Best Sex Writing 2009 (22 page)

It seems logical that closeted men—that included Michael be- fore his arrest—would seek out anonymous, fleeting encounters, typically in the most transitory sorts of restrooms, at truck stops, airports, and other areas of high pedestrian traffic. But this cul- tural phenomenon is not limited to closeted men or even Catholic priests. So why would openly gay and bisexual men who have ac- cess to more comfortable venues like their homes, and the option of attending events such as the Black Party, an annual public sex extravaganza disguised as a dance, indulge in restroom tricks?

Men are sluts. Gay men who have embraced their slut (not technically an “inner” one) may feel they have less at stake when participating in a bit of lavatory horseplay, but the transgression and fear of being caught add an extra thrill to the experience, as Michael has admitted. Some gay men are also turned on by servic- ing straight guys, perhaps especially while in service stations. And no one cares about your “orientation” in a lavatory—in there, it’s all business.

While I’ve never done it in a public bathroom (no, really!), I’ve been to lots of sex clubs and orgies, which I’ve always found cleaner and comfier. Video booths in porno shops could be a safe sub- stitute for bathrooms, too, but if you’re caught in a porno shop, you can’t say you were just taking a leak. In all cases, though, the protocol is the same: a dude will grab you by the biscuits, and you can either let him continue or gently remove his hand.You may not blurt out,“Hey! Get your hands off me!” like a friend of mine once did in a back room, before he was snappily reminded of where he was. In clubs where men walk around in towels, suitors will gently tweak your nipple to gauge your interest, a greeting another friend dubbed “the Chelsea handshake.”

Most homosexual men spend our formative years in the closet, and once we come out, we tend to deny that closetedness has its pleasures—and damned juicy ones, truth be told. Having a secret, perhaps double, life gives you a sense of importance, of life as drama, a sense you’ll probably relish if you find yourself elected governor of New Jersey. Sex feels otherworldly, forbidden, and scary, like you’ve gone so deep into the closet that you’ve arrived in Narnia. For this reason, some openly gay men end up seeking out closets within outness: the closets of sex and/or drug addiction, fetish scenes, knit- ting circles—it can get crazy.

But at first it’s not easy for queer goslings in the United States to find the gay world. (In a few other countries it’s much easier. I’ll never forget my astonishment at how many gay bars in Holland are outdoor cafes, one of which screams Gay Life in large letters across its facade; in Middle America, gay bars are still in unmarked store- fronts with tinted windows.) One of the first ways you learn to find other gay Americans is to listen closely when straight people de- nounce homosexuals. If a relative grumbles about “faggots doing it in the park,” you might think to ask, as innocently as possible,“Fag-

gots? Really? I’ve never heard that.Which park? What are the cross streets?” After which you’ll go there in the dead of night and find some sense of community, however narrowly focused. If a senator in your state is involved in a scandal, you might search the Internet to find his hunting grounds, even if he’s not your type.

Newbies quickly learn that tapping your feet while sitting in a stall is a good way of letting other cruisers know you’re on the prowl. This may be what alerted the officer who nabbed Senator Craig, and since foot tapping is such an ordinary activity, I suspect that once it becomes common knowledge, straight men will learn to keep their feet frozen stiff in the stalls. Or not.

But even these explanations for the enduring joy of cottag- ing seem overwrought, since what motivates a lot of men sexually is simply the prospect of easy prey with no room for intimacy. If there’s one thing for which straight men envy gay men, aside from that fashion-sense stereotype, it’s that we have institutions that pro- mote no-strings sexual encounters, and that on nights when we haven’t gotten lucky by last call, we can stop off at a sex club, a bar with a back room, a park, or a public bathroom to find like-minded guys, usually at no charge beyond admission. So if you’re a slut and all you want is a mouth on your dick, it might not matter to you whether that hole’s wearing lipstick, a goatee, or both.

Imagining that closeted gay men are the only ones involved in bathroom sex is naive, since it assumes that homosexual acts are synonymous with homosexual identity, which is silly. One hardly needs to be reminded of the many hypermasculine set- tings with a reputation for fostering homosexual behavior: prisons, armies, the high seas, the Village People, et cetera. (Historian B. R. Burg has argued that the seventeenth-century buccaneers of the Caribbean engaged exclusively in homosexual behavior.Take that, Johnny Depp!)

