This article appeared in the April 1979 issue of Christopher Street.
Most dinner parties have two lives: the dinner itself, at which you gather with others, and the remembered dinner, which is far more delicious, actually. Just as Wordsworth savored the beauty of his jocund daffodils while lying at home afterward in a reverie, so a dinner party fulfills itself as recollection, when the dish on the table gives way to the dish on the telephone. I just learned, for example, that a recent visitor from San Francisco—a cherubic journalist—told our host at a dinner we attended together that he found the other guests cerebral, New Yorkish, and antisexual. He got this impression when someone remarked that he’d had sex only three times in the past year and I said, “How civilized, how discreet!”—half ironic, half in earnest. The San Franciscan thought I was completely serious, and it confirmed his worst suspicions. “You look so weary, all of you in New York,” he told our host the next morning. “Well,” said the host sweetly, “that’s because we are weary.”
Weary of sex even—yes, I’m not afraid to admit it: I was congratulating that man for having sex only three times in the past year. The last time I had been intrigued by a sexual confession (such a staple in gay life, one would almost prefer a companion discuss nuclear fission) was when a friend told me of a fellow he had had to date nineteen times before he could kiss him. How marvelous that in 1979 someone would still refuse his person to another! For people aren’t refusing their persons much any more. In fact, grabbing a body is about as easy as going downstairs and buying a hamburger—which is why in San Francisco they call it “fast-food sex.”
When I first arrived in New York, friends would walk past buildings and say, “Oh, that was the Triangle, that was the Stud, that was …,” and I’d listen to tales of back-room bars as exotic as palaces of the Ming dynasty. In those days you would be ejected for blowing someone in a certain bar, but history has come round. Now that bar sports closed-circuit TVs on which pornographic films unfold; slides of Colt models appear on another wall, and the live men at your side have sex right there. The city has more baths and discotheques than ever before, and more homosexuals to have sex with. Visiting Sheridan Square has become an almost frightening experience: they come down Christopher Street like an army, in ranks and ranks, and (here’s the nightmare) all of them are handsome, all of them your physical ideal. It’s the doom of Don Juan: must I go to bed with all of them? A friend looking at this homogeneous mob one Sunday afternoon moaned, “It’s like an invasion of the body snatchers.”
And that’s just what we all want, isn’t it, kiddo: to snatch a body, to use someone’s genitals and get off on his smooth, flat stomach.
❡
I was delighted later to run into the man my friend had dated nineteen times before kissing. I was crossing Washington Square on a snowy Friday dusk, and he was out walking his dog. A handsome man in a gray topcoat whose collie was romping with some other dogs around a tree, he seemed embarrassed when I introduced myself and said how rare a species I considered him.
“It’s not what I want, believe me,” he said, blushing slightly. “But yes, it’s true. In the old days I loved the very things I loathe today— like that fellow there” (he nodded at a young man crossing the square in torn jeans, engineer boots, hooded sweatshirt, and leather jacket). “Five years ago, the gayer the outfit the better. Someone like that struck me as a soldier of sex—devoted, in uniform, solely at the service of the only thing I lived for, sex with another man. Now” (the young man was disappearing into the trees) “I look at him and think: how ghastly, to extinguish one’s individuality, to dress as a human dildo. ... Everything that attracted me five years ago now seems totally stupid. Getting blown is so easy now, and so meaningless, that it’s about as significant an event as a sneeze!” He turned to watch his collie hurl itself against an imperturbable Great Dane, then continued.
“My friend says that men are like dogs, they should screw every day, but,” he sighed, “I’m afraid I’ve lost that talent. Last week in the baths I was sitting in a corner waiting for Mister Right when I saw two men go into an even darker nook and run through the entire gamut of sexual acts. And when they were finished— after all these kisses” (he was suddenly agitated) “and moans and gasps, things that caused scandals in the nineteenth century, toppled families, drove Anna Karenina to suicide—” (he raised his eyebrows) “after all that, they each went to a separate bedroom to wash up. Now, you may view this as the glory of the zipless fuck, but I found it suddenly—and it surprised me, for I’d always adored this event before—the most reductive, barren version of sex a man could devise. Barbarella was more human pressing her fingertips against the angel!”
“Fast-food sex,” I said.
“Fast-food, twentieth-century, American sex!” he said, his face excited in the soft light of the descending sun.
