Talking Art Deco with a Trick (1975)

After the party ended, I was hoping for a trick. What I didn't anticipate was a trick with whom I could discuss art deco architecture. Or a trick with whom I'd want to discuss art deco. Or that we'd be having this discussion on the bare floor of a house in the shadow of a casket factory.

Let's flash back to earlier in the evening.

The setting for the party was someone's house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. The party began as the bars were closing and the attendees had all learned of it at the bars. Not everyone had been told, of course, but enough that the house was packed with sweaty gay males in their best club clothes. That they were at the party, of course, meant either they were already "partnered" for the night or hadn't found a trick at the bar. If the former, they were looking for more party before tricking; if the latter, they were still looking for a trick. Those not in attendance had either not been told of the party or had already found a trick and considered an after-party redundant.

That I don't remember much of the party itself likely means it was a generic after-party. Drinking, dancing, loud conversation. More drinking, more dancing, some groping. And so on.

The crowd faded away within a few hours, again typical for such a gathering. They half dozen or so of us left knew each other barely or not at all. This unfamiliarity faded quickly too as we paired off. One couple left the house, another left the room, and that left us in a bare living room to determine what happened next.

So what would happen next? Was I left with a trick or just someone to talk with?

Neither of us had spoken to the other during the party, neither of us knew each before now, and neither of us probably had an idea of where things were going.

There was no furniture in the room, just a sleeping bag and a few blankets in one corner. So that's where we sat down.

We didn’t lie down, we sat down. Facing each other. Not normal behavior for two guys about to trick. But, then, I don't believe either of us knew if we were going to. After all, we were only together through process of elimination.

He was skinny with tousled hair, and cute in a sort of nerdish way. He was taller than me - who wasn't? - but not by that much. Had I noticed him during the party, would I have put the moves on him? Maybe. Would he have come on to me? I had no clue.

But here we were, face to face, sitting on the floor of an empty room. In the dark except for light from street lights through three bare windows. I looked out the window over his shoulder and saw a factory across the street. The sign in front of it said it was a casket factory. As I said, we were in an out-of-the-way neighborhood.

On the floor below the window I noticed a book, a large coffee table sized book. I could see part of the title from the light through the window. Art Deco. I reached over and picked up the book and began to thumb through it. In the near dark. At least there were some pictures to look at, as best as I could see them with so little light.

"Are you interested in Art Deco?"

His question made me realize that picking up and thumbing through a random book wasn't something I normally did when alone with a guy I was about to trick with. But then I didn't know if we would. Trick, that is. Perhaps now we wouldn't. Perhaps we'd discuss architecture through the night. That would be something I had never done.

"Well, sort of," I replied.

I lied.

I knew vaguely of Art Deco style because of Entre Nous, a gay bar that had opened recently in Knoxville. Everyone - well at least those seeking to appear sophisticated - raved about its Art Deco style. So I'd done a little research about it, though I didn't bother to research what "entre nous" meant. For all I knew, it meant "stylish gay bar with very small dance floor." And my knowledge of Art Deco wasn't much better.

Ironically, given that we were alone in an empty room, entre nous means "between us" used with something spoken in confidence. The phrase may not have applied to the bar, but it certainly applied to our situation.

I needn't have worried. Apparently he knew a good deal about Art Deco and, holding the book near the window light, proceeded to expand my understanding as he thumbed through the pages and discussed various illustrations. I was fascinated.

By his knowledge. By the subject. And by the possibility of architectural style as foreplay.

After a while he put the book aside and we both lay on our sides, face to face, continuing the discussion. Then we both lay on our backs on the blankets and continued talking. About Art Deco, about the house (his friend in the other room lived there), and eventually we stopped talking.

We turned back on our sides, face to face, and held each other. And we kissed and our hands explored each other's body.

And then we tricked. And fell asleep.

On the blankets on the floor of an empty room in an empty house across the street from a casket factory.

I don't recall his name and I never saw him again after that night. But whenever I encounter Art Deco style I think back on that night. I think of what we talked about. And what we did when the talking stopped.

What did we do when the talking stopped?

Sorry. That's entre nous.

Back to work!

Maybe it was getting to sleep late three days in a row or maybe the summer sunshine or whatever, but I'm finally back to writing and on a new story at that. It involves a bar, a phone booth and a really, really big fire. More soon.

New Posts soon, I promise

It's been since March that I've posted a story but it's been a busy, busy time. Now that I get a summer break in another week, I have two stories in progress that, I hope, will find completion. Some time off - and some time at the beach - should allow for that.

Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)

This is the most recently completed story. In chronological order, it would be the twelfth of the nineteenth finished so far.

===============

Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)


The two-room apartment was spare but homey. It was actually half of a small house. The other half had a separate kitchen. Mine had a front room and a back room and a bathroom. The front room was the "living" room, the back was the bedroom and kitchen. And the bed was barely a bed, more a cot and not a good one at that. I had moved there with a roommate who had bunk beds but when his ultra-conservative parents found out he was gay, they drove up from Chattanooga to take him home for therapy and took the bunk beds with them. That left me with a very modest and worn twin bed, one Charlie has offered me when I moved out of his and Danny's apartment.

The rest of the furniture was not much to speak of either, but it was adequate for my needs.
But it wasn't a place to bring a trick home to. A trick might not pay attention to the ratty couch or what barely passed for a dining table, but the bed would be another matter. It's difficult enough for two people to share a twin bed, but this particular bed presented even more of a problem.

In my previous apartment, the one I rented the day I fled Atlanta for Knoxville, I could easily move the two parts of the sectional couch together. The enormous living room allowed for that. The current living room was too small to make that convenient.

This all became apparent one night shortly after my roommate had been abducted, er, had left.
I was up for a trick or at least an evening of hunting for one. You know how hunters say they really aren't in it for the kill, but for the thrill of the hunt and being out in nature. I was a hunter of tricks. If I didn't find one, there was still the thrill of the hunt and being out in gayville.
Knoxville hadn’t yet entered the age of the gay dance club. K-town gave gay boys a choice: either a dive of a beer bar located down a dark alley or a dive of a beer bar located near another dark alley a few blocks away.

I took the first choice. Both bars were run by lesbians (most gay bars were then), but I liked the, um, ambience of the one down the alley. All bars, gay or straight, had to close at midnight sharp and would begin shutting down around eleven-thirty to be sure to be in compliance with any Knoxville Beer Board inspectors who might be driving around at that hour. Beer only. No booze, no setups, no BYOB. And, of course, no dancing. Sounds grim, but it could be fun.

What was grim this particular night was the crowd. There was no crowd. The bar staff outnumbered the customers and there were only four people working.

I was about to head for the other bar but decided to stay long enough for a beer. The other place sort of scared me, unless I was there with some friends. And since I was trick hunting, I was flying solo.

In scanning the empty booths to decide where I would sit alone I realized one of the booths wasn't empty. It was occupied by someone I didn't know, but someone I realized I would like to know. At least for a night. So I grabbed my beer and headed for his booth.

I don't recall what tired cliché I must have used to explain why, with all the other booths empty, I chose to sit in the one he was already occupying. I guess I just assumed he was looking for someone to join him. This was a gay bar, after all. He must have known that. If I wasn't what he was looking for he would certainly let me know. But he apparently had no problem with my joining him and the hunt was on.

Whether I was hunting for him or he for me didn't matter. If we left together, if we tricked together, it didn't matter who had propositioned whom.

The conversation–what there was of it–was awkward at first. That wasn't so unusual then. In later years, in a crowded dance bar full of buff, mostly shirtless men, a guy could be more direct with a pickup line. We knew where we were (a gay club) and we knew what we wanted (a trick.) In a back alley neighborhood beer bar, however, you had to exercise some care. Maybe he was just there for a beer. Maybe he didn't know it was a gay club. We didn't have rainbows everywhere then. And the place was almost empty he might have just figured it a good place to grab a beer or two.

This guy was too young, too small-town to be part of the vice squad and those guys didn't hassle the bars anyway, just the restrooms in public buildings. And they did that during the daytime.
Back then I never gave much thought to the possibility of what we now call gay bashing. Maybe it was because I was usually drawn to guys not likely to overpower me or who were so likely queer as to fear that I might bash them.

This guy was tough to figure out though. Most pickup conversations avoid direct propositions but this one was indirect to the point of near obscurity. I began to think the night would end right there in the booth.

Yet somehow, I don't recall how, he left with me and followed me in his car to my house.
We were undressed and in bed within minutes, perhaps seconds.

And then a problem arose. Or, rather, didn't, um, rise.

No, it wasn't what would be today a Viagra moment, but neither of us somehow could get turned on enough to do anything.

It wasn't our hormones' fault.

It was the bed's fault.

Then I got an idea.

“Why don’t we drive to the Smokies?”

“Huh?”

Somehow I managed to explain my idea. The bed just wasn’t working and maybe what we needed was something radically different. Like sex in a car on a lonely road. Or sex in the woods. I told him I knew of several out-of-the-way places in the mountains – about an hour away – where we could get it on. How this would be more comfortable than an a bed indoors wasn’t really clear to either of us. But he bought into the idea and off we went to the Great Smoky Mountains.

Now where did I ever come up with such an idea? A few years earlier I had worked for a radio station in the Smokies that was a thirty-mile drive from Knoxville. And most of that thirty miles was very rural, although the road was a wide four-lane. One day, while rounding one of the road’s many curves, I saw a young guy standing by the side of the road hitchhiking. Only as I passed did I notice something unusual. He was wearing jockey shorts. Just jockey shorts. For some reason—maybe I was just in a hurry to get work or didn’t believe what I saw—I continued on without stopping. But I didn’t stop thinking about what I saw. Or letting what I saw develop into a fantasy.

