Cruising: an intimate history of a radical pastime 9781944700829

Citation preview

Combining historical research and

oral history with his own personal experience, Espinoza examines the political and cultural forces behind this radical pastime. From Greek antiquity to the notorious Molly houses of 18th century England, the raucous 1970s to the algorithms of Grindr, Oscar Wilde to George Michael, cruising remains at once a

reclamation of public space and the creation of its own unique locale— one in which men of all races and classes interact, even in the shadow of repressive governments. In Uganda and Russia, we meet activists for whom cruising can be a matter of life and death; while in the West Espinoza shows how cruising circumvents the inequalities and abuses of power that plague heterosexual encounters. Ultimately, Espinoza illustrates how cruising functions as a powerful rebuke to patriarchy and capitalism—aunless

you’re cruising the department store restroom, of course.

attat le), sae

Qf Ae. Patx

a radical pastime

Alex“°Espjnoza

The Unnamed

Press

Los Angeles, CA

AN UNNAMED

PRESS BOOK

Copyright © 2019 Alex Espinoza

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to

[email protected]. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press. www.unnamedpress.com

Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1944700829 Cover Design by Robert Bieselin

Distributed by Publishers Group West Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition This book is a work of nonfiction.

Many of the interviews in this book were conducted via telephone,

over email, through online forums, or in person. Some happened years before I began putting this manuscript together, others while I was deep into my research. In order+o protect the individuals’ privacy, names

and biographical information have been changed or slightly altered.

The promiscuous homosexual is a sexual revolutionary. Each moment of his outlaw existence he confronts repressive laws, repressive “morality.” Parks, alleys, subway tunnels,

garages, streets—these are the battlefields. —John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw

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Table of Contents Beyonce

cnc heen shinepein ah nea tenbekev ere sedans stonnsnbeqseat onaseers 11

EL TAIT OCI CON LORE ALE iris cs enssiats csovectvonssccaqnatvconinieterees 15 REEVES AS CUSTS sory bsna san scvutaancevatsacbaskavous aikantheeeensisonsarsere 35 Chapter 2: Cruising and the City, Part 1............cscscsessees 47

Chapter 3: Blacklists and Address Books: Codes, Cruising, and the Early Twentieth Century................ 67 Chapter 4: Cruising the “706...............cscssssssessssssseeeerscsrseees 91

Chapter 5: The ‘80s: A Turning POinL............eseeseseseseees 107 Chapter 6: Cruising COMpute’.........seseeeesesseeseeseeeees 121

Chapter 7: Interlude.............ssscssssscsseesssesseescscscorsssosveenes 137 Chapter 8: Back Outside..........ssseececsesssesssesessenseseeeseneanee 145 Chapter 9: Cruising and the City, Part 2.......ssessesseeee 155 Chapter 10: Russia, Uganda, and Cruising the World.......167

Chapter 11: Cruising AZtlam..........ssssesecessseesseseesesensenenees 189 Chapter 12: The Magic.........-ssessssesssesssssssssseneneseeensesenennes 209 Ackn0wledgMentt......s.esessersreererssrensesensncesencenencesensnsesseens 223 INGLES: dasesntescnose-orassescusonswsonstaas And because freeborn adult Roman men were allowed to have sex with anyone, there wasn’t much need for a gay subculture to emerge. Masculine Roman men could actively engage in all kinds of sex, as long as they maintained the dominant role. These encounters were highly regulated, and there were explicit rules governed by fundamental attitudes surrounding passivity and femininity in relation to assertion and masculinity. It would have been impossible for two men to have a sexual encounter based on mutual respect, because only the free man took the active role. The passive role was relegated to a boy, a slave, a woman, or a prostitute of either gender. A free adult male who chose the passive role would be stigmatized and viewed as “servile and effeminate.” So to be exclusively homosexual, and to have romantic feelings of that nature, was not an acceptable way to be. Then again, there have always been men who fall into this category. Even in antiquity, there were telltale signs of preference, indicators that hinted where someone fell on the

sexual spectrum. According to Williams:

Those who look for and claim to detect signs of a subculture in ancient Rome, whether they call it “homosexual,” “passive homosexual,” or

“pathic,” have pointed to a set practices attributed

40

CRUISING - *

to some men in ancient texts—feminine clothing

styles and bodily comportment, depilation of the arms and legs, the use of makeup and perfume, certain gestures—which might have “formed part of a self-presentation used for sexual signals and group cohesion.”””

Did these men cruise? Or fall in love and have romantic partners as we might today, despite the challenges? So many questions remain.

What we do know is that cruising thrives in societies that are, above all, social. After the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe entered the Middle Ages, the presence of

homosexuality (and tropes we could align with cruising) ceased to be documented. Feudal society suffered massive contractions in economy and trade, leading to the shrinkage of city centers and the growth of an isolated and superstitious peasant population. Threats of warfare and violence led to increasing mistrust between people, and meetings between strangers—the spark for a cruising culture—became less and less safe.

Together with the arrival of Christianity and Islam, not to mention the ensuing crusades where allegiance and adherence to religion was a matter of life and death, an

g oppressive and judgmental environment stifled the cruisin

impulse, among many other things. If you were going to take the risk of practicing homosexuality in medieval Europe, you really needed to trust the person you were doing it with. do indiWhen societies become closed and mistrustful, so

viduals. One thing is for certain: LGBT people have always

existed, but whether and how they’ve been able to express

Ai

ALEX ESPINOZA

Detail of a Fresco from the North wall of the Tomb of the Diver in the Greek colony of Paestum, Italy.