“Well,” I said, half ironic, half in earnest (that New York vice), “we’ve destroyed many aspects of the previous century, you know: luxury liners, formality, long lunches, handmade lace, leisure, and court balls. I guess we’ll destroy sex, too.”
“We already have! My orgasms don’t interest me any more! Why do these assholes praise promiscuous sex, say there’s nothing wrong with it, that because we’re gay we’re leaders in a brave new world who will set new patterns of behavior, and all that crap, when even sex, on that basis, ceases to be erotic? Do they really think that because we’re gay, young, and urban we don’t have the same need for fidelity and intimacy that any other human beings do? When sex is as easy to get as a burger at McDonald’s, it ain’t too mysterious or marvelous, believe me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his eyes and then raising them to fix me with a desperate stare, “but you can’t imagine how awful it is. To be gay, yet no longer able to respond to other gay men because you know it will only be an exchange as profound as eating an Egg McMuffin— I feel as if I’ve developed a disease or something, and I’m doomed to wander as a ghost, alienated from my own kind.”
A man in a blue wool hat sauntered up to us: “Loose joynts, man, Valium, methadone, Black Beauties, anything that turns you on.”
“Go fuck yourself,” muttered the man my friend had dated nineteen times, and he began to walk westward with his dog. “I’m in a terrible mood lately,” he said, “because I’m just as lonely as ever, and just as horny too, and yet I won’t, I can’t do it just for sex any more, it has to be with some kind of interest in the human personality connected to the genital,” and he gave a deprecating little laugh.
❡
We walked in silence in the gathering darkness till we were at the tiny park that gives onto Sheridan Square, where, as on every Friday night, the piazza was filled with faces shining beneath the streetlights. “Don’t you think,” the man who had dated nineteen times said with a shudder, echoing my own unease, “that there are more gay men in the West Village than ever before? And more attractive gay men! Look at them!” he exclaimed, staring wildly at the sea of black-eyed, mustached fellows coming toward us like the children in The Village of the Damned. “Quick, let’s go down Grove Street!”
Running to catch up with him, I followed the man who had dated nineteen times down the short street that parallels Christopher Street but bears none of its gorgeous traffic. “You see, sex is simpler than love,” he said. “It doesn’t interrupt your workout, or burden you with another person’s ego, or with the fear that one day he’ll cease to care. Do you suppose that’s why we’re all having sex instead of making love? Or is it because we hate ourselves? Or maybe because love is simply—as a matter of fact—a very rare thing we cannot beckon or search for but that simply happens to us if we’re lucky. My best friend says he likes fast-food sex because he’s tired of getting burnt, he no longer trusts people; so now he goes to the baths every Sunday night and comes back, his face aglow, after three ejaculations, and he’s ready for the workweek. And I guess that’s important in New York. But really! That’s sex as a massage, sex as a face mask!
“How kind of you to listen to all this madness,” he said. “It sounds like the sour grapes of someone who can’t get laid— and yet I’m handsomer now, if you’ll pardon me, than I ever was, and I’m cruised ten times a day; but my eyes lock with theirs and I think, ‘Oh, what’s the point?’ And really” (he sighed again) “what is the point?” He looked at me through the falling snow. “I wrote a letter to Anna Karenina,” he said and handed me an envelope before disappearing into a courtyard. I sat down and read his letter to Anna K. later that night. “Dear Anna,” it said, “Why so upset over Vronsky? If he is beginning to tire of you, to cease to love you, so what? Commit suicide over love? Get real! Instead of going into the street and driving to the train station in that down mood, dump the jerk! Take a Valium, dear, and play some paddle ball. You’ll feel better, and tonight we’ll go to the Ramrod; you’ll meet someone new. Years ago, Anna, I used to get butterflies in my stomach at the baths before I approached someone I really wanted, sex meant that much to me. Now I rub my body against another the way you rub sticks to start a fire, curious to see if lust will develop. As the Marvelettes said, there are too many fish in the sea. Get out, girl, and remember: you’ve got to survive!”
But Anna still goes rattling off across the streets of Moscow to her inevitable doom, a hundred years too early. Certainly today she would know that we don’t feel the pain of love any more, even if we don’t feel much of anything else either (dry skin is about our most serious discomfort); certainly she would know that, the way we offer ourselves to each other today, kisses are not a surrender of the soul but mean very little — about as much (the man who dated nineteen times would say) as an Egg McMuffin. ❡