No, it wasn’t a fantasy about being stranded on a lonely highway in only my jockeys. On that stretch of highway I wouldn't want to be stranded fully clothed – and armed.

Instead I imagined being with this hitchhiker somewhere in the Smokies, somewhere secluded and safe. Somehow the phrase, "sex in the Smokies" kept running through my horny mind.
Now the guy in my bed wasn't the hitchhiker and he wasn't wearing jockeys. Or anything else. But, hey, fantasies are flexible and he was flexible enough to agree with the idea. So off to the Smokies we went.

Where exactly we were going I wasn't sure. And I was the one driving. But the nearest place I had in mind was almost an hour away so I had time to think. Or so I thought.

But after we had passed through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge on the way to the mountain bypass around Gatlinburg, I still wasn't sure of a safe destination so I pulled over into an parking area - a scenic overlook they call it - with a view of Gatlinburg far below.

Trick - let's just call him Trick - apparently thought this was our final destination. He began undressing, although I was so occupied I didn't notice. Until he spoke.

"I am now completely naked," he announced.

I looked to my right. He sure was. Completely.

So let's review. It's a weeknight and I'm parked at an overlook above Gatlinburg in the Great Smoky Mountains after midnight.

With a naked guy in the passenger seat.

A naked guy whose name I did not know. His name? I didn't even know him, much less his name. (Thus I’ll call him Trick.)

So, I wondered, what do I do now?

Option one: get naked as well. Option two: pretend I hadn't heard Trick and visually confirmed his nakedness. Option three: Stay clothed but take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick.

I went with Option Four: Get naked and take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick. Now that might have been easy if we’d been in the back seat of my Camaro, but we were in the front seat! In bucket seats. With a stick shift between us.

That configuration caused a number of problems. First of all, Trick had it easier getting undressed. He didn’t have a steering wheel to contend with. Or three pedals on the floor.
Second, even when I managed to get undressed without putting the car out of gear, I had that Hurst shifter between us. And the parking brake.

So, you say, why not get in the back seat? Let me draw you a picture.

We’re in a Camaro. It has two doors. To get from the front seat to the back seat you have to first, open the door nearest you and, second, step out of the car to move the seat forward in order to get in back.

Would you really want to do that naked?

(And, no, you wouldn't want to - or be able to - climb over the high-back bucket seats - either naked or clothed.)

True, there were no other cars parked on the overlook, probably because of the late hour on a weeknight in the fall. That was one of the reasons I chose the place. I certainly wouldn’t have done it in the heat of summer and the height of the tourist season. And there were likely not going to be any other cars, but how could we be sure?

The Camaro was becoming a much bigger challenge than my bed. Try as we might, there was no comfortable way to do, um, it, whatever “it” might be. The bucket seats, the stick shift, the parking brake, even the location conspired against us. Sure we could reach across the console and grab and grope each other, but what we both wanted was more than that; we wanted sex but we wanted full-body-contact sex. And that was just impossible in the front seat of a Camaro.

I signaled surrender by starting to get dressed. Trick followed my lead but only to the point of pulling up his underwear. We were halfway back to Knoxville before I convinced it might be a good idea - in the glare of city lights - to be a bit more clothed. He agreed.
We got back to my place just over two hours after we’d left it.

The hour was late, we both were tired, so we both made it back into my bed, but not to sleep. At least not right away.

Perhaps it was all that mountain air, but this time the bed didn’t cause us any problems.

How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

Preface II: How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

James had a cat. James was cute.

Actually, the cat wasn’t James’ cat. He didn’t know whose cat it was, but he was playing with it the day I met him.

James was a neighbor of Sandra and Rick, a couple I knew through grad school. Neither one was a student, but Sandra liked to hang out at the university and through her I met Rick, who was her boyfriend and, later, husband.

Sandra was a Jewish girl from a small town in eastern Kentucky, where her daddy owned a clothing store. Rick was an East Tennessee gentile. They were a volatile combination, sometimes fighting, sometimes loving, and sometimes doing both at the same time. They were unpredictable and they became my good friends.

They had taken an apartment a few blocks from me, so I dropped by often, especially during the early summer months when neither my class work nor my broadcasting job occupied much of my time. We’d listen to music or talk politics or watch TV, go out to eat on the Cumberland Avenue “strip,” or, on a warm summer evening, sit outside the house their apartment was in and just talk.

James lived in a house across the street, with his aunt as I recall, although it might have been his grandmother. I don’t recall and I don’t believe I was clear about it at the time. When I would visit him later, he seemed to be the only one home.

Sandra was, um, outgoing. No, she was more than that. Spotting a person she didn’t know, she’d go right up to them and just start a conversation. Eventually she’d introduce herself to the often-startled individual. She’d spotted James on his porch and soon she considered him a good friend. There are those of whom it’s said, they’ve never met a stranger. Sandra didn’t know what a stranger was, although some she met probably wished that she had understood the idea better.
One evening as we were sitting on her front steps, she spotted James on his porch and insisted I meet him. We walked over and Sandra introduced me. So maybe it was Sandra, more than James’ cat, that was a proximate cause of my coming out. But I have to give the cat some credit, since, from a distance, it was the cat – and not James – that I noticed.

Then we got closer and I noticed James.

Did I mention James was cute?

Actually, I doubt that I thought of him that way at the time. I wasn’t really out to myself, and I’d grown up being told that boys didn’t refer to other boys as, “cute.” Handsome, maybe. But never cute.

Fear of coming out isn’t just fear of what friends and family will think of you. It’s also about what you will think of you. And it’s not just trying to imagine yourself having sex with another guy. Before coming out, most gay guys aren’t at all sure what gay sex might involve.

Society raises all males, gay or straight, to have a certain discomfort with intimacy and even with gentleness. Even straight boys don’t refer to attractive girls as cute, but maybe “nice,” or maybe “hot.” Somehow they have to keep a rougher edge about it, so as not to seem “girlish.”

So when a not-yet-out gay boy finds himself attracted to another boy, he knows the other boy looks good, looks appealing, but he can’t quite bring himself to say – even to himself – that the boy is “cute.”

But James was cute. I guess I’ve already mentioned that.

Somehow, I also knew James was gay.

Somehow, James also knew I was gay.

Somehow, I also knew that James knew that I knew that he knew.

How? I can’t explain that anymore than I can explain gaydar. It’s really a sensation in a moment of time – or perhaps out of time – an almost instant recognition. Most gay people have it. Some straight people even claim to have it. At the time, I would have claimed I was straight and that I’d never heard of gaydar. That didn’t matter; I knew James was gay and James knew I was gay. And I knew that he knew that I knew.

And though I would have said I was straight, I knew that I wasn’t. But I had no clue of what being gay really meant. No clue? Yes, no clue. There were no gay role models. Gay characters in movies committed suicide or were killed. Even the most sympathetic psychologists called gay people “inverts” or “deviates.” Was being gay just about furtive sex acts, likely performed in some dangerous place? Was being gay being effeminate, wanting to be female rather than male? So it would seem from all the information one could gather from books or from teachers or from friends. And if I didn't find myself in those books, then I must not be gay.

It was the early summer of 1969. Stonewall had already happened in New York City, but we knew nothing about that event in East Tennessee. (I first learned of the June event in December, while job hunting in Atlanta.) All I knew was that James was cute, James was obviously (to me, at least) gay, and I wanted to get to know him better. What that meant, I didn’t really know.
The way to some men’s hearts may be through their stomachs, but the way to James’ heart, I suspected, was through his (or whoever’s) cat. But I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get to James’ heart, just to his body. What I would do with it once I got to it, I also didn’t know. First things first, though, which meant focusing first upon the cat.

Since I hadn’t come out yet, not even fully to myself, Sandra had no idea what thoughts James was putting in my mind. And I thought it best that first night on James’ porch not to put any thoughts in her mind. So the three of us just talked about this and that and I asked James about the cat.

The cat in question, as I said, wasn’t actually James’ cat. It had shown up on his porch recently and essentially adopted James. Apparently the cat found something attractive about James as well.

It being early summer, my only school work involved thesis hours I registered for while (supposedly) working on a master’s thesis in philosophy. I had already been accepted to Ohio University in communications for the fall and I was working five days a week at an AM/FM radio operation in the Smokies. So I had evenings (and a lot of other time) free.

I began to spend some of that free time visiting James on his porch – without Sandra. We did quite a bit of verbal dancing, deftly stepping around the subject both of us wanted to bring up. It was a behavior not uncommon for not-yet-out gay guys who wanted to let the other guy know about themselves but not risk too much self-disclosure. We would use a kind of code and a lot of body language.

The code could be cultural, involving mention of supposedly gay-identifiable personalities, writers or musicians. Urban gay-guys-in-waiting might find references to Judy Garland or Broadway show tunes to be good for testing the waters. That didn’t work well this far from the Great White Way. All I knew about Judy Garland was that her daughter, Liza Minelli, had starred in a movie that was filmed at my undergraduate alma mater. The film’s story involved a very straight college romance. And I only liked Broadway musicals if there was no singing. Elton John not only was not yet out as gay, he wasn’t even known outside of his own family in England, and they knew him as Reginald Dwight. Trying to find gay cultural references in a part of the country known best for Elvis and the Grand Ol’ Opry was rather difficult.