42

CRUISING

. »

themselves varies at a near case-by-case basis and is as diverse as the human experience itself. Evidence is only just now emerging of homosexuality in

ancient Egypt, whose hieroglyphics have long been interpreted by Western scholars with a Victorian bias, blind to the subtle and often overtly gay cues. Furthermore, ancient

Egypt’s

practices

were. often

compared

with

Greece’s and Rome’s, rather than those of the ancient civilizations of the African continent, where there remains scant

research on the subject. To be sure, we haven’t come close

to understanding how homosexuality was perceived and experienced throughout the ancient world."

The same Roman attitudes about masculinity—the of the straight male being incompatible with a role—persisted even in my childhood. When I was there was a story about an older kid who lived ina

notion passive young, nearby

neighborhood. I never knew his name, but my friend told

me about him. He wore rumpled clothing and had bad acne.

His father was in prison for stabbing a guy on the street in a

dispute over money. This kid lived in an apartment with his mother and sister, who had some sort of mental disability. Apparently, the mother worked long shifts. She left early in the morning and came home late at night, leaving him alone, unsupervised, and in charge of his special needs sister.

Each day after school, you could pay this guy a visit

and get a blow job. Everybody went, my friend told me. Guys Evidently, he was very good at it. He even enjoyed it.

would ejaculate all over him, and he wouldn't stop to clean himself up. He would just continue. On and on. Meanwhile,

43

ALEX ESPINOZA

the sister spent the majority of her time in her room, locked inside a pen so that she wouldn’t harm herself. “It was like a 7-Eleven in there,” my friend said. People coming and going all the time. Even he had gone, as had his brother. The first time I heard about this, I was shocked.

But then they explained it to me: Getting your dick sucked by another guy doesn’t make you a fag. It was giving one that made you a fag.

I couldn’t wrap my head around the notion that certain sexual acts defined you as homosexual while others did not. If you engaged in a sexual act with another man, then weren't you by definition gay? I was too young and too na-

ive to argue this point with them. I was also too concerned with winning them over—to keep them convinced of my straightness—to challenge their opinions. Instead, I said nothing. I watched and tried to learn as much as possible. To be gay in ancient Greece or Rome was no different from being gay in 1980s La Puente, California, where sexuality was predicated on a set of stringent rules and standards one needed to follow, where you weren’t considered gay if a guy gave you a blow job, but if you did, then that was it. That was the end for you. My gay utopia would eventually be found there, existing all along, in the liminal and anonymous spaces where contact

and contradiction thrived.

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Chapter 5 Black Lists and Address Books: Codes, Cruising, and the

Early Twentieth Century

A

n often overlooked chapter of gay history is the

community that thrived in New York City in the half century from 1890 to the beginning of World War II. Bolstered by a tremendous output of art and literature, the proliferation of extremely popular drag performances and balls, and the opening of a number of gay saloons and restaurants, a gay culture was established in Brooklyn, Harlem, Greenwich Village, and Times Square. While

cruising sites were well known throughout the city for briefer encounters, the term marriage was being used by some gay men in monogamous relationships. In short, there was a gay city in the heart of New York before World War II, and history had forgotten it. Decades of being

ignored by historians and the dominant cultural narratives led to its erasure from popular memory, and only very

recently has it become the subject of a book of its own, When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan.

One of the most significant figures to emerge from the burgeoning gay scene in Greenwich Village was the actor William Haines, who was discovered in 1922 by Goldwyn Pictures’ “New Faces” contest.* Soon after, Haines relocated

to Los Angeles, where he would eventually be considered Hollywood’s first openly gay film star. He got his start in silent pictures, appearing in films like Three Wise Fools

ALEX ESPINOZA

(1923), The Gaiety Girls (1924), and Spring Fever (1927), and

was one of the few actors to make the successful transition to “talkies.” He was often paired with the likes of Joan Crawford,

and the two went on to develop a long and

meaningful friendship over the years. According to TCM: “An energetic male lead of the late silent and early talkie era, and one of MGM's most bankable stars, actor William

Haines used his boy-next-door looks and charm to play young collegiates or military recruits in a number of successful pictures.””” In short, Haines had all the qualities necessary for blockbuster success. Everything changed for the actor, however, on a trip out of state. Slate contributor

Karina Longworth writes: In 1926, on a trip to New York while on the

cusp of his superstardom, Haines had a whirlwind fling with a 21-year-old former sailor named Jimmy Shields [sic]. When Haines

returned to L.A., he brought Shields with him, and moved his new boyfriend into his house and got him work as an extra at MGM. Following the example of his friends from his days in New York’s Greenwich Village, Billy was intent on living with Jimmy without embarrassment

or apology.”*®

Radical as it may seem, the fact that Haines was gay wasn’t seen as anything too shocking because, by and

large, the sexual mores of the 1910s and 1920s were not as restrictive as they are today. “That Haines was living openly with another man, thereby destroying any possibility that

he might not be gay, initially did absolutely nothing to 70

Stud io publ ic ity shot of Will iam Ha ines.

71

ALEX ESPINOZA

impact Haines’ popularity around town or at his home studio,” writes Longworth, adding, “By 1929, his studio

boss, MGM's Irving Thalberg, was holding up Haines as both the prototypical symbol of male youth of his day, and also the new model of a male romantic star.” But the 1930s saw the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of stringent moral guidelines popu-

larly known as the Hays Code. There were several bedrock principles:

1. Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence placed in them by the people of the world, and they recognize their responsibility to the public because of this trust. 2. Theatrical motion pictures...are primarily to be regarded as entertainment. Mankind has always regarded the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings.

