always took a front row seat, between this and them playing old VHS tapes of Joan Crawford movies or playing tapes of old Betty Wright songs.
Don’t blame Mr. Charlie, Mr. Charlie is just a manAnd he’s doing the best he can’I heard ’em say, ‘Don’t blame Mr. Charlie, Mr. Charlie is just a manAnd he’s doing the best he can
I didn’t get the implication, knowing nothing of what sex really was that they were probably spreading and clapping cheeks of an infinite variety of men. Those men clearly had non-procreative sexual desires aimed squarely at satisfying the tickle of some some of the most sensitive, precious and tender flesh on the human body. Moreso then than now, they held the societal shame and pressure of ignoring something quite natural about themselves. Memory serves that Miss Nicole would be by our more modern definitions, be more passable. I don’t remember her being as loud about her conquests. Retroactively I wonder if her relative stealthiness upped her booty busting count for those men a little bit more afraid of exploring the depths of their sexuality with bodies more similar than not to theirs.
Bathhouses like Bachelor’s Quarters served a purpose, like so many spaces up to that point. I can’t help but think of the cross section of Stanford undergrads, professors, then probably 98% white and closeted, undressing and lubing up with Crisco with the assortment of what then was East Palo Alto’s queer residents. When I was born, East Palo Alto, pre-incorporation was nearly 60% African American, with a significant Central American/Mexican dominant Latinx population and the burgeoning swell of a Pacific Islander concentration.
I can think of so many intense socio-economic dynamics in that crammed space that I’m curious to how anyone could pop a boner in such circumstances. Bachelor’s Quarters would, to me, also seem like an outlier in what we retroactively see as “Bathhouse Culture” that was preserved over the last 45 years. It was more or less a real slice of who is all queer, which is, basically all of us when we find ourselves seeking the truth about ourselves in a confined environment.
Most representations of what is “Bathhouse Culture” that is saved and held as ritualized today was nearly exclusive spaces for white men. Within that, there was a clear hierarchy of who was desired: Those fair skinned but with some ability to tan, or develop tan lines. Then preference to those with blonde hair and blue eyes and or thin to muscular builds. Only Respectable, ruly levels of body hair need apply.
If you met all of these criteria and are under 30, you were positioned at the top of the pecking order. Every deviation from this standard that to me seems precariously positioned against standards of Hitler’s Youth; you still have less desirability value. Depending on spaces, there came a point were you were explicitly excluded. For some white men that may have been considered not white 2 or 3 generations before, I’m sure it came as a shock to be fetishized at best as a primal brute.
Let’s keep this word problem going!
Let’s add in the factors of sodomy was illegal in the United States until just over 20 years ago. That’s anxiety area number one. You could have your life ruined for seeking out pleasure you desire. From what I gather, each new encounter was more often than not with someone you didn’t know. Today, it’s still the same factor. Not only is the person new, you do have to ‘adjust’ to the immediate reality of relaxing before you can relate to your suitor of the moment. You were putting a lot of intimate trust in a complete stranger that could be your next husband or a cop willing to weaponize his dick as an agent of the state. It’s not a private space for what, I project, is a very private intimate act, that also, had clear time and space constraints.
About the only relief I can see in all of these complications is the access to alcohol and or drugs to give oneself a little less in the way of inhibitions to operate functionally and comfortable with all of these factors in place. For better or worse, Nancy Reagan’s war on drugs really worked on me, I’ve only been comfortable with my now current cannabis usage after we’ve made it nearly 5 years in this current pandemic while I manage the stress of my own current health conditions, and, (waves broadly), at life in general. I know how I am, and none of this seems sexy, arousing, or comfortable. If I struggled to finally enjoy nutting on someone’s hairy chest in a queen sized bed of a Extended Stay Suite with crisp clean sheets, how in the fuck would I ever make it in a bath house?
I wonder why the hell I’m the outlier 45 years later as I see the parade of images from Analog Cruising by Leo Herrera flow freely in the chaos that’s Twitter as I try to traipse back into that hellscape, scouring what COVID, Palestine and election details I can from the endless flow of bots and hot and bothered voices screaming into the abyss for validation. Why would anyone want to set this as the cultural default? Why is this the prize? Is it a prize? I guffaw at this being declared ancestral reverence. Any blonde haired, blue eyed ancestors I have raped the ones that look like I actually do 25 years into the 21st century.
Somehow this particular sex culture is framed as abundance. I can’t help but still see it as patriarchal constraints. Prescriptive, medicinal, at best a mere patch to tide you over instead of potentially looking at the root causes that may lead to healing. The new guide follows old tropes, sometimes rightfully deriding the online app culture that supplanted cruising and bathhouses as the default for gay sexual connection. I try to no yuck anyone’s yum but it feels like I’m constantly being slapped in the face with a dead fish.
Mauricewas released a year after E.M. Forester’s death. Like most, my first encounter with the work was through the 1987 Merchant-Ivory film. Of course. I didn’t encounter the movie until nearly a decade after its initial release. As I let the Cable Channel schedule shuffle along on one of those nights my dad worked graveyard, alone, the description Cable Co-op provided on the Sundance Channel showing, perhaps in 1996 or 1997, at least grabbed my interest to stay up to watch it instead of making midsummers nights dreams out of requesting forgotten Supremes hits with Candy Chamberlain on KFRC.