There’s an age-old phenomenon known as “trade,” an exchange between two men, at least one of whom is ostensibly heterosexual, in which the recipient of a blow job or the active partner in anal sex can walk away from his hanky-panky with plausible deniabil- ity. In other words, he can console himself with the belief that he is “not gay,” because for some reason (misogyny, let’s say) a lot of men think that whoever gets penetrated is “the woman,” or more womanlike.

Which brings us back to Senator Craig. Though the
Idaho Statesman
has cataloged a series of incidents that point to homosex- ual pickups dating back to 1967, he’s sticking to the straight story, unlike Ted Haggard, who admitted partial guilt, confessed com- pletely and then claimed to have been “cured” after three weeks of so-called reparative therapy. So unless we can get a full, graphic report on who was planning to do what to whom in that airport bathroom stall, the senator is free to believe that he is not gay, and has never been gay. Until then, we’ll all be tapping our feet.

kids and Comstockery,

Back (and Forward) in the day

d ebbie n athan

Ah, yes, children and porn. Children
consuming
porn, I mean: a venerable American pastime. Did you know you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned.

Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street and First Avenue in New York City’s East Harlem, was busted on obscenity charges. His arrest happened after notorious vice czar Anthony Comstock, sneaking around town undercover, watched while Eliseo “gleefully showed his rot” to some children.

What sort of rot? Eliseo, according to Comstock,“Dealt in most sacrilegious and blasphemous books & papers. Awfull!!” (Yes, “aw- full” with two
l
’s.) According to Comstock, Eliseo kept “ob.”— Comstock’s shorthand for “obscene”—materials in his store and “took young men into [the] basement to sell them books.” Worse,

he peddled ob. right on the street, where he made a habit of “ex- posing pictures in full view of boys and girls.” These were prob- ably “French postcards,” and when Comstock happened upon Eliseo, the latter was hawking them at a penny apiece. It’s not clear if he had any paying customers, but he clearly attracted some very enthusiastic young window-shoppers.

Such details come from a tall, narrow logbook that Comstock kept for decades. He used it to tabulate his obscenity arrests—in muddy, cramped handwriting, and language so fevered that it of- ten came out misspelled and weirdly punctuated. The logbook has been microfilmed by the Library of Congress, in Washing- ton. It’s a popular item in the rare manuscripts collection there, and recently while visiting DC, I skipped the Lincoln Memorial and instead enjoyed the fruits of my taxpayer money by perusing Comstock’s records.

What a glorious institution the LOC is! It houses a copy of almost every book ever published in this country (and many from other countries besides). Its librarians practically trip over them- selves to help patrons. Reading rooms are well-appointed and in- viting, the cafeteria food scrumptious and cheap.There’s no charge to use these facilities. The LOC: a people’s palace for research and knowledge. Makes you feel downright patriotic…even as you fol- low the creepy archival trail of federal official Comstock as he ha- rassed citizens and worked hard to repress our culture.

A small town druggist turned moral crusader, Comstock came to power after the end of the Civil War, when he was appointed by New York State and the U.S. Post Office as
the
bigwig, antiob- scenity cop. At first, he mainly went after people who advocated for and provided birth control, sex education, and other means of sexual pleasure—including toys. One such early Comstock victim is listed in his logbook as a “shrewd villain” who was “Notorious

as an abortionist.”There’s also the “low ignorant laborer” who “ad- vertised himself as an MD and celebrated physician for treatment of female complaints”—yet was really “An abortionist.” Thanks to Comstock, this man got one year and three months at an upstate penitentiary.

Also arrested was someone named Brinckerhoff and “one Travis of Goodyear Rubber Glove Co.,” who jointly “invented a substi- tute for a dildoe.” Comstock gloated that he actually seized “the article.” He added that the subsequent guilty verdict made this a “test case of great importance.”

Comstock was also obsessed with protecting children from dirty materials. He wrote that he arrested a man who “used to loan the vilest Books, to young boys & girls, and sell to school children His wife to girls & he to boys & young men. He was convicted in Special Sessions, in Summer of 1868, by myself.” Comstock dissed this defendant as the “Worst man in N.Y.” He was sent to Blackwell’s Island.

But Comstock’s prosecutions were partly a losing battle.