The code could also be rather Freudian, with humorous but barely subtle references to “fruit,” to “sucking” on something, something innocent like a popsicle, of course, but the accompanying body language added a bit of salaciousness to the phrase. Sometimes more than a bit.
We continued to mutually choreograph this little dance of identity over our first three or four visits together, all of them on James’ front porch. Whether the cat, who was always there, picked up on what we were doing is uncertain, but apparently we were entertaining enough to sustain a feline’s interest. That was probably because, whenever one of us seemed to be getting too close to self-disclosure, we would change the subject to something about the cat. Good cat. Pretty cat. Nice kitty. Anything about the cat, anything to avoid saying, “Hey, I’m gay and you are too and I think you’re really cute!”

Of course that’s not all either of us probably wanted to say. That sentence might end, “I think you’re really cute and I’d like to …” But that would present another problem even if one of us said it. When two guys are trying to determine if the other is gay – if their own gaydar is working – there are other questions involved. If the other guy is gay, is he out of the closet? Does anyone else know he’s gay? Is he, um, experienced? What kind of experience has he had? What does he like to “do?” Am I even his type?

Such questions really never go away even when the sexual orientation of both parties is known. If you haven’t tricked with someone before, you have no idea what this other person likes to do in bed. Or even before getting to the bed. And even before the conversation gets underway, you don’t have any way of knowing if your interest in him is reciprocated. The cutest looking preppy boy in khakis and polo shirt may be looking for a strapping, hairy older guy in leather. And vice-versa.

So here’s the dilemma: I think I’m gay. I’m pretty sure he’s gay. I’m pretty sure he knows I’m gay.

But I can’t read his mind.

In the two or three weeks since Sandra had introduced me to James (and his cat), I had spent several evenings on James’ porch. Some of these meetings were random, some were planned. And some that may have seemed random to James were really planned. I would drive near James’ house, never getting closer than a block or two away. Then, if I spotted him on the porch I would take the car back home and walk over to his place. I would act as if I were heading to Sandra and Rick’s and seem surprised that he was at home on his porch. And to think I hadn’t yet heard the term, “drama queen!”

Wow, I sound like a stalker. Actually I think I put on a pretty good act. After all, I had done my share of theater over the years. At least I think I was convincing to James. And I never resorted to such tired lines as, “Oh, hi! I was just out for a walk and saw you on the porch.” Or, “Gee, I didn’t think you’d be home! Mind if I stop and chat a while?“ I was a much better drama queen than that.

For whatever reason, James never invited anyone into the house. We were always on the porch. That was fine for informal chats on warm East Tennessee summer evenings. But it was a bit too, um, public for anything more than chat and iced tea.

Finally I determined that if James weren’t going to invite me into his house, I would invite him into mine. I had a small two-room apartment in an old house about four blocks from James. It was actually two rented rooms, one of which happened to have a kitchen.

It seemed a perfect idea. I had a color TV. I had a stereo system. I had a cat.

We’d maybe watch some TV. We’d listen to some music. He’d play with my cat.

But then what?

As it turned out, we never did watch TV, we never did listen to the stereo. But James and my cat did get along famously.

So did James and I. After a fashion.

It turned out that James was as inexperienced as I in what to do next. He had “messed around” with a few other guys, but he wasn’t “out” in the gay scene of Knoxville, such scene as there was. His gay sexual experience was little more than that of any number of adolescent straight boys who “messed around” with their buddies.

So did we have sex? Well, yes and no. We were both horny and naïve. Our bodies (hormones) reacted but our minds didn’t know what to next. So we spent a lot of time hugging, groping, fondling, and even giggling as we ended up on the hard, cold floor of my apartment in our underwear. While maybe we didn’t “have” sex, the mechanics of which neither of us was clear about, we both got, um, sexual release. Then we got dressed and it was time for James to go.
It wasn’t until I looked at my desk calendar the next morning I realized that I’d had my first gay experience – my coming out event – on July 4th. Independence Day. Somehow that made me smile.

I had finally come out, at least to myself and one other guy.

Thanks to James.

And James’ cat.

Time to go back in time

So far, for you following this blog, I've been posting the collected and completed stories chronologically.
I don't write them that way. At the moment I'm working on two that will go in different places in the three-part timeline of the 1970s. One is from 1971, the other several years later.

But my very next post will be a story completed a few years back that takes place in 1969. In the collection I'm assembling it appears as a Preface. It's my coming-out story.

Enjoy. And please comment.

Story 16: Living Apart - Together (1974)

Living Apart – Together (1974)

Shortly after Steve and I broke up, we did the next obvious thing.

We moved in together.

Twice.

Well, we didn’t move in together right away. But we spent enough time together that only those really close to us knew that we had broken up. And even they weren’t terribly sure.

When Steve and I first met, he was sharing a two-bedroom house with a straight guy. A straight guy with a fiancé. A fiancé who didn’t live there but spent each night there. Straight Boy had the front bedroom. Steve had the back bedroom. The back bedroom also happened to be the only one with an adjoining bathroom.

That meant that Straight Boy and Straight Boy’s fiancé had to go through Steve’s bedroom to get to the one and only bathroom in the place.

This wasn’t so much a problem during the first few weeks Steve and I were together because he usually drove out to Kingston to my mobile home (yes, I now owned a mobile home) to spend the night, driving back to Knoxville in the morning for work. Sometimes I’d be in Knoxville and would bring him out for the night and drive him back in the morning.

On weekends, however, I worked in Knoxville, noon to six on Saturday and the same on Sunday. During the week I was program director at a small-town AM Top 40 station. On weekends I played six hours of classic country gospel music and on Sunday NASCAR races on a Knoxville FM station. Sound crazy? Well, on some Saturdays I worked the 6 a.m. to noon shift in Rockwood playing Top 40, then drove to Knoxville and did six hours of country gospel. Then I changed clothes at the station and went out and played club kid. That was my schedule the day I first dated Steve. I had done two air shifts at two different radio stations with two different formats in two different towns and then gone out on a date. The next morning – the first morning Steve and I woke up in bed together – I had to leave and go play six hours of country gospel music.

Over the next few months, things changed. Straight Boy and his fiancé finally moved out and married, leaving Steve with a whole four-room house to himself. I decided to return to Knoxville, find work and finish my long-dormant master’s degree.

And Steve and I decided to break up.

Actually we decided it would be nice “if maybe we saw other people.”

Actually Steve thought of it first, but not much before I came to the same conclusion.
But it wasn’t like the usual “let’s see other people but still be friends” type break up. Somehow, we knew, we still loved each other. We still wanted to be together. But, contrary to the cliché, we really did want to date other people.

No, we didn’t really want to date other people.

We just wanted to trick with other people.

A lot.

Steve brought up the idea one morning at his place. Over breakfast. By the time breakfast was over, we had broken up. By that evening I was moving in to Steve’s old bedroom. The one you had to walk through to get to the bathroom. Steve had set himself up in Straight Boy’s room. Of course this now meant that if I had a trick, Steve would have to walk in on us. And, if Steve had a trick, the trick would have to walk in on us or, more likely, just me. Alone.

Since I had landed work in Knoxville and had gotten back to full-time graduate study, moving in with Steve allowed me to put the mobile home up for sale and avoid the daily commute from Roane County.

Steve was still finishing his degree in commercial art and was a night manager at Arby’s. I was working toward a master’s in communication and working nights as creative director, copywriter and production director for an “easy listening” FM station. We saw each other, if at all, late at night. Unless of course we were out at the clubs. Or in bed with a trick.

The arrangement worked well for several months. We made it all the way through Christmas, in fact. Steve’s gift to me was a new space heater for my bedroom. We had been trying to heat all four rooms with just two space heaters and that just wasn’t working. “I hope you have the warmest Christmas ever,” read Steve’s card attached to the space heater.

Then Steve moved out. Someone he worked with had lost a roommate for his two-bedroom townhouse and begged Steve to move in. I was OK with the idea since the rent for the house wasn’t that bad for me to manage myself. It also meant no more “interruptions” from someone wanting to use the bathroom.

But a few weeks after Steve’s departure I came home to find a sign on the front door of the house.

It had been condemned “for human habitation.”

What?

Apparently the local authorities were inspecting properties in our area and were not terribly happy with something – perhaps the wiring or the plumbing. I’ll never know because I didn’t bother to ask.

I called Steve only to find out that his roommate – the one who had begged him to move into the townhouse – had moved out to be with his newest “relationship.”

So, once again, it happened.

Steve and I were living together.

At least now the bathroom was located between our two bedrooms.

Story 15: Steve: When a Trick Becomes a Treat (1974)

Steve: When a Trick became a Treat (1974)

It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that there’s not a lot to do in Rockwood, Tennessee on a Wednesday night.

It was late winter of 1974. I’d moved to Rockwood in the fall of 1972 to join a daytime AM radio station as a disk jockey and ended up as program director doing the morning shift. Rockwood was just over forty miles west of Knoxville via I-40, but a world away for a gay boy.

As I was on the air by 6 a.m. Monday through Saturday, Saturday night was about the only time I made it to the bright lights of the big city and the darkened rooms of its gay clubs. I was pretty much out to everyone at the station, the result of a visit by Joey a year ago when he got stranded at my place for four nights because of an ice storm. Before they come out, most gay guys assume they are the only one in the world. I pretty much knew I was the only gay guy in Rockwood.
Going to a bar in Knoxville on a weeknight was difficult. I had to be up at 4:30 the next morning for work and there wasn’t much “action” on those nights.