3. It is recognized that there is entertainment which tends to improve the race (or at least to re-create and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life), and

entertainment which tends to harm human beings, or to lower their standard of life and living. 4. Motion pictures are an important form of art expression:

Arts enters intimately into the lives of human beings. The art of motion pictures has the same object as the other arts— the presentation of human thought, emotion, and experience, in terms of an appeal to the soul through the senses.

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CRUISING

5. In consequence of the forgoing facts the following general principals are adopted:

No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standard of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. Correct standards of life shall be presented on the screen, subject only to necessary dramatic contrasts. Law, natural or human, should not be ridiculed, nor

shall sympathy be created for its violation.”

There were codes that forbade, among other things, depictions ofillegal drug use, interracial romances,

revenge plots, and any scene that involved the mocking of religion. The codes established strict guidelines regarding film content, but some studio executives, pressured

perhaps by religious leaders, used them as opportunities to curb the behavior of many of the film industry’s biggest stars of the time. If moral decency was to be the rule of law governing films, then the actors starring in those films needed to also be living morally decent, scandal-free lives. As silent films ceded to talkies,

captivating the country, their stars grew more influential and occasionally got themselves into trouble. Film critic Bob Mondello opined: “Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle

charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses—small wonder the nation’s religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chop-

ping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.””

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ALEX ESPINOZA

All this spelled trouble for Haines. That he was an openly gay actor was one thing. That he was an openly gay actor under contract at MGM and in a relationship with another man was something else entirely. Now more than ever, actors needed to maintain clean public personas and cause as little scandal.as possible, lest the morality

police come knocking on their door and take them (and the entire studio that contracted them) down.

The charismatic and witty Haines had a thing for men in uniform—Jimmie Shields had been a sailor, after all—

and it was an incident with a man in uniform that would eventually lead studio head Louis B. Mayer to issue Haines an ultimatum that would forever alter the actor’s career trajectory. Studio executives were faced with a PR nightmare when, in 1933, Haines was arrested at a YMCA

with a sailor he had picked up in downtown LA’s Pershing Square. In response to the incident, Mayer threatened

to fire Haines and release him from his contract unless he agreed to what was called a “lavender marriage,” to

hide his homosexuality, and to end his relationship with Shields. The actor, however, refused. Mayer banished him from the studio, blacklisted him around Hollywood, and

saw to it that Haines never made another picture again.

Despite this, Haines was still able to shake off the “stigma” of his lifestyle (and the scandal of his arrest after his cruising incident) and have an incredibly successful career as an interior designer to the stars. His earliest clients included

Gloria Swanson,

Carole Lombard,

and

George Cukor.

William Haines and Jimmie Shields were together for nearly fifty years, and “Billy and Jimmy [sic] enjoyed a

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CRUISING

high position in Hollywood for decades. Some members of

the Hollywood community shunned them for living openly, but their true friends stayed loyal. They continued to attend parties at San Simeon [Hearst Castle], and at Joan Crawford’s

house. And they stayed together until Billy’s death, in 197at?

The Haines incident illustrates the ways in which cruising disrupts and destabilizes traditional power structures predicated on the belief that sexual intimacy equals love and fidelity. Though cruising eventually led to the end of Haines’s promising career at MGM, it didn’t entirely ruin the actor’s life, nor did it result in the end of his relation-

ship with Shields. Cruising is not just about participation in a sexual experience; it is an act that promulgates a unique

cultural practice necessary for the survival of the culture as a whole.

In a chapter unceremoniously entitled “Rules and Roles,” from the equally dry book Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, author and psychologist Laud Humphreys offers a deeply researched examination of “deviant sexual behavior” in public places.* A surreptitious, albeit growing,

trend was emerging throughout the major metropolitan cities of post-World War II America. “Tearooms,” as they were commonly referred to in the gay subculture of the time, were secret locations that included parks and public bathrooms where men engaged in intimate encounters. Unrelated to the small cafés found in department stores

and shopping centers that served tea and light snacks, the word seems to have evolved from the more common name

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ALEX ESPINOZA

for a public restroom. Called a “t-room” or “toilet room,” “tearooms” (and their activities) were ground zero for Humphrey’s fascination with the mores of gay sexuality. He wrote:

The homosexual games of cruising for the one-night-stand exhibit the universal and protective nature of rules, which are standard for all situations:

1. Avoid the exchange of biographical data. 2. Watch out for chicken [teen-agers]—they’re dangerous game. 3. Never force your intentions on anyone. 4. Don’t knock [criticize] a trick [sex partner]—

he may be somebody’s mother [homosexual mentor].