I had skipped, ignored other 1980’s offerings that showed a slice of gay life. Notably, Cruising (1980) never has, and perhaps never will be something I want to watch. Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves are far more dreamy specimen of white men than Al Pacino could ever hope to be. I’ve just noted I needed something to pull me away from requesting “When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” for the 100th time or so.
What cruising represented was shown as a joke in Police Academy anyways. My parents cringed at what was represented in those “Blue Oyster” scenes. The full irony of rewatching those vignettes is that they’re remarkably romantic very quickly after the shock factor is established on screen as comic relief from conformity. The surliness of the patrons quickly segues to moments soundtracked by The Shirelles “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” after those delightful tango scenes.
As you see, even the surprise of romance can still “get me.”
Getting back to Maurice however, and this odd connection to Police Academy is the sense of possibility that both represented in very very differing ways. Where the film and novel are yards away from bath house and leather culture, the movie in particular plays on themes of Victorian era class, propriety and eventually faith around possibility. There’s hope in pursuing consistently any opportunities you find to genuinely spend languid time with someone that strikes your interest. It’s a film you don’t have to convince me to cuddle up to and watch. I still find all the sentiments included in the film worthwhile to what I would ideally want in my life.
Those ‘Blue Oyster’ scenes, while bawdily reveling in juvenile jokes about outside perceptions of gay sex are also romantic and full of possibilities. The absolute pinnacles of desire in patriarchal American culture fall for a prank. They find themselves dancing absolutely perfectly with leathermen. This probably complicates everything they thought about their sexuality due to whatever happened off-screen over a much beloved Goffin/King song about the vulnerability of sex. A good hands free orgasm will get you contemplating what life is really all about. In the later case, the scenes are devoid of dialogue, except for the questions about intimacy raised by the song. Sixty-six years after the song was recorded, it’s still a really valid fucking question, especially if you morph ‘fucking’ into a noun and a verb at the same time.
Granted, The Blue Oyster is represented as a Bar moreso than a bathhouse. It’s a community space a lot more well lit than a bath house typically is. If there’s an implied space for sex, it’s understood collectively that there’s a backroom for that back door action. The leathermen within are a community finding fascinating intimacy not just through sex, but by repeated gathering and gathering over artistic practice to boot. There is a love there that goes beyond the intimacy of sex.
It spills over into the love of community and giving space for everyone seeking love that they need in their lives to have access to it. I wonder who thought of giving that brief, barely two minutes of coded possibility in that film at an especially dire time. Police Academy was released in 1984. AIDS had been declared a public health emergency the year before. The Reagan Administration was slow to acknowledge it.
There’s also a shared comradery that is missing from the privileged echelons of Maurice. That world, also familiar to me, is full of unrequited affections in deference to respectability. My brain remembers the longing of A.E. Housman’s poetry ringing through my brain, flashing back 30 years again to see what was possible and what was prevented, hoping that my chances would be better. Where Police Academy trades in a bit of farce, the works of Forester and Housman play in explicit material realities. Perhaps the ability for both to exist, for them to exist with the narrative valley of existence between monolithic cruising and capitalist conformity is possible.
I look back with nostalgia of the picture taken at Bonneville dam before that penultimate evening. One comment shouted…
This is my favorite post of yours in a while!
Indeed it was my 3rd most liked post on Instagram in 2018 (remember when we validated our lives based on likes? Whoops we still do that don’t we?). I wondered sheeplishly, almost ashamed, wondering if the afterglow of ‘good sex’ was that visible and documented. Given that penultimate time meant that Spring Fling was returning home to his dead engagements, I had a certain level of ambivalence about how I looked in the photo. It wouldn’t be until exactly 6 years later that someone’s gentle touch on my shoulder would radiate any similar capture of a feeling into a image of me. I pride that time more because it wasn’t anything digitally manipulated. It was pure Ektar 100. Early Taurus Season will always make me feel a certain type of way.
It’s interesting to look back at that 2018 image and see quantifiable data. I remember that picture and the commentary in haze, yet, for now there’s a digital record of me, finally enjoying sex. After years of trial and error based on dreams and desires I aspired to. Those had to dance for 18 years after my first time with the prescribed dreams and desires of this society filtered through a modest amount of bodies before it even started to feel right.
The photo is on a bright, sunny day, my skin glowing, my hairy shiny. Same afternoon, that penultimate time, I see this radiance of even giving myself half a chance at a more complete, embodied and enjoyed self. There’s some luck that I have in recall, and happy to see I’ve been caught with more smiles lately. It still lives on social media as a postcard to a version of myself I hope I’m still becoming, even if I’ve had to switch the actor on stage with me a few times since.
Some of those smiles came from cuddling naked on one earlier surprisingly warm April Day on Sauvie’s Island. Both of us a bit surprised, and a bit embarrassed that the comfort and vulnerability of naked touch aroused us both, so we scuttled back to my Cadillac to the expanse of that Extended Stay Suite. If there’s anything I’m gonna strive to thrive for it’s recreating moments like that. Seeing the possibilities of slowing down, to touch and be tender in as many places as possible. Maybe we should consider learning from the limits of the past.
Maybe we would-should actively move away from what no longer serves us from the past.