But one fateful night I couldn’t help myself. The aluminum walls of my mobile home were closing in, so I fired up my trusty Gremlin and headed for K-town.

For no special reason, I headed for Entrè Nous, a small club in Art Deco style just west of Gay Street. (Yes, Knoxville’s main street was named Gay Street.) Although it was a fairly chilly night, there seemed to be more guys standing outside in the parking lot than inside. I knew most of them, all except one.

He caught my attention for a number of reasons. He was dressed in jeans, a sweater and a waist length winter-weight jacket. He had black – very black – straight hair that fell over his forehead. And he was short. Not as short as me, for few people are, but short enough I could almost look directly into his eyes when talking to him. And talk to him I did. And he talked to me. His name was Steve.

Steve was a UT undergrad, major in communication design, UT’s fancy name for commercial art. He was assistant manager at an Arby’s and he shared a house with a straight roommate and, often, the straight roommate’s fiancé.

We talked for some time and then we made a date. Yes, a date. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who had to be to work by 6 a.m. Fast food managers did too.

We agreed to meet at his house around 6:30 on Saturday. Besides my Rockwood radio work, I did afternoon shifts Saturday and Sunday on a Knoxville country station. Steve had Sundays off and I didn’t have to be to the station until noon. We’d go eat, maybe go see a movie, go to a club or two and then, well, we knew what was next.

He gave me his address and phone number and we said our goodbyes.

We had made a date, but I’m sure we both knew it wasn’t a real date; it was a prearranged trick. That was all I expected or thought I wanted and he later admitted that was all he had in mind. Little did we know.

Over the next days, I thought about Saturday night, but it didn’t obsess me. It was exciting to know who I’d be sleeping with that night, but I never got starry eyed or imagined I’d found a lover. Steve would be another trick. The only difference was I had gotten his phone number before instead of after the trick..

When Saturday morning arrived, I selected a change of clothes for the evening I thought would be appropriate and headed out for Knoxville and six hours of playing country “classics” (oldies) on WIVK-FM. After signing off at six, I went to the downstairs lounge and restroom to change, freshen up and call Steve. He told me he’d just gotten home and was going to take a bath. If he didn’t answer the door when I got there, I was to come in and wait in the living room and he’d be out shortly. I wondered that he said he was going to take a bath and not a shower, but I’d discover later that his house, where I would later live, had only a bathtub.

I arrived about 6:30 and, sure enough, there was no answer, so I let myself in. Steve heard me come in and called from the bathroom that he’d be out in a minute or so.

I felt a little unsure of what would transpire when he did come out. After all, this was a date and not the usual trick. We wouldn’t have just arrived at his place (or my place) after meeting and talking (and likely groping) at the bar, ready for, um, action. ONo, our plan was to go get something to eat, maybe see a movie, and then hit the club scene.

Steve seemed just as unsure, for when he did come into the living room, we just greeted one another, made obligatory comments on each other’s outfits and then sat down on the couch as if to engage in some small talk about how each other’s day had gone.

But that’s not what happened.

Within seconds we were in a tight embrace, kissing and hugging like long-lost lovers reunited. It was a couple of minutes – time seemed irrelevant – before we came up for air and then it started again within seconds. Gone were thoughts of dinner, a movie, and the club. Neither one of us wanted to let go, even to leave the couch.

Oh, I’d had somewhat similar encounters with tricks, but we were usually on our feet, one leading the other awkwardly in the direction of the bedroom. But neither Steve nor I was leading anywhere.

My mind was flashing alarm signals. This wasn’t the passionate foreplay of a trick. This was something else. Something dangerous. Something that, dare I even think it, began with the letter, “l.”

No, I knew, you don’t fall in love with a trick. You don’t even say the word in a casual way, the way you might say, “I love that song,” or “I love pizza.” Maybe the word would come after a series of encounters, and then only hesitantly. Love was dangerous. Love could hurt.
Yet I was in love. As a song from years later would put it, truly, madly, deeply.

What in hell was going on here?

Finally we were ready to leave the couch. How long we were there I don’t know, but it was now dark outside and I had arrived about an hour before sunset.

Clearly Steve was thinking the same things I was and we both agreed it was time to at least get something to eat. So we sat back on the couch, a bit apart from each other, and decided on a place to go.

Then it started all over again.

I guess we both realized it was too early for bed, but dinner, a movie or a night at the club seemed irrelevant now. The night was to be ours and ours alone.

So what did we do next, finally freeing ourselves from the passionate hold of the couch? We went shopping, of course.

Well, actually, we headed out for the “Strip,” the several block section of Cumberland Avenue that runs through the University, block after block of eateries, record shops, service stations and anything else to attract a college crowd. Steve lived about six blocks north of the Strip, just off 17th, and, no, I don’t remember a thing we talked about while walking there. Nights like that are like that, I guess, with certain moments recorded indelibly and others lost forever because, perhaps, they didn’t matter. They didn’t matter because all that was important was we were together. Neither of us had said the “L” word yet and not just because gay boys are afraid to say it. We both knew it was going to be said, but we had all the time in the world to say it.

I don’t even recall where we ate, but I’m sure we did. It was probably at the Krystal, as there was no McDonald’s yet on the strip. It was just one more thing not worth remembering.

Now had we been straight, and had Steve been a girl, we’d likely have gone to a nice restaurant (there were a few nearby) for a quiet dinner at a dimly lit table.

But since we were gay, and we were both guys, we did what a gay couple would do. We went shopping for clothes. Our styles were a bit different, but not conflicting it turned out. Steve looked at things he liked and I looked over and tried on things I liked and we each offered opinions on the other selections. Straight women do this. Gay women do this. Straight guys don’t do this. Gay guys do. (Think about this the next time you see two guys shopping for clothes and asking each other’s opinions.)

It turned out neither of us had enough money on us for big-ticket items, so we settled on something we both liked and agreed upon.

Underwear.

Yes, the first intimate gift I bought for Steve was a pair of briefs with a checked pattern that reminded me of a tablecloth. He bought me a pair that was pale blue. Only gay guys in love would do that.

I’m sure we both saw where this was leading. If we’d bought each other jackets, we could have put them on there and worn them home, showing them off wherever we went. But, practically, putting on the underwear would have to wait until we returned to Steve’s place. And, that, of course, would mean getting undressed. Together. I know this was what I was thinking and I’m sure Steve was too.

As I recall, we didn’t head straight home, but wandered through a few more of the shops on the Strip, likely England’s record store and probably the Vol Market, a local deli, to buy a Coke. We knew what the evening still held, but somehow we were in no hurry to get to that point.

Shopping, browsing, snacking, walking, all that seemed to matter was that we were together. We talked on the way back, I’m sure, but I don’t remember what we said. I guess we probably were just getting to know more about each other.

One of the reasons Steve had suggested we get together this particular night was that his housemate (and the housemate’s fiancé) would be away the whole night. Or so we thought. At least they weren’t there when we returned.

It was at this point I was glad we’d bought the underwear. Without it, neither of us would have known what to do next. Why? Well, because we’d never been in quite this situation before.
You see, when two guys meet in a bar and head to one of their places, the process is simple. A bit of small talk, maybe a quick tour of the digs, an offer of a drink, a little “mood” music on the stereo, and then it begins. First, the kissing, the embracing, the groping, then the slow undressing, all accompanied by a gradual movement toward the bedroom and the bed.

Both of us had dated girls in high school. We’d meet them, take them to dinner, maybe a movie, maybe go for a walk and then take them back home. And there, because we were gay guys, the evening ended.

A trick, on the other hand, began at this point. There was no dinner or movie or long walk beforehand, only some glances and dances at a bar, a bar we’d both arrived at alone, hoping we wouldn’t leave alone.

Steve and I had spent the entire evening together and only now were we in his bedroom. Now what?

We did what we knew. When you get home from shopping, you try on what bought. You show it off to each other. We had bought each other underwear.

Story 14: Miss Gay Knoxville at the Hyatt Regency

Miss Gay Knoxville at the Hyatt Regency (1974)

Many young girls dream of growing up to be Miss America
.
Not many young boys dream of growing up to be Miss Gay Knoxville.

I never dreamed of growing up to emcee the Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant.

But I did.

Don’t let the “Miss” mislead you. Any pageant with “Miss Gay” in the title is a beauty pageant composed of drag queens. And don’t let the official sounding title mislead you either. Drag pageant names are generally as phony as “world championship” titles in professional wrestling or “very special episodes” of prime-time television series. Sometimes the winner of a local drag pageant will indeed go on to a more select regional or national competition but not always.
By the mid 1970s gay life in Knoxville had grown to the point where the community supported at least a half-dozen bars of decent quality and size. Tennessee’s drinking age was eighteen and Knoxville’s liquor-by-the-drink law set closing time at 3 a.m., drawing patrons – especially on the weekends – from as far away as Lexington, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia, where the drinking age was higher and the closing time earlier.

So when some people decided it was time for a Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant to be held, they didn’t think small. The very first such event would be held not in a large gay club. No, it would held in the enormous grand ballroom at the Knoxville Hyatt Regency. Among the celebrity judges would be Knoxville’s mayor, a very straight man who seemed to have no problem being associated with such an event.

What was needed was a celebrity emcee. For reasons of which I’ve never been entirely certain, that turned out to be me.

I wasn’t really a celebrity but a somewhat well-known local radio personality. I considered myself actually less than somewhat well-known but the organizers didn’t think so. Or maybe everyone they had asked had turned them down.