5. Never back down on trade agreements. [“Trade” are “tricks” who do not, as yet,

consider themselves homosexual. This group includes most of the male prostitutes, “hustlers.” Trade agreements, then, include

paying the amount promised, if a financial transaction is involved, and no kissing above the belt, because most “trade” think kissing is “queer.” |]The only change in basic rules for the tearoom scene involves a tightening of rule (1) to the point of silence, a modification

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CRUISING

resulting, in part, from the more public nature

and higher turnover of the tearoom market. Under these conditions, greater caution in preserving anonymity must be exercised.*

Ina style of writing that can best be described as anthropological, where Humphreys sounds more like an explorer studying the mating habits of wild animals of the African Serengeti (“If there is a ‘glory hole’ [a small hole, approximately three inches in diameter, which has been carefully carved, at about average ‘penis height,’ in the partition of the stall], it may be used as a means of signaling from the stall.”*5), the book is filled with details that study and

scrutinize the strategies of cruising. Criticized for his

research methods (Humphreys did not gain the consent of the men he interviewed), Tearoom Trade nevertheless offers

a snapshot not just of why people cruised, but how it felt to be cruising. The subjects of his investigation, for instance,

all expressed an interest in the rush associated with their risky activity. And yet there is an inherent contradiction:

“What the person who engages in covert deviant behavior (especially when that behavior is sexual) fears most is discovery, exposure that might do irreparable harm to the whole network of social and psychological images we call

the self.” Humphreys found that over half the subjects he studied identified as straight and came from a wide range of backgrounds. He reported a number of reasons they engaged in such a practice and was able to collect such candid responses in large part to his going undercover. He rarely disclosed his true intentions and often posed as a “look-

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ALEX ESPINOZA

out queen,” alerting men when someone was near—a rather ironic cover in retrospect.

A lasting impact of Tearoom Trade, written solely, asa sociological text rooted in scholarly and empirical examination, has been the ethical questions it has raised about responsible research and data collecting. And yet it is also

an important ethnographic study of a subculture within the gay community—one of the first to explore cruising in close detail. Without question, to the isolated, would-be cruiser, it

sure helped paint a picture. Soon, more practical guides became available. Bob Damron’s

Address Book was like a gay yellow pages, a directory listing

all the gay-friendly bars and places strewn across the United

States where men could meet and hook up (though of course there was always the danger of plants and undercover cops). The first was published in 1965 and was so small it could fit inside the back pocket of a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers. According to the website Damron.com, “Despite its petite size, this book was an impressive accomplishment. Each one of the listings [Bob Damron, a gay bar owner who traveled widely in his spare time,] had visited himself. Every last copy

of the book he sold himself.”*” How did I not know something like this was out there? was my first thought when I originally heard about Damron’s Address Book on an episode of Lost LA

(a program that aired on my local public TV station KCET). A few weeks before I sat down to write this, I had the

opportunity to hold an actual copy of that first issue. It was wrapped in protective plastic and some of its pages had

broken loose from the spine. “Be careful with the earlier ones,” the attendant at USC’s

ONE Archive said as I reached inside the file box. “They're very worn.” 78

CRUISING.

*

The 1970, 1971, and 1972 editions of Bob Damron’s Address Book.

79

ALEX ESPINOZA

A weird, almost temporal distortion of space and

time occurred that afternoon as I leafed through page after tattered page of each Address Book. In the years

before the internet, when I had spent countless lonely hours fretting and worrying about my sexuality, about my urge for contact, about my constant desire to cruise

bathrooms and parks and other public places, there had been guidebooks dedicated solely to this pursuit. How had I missed this? Why was I only now discovering this invaluable resource? There were names of bars I recognized, some I'd frequented, like Nardi’s in Pasadena (first listed in 1970) and

Studio One in West Hollywood (first listed in 1984), the latter a place where I had spent so many evenings—drunk

and with my back against the wall as my friends danced— during my late teens and early twenties. And there were

places listed that I’d never heard of, gay bars and bathhouses in primarily working-class areas I knew, like Duarte, Baldwin Park, and El Monte (which had a place called

“Samson and Delilah Baths” on Garvey Avenue)—cities

not that far from my hometown of La Puente. As I sat there with these tiny booklets spread out before me like playing cards, each cover printed in a bright color and advertising a different year, it struck me as a form of defiance that a

directory meant for the surreptitious consumer would be

so willing to call attention to itself, that a book advertising such a subversive act as anonymous public sex would be

so bold. However, the publication of Address Book started not with Damron, but rather with

a man named Hal Call, an

ex-journalist and member of the Mattachine Society, one

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CRUISING

of the first gay rights organizations founded in the United States. “[Call’s] political goal, and the goal of the Mattachine Society under his influence, was to accommodate gay people politely into American society, without the riots and political demands for equality that would define the later movement.”* Call would eventually found and run

Pan-Graphic Press, which he used. as a platform for the publication of a magazine he hoped would compete with the more radical and leftist ONE, an openly gay monthly magazine. Because the angle of Call’s magazine was to spread an assimilationist ideology, discouraging gay men from establishing their own “gay subculture” separate from a heteronormative one, the magazine lost readership quickly. So, in 1958, Call established Dorian Book Service,

a gay book clearinghouse. He printed and sold books by mail to a clandestine gay clientele. This served to be one of his most lucrative ventures and led Call to focus more on

personal entrepreneurship, which eventually pulled him away from ideological gay rights organizations like the

Mattachine Society. In 1967, Damron and Call teamed up to open Adonis

Bookstore, the first openly gay bookstore in the country. Through his Pan-Graphic Press, Call began publishing Damron’s listings, which they called Address Book. Indeed, Address Book is like peering into a well-preserved time capsule of gay life in the midcentury, when so much remained underground and the network was a lot simpler. Within the thin and delicate pages of the directory, one finds the crucial information necessary to navigate the gay subculture of post-World War II America in the years before the internet and long before apps like Grindr and

81

ALEX ESPINOZA

Scruff. In any given edition of Address Book, and preceding Damron’s state-by-state list of locations, a helpful, often amusing key would be provided: Very popular e

