(This series of writings appeared in early 2010 as a 9 week episodic replacing my regular weekly column, Beat This, in the SF Bay Times. It’s just a romp through some filthy, sexy and dangerous times that shouldn’t be forgotten)
When I made my first attempt to actually move into San Francisco I spent a brief amount of time temporarily residing with some friends in San Mateo. On the evening I moved all of my belongings into their garage, we had a u-haul truck that needed to be returned to the rental place in Redwood City. There happened to be one little non-descript gay bar in Redwood City so we decided to make the chore enjoyable and drop in for a drink after returning the truck. It was just about dark when we pulled up to the plain gray building with two doorways, one lit and one not. As an occasional man darted in the lit doorway with a speak-easy-like secrecy–collars up, hat’s forward—I noticed a figure standing in the dark doorway. Shame did not resonate from the form, in fact this person leaned seductively, one hip protruding from the shadows defiantly unrepressed. When my friends hopped out of the car and towards the door I stopped them and said, “Can I have the car keys? I’ll be in in just a minute.”
One of them looked at me curiously while the other smiled and knew exactly what was on my mind.
“Give him the keys,” He said, “Let’s go have some beers.”
I wandered over to the dark doorway and gazed into the shadows tentatively, knowing that what was hidden by darkness might very well be something that should have stayed hidden. A young voice said “Hi,” with a smile I heard before I saw then it was all I could see, a perfect smile, small ultra-white teeth in straight and flawless formation. Their brightness gave way to the whites of his eyes as my vision began to adjust to the darkness. I was taken aback by this young mans beauty. He was angelic yet cocky, possessing an attitude that even I hadn’t the experience to pull off with such savvy. The urban edge and gay male nuances of a subculture I was only beginning to absorb and in some ways found frightening were already clearly present in him. I told him I was eventually moving into the city, just staying with friends in San Mateo at the moment. He said he planned to move to the city as well. “I love it there. I’ve been to the Stud a bunch of times.” I was shocked by his boast of going to a place I was still afraid to enter, being a small-town boy and all. I suddenly had to know,
“How old are you?” He smiled sheepishly and said, “Fifteen…no, sixteen, today is my birthday!”
“Really? How’d you get in The Stud?”
“I walked in, they didn’t card me.”
“Well happy birthday,” I said, my mind racing through facts regarding age of consent state by state.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Pride,” he said, with a hint of a southern accent, the first time I noticed it in our conversation.
“Did your Mom name you that?”
“Yep.”
“Cool name,” I replied, approving only because his mother chose it. Had it been some modern name-change of his choice in some form of tribute to the annual gay and lesbian pride parade in San Francisco, I would have refused to call him that, thinking the word pride was one bandied about by a community with a bit too much haste and a false sense of well-being more applicable to cocaine abuse than the varied lifestyle choices of those enveloped by “the love that dare not speak its name.” Even back then I was toying with the concept of Gay Shame Day as opposed to gay pride day
“Do you hang around outside this bar often,” I asked.
“Just until I meet someone to go home with, I can’t go inside, they know I’m underage here.” He said, shifting coquettishly from one foot to the other, inside and outside of the shadows.
“Well, I don’t have a home to invite you to tonight, seeing as how I just moved in with friends today—but I do have their car keys. Do you wanna sit in the car with me until they finish their beers? They said we could.”
“Sure,” he said smiling and giving the front of his sweatpants a tug, just like those guys in the movies, the ones I watched in closet-sized booths in a bookstore on Polk Street. How did this boy so young know so much about this big gay world that I only stood at the edge of, at long last poised and ready to jump into?
I unlocked the car and he gingerly hopped into the driver seat and I suddenly had slight worries of him starting it up and taking off on a high-speed chase, a run from the law, criminal madness. I jammed the keys way down in my pocket and slid into the passenger seat. We immediately started groping each other’s crotches, somewhat nervous that a patrolling persecuting Redwood City Cop would discover us. It wasn’t unusual back then for gays to be unduly harassed when seen leaving the only gay bar in a smaller peninsula town and slapped with a nasty DUI violation or whatever else they could scrape up on a random homosexual leaving their designated hangout or coming way too close to a schoolyard or a shopping mall to recruit innocent children into a life of depravity and sexually deviant behaviors. In fact, back then it wasn’t too far-fetched a possibility that a pair of officers might even take the whole judicial process into their own hands and leave a gay man beaten and humiliated and too frightened to report the injustice to the same authorities who brutalized them. These thoughts in the back of my mind added a special sense of danger, a zeal or exhilaration to our rushed sexual interaction. As he shot his barely 16-year-old load in my mouth I was almost conjuring the cops flashlight beaming in, catching me like a vampire draining the boys essence, sperm dripping from my chin. He quickly returned the gesture in a way that couldn’t have possibly been construed as novice, pausing once to look up and smile sweetly and ask, “Am I doing it right.” This I’m certain he said for effect. I was able to confirm this suspicion but not until several years later.
Relieved yet worried that my friends would be coming back to the car any minute, we made ourselves presentable and traded phone numbers and I promised to call him when I finally got settled in to my own place in the city. We said goodbye and he wandered off into the darkness, flashing that perfect smile. The more prudish of my two friends gave me attitude when I stepped into the bar and as I handed his car-keys back to him he looked repulsed as if I had soiled them, tossing them on the bar and wiping his hand on his jeans. The other one smiled wide with eyes that said, “Did ya get any? Tell me all about it…. later.” I then said, “Thanks you guys. Oh yeah, could we find a carwash place somewhere—I’m really sorry but the car is gonna need it.” We all laughed and headed home.