I did have some concerns when they made the offer. Would I have to be in drag? No, they said, I would be in a tuxedo. Given my life-long aversion to formal wear, I didn’t really consider that a yes or no answer. I’d never dressed in drag but suspected a dress would be more comfortable than a tux. But a tux it was to be, they said. They would even pay for it. Fine. And they would pay me. Also fine. Then I decided to push my luck. Would they pay for my drinks at the after party at the Back Office Lounge? Yes they would. Again fine. Then I really pushed my luck. Would they provide me with, um, “companionship” for the evening? I don’t think I was really serious about that request but they said, yes, they would. I wasn’t sure how fine that was.

The big night arrived. I’d been fitted for the tux a week earlier and, yes, they had paid for it. The mayor was indeed there along with such “celebrity” judges as a local hairdresser and a female TV news personality and an audience of several hundred.

The lobby outside the Hyatt’s three main meeting room/ballrooms was, well, interesting. Apparently no knew that the adjacent ballroom was to be occupied by the Rev. Bob Bevington, “the chaplain of Bourbon Street,” who was in the second night of revival services. He was apparently unaware that he was to be preaching that night next door to a drag queen pageant.
But I had other concerns. First of all, I had never emceed a beauty pageant of any kind, much less a gay beauty pageant. My only familiarity with such was years of watching Bert Parks host the Miss America Pageant. Somehow I didn’t consider Bert Parks a model for the role I was about to play.

A few years earlier, I had emceed a number of drag shows at the Europa, but I had worked backstage with a microphone and a list of performers and cues as to their preferred introductions. I could dress as I liked, usually in my club clothes. Backstage was also the changing area for the performers so I was generally the only guy back there who remained fully clothed. The owner paid me in cash at the end of each evening and I also got free drinks during the shows. Although I introduced all the acts I never introduced myself. I was just a voice over the PA system.

But now I would be introduced. And now I would be seen. In a tuxedo.

I would have note cards for the introductions but I couldn’t just hold them and read them word for word as I had done at the Europa. I had been chosen emcee in part because I was a radio personality. You don’t see radio personalities. You hear them. It doesn’t matter how they are dressed. It doesn’t matter if they are reading everything they say. I had done theater and I had public speaking experience, but my everyday work in radio depended only upon my voice.
Now, I realized, I would be one of the performers. I wouldn’t be in drag, I wouldn’t be lip-synching, but I would be performing. And I wouldn’t just do introductions for each act; I would have to introduce the whole event. I would have to welcome the audience, introduce the judges, explain the judging procedure, thank the sponsors and keep the whole event running smoothly.

Ouch.

Should I prepare a monologue of some sort? No. Should I just keep it simple? Yes. Either way I had to have an opening line. In my years of theater I had learned that if I could get past my very first line the rest would fall into place.

When the big night arrived, once again I found myself backstage and once again it was the changing area for the performers. The scene was rather Felliniesque, I in my tux and a group of young males in various stages of female attire. Well, mostly female attire. While all the performers’ outfits included wigs, heels, gowns and usually bras to maintain a feminine illusion, what they wore underneath varied considerably. Some wore girdles for shape and concealment while others wore basic women’s panties. Still others wore jockey shorts under their pantyhose. While each performer was onstage, I would be checking with those still to perform to see if there were any changes needed for their introductions. It is more than a bit surreal to be dressed formally and be having a conversation with another guy dressed in a wig, full makeup, bra, pantyhose and jockey shorts.

Finally, my note cards in order, the audience was seated, I walked on stage, adjusted the microphone stand and said, “Good evening and welcome to the first annual Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant!” Then it was time for the line that had just come to me backstage.

“Tonight,” I continued, “represents the bringing together of two great American traditions: The Miss America Pageant and ‘I’ve Got a Secret,” referring to a once-popular television quiz show that had left the air a few years earlier. The audience’s abundant laughter meant they got the joke.

The ice broken, I quickly moved on to introduce the judges and give an overview of the evening, introduced the first performer and exited stage right. Stage right, in theater terms, is to the audience’s left and it was in that offstage area that the performers changed, the show’s directors ran about in a perpetual state of queenly panic and I, ever the actor, pondered my lines for my next appearance on stage. I kept each introduction brief and appropriate. “Celebrity” though I might allegedly be, the audience was not there to see me. And I didn’t consider tonight’s work to be a career move. This might indeed be the first Miss Gay Knoxville Pageant but I doubted I would ever host a second one, if indeed there were a second one. (As it turned out I wasn’t living in Knoxville the next year and have no idea if there ever was a second one.)

I don’t recall much of the rest of the pageant, at least the on-stage portion. I don’t recall who won or how the individual judges’ voting went. I have a vague memory of meeting backstage (stage left this time, away from the boys in lingerie) to tally the results.

What I do recall is the after-party and the night (all night) that followed. The party began at the Back Office Lounge around ten and ended, for me at least, around six the next morning in the bedroom of my mobile home some fifty miles away.

The Back Office Lounge was part of the gay bar renaissance of the early 1970s in Knoxville. The legalizing of liquor-by-the-drink in Knoxville and the lowering of the drinking age to 18 and a closing time of 3 a.m. for clubs that served liquor led to a real expansion of Knoxville nightlife, gay life included. The Carousel drew a mixed gay-straight crowd during the height of the disco era because of its large dance floor (lighted from underneath) and DJ booth, a first for the city. It also had a show bar upstairs for drag performances. Entré Nous was an intimate art deco club with a small dance floor. The Carousel was tucked away in the Fort Sanders neighborhood near the University of Tennessee. Entré Nous was a few blocks east of Gay Street, the main shopping street. (That’s right, Gay Street.) The two remaining “old school” gay bars – beer only, midnight closing time – were likewise off the beaten path.

The Back Office Lounge, however, was a former restaurant right across from the main post office and just a few steps from the county court house. Actually, it still served as a restaurant during the day for the downtown lunch crowd. By nine or ten p.m., however, it became a gay bar. It lacked a dance floor and therefore was primarily a “cruise” bar, a place to meet both old friends and, if things worked out, new friends.

It was the perfect place for an after-party with lots of room at the bar and lots of tables throughout the room, suitable for the crowd – well-dressed and, um, sexually diverse – that would be arriving from the pageant.

So far, all had gone as planned. The promoters had paid for my tux and paid me a small fee for hosting the pageant. Throughout the after-party I’d be told what a good job I had done hosting. And throughout the after party, the promoters had kept another promise: they paid for my drinks. But what about my (perhaps) facetious request for, um, companionship for the night?
They came through on that score also.

With a contestant from the pageant.

Fortunately, it was someone I already knew, someone whose house I’d been to for an after-bar party the previous year when bars still closed early. Unfortunately, although they had honored my assumedly facetious request, I was now committed – at least out of good manners – to spend significant time with this guy, missing out (or so I imagined) on other opportunities with guys just waiting to trick with a pageant MC. Yeah, right. On the other hand, he was a friend, a fun guy and not a regular at drag, although he had performed once at the Carousel. And because I had been at his house for a party after that performance I knew he was one of those who did drag while wearing jockey shorts (underneath his pantyhose.)

(A bit of history here: In the days before – and for some time after – Stonewall, many municipalities included among their anti-gay laws a requirement that any person in drag must be wearing at least three items of clothing “appropriate to gender.” Thus many drag performers wore male underwear – and perhaps an item of outerwear such as shirt – under their gowns. Police conducting all-too-frequent raids on gay bars would check for such things. Even though the laws fell into disuse by the mid-1970s many performers followed the tradition. Others felt keeping their male underwear drew some sort of gender line between being a drag performer and a transvestite or “tranny.” End of history lesson.)

Somehow the successful experience of hosting the pageant – and the free drinks – helped me accept his companionship. Mostly it was the free drinks. At first.

The after-party was fun, although I felt a bit strange being the only guy there in a tux. Most of the contestants had shed their costumes and assumed their male identities, all except two: the winner whose name (both drag name and real name) I cannot remember and my “companion” for the evening, whose name I also cannot remember.

The club having no dance floor, everyone did a lot of table hopping. Most of the crowd had been at the pageant, and most of them stopped by our table, many offering assumedly sincere compliments to either me or my companion.

As the evening – and it was rather late evening, after midnight for sure, by now – wore on, the drinks wore us down. The crowd thinned and it was time to go. But go where?
Apparently it was decided – by me or by him or by both of us, I’m not sure – that “where” would be back to my mobile home in Roane County.

Story 13: Tom, the Discount Drug Dealer and Closet Case

Tom, the Discount Drug Dealer and Closet Case (1973)

I met Tom through Joe.

Joe was my afternoon DJ, an affable, heavy-set, baby-faced guy who had an affinity for smoking illicit substances.

In other words, Joe was a stoner.

Tom was his dealer.

And a more unlikely drug dealer I had never known. Tom was twenty, but looked about sixteen. His late parents (I never knew the circumstances of their death) had left him a trust fund but he didn’t have full control of it yet. It paid for his classes at the community college, but not much else. So he sold marijuana. The Roane County airport was lighted but unstaffed at night and, being located up on Roosevelt Mountain, was rather isolated. It was, therefore, a major drop-off point for marijuana shipments. At the time, apparently, most marijuana sold in the greater Knoxville area arrived at the Roane County Airport. Somehow Tom was part of the distribution network. As far as I know, Tom never dealt in any “heavier” drugs and he only did enough
dealing to pay his rent and basic expenses.

It was known to many that Tom was a dealer.

It was known to very few was that Tom was a closet case.

I didn’t know it at first. My gaydar barely went off when I first met him. I did find him very cute, however, in a “why can’t he be gay” sort of way.