: Coffee, sometimes food too, usually open late when bars are closed

D

Dancing

G

7 Girls, but rarely exclusively

H

; Hotel, motel, lodgings or other overnight

: M

accommodations

: Mixed crowd and/or tourists

e

Private club policy, make local inquiry as to admission

rE

Pretty Elegant, usually jacket and tie advised if not required

R

Restaurant, although not all places serving food

:

RT

are so indicated. A * after this symbol doesn’t indicate quality of the food served, but the popularity of the bar. “Raunchy Types,” often commercial

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CRUISING

5

Shows, often impersonators and record

pantomime acts

SM

Some Motorcycle. Don’t confuse it with “M-S” which means mixed crowd /show.°*? Over the years, codes were added: BYOB (“Bring Your

Beer”) appeared in 1970, as does B for “Black Predominant”; and the 1975 issue lists the designation BA

Own

(“Bare Ass”) for the first time. By 1972, we see the addition

of “cruisy areas,” with an explanation below the key itself that read as follows:

CRUISY AREAS:

This is another new category, listed at the request of a number of readers. It is not listed alphabetically, but rather at the bottom of the regular

listings of those cities applicable. Included are parks, beaches and other public grounds which may or may not be active depending upon the season, weather and time of day. These may be very dangerous for various reasons, and should

be visited strictly at your own risk.” There also appeared a detailed explanation of colors

and their meaning according to the “Hankie Code.” Gay men used the Hankie Code as a way to determine who was into what. Various sexual acts were assigned various

handkerchief colors. Which side of the back pocket one wore the handkerchief determined one’s preference, either passive (right) or active (left).

83

ALEX ESPINOZA

Left

Color

Right

Greek Active

Dark Blue

Greek Passive

FF’er

Red

FFA Receiver

Has 8”+

Mustard

Wants 8”

69’er

Light Blue

No 69

Anything

Orange

Nothing

Golden Shower

Yellow

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Wants Uniform

Hustler

Green

Buyer

Scat Top

Brown

Scat Bottom

Master

Gray

Slave

J/O

White

Gives J/O

Whipper

Black

Whippee

Paging through the editions of Address Book, with their creased corners, pencil-marked margins, and threadbare

covers, it was impossible not to imagine the pockets these little books had been shoved inside of, what these slim editions had seen, where they’d come from, and where

they’d been. I imagined a young man, not so different from me, sitting alone in his room, opening up his guide-

book, mentally constructing the meet-ups and trysts he’d have in the dark corners and hidden back rooms across

the United States. It wasn’t until the mid- to late ’70s that

bookstores and adult theaters were added to the general listings of locations. Before this, it was mainly bars, restau-

rants, hotels, and a few bathhouses and saunas. This was

a type of cruising that took some detective work, that 84

CRUISING

required someone to look up a place, take a chance, and go explore. It took time and dedication. A friend of mine, who was the first person to explain

the Hankie Code to me years ago, said he used Address

Book in the years before the internet. Growing up ina strict Baptist household, he had to be careful where he kept the book when he left it at home. “My mother would go through my drawers all the time,” he said. “I would hide my copies behind the air vent in my bedroom.” Later on, when he was a graduate student, he came

across a listing for a bathroom in a building that happened to be on his college campus. Because he was so far from home and because he was single and in a city where he knew very few people, my friend said that bathroom and its stalls became his refuge. “What I remember most about cruising back then was the waiting you had to do,” he confessed. “I used to take stacks of student papers, sit in the stall, grade, and wait

until someone moved into the booth next to mine. Sometimes they’d tap their foot, and we'd have some fun. Other

times they’d just fart and then you'd hear them having a bowel movement and then they’d flush the toilet, zip up, and be gone.”

He said his years of cruising the bathroom, of using Address Book to help him find locations as he drove across the country to visit his family, were met with more failures than successes. Still, he said, every now

and again he

would get lucky. It was the rush. The pounding heart, the knowing glances, the deciphering of codes and body language, that

85

ALEX ESPINOZA

made it so irresistible. It became more than just about the risk of getting caught, the risk of catching something; more than just about sex. It was, he said, what life was all about.

In the sixties, the risks associated with being caught cruising,

and

in turn being identified

as homosexual,

could have truly sinister implications. Address Book may seem charming to us now, a quaint product of a simpler time, but the importance

of its covert function should

never be forgotten. Take the case of eighteen-year-old Jerrell R. Howell, who confessed in 1962 to killing two young girls after they refused to perform oral sex on him. He claimed he was not entirely accountable, pinning the

blame on the experiences he’d had in the men’s bathroom at Central Park in Mansfield, Ohio, which he cited as the

cause of his moral indecency. This provided the Mansfield Police Department an ideal opportunity to monitor and criminalize private

encounters between men, which—using Howell’s case as proof—ultimately led to child molestation, rape, and murder. Determined

to crack down on sexual deviance,

the police took decisive action, setting up a 16mm camera behind a two-way mirror affixed to a door leading into a

supply closet in the men’s bathroom of Central Park. There they installed a police officer, who recorded all activities.

This went on for two weeks. In the end, seventy-nine men were arrested. Nearly half a century later, artist William E. Jones discovered the surveillance footage and, in 2008, screened

this at art galleries. Called Tearoom, Jones’s film was met

86

CRUISING

with both praise and objection. In “Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom,”

authors Katherine Biber and Derek Dalton argued that Jones’s project raises serious ethical questions regarding

the place of privacy and art and the moral and ethical dilemmas such movements make. Of the film, they wrote: Tearoom is 56 minutes of rapidly spliced scenes of men wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and their everyday shirts, flickering hints and several clear views of fellatio and masturbation,

erections and penetrations. Parts of the footage

are badly degraded, much of it is incomprehensible or ambiguous, its meaning imposed by its context: we know this is supposed to be a compilation of scenes of anonymous gay sex

in a public toilet, so we presume that is what we are viewing. Watching it feels like riffling

through a worn-out flip-book, its pages stained or missing, the deterioration itself a form of

evidence of both over-use and neglect.”