By the 1870s,sexy pictures,texts,and tchotchkes were everywhere, in full view of the kids. In 1875, for instance,Thomas Early, twenty- three, was arrested by police in Yonkers and given three months at hard labor. His crime: distributing handbills for Kahn’s Museum, on Broadway in Manhattan. Kahn’s was where the public went to look at fetuses in jars, preserved cadavers, and medical specimen geni- tals. InVictorian America, this was how ordinary people —including women—learned about anatomy and the biology of sex. Comstock caught Early giving Kahn’s flyers “indiscriminately to boys & girls.” As a result, he noted in his crabbed handwriting, one child “found a book & took it to her mother to know what ‘penis’ meant.”

Another log entry, from 1877, describes the arrest of Timo- thy P. Ide, nineteen, for mailing obscene pictures and books. “He

advertised for ‘Boys only’ in various ‘Boys Weekly’ papers. He had three new books & was getting up another. He is a cool deliberate villain.Young as he is he surpasses many older criminals.”

That same year, Mrs. Sarah E. Summers got a year of hard penal labor after Comstock’s investigators found hundreds of letters and circulars in her possession, as well as articles “to prevent conception [and] procure abortion.” Not only that, Comstock wrote, but Mrs. Summers had, in a popular publication, advertised the following offer: “‘Girls. Secret. How to gain the love of any man for $1.00.’” For each dollar she received, Mrs. Summers sent out “her circular & a powder with written instructions to girls to mix with their own menses and administer in cold drink.” Most of the letters seized were from young females, Comstock noted, including “a 16-year-old minister’s daugh- ter.” Comstock must have raided this teenager’s bedroom: the log notes that when discovered, she had already “sent for and adminis- tered one powder & another all prepared was found on her person.” The year 1877 also saw hanky panky with magic lanterns—con- traptions that projected images in sequence to create the illusion of movement. Tremendously popular, they were forerunners to the motion picture camera. Comstock recorded that a NewYorker,An- drew Trosch, age sixty, who sold stereopticons and magic lanterns on Broome Street in Manhattan, gave a magic lantern show on the Bowery. Apparently he was projecting French postcards, or maybe just Kahn’s Museum fliers. “His obscene views,” Comstock wrote,

“disgusted spectators. He was arrested for selling same views.”

A year later, Kahn’s Museum tormented again. It was displaying “wax figures of females life size, some pregnant & some otherwise

& 37 cases of filthy penises. These cases were disposed of before Judge Gildersleeve.”

As time passed things only got worse. In 1895,Alfred S.Thomp- son, of 106 E. 14th Street, was arrested for being the “manager of

6 fat women at Huber’s Museum who dress in tights and ride bi- cycles. A nauseating display.”

Alfred’s wife, Alice, was also charged. Comstock listed her oc- cupation as “Show Woman” and went after her because she “Sells pictures of herself in tights in a bawdy attire and posture.”

Not long after, thirty-six-year-old Pauline Sheldon, of W. 98th Street, was apprehended for working at clubs such as the Black Rabbit’s and the Maquet Union, on Bleeker Street. Comstock’s log describes Sheldon as “A hermafadite [
sic
] & exhibited herself at $1 per person.” She was charged with indecent exposure. Her destina- tion was the Tombs.

During Comstock’s earlier years, his busts were lauded by the establishment, including the
New York Times.
By the turn of the twentieth century, though, he was going stale. That’s around the time he went after Ida Craddock—who today could well be de- scribed as this country’s first “Dr. Ruth.” A former shorthand in- structor and head of “The Church of Yoga,” Craddock was famous for her sex education classes and pamphlets for married couples. They extolled foreplay as vital for female pleasure, and gave de- tailed instructions on how to accomplish it.And to avoid unwanted pregnancy, Craddock taught men how to prevent ejaculation. All this infuriated Comstock. Craddock was busted and imprisoned so many times that the last time it happened, she couldn’t take it any- more. She committed suicide by gas oven in an apartment on 23rd Street in 1902. The public was remorseful. Comstock was widely seen as a villain.

But he still had an ace in the hole: the danger of “ob.” to chil- dren.Yet the kids themselves were now starting to make and dis- tribute ob. Already in 1900, for instance, twelve-year-old Emil Grossmann, of 81 E. 11th St., had been picked up by Comstock because he “Used foul language in school room. Sent obscene letter