It also took me a while to figure out just why Tom was hanging around the radio station so much. In a small-town radio station, things can get a bit informal. Friends do drop by and most of them know the protocol if we let them in the control room. When the red light goes on, shut up! At first I didn’t know just whose friend Tom was. Then I realized he was usually around during Joe’s afternoon shift, which ran from two to six. Since I did the six to ten a.m. shift, I was usually busy with production work when Tom would come around. Or I’d be ready to leave for the day.

But then Tom began showing up when Joe wasn’t there. I really doubted he was dealing to any other staff members. The owner and his wife preferred margaritas as their drug of choice. The news director was a family man into church activities and martial arts. The station secretary’s idea of living on the edge was extra sugar in her morning coffee.

That left just me. And my drug of choice was, well, tricking.

Perhaps Tom wanted to be my “dealer” too. Or maybe he just liked hanging out at the station between classes.

But then he started dropping by during my Saturday morning shift – when I was the only one at the station.

Mostly we talked about music, not unusual considering we were in a radio station control room, listening to music I was playing.

And then, one day, he invited me to his apartment.

To listen to music.

Tom’s apartment was in the back of a large old house. It was really a studio with one L-shaped room serving as dining area, kitchen, living room and bedroom. The living room furniture consisted of two chairs and his bed.

I quickly realized that Tom knew I was gay. Perhaps he’d heard about the hickey incident with Joey. Perhaps he had gaydar. Perhaps he was gay. I wasn’t yet sure.

In fact while we talked about me being gay, Tom seems at pains to indicate that he was not gay. At first he played the, “Oh I’m straight, but I’m very cool with gay guys.” I’d heard that from a lot of guys. Some I’d ended up having sex with. Others just became friends.

Tom was fun to be with, fun to discuss music with, so I pretty much played along with his claim of heterosexuality.

Until the back rubs started.

Tom was only a few inches taller than me, but very slender, basically a healthy version of skin and bones. From his energy and his healthy appearance, I suspected he did little or none of the drugs he sold. In fact we never smoked weed together. Maybe he knew I wasn’t a stoner; maybe he wasn’t a stoner, just a businessman.

One night I arrived just as Tom had finished a shower and he was wearing only his jockeys when he let me in, although he was holding his jeans as if in the process of getting dressed.

“Do you know any massage techniques?” he asked. It was an interesting conversation starter, not the usual, “Hi, come on in. Can I get you a drink?”

“Not in a professional way,” I replied, “but I was in sports and I know some things about sore muscles.” Who knows, I thought, maybe he strained a shoulder lifting a bag of Colombian.
“I really need a back rub, man. I’m really tight and tense.”

He apparently took my silence for assent and, dropping his jeans on a chair, lay face down on his bed. I was still standing by the door and hadn’t yet taken off my jacket. Just over a minute had passed since I’d knocked on Tom’s door and now I was removing my jacket and Tom was lying face down on his bed in his jockey shorts.

The boy is fast, I thought. And I’d always prided myself on cutting to the chase with a trick. But I’d never gotten them undressed and on a bed this quickly.

I got up on the end of his bed on my knees and leaned forward to begin working on Tom’s shoulders. I was no professional masseuse, but I’d seen enough – and experienced enough – muscle massages during my years as a college athlete to know the basics. I worked down from his shoulders to his upper back. He was indeed quite tense and tight and he told me it felt good, so I continued. I moved down the middle of his back and then his lower back toward the waist band of his briefs. Up to now, although I was enjoying the experience, I treated it as one guy giving another a back rub. I’d done this for teammates in college and been the recipient a few times as well. No big deal up to this point.

But then I got a bit silly – or maybe just horny – and snapped the waist band of his briefs as if I were planning to go lower. I wasn’t sure if straight-proclaiming Tom would tell me stop right then and there.

Instead he reached back with both arms and slid his briefs down below his butt cheeks.
That had never happened to me in college.

Straight-proclaiming or not, Tom was about to get his butt cheeks massaged. He had a small, smooth, not-quite-bubble butt. I began where the waistband had been snapped, then smoothly over each cheek, then ran my fingers across the bottom where the leg openings had been. Then, sensing no objection, I pulled his briefs down further and went to work on his legs, then slipped his jockeys all the way off, even giving his freshly-showered feet a bit of a rub.

It was like a fantasy, the inspiration for a wet dream. Me, kneeling at the end of a boy’s bed while said boy lay face down and naked and asking for a back rub.

Tom lay still for a moment. I remained still too, wondering what would happen next. What would he say? What would he do? Where would we go from here?

Sorry to disappoint, but what follows isn’t an erotically arousing tale of passionate, unbridled sex that lasts late into the night.

Didn’t happen. Not that night.

Tom slid off his bed, retrieved his underpants, put them on, finished dressing in jeans and a flannel shirt and asked if I wanted a Coke.

“You’re good,” he told me.

I thanked him and then we spent the rest of the evening talking about and listening to music.
But the next time I visited Tom he wanted another “back rub.” And the time after that. And the time after that.

Eventually no visit to Tom’s was complete without him stripping to his briefs and lying face down on his bed.

And, eventually, it led to something more.

Never was a word said about Tom’s sexuality, the conversation of the evening remaininged about music or about the radio station or about school. Tom never spoke about his drug-dealing sideline and we never consumed any of his product. (I didn’t know - or want to know - where he kept his “stash.”)

Then one night when Tom had stripped down to his briefs I stripped down to mine too and went to work giving Tom a “back rub.”

When I finished I asked if he would return the favor, the favor I had offered so many times now.
He seemed to be confused by the request. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, I thought. Maybe I’d sent him into such a state of bliss with the back rub that he was having trouble receiving communication from here on Earth and, for a moment, he remained motionless, lying still face-down on his bed.

Suddenly he got up, keeping his back to me, reached down for his briefs and put them on, then turned around and gestured for me to lie face down on the bed. As I did, I couldn’t help but notice that either Tom’s briefs were rather loose or he was somewhat aroused. Not wanting to ruin the moment, I said nothing and just lay down awaiting Tom’s touch.

I was curious as to how this role reversal would work. Until now I had given the “massages” and Tom had received them. And I had been making it all up as I went along, trying to recall post-practice massages from the college athletic trainer. As far as I knew, Tom lacked any such memories.

But it didn’t seem to matter. Tom was either a natural or he was channeling my college trainer. Of course, my trainer’s hands never went some of the places that Tom’s hands were going.
For the most part Tom followed my pattern. He began with the shoulders and the upper back, then the lower back, all very legitimate moves my college trainer would have approved.
He also followed my moves around the waist and below. Down came my briefs – followed by Tom’s caressing hands – all the way down to my ankles.

As he finished and I lay there face down, I found the answer to my earlier question about Tom’s briefs. No, they weren’t loose.

I was about to discreetly get up and retrieve my underwear when Tom’s hands grabbed my waist and turned me over on my back. And "massaged" away any of my remaining stiffness.

Story 12 - Snowbound - with Hickeys

Snowbound – with Hickeys (1973)

Someone has written that, “February is the cruelest month.” That someone never experienced January while working at a radio station. The Christmas rush is over, the advertisers aren’t advertising so the sales staff is in a bad mood. That puts the manager in a bad mood and the staff follows suit.

There’s no more Christmas music to play, but the labels don’t put out much new music until early spring, so even the regular playlist sounds stale.

So when Joey called and invited himself over for a few days, I was delighted. He wouldn’t start spring term at junior college for another week. Since I’d moved to the end of the world – otherwise known as Rockwood, Tennessee – a few months earlier, I hadn’t seen Joey much. (I was later to visit him and spend the night – against school rules – in his dorm room, but that’s another story.)

Joey didn’t have a car, so I drove over in my trusty ’67 Camaro to pick him up and bring him back to my rented trailer. OK, mobile home. No, trailer. In another year I would own an actual mobile home, but this place was too old, too metallic, too, um, rustic to be called anything but a trailer. Plus it was in a trailer park, basically a large front yard of a home in which the owner had placed – at various angles – a variety of trailers. The trailer had a living room/kitchen, a bathroom with shower, and a second bedroom that was more of a large closet into which could be squeezed a twin-sized bed. It was cozy, it was adequate, and it was cheap.

One of the other DJ’s from the radio station lived in another trailer in the “park.” He was an overweight and jolly stoner named Joe. His on-air greeting was “Hi on you,” which of course could be heard as “High on you.” When his mother visited and found his stash of weed, he promised to dispose of it. He did. He placed it in the trash barrel next to his trailer, lit it and stood over it inhaling, turning on most of the trailer park in the process.

Joey didn’t smoke weed or even drink much. I only drank at clubs and hadn’t yet met Tom, the local boy who was one of Joe-the-stoner-DJ’s suppliers and who would become a regular visitor to the radio station. He was selling weed to pay his way through community college until his trust fund kicked in. Roane County had an airport up on Roosevelt Mountain with a lighted runway and it was a drop-off point for most of the marijuana coming into that part of East Tennessee. Sometimes so much arrived that Tom couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough. One time he arrived at that mobile home I eventually bought offering “discount” Colombian saying he was having an “overstock” sale!