As I watched Tearoom, intimate and erotic in its own way,

I couldn’t help but wonder what became of these men with their faded shirts and messy hair, their hats and baggy trousers. Encounter after encounter is carefully chronicled. We

watch as random guys exchange hand jobs or blow jobs, as they penetrate each other, as they spy through peepholes in the thin partitions separating the stalls, lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. We see several of them make hands multiple appearances: one mills about, washing his

87

ALEX ESPINOZA

and checks out his hair in the two-way mirror; another

tries to either adjust or break the lightbulb above, perhaps in an attempt to create some

atmosphere.

Tearoom also

manages to capture a fascinating cross-sectional view of

midwestern America during the early 1960s, with black and white, young and old, thin and portly, working-and middle-class men meeting, hooking up, and leaving.

Jones’s work highlights the power art has to illuminate and expand our understanding of human connection. I felt a similar sense of intimacy during my interviews with friends as they recounted their upbringings and experiences

cruising public bathrooms and parks. Tearoom emphasizes the potency of the cruising spaces themselves, as well as the diversity of the experience and of the men who seek it~in this case, men who would not relent in the face of so much adversity, whose police footage, which had been

used to prosecute and punish them, has been repurposed as an art project that celebrates their spirit. What would the detectives at the Mansfield Ohio PD,

the ones responsible for this footage, think of such a repurposing? For that matter, what would they think of the decade that was to come?

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n the heels of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the

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gay civil rights movement took to the streets, gain-

ing momentum during the early ’70s. In 1973, the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of “mental disorders,” and an openly gay politician named Harvey Milk ran for city supervisor in San Francisco. Milk’s candidacy garnered a great deal of mainstream media coverage, thrusting him and the gay community into the larger spotlight of American social consciousness.

By that same year, more than one thousand gay activist organizations had been established in the United States.*" "Tt wasn’t just politics and activism either. The movie industry had openly addressed the “gay thing” in The Children’s Hour (1961) and The Fox (1967). It was William

Friedkin’s 1970 film The Boys in the Band that portrayed gay men as something else besides psychologically dam-

aged and wretched human beings (Friedkin would save that depiction for his disastrous 1980 film Cruising). Gay visibility was slowly becoming a relevant, though

g to still controversial, theme that television was comin Movie of the terms with. On November 1, 1972, the ABC

Certain Week starred Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen in That e-aged Summer. Holbrook plays Doug Salter, a middl ed and contractor in San Francisco who is recently divorc

by living with his “life partner” Gary McClain, played

ALEX ESPINOZA

Sheen. When Doug’s teenage son, Nick, flies up from Los Angeles to spend the summer with him, he discovers his father’s secret. Doug must come out to his son and reveal his true feelings about Gary and their relationship. That Certain Summer was lauded for its frankness and honesty,

and it is considered the first TV production to show a sympathetic portrayal of homosexuals and the gay community’s struggle for acceptance and equality. The following year, PBS aired An American Family, a thirteen-part documentary-style program. The cameras followed the upper-middle-class Louds of Santa Barbara, California, into their home and filmed their every move

and conversation. The aim was to depict the daily life of the “typical American family.” Producers, however, had chosen

a family in turmoil. Viewers watched as the marriage between the father of the family, Bill Loud, and his wife, Pat

Loud, slowly unraveled. Perhaps the biggest controversy of the show was the coming out of the Louds’ eldest child, Lance. Considered by many as a trailblazer of the gay move-

ment, Lance’s role helped shaped the discourse surrounding gay rights and advocacy in the United States. Twenty years later, An American Family’s influence re-

mained strong, serving as the inspiration for the popular

MTV show The Real World, which, during its long run, has regularly featured gay house members. Perhaps the most remembered of these was Pedro Zamora, a young Cuban American from Florida living with AIDS, from the show’s

third season. Viewers tuned in and watched Pedro struggle

with his diagnosis, the trauma it inflicted on his life, and the stress it placed on his position living with a group of strangers, some of whom were not initially thrilled to be

94

CRUISING

sharing a home with an “infected” person. Most notably, perhaps, was Pedro’s tireless work as an AIDS activist, as

The Real World: San Francisco chronicled the young man’s efforts to openly discuss his condition at college campuses and rallies across the country. “When Pedro Zamora arrived at The Real World house on Russian Hill in San Francisco on February 12th of 1994, he was already a seasoned HIV/ AIDS activist,” reflected Jeffry J. lovannone years later, in an

essay posted on Medium. “But as he crossed the threshold and the cameras turned on, he broke new barriers, becom-

ing the first openly HIV-positive and openly gay person on television.”*2 Zamora died on November 11, 1994.

What Zamora was able to do in the 1990s for gays on television, Lance Loud had achieved two decades before.

