Category Archives: sex

Home Safe and Sound

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From 304 Winfield Street, San Francisco, CA:

I made it home safe and sound.

South America was amazing for me.

Taking care of Grampy in Washington, D.C., along with my mother, was important.

Sending money to Guille in Montevideo may have been foolish. I’ve been trying to reach him by phone every day since I got back here with no success. I’m not sure why it’s so much worse for me not knowing what has happened then, let’s say, hearing from him that he no longer wants me to contact him. The uncertainty of not knowing if something has happened to him is part of it. Perhaps it’s part of my “wanting to rescue a boy” complex like Nikas talked about.

I met Nikas when I invited Storm out for a night dancing at the End Up. Storm flirted with him first — we both thought he was real humpy. It surprised me when he said he wanted to spend the night with me instead of Storm. He actually gave Storm $20 for a taxi home when I mentioned I was worried about him getting home OK. Storm seemed happy with the arrangement and Nikas didn’t seem like a psycho-killer, so I went home with him.

When we arrived in his bed, he told me has been HIV+ for years. We still hugged and kissed. I was horny, so jacked him off, which he liked, and he then did the same for me. It was comfortable hanging out with him, even though he confided in me that he’s had a speed addiction, shooting it up. Although he says he’s now off it, I get the sense that it may rear its ugly head in his life again. We ate a nice brunch at a place called Cafe 69, or something like that, on Maiden Lane. Then, we went our separate ways. It’s been a few days and I haven’t heard a peep from him. He has my info and Storm has his phone number in his cell phone.

The Lucknow 4: Gay Club Arrests in India

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I’m shocked to read of the arrest of four gay men in India for simply meeting together for a picnic. Apparently, although no sex was involved, the police entrapped them and charged them with a violation of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, punishable by 10 years to life imprisonment. The police apparently traced the guys through an online website.

One can only hope that this is the final straw that breaks the camel’s back to reform this antiquated law from the era of British colonialism so that gay people can take their place alongside the rest of humanity in India and around the globe.

Memory Lane: Interview with Allen Ginsberg (Between the Sheets)

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This evening, I watched a documentary called Walt Whitman, part of the Voices and Visions series, directed by Jack Smithie, and copyrighted in 1988 by the New York Center for Visual History. The documentary includes numerous excerpts from interviews of Allen Ginsberg, including one snippet where he mentions a sexual lineage that connected him to Whitman through Neal Cassady, Gavin Arthur, and Edward Carpenter (a claim he also apparently made in a Gay Sunshine interview).

I had a flashback to the time I spent with Ginsberg in Cambridge, MA, in 1982, when he told me that I was part of an erotic lineage that connected me to Whitman through him and Carpenter and others I didn’t remember from that time. I now know much more clearly who Neal Cassady is, although Gavin Arthur remains a mystery. One result of a quick Google search identifies Arthur as ” a certain astrologer and San Francisco character, Gavin Arthur (grandson of president Chester A Arthur), who gave lectures at San Quentin while Neal was a prisoner.” Another entry reports that he studied astrology with Ronald Reagan before Reagan started his political career.

I had interviewed Ginsberg for Gay Community News in an issue published on August 21, 1982. The funny part of the interview was how we decided to end it in print, that is, with Ginsberg’s question to me about whether I was going to refer to the conditions of the interview in publication, my question to him about what he meant, and his reply that the interview was conducted when we were in bed together.

A month or so ago, I found a cassette tape containing the whole interview and listened to it for the first time in more than 20 years. I was surprised at how fresh and relevant Ginsberg’s words remained to me and to the current political situation in the U.S.

Perhaps an archive somewhere would be interested in the recording? If so, please contact me. Or perhaps I should just transcribe the whole thing and post it on this blog. The incomplete interview, as published in Gay Community News, is now apparently selling for $22 an issue on the web, so I guess I should scrounge around in the basement to see if I still have any copies, eh?

Bareback Mountain: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Neighm

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A friend on a private email list asked me why I thought “Bareback Mountain,” (if not available at the previous link, try “Bareback Mountain” instead) the parody of Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” was funny, rather than an affront to the queer community. My answer:

While I thought Brokeback was an excellent film, it can be read in various ways by various audiences. One way to read the film is as a reinforcement of the “shocking” “lifestyle” of homosexuality and the inevitable destruction of those who are foolish enough to participate in it. I suspect that there are large segments of U.S. society that will walk away from Brokeback with that take on the film if they ever chance to see it. As other reviews have pointed out, it’s curious that the hetero sex is so much more openly filmed that the homo sex for example. Perhaps that’s why I felt profoundly depressed by the film.

The reason that the Bareback parody is funny is because it ridicules a reading of Brokeback in which homosexuality is as “shocking” and “deviant” as bestiality. It uses a similar meme of the cowboy (or shephard or whatever) so emotionally isolated he can only express his secret longings in physical isolation and in constant fear of discovery.

The shadow puppet sequences of physical intimacy are there because showing the actual act would be far too “disturbing” and “inappropriate”, unlike normative male-female sex. And the scenes of him turning away from his wife in bed (and presumably family as in Brokeback), his wife wielding the humungous dildo and recounting the visit from animal services, show just how dangerous such deviance can be to the traditional family structure.

I certainly don’t believe it’s the intent of the parody to compare homosexuality to bestiality in a serious way, but to tease out the themes of Brokeback that lead to a regressive and rather disturbing reading of it, unfortunately a reading that much of the movie-watching public may walk away with. The parody is, somewhat paradoxically, the kick in the butt that Brokeback needs for me to walk away from both films feeling integrated as a queer with a chance of living as a respected human being in a diverse and accepting society.

I won’t even begin to delve into the morality of such relations with animals… that’s a topic for another day.

Another person quoted on the list who saw the parody quipped that it explored “the Love that dare not speak its neighm.”