I wasn’t “out” at work, but that wasn’t an issue. I was young (and poor) enough not to be yet married and none of the other jocks were married either. We all conducted our social life either forty miles east in Knoxville or occasionally a hundred miles or so west in Nashville. None of us were local boys anyhow. I apparently didn’t give off any “gay vibes” in any case. Once, a sales rep who visited the station occasionally offered to lend me his Playboy Club key when I told him I was going to Atlanta for the weekend. He apparently assumed I’d be interested in using it.
As a result, having Joey stay a few days and hang out at the radio station during the day wouldn’t by itself raise any suspicions. Joey was as country in his ways as the owner and the other local staff. He’d fit right in.

And no one would have suspected a thing. Ever. If it hadn’t been for just one thing. Hickeys. Let me explain.

The first night of Joey’s stay was uneventful. We talked, watched TV, listened to music and fell asleep because I had to be up very early to sign the station on at 6 a.m. The plan was for him to stay two nights and then I would drive him back to school. He hung out at the station during my morning shift and my office work during the day and we headed back to the trailer.

That night snow fell. And fell. And fell. The roads were barely drivable the next morning, but we made it to the station. Being Saturday meant I had only my morning air shift to do. We stopped at a local grocery on the way home to get some food. The night was again uneventful although we did do a bit of cuddling on the sectional couch we had re-assembled into a makeshift double bed. The snow had let up but temperatures remained well below freezing so the area roads were basically impassible. We could get around town with difficulty, but getting in or out of town was virtually impossible. Joey called and learned that school wouldn’t open Monday because most students couldn’t make it back over the weekend. So he would be staying at least until Monday. And I didn’t have to work at the station on Sunday. The weather was not too bad to go anywhere and there was really no place to go in Rockwood even in good weather.

So we did what came, uh, naturally.

All. Night. Long.

As I explained in the previous story, Joey and I were never lovers and the term “boyfriend” wasn’t really in use at the time. A male sex partner was either a “trick” or a “lover.” The distinction could be vague. Someone might trick more than one night with the same person and they wouldn’t be “lovers.” “Lover” implied exclusivity, if only briefly. If one had a lover, one didn’t trick. Although Joey and I had “messed around” frequently during those first few months after meeting at the campus gay group, we hadn’t had many encounters since then. And although I’d spent some nights at his home in the mountains, his family was usually there and we had never “slept” together.

And although I know we meant a great deal to each other, even loved each other, we were not in love with each other. Two people in love and in bed whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears, touch each other softly, share a physical expression of their innermost feelings. Two people who are tricking don’t whisper anything except perhaps, “Do you like this?”, touch each other rather briskly, and share a physical expression of their innermost hormonal desires. Two people in love will awake in the morning in each other’s arms. Two people who are tricking aren’t usually together when the morning comes.

So that night we weren’t “making love.”

We were tricking. With each other.

Since we were snowbound and would be through the coming day, we never went to sleep that night. We had sex, we talked, we had sex, we played some music, we had sex, and we talked some more.

And we gave each other hickeys.

It started innocently enough. About halfway through the night we hit a silly spot, a time of spontaneous unmotivated silliness and giggling. Perhaps it was the snow. Perhaps it was lack of sleep. But I grabbed him and, vampire-like, went for his neck and gave him a hickey. I wasn’t even sure it would work, but it did.

“Did it leave a mark,” he asked. I looked. “It sure did,” I replied.

So he retaliated.

Giving a hickey wasn’t that uncommon, but it usually stopped at one. Turtlenecks weren’t a fashion rage at the time (and really should never be) and even the horniest of gay guys usually had to go to work or school the next day and didn’t really want a visible mark of his nocturnal activity. There were no metrosexuals at the time, so only women and drag queens used makeup, so there was no way to conceal most hickeys.

Tricks seldom inflicted hickeys. That was almost taboo. Hickeys were generally considered as evidence of passionate love making, not tricking.

But silliness overcame gay social and sexual convention that night, so we kept at it. Vampires don’t attack necks as often as we did that night. It’s amazing we didn’t draw any blood.
The Sunday morning sun began to warm the air and by late that day the road ice was melting. We slept most of the day, watched some TV, listened to some music, ate, and then rested some more. Tomorrow we’d go to the station for my air shift and then we’d take Joey back to school.
It wasn’t until Monday morning that I realized we had a problem. We arose around 4:30 a.m., my usual time since I had to be at the station by 5:45. The problem hit me while I was shaving. The problem was what I saw in the mirror. On my neck. All around my neck.

Until about 8 a.m. it wouldn’t matter. Only Joey and I would be at the station. But what would everything think as they arrived? Even if Joey stayed at the trailer and I picked him up after my shift, that wouldn’t matter. Everyone had met Joey, everyone knew he had stayed the weekend, and everyone knew there was no one else who could have inflicted these marks on my neck. We had all been snowbound. So it didn’t really matter if Joey went to work with me or not.
The damage had been done.

I found a shirt with a high collar to wear under my sweater but it wouldn’t be enough. We would just have to tough it out.

We did. Everyone noticed. I know they noticed. But no one said anything, at least not openly. Had they already assumed we were gay? All I know is that were very happy to depart the station immediately after my air shift.

Problem solved, right?

Well, no.

We left the station and headed for Interstate 40. As we were halfway up the ramp the Camaro started to overheat. I pulled to the side of the ramp, stopped before the engine got too hot, waited a moment and started again. The problem was still there. So I turned around and drove the wrong way down the ramp back to the highway, stopped two or three more times to cool the engine a bit and finally made it to Rockwood’s lone service station.

We both were wearing jackets and scarves, but anyway I wasn’t thinking about my neck but about my beloved Camaro (not so beloved that it wouldn’t soon be replaced, however.)
There was no major problem with the car. It just needed a new thermostat and they had the right one in stock.

The problem was that it was cold outside so we waited indoors where it was nice and warm.
It was so warm that, without thinking, we took off our scarves.

Oh yes, we got away in good shape. No one said anything, at least while we were there. And we had an uneventful trip back to Joey’s school.

But I developed a sudden affinity for turtlenecks.

Story 11: Introducing Joey - "I'm not gay, but . . ."

The following story begins the second part of the collection - The Years of Joey

“I’m not gay, but . . .” (1972)

His name was Joe, but I called him Joey.

His name was Joe, not Joseph. Just Joe. He told me he’d gotten in a terrible row with his third grade teacher who told him, “Your name is Joseph. Joe is a nickname.” His mother was called in and she informed the teacher, “His name is not Joseph. His name is Joe.”
But I called him Joey.

We met at a meeting of the Gay Liberation Front, an organization of University of Tennessee students who had so far failed to get university recognition for the group. We met each week just off campus and the location was publicized through posters on university bulletin boards, utility poles and such, so it wasn’t unusual to have visitors at a meeting.

We began, twelve-step style, with introductions. When it came Joey’s turn, he began, “I’m not gay, but I’m doing a paper for a class.”

“I’m not gay, but . . .” Sometimes that was true. This time my gaydar told me it wasn’t, but neither I nor any of the others pressed the issue. Joey was personable, articulate, and likable. And cute. Well, everyone thought he was personable, articulate and likable. I thought he was cute.

Joey was a somewhat tall, slender, blond boy from rural Sevier County, finishing his first year at UT. His personality was southern country boy, but he clearly had an intellectual bent that he revealed in his conversation.

Part of what Joey said was true: he was writing a paper for a class. He asked some good questions and we answered.

When the meeting broke up, a few of us stayed to answer more of his questions. Joey received a fairly heavy dose of Gay 101, probably more than he needed for a class paper. As we all left, I asked Joey if he’d like to get something to eat. He did and we did. Eat, that is. I don’t remember where we ate, but I did learn his address and he got my phone number. I couldn’t ask for more than that. After all, he wasn’t gay. He’d said so.

At the time, I was only enrolled for three credits of thesis hours, which meant I wasn’t attending classes, but supposedly completing a great research work in philosophy. What I was doing was working on a government project for UT, working part-time at a country radio station, and living the club kid life. The university job was my third since returning to Knoxville from Atlanta, although the first job, at a fourth-rate AM station, had lasted only a few weeks. I left after the production room caught fire. I’d then spent most of a year as a copywriter and weekend DJ for a first-rate Top 40 station. The university job had flexible hours and I made them real flexible. Oh, I got my work done, but I had maybe twenty hours of work to stretch over forty salaried hours. This was government work, after all.

Joey lived in a rooming house just off campus and I visited that room often in the next few weeks. My first impressions about his intellectual depth were confirmed each time. My suspicions about his sexuality were more and more confirmed each time.
He hadn’t actually been lying when he said, “I’m not gay, but,” he just hadn’t come out to himself as yet. When a guy says, “I’m not gay, but,” it’s not the same as a bigot saying, “I’m not prejudiced, but.” The bigot knows he’s prejudiced; he just doesn’t want to admit it. The soon-to-be-out (or sooner-or-later-to-be-out) guy may not really know he’s gay. He may think being gay means very stereotypical things. Since he likes being a guy, since he doesn’t want to dress in drag (not yet, anyway), since he thinks all gay guys are easy to recognize by their speech and mannerisms, well, he thinks he’s not really gay.

I’d gone through that stage. How could a former college hockey player be gay? How could a sports-loving guy who screamed his head off when Tennessee played Alabama be gay? How could a philosophy major be gay? OK, maybe that last one was a clue. It’s not really being in denial, but being in the dark, the dark of the deepest part of the closet. It’s so dark you can’t even see that you’re gay.

Joey was going through that stage. He really was writing a class paper and I suspected he’d chosen the topic not just to fulfill an assignment, but also to better understand what he was going through.