Through his own activism and his lifestyle, one he flaunted with wit and flamboyance, Lance became one of T'V’s first

reality stars, sharing his coming out with 10 million viewers in 1973. As for cruising itself, the aptly titled documentary Gay

Sex in the 70s examines the hedonism and sexual liberation that occurred in and around New York City in the wake of Stonewall. Through candid interviews with, among others,

photographer Tom Bianchi; LGBT rights activist, author, and film producer Larry Kramer; and animator Robert

Alvarez, filmmaker Joseph Lovett chronicles the explosive impact the gay sex scene had in the decade of decadence,

free love, and drugs. The documentary maps some of the

the most popular (and notorious) gay cruising locations in , United States. Large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles for zero San Francisco, and New York City became ground ed the counterculture movement, bringing with it unbridl

95

ALEX ESPINOZA

sexual experimentation. “Greenwich Village in New York City was a homosexual’s dream come true in the 1970's and early 80's,” wrote historian Will Kohler. “You could literally

walk down Christopher Street and have as much sex as you wanted, anytime that you wanted either day or night.”* Immediately following the Stonewall riots, Christopher Street took on particular significance as a gay enclave and also

doubled as the main thoroughfare by which to access the adjacent Greenwich Village waterfront near the Hudson River. Abandoned by the shipping industry in the mid-’60s, the piers succumbed to the ravages of misuse and neglect. Dubbed the “Christopher Street Pier,” Pier 45, as well as Piers 46, 48, and 51, became a popular destination for the city’s

gay community to sunbathe naked on the docks and cruise for sex. Commercial trucks used during the day would be parked nearby and left unlocked. At night, they were secluded, tight, and intensely dark, providing the perfect environment

for anonymous encounters. There was also the Central Park Ramble, where men

hooked up behind bushes and under shaded canopies, and Mineshaft, known as one of the most hard-core S&M leather

bars at the time.™ Jockstrap-clad visitors enjoyed plentiful

glory holes and golden shower tubs, among other adult attractions.

Meanwhile,

uptown,

Bette Midler

and

Barry

Manilow entertained towel-clad men at the Continental, a

bathhouse located-in the basement of the Ansonia hotel on West Seventy-Fourth Street.°° For many men in places like New York City, the liberation

that came in the ‘70s provided them with an opportunity to reject the predetermined roles many believed they were being forced into by a dominant patriarchal society. This

96

CRUISING

generation, like the generation before, had learned to hide from authoritarian institutions such as the police, the govern-

ment, and the church—those long-standing foundations that enforced rules meant to stamp out deviance. Author Charles Kaiser wrote, “The sexual freedom of the seventies and the

political awareness that flowed from Stonewall exerted two different influences on gay people coming of age in this era. The essential messages of the sexual revolution were about freedom and experimentation, and they encouraged men and women to sample every kind of erotic experience.”*° Gay men suddenly found themselves part of a new

“brotherhood” that had also rejected and rebelled against the convention of straight marriage and suburbia. As a practice in this environment, cruising was blatant and very proud. It was unabashedly gay and revolutionary. There were no lasting consequences to sex either. No unintended pregnancies to worry about. No birth control pills or condoms to fret about,

because STDs could be cured, and they couldn’t kill you. The gay liberation sweeping the big cities wasn’t just contained in the metropolitan hubs of the United States. In almost every part of the country, gay men were suddenly finding themselves enjoying the type of sexual freedom their predecessors could never, ever imagine.

The gay community went from repression to celebration almost overnight.

And the party was just getting started.

Adam is unusually talkative and animated when I meet him for coffee. In his sixties, Adam is the kind of man who has

retained a youthful ebullience; because he acts like a person

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ALEX ESPINOZA

twenty years younger, he also looks it. He wears his silver hair short and spiked, and a neatly trimmed goatee frames his chin. He’s thin, with warm eyes and a welcoming smile. I like Adam. He’s one of those people who I often say is “a character.” As a writer, he’s the kind of person I constantly find myself gravitating toward, intrigued by. Adam has lived a wild life. He’s done drugs, taught middle school, owned several small businesses, and worked in the nonprofit sector. He always wears shorts that hang down low across his willowy frame, sandals, and oversized T-shirts. There’s an energy to my friend, a buzz—something elemental, natural,

a little woodsy, and completely unpredictable.

He grew up ina suburb of Tucson, Arizona. He recalls his

father giving him copies of Playboy magazine at a young age. “He’d say to me, ‘So what did you think of Miss September, huh? Did you like her?’” Adam laughs. “I'd just nod and play along.”

His first sexual encounter was with his best friend when they were both in middle school; he’d spent the night at Adam’s, and they exchanged blow jobs. In adolescence, Adam began to feel as if he were living two parallel lives.

There was the “straight life” of his father’s dirty magazines and the secret gay life that nobody knew about. “I used

to have sex with women. A lot of sex. I figured if I fucked enough women that would drown out the gay part.” Adam admits that he didn’t want to be gay, but all the times he was having sex with girls in high school, he’d imagine having sex with guys. “Everybody used to hitchhike back then,” he says. “Remember that?” “From the movies,” I confess.