Knowing this, I had to be sensitive in our relationship. I’d been out a whole two years at this point. I was a seasoned veteran. I was definitely attracted to him, and I could sense some attraction to me on his part. OK, OK, I was more than definitely attracted to him; I wanted him. Badly. For a gay boy like me who could find a trick for the night even when I arrived a half-hour before the bar closed, patience was difficult. Yet I sensed this would be too important a relationship to put in jeopardy by coming on too strong – or too soon.

Ultimately, we would not become lovers, although we would have sex. It took about three weeks for that to occur. The gay male world has elusive terminology for relationships. I’d say that we became boyfriends, except that so many equate that term with lovers. Oh, we did come to love each other, but we never became lovers.

My patience paid off. Even when we first became intimate, it was different that tricking. We were exploring our relationship, our bodies, and our identities. At times it was as if we were two straight boys in their early teens, best pals, just “messing around” until we could start dating girls. For a guy like me, who often imagined that the next trick might turn into a boyfriend or lover (as sometimes happened), intimacy with Joey was fun, refreshing, exhilarating even. Maybe even a bit innocent. And even a bit of innocence felt good.

The relationship wasn’t about sex, ultimately; it was about friendship, a friendship that would become even more meaningful over the years ahead. It wouldn’t always go smoothly, and there was a time when we stopped speaking (or, rather he stopped to speaking to me or just about anyone), but our relationship carried each of us through some strange times. We were so different and yet so alike. That probably made all the difference. We could be open with each other, share each other’s secrets, things we’d be afraid to tell someone else. I don’t mean scandalous things, but just those personal things you tend to withhold from friends and acquaintances for fear it will jeopardize the relationship. Gay guys have as many hang-ups about their masculinity as straight guys, maybe more. Like the drag queen who always wore Jockey shorts under his dress because, “wearing panties would make me a transvestite,” many of us felt the slightest hint of sensitivity or vulnerability would make others doubt our inherent maleness. We didn’t use the terms “top” and “bottom” then, but “butch” and “fem.” And if anything you did betrayed your “butch-ness,” you were subtly, or not so subtly, cast as “fem.” And that limited your social – or at least, your tricking – opportunities greatly.

Since Joey had yet to visit his first gay bar, he hadn’t been exposed to such oppressive attitudes. He was who he was and he wasn’t about to be labeled. Nor did he desire to label me. Since his first gay social exposure was to other members of the campus group, he got to see the diversity among us and receive the kind of acceptance he likely would not have received if his first gay gathering had been at a bar.

With Joey’s class schedule and my, um, flexible work schedule, we saw each other a lot. His rented room was a short five-block walk from my apartment.

Joey was from Sevierville, in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Actually, he was from some distance outside Sevierville. His home place was an old house with indoor plumbing, but outdoor toilet, located along Douglas Lake. When TVA kept the lake level low, his front lawn was spacious bottom land. When TVA raised the levels, the lake covered the access road and you had to park nearby and traverse a hill to get to the house. There were warning signs aplenty that the lake level could rise at any time. Nonetheless, fishermen often ignored the signs, parked their cars, launched their boats, and returned a few hours later to see only their cars’ antennas.
It was about a month after we met that Joey invited me to visit his family. He lived with his mother and sister, his father having died several years earlier. As he was not out to anyone but me (he still maintained, to a degree, the “I’m not gay, but” front when around the others in the campus group), he certainly wasn’t out to his family.

His sister was just a few years older than Joey and was usually away from the house when I visited, creating whatever kind of social life she could in Sevierville or Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge. Joey and I sensed that she suspected something, but wasn’t about to deal with it or mention it to us.

His mother, a solid old-fashioned country woman, took to me right away. Besides my weekday job at the university, I worked weekend air shifts at WIVK, the dominant country station in the area. And Mama was country and a big WIVK fan. Often she’d call in a request when I was on the air. She’d say, “Sing that new one by Merle Haggard.” She knew I didn’t sing the song, but that was her way of asking me to play a favorite of hers.

If Joey’s sister suspected anything about either him or me, Joey’s mama was without a clue. Gay people were something utterly foreign to her upbringing and environment. She’d been born and raised in the community that was now mostly under Douglas Lake. Folks around there were born there, married there, raised a family there, and died there. They’d go into Sevierville for shopping or maybe church, if there wasn’t one closer, and they’d occasionally journey to the big, big city of Knoxville.

Mama thus welcomed me with open arms, always glad to have me visit. And I welcomed those visits too. There was something calming, quieting, about escaping the academic world and the concrete of Knoxville and stepping back in time to an old house in the country by a lake. Joey and I would go walking paths he’d learned every inch of since childhood. When Douglas Lake was especially low, we’d even get to walk the “streets” of his mother’s old community, noting the cornerstone of what was once a store or the outline of a house foundation. We’d imagine what life was like before TVA came calling in the 1930s, life before the lake and life before electricity, for that is what TVA had brought the Tennessee Valley, along with flood control.

My own mother had grown up on a farm in upstate New York and they hadn’t gotten electricity until just before World War II. My father, the youngest of seven, just missed being born on his family’s farm, the family having migrated to Rochester a few years before his birth. Until fourth grade I’d lived in the city, where houses were set close to each other and to the sidewalk and where most shopping trips were to the corner grocery or bakery or cleaners. Then we moved to the wide expanses of suburbia, with spacious lawns and cars that we needed to get to the shopping centers that preceded the malls. Yet I somehow felt a kinship to the country; I somehow felt at home there. I doubt I’d have made much of a farmer, but I’d probably made a pretty good country boy. For a while at least, until, like Joey, I was ready to come out.

And Joey was ready, no matter what he said that first night.

Story 10: Without a trick, without a clue . . .

Without a Trick, Without a Clue – After Hours at the Marriott (1970)

Midnight sucked. At least on Saturdays. The year was 1970. The place was Atlanta. (Not “Hot’lanta” yet – not by a long shot.) And on Saturday, Atlanta bars closed at midnight. And that sucked. Especially for a gay boy.

You see, straights will drop into their local club not long after dinner or maybe after an early movie. Not gay boys. Our timetable was much different.

Around nine, we’d start figuring out a wardrobe. By nine-thirty, if we’d figured out what to wear, we’d take a shower. Then the hair. Oh, the hair. When I saw Saturday Night Fever, I knew John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, was straight. The boy showered, tried on three different outfits and styled his hair to perfection in the time between getting home from work and sitting down to the family dinner table. And he went to the club right after dinner. Definitely straight behavior.

Ten-thirty was the earliest a conscientious gay boy would make the club scene and, even then, the crowd would be sparse, as the “action” didn’t begin until at least eleven. So you can see that a midnight bar closing could really cramp one’s cruising style. Considering that the club lights would come on full about fifteen minutes before closing, that left barely an hour to find a trick, at least to find one in subdued lighting. Trust me, the old country song that says, “the girls all look prettier at closing time,” does not apply to gay bars.
So what did a boy without a trick – and without a clue – do when midnight came around? He could go home. Home alone? On Saturday night?

He could go to an “after hours” club, a very illegal gathering in some very dangerous neighborhood, as long as he had money for drinks — and for bail.

Or he could go to the Marriott.

The Marriott Hotel in downtown Atlanta had a restaurant open late. I don’t know if it was open all night, but it was open after midnight, for several hours after midnight, and that was all that mattered. And what a sight it was after midnight.

By twelve-fifteen, every trick-less gay guy was there, ordering omelets or pancakes or coffee. Tables were put together to accommodate large groups of people, many of whom wouldn’t even speak to each other in the bars. So why were we so sociable there? There were a couple of reasons.

First of all, we were alone. Some of us were there because we’d failed to hear those four romantic words, “Your place or mine?” sometime earlier in the evening. Some tragic cases might have begun the evening with someone, but it had ended badly – so they ended up at the Marriott. Whatever the reason, we were alone. And we didn’t want to be. Not yet, at least.

Second, there were the queens. They were never alone, always ready to perform for any audience, anywhere, any time. They didn’t go to bars to find partners for the night; those they would find in “tea rooms” or street corners. They went to the bars – and to the Marriott – to be fabulous, even though we didn’t use that word yet in 1970. They called each other, “girl.” They called everyone “girl.” Everyone, that is, but the cute male servers and bus boys, although most of them were gay anyhow. (Gay male server is probably about as redundant as gay church organist.) We “butch” boys (not too butch to spend maybe an hour getting our hair to look right, though) never called each other “girl.” But that made no difference to the queens; we were “girls” nonetheless. The only “real men,” according to them, were the straight boys they would trick with in the stalls or in cars. “I’m going to find myself a man,” they would declare, to a room full of males. Males, yes, but not “real men.”

Don’t get me wrong. Some of them were wonderful people, even cherished friends, but they didn’t sleep with other gay guys. And we didn’t sleep with them. Well, to be truthful, sometimes we did. And we discovered just how butch they could be in bed. Which probably isn’t surprising, considering the number of “butch” boys who must have been raised by dog trainers, the ones who responded really well to the words, “roll over.”

After hours at the Marriott was a social time. While we did indeed cruise, we knew that our chances for a trick were slim to none. That also meant we weren’t competing with each other, something males – gay or straight – are really good at. And it was a public place, so we couldn’t be too open with our affections. But we could actually talk. We could “dish.” We could listen to some queen “read” another queen’s “beads.” “If that bitch comes near me again, I will read her beads!” And they often did.

I don’t remember much what we talked about, at least not specifically. I guess at those times in those places you’re not really supposed to say anything you’d remember later. We were just there to be together. We were just there not to be alone. We were there without a trick. We were there without a clue. We were at the Marriott after hours.

And we were together.