98

CRUISING

“T used to love hitching. Even if you didn’t know where you were going, you'd just hitchhike. Someone would eventually pick you up and you’d almost always end up fucking around.” He was sixteen the first time he had sex

with an adult when an Israeli man offered him a ride. The guy took Adam back to his apartment, and they messed around. Once they finished, the guy drove Adam back to where he’d initially picked him up. “T got lots of blow jobs hitchhiking,” he adds. A distinctly American activity that peaked in the 1970s, hitchhiking was also, for many gay men in the closet, the

most convenient way to satisfy their secret urges. Another by-product of car culture—like drive-ins and fast food— hitchhiking enabled men cruising in cars to easily discover

each other on the road, via a simple and subtly provocative signal: the extended thumb. As the practice became more common and widespread,

government agencies began regulating hitchhiking. Joseph Stromberg, writing for Vox, reported, “Starting in the 1960s and ’70s, some of the first laws against hitching were passed, and local and federal law enforcement agencies

began using scare tactics to get both drivers and hitchhikers to stop doing it.” Hitchhikers could be deranged serial killers or “sex maniacs” preying on unsuspecting travelers,

pamphlets warned. “Combine this with a handful of horror movies involving hitchhiking murderers, as well as high-

profile murder victims who'd been hitching, and you get the now-dominant perception that hitchhiking is simply too risky to try,” Stromberg continued. Still, for Adam and many of his generation, hitchhiking

is synonymous with the 1970s. “It wasn’t viewed as weird

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ALEX ESPINOZA

or dangerous,” he says. “I usually got high or a blow job from someone, and that was perfectly fine with me.” In fact, the only times he had encounters with men were usually when he was really drunk or really high. In hindsight, Adam realizes that this was in order to justify his actions. “I could say to myself that I wasn’t gay, that I’d only done it because I was under the influence or whatever. That I was just being wild and crazy, just messing around, you know?”

But his encounters were not just limited to hitchhiking. He recalls an adult bookstore called Eros back in his hometown with video arcades where guys lurked around in the shadowy back booths, offering blow jobs. Adam never gave blow jobs. He would always receive them.

“Everyone did Quaaludes back then,” he says. “Oh, they were so big. They wouldn’t make you horny or anything like that. They just made you feel really drunk and euphoric. All your inhibitions would just float away.” Originally intended to treat malaria, methaqualone popped up during the ’60s and ‘70s, introduced along with

a host of other drugs like LSD, marijuana, and mescaline. Working its way through the countercultural revolution of the time, the drug became popular because of the euphoric sensation it provided. Over time, a bootlegged version of the drug, referred to as “’ludes,” surfaced and rapidly be-

came one of the more common party drugs, not just with

hippies but also with clubgoers. Quaaludes earned the nickname “disco biscuits,” owing to an upsurge in use in discotheques across the country. Rampant abuse forced

the United States to outlaw and ban the drug in 1982. It resurfaced again more recently when it was discovered

100

CRUISING

that Bill Cosby had acquired a prescription from his doctor and used the drug to incapacitate the women he abused. “There’s one experience I remember vividly that involves getting high on Quaaludes,” Adam continues. It was the

very beginning of the seventies. He was sixteen when he met a seventeen-year-old guy living in a house with two other men who were much older. Adam, his new friend,

and the guy’s girlfriend got high on Quaaludes one afternoon. He ended up messing around with the guy when his girlfriend passed out. He discovered that the guy was being “kept” for sexual purposes by the two older men.

Eventually, Adam got to know them and started recruiting other young guys for the men to host in their home for sex parties. Adam’s “payment” for his services came in the form of drugs or being allowed to participate. “One of these men, I don’t recall which one, knew this man who would come into town from Los Angeles,” Adam

explains. “He was a judge who would set himself up in a motel, and me and several other guys my age would stop by and he'd take turns giving us all blow jobs. He gave us

each a twenty-dollar bill wrapped neatly in tinfoil.” Adam laughs and shakes his head. It was a different time, he concedes, nothing at all like today, where everyone is so uptight, caught up in looks and distracted by the world. Adam’s been sober for many years now, and his perspec-

tive on sex, drugs, and alcohol has changed radically. Drugs helped to remove the inhibitions he had from growing up with such an overpowering sexual curiosity. That curiosity is still there; Adam is flirtatious. When a guy sits down at

one of the nearby tables, he makes a comment about his arms and ass.

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ALEX ESPINOZA

“I'm so bad,” he says, laughing. “Right?”

“Who am I to judge?” I reply. “Really, Adam. Who the fuck am I?”

Alarmed by the seemingly progressive attitude that film

and television were taking when it came to the topic of homosexuality, Christian conservatives were quick to denounce the gay lifestyle, taking to the pulpit (and even television) to decry the evils of homosexuality. I was too young to experience it, or to know the name Anita Bryant, but I have, of course, become familiar with her

and the 1977 Save Our Children campaign, which she spearheaded; it sought to repeal an ordinance in Dade County, Florida banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. I would come across the now legendary clip

of Bryant getting a pie thrown in her face by gay rights activist Thom Higgins during a press conference. She could be heard retorting, “At least it was a fruit pie,” be-

fore bowing her head, taking the hand of her husband

sitting beside her, and praying. At the time, Bryant was the spokeswoman

for the

Florida Citrus Commission. The gay community retal-

iated by boycotting orange juice and mobilizing against

right-wing religious extremists who deemed homosexuality sinful. Her hate-filled agenda ultimately took its toll on the former beauty queen, and Bryant lost her

job with the Florida Citrus Commission. On top of that, her marriage ended, and evangelicals excluded her from

events. Bryant had given the gay community exactly what it needed: a very public forum to stand up for its rights.

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CRUISING

But the man who had a major role in bringing gay life to the forefront in America was an Irish Catholic heterosexual.®? Phil Donahue’s popular talk show, The Phil Donahue Show, never shied away from tackling controversial subjects in the 1970s. In the nascent days of reality TV, before Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Jersey Shore,

shows like Donahue’s provided audiences with opportunities to examine and confront the more “taboo” topics typically left out of the larger discourse on American identity. I recall watching as a young boy an episode involving female impersonators. They danced and lip-synched to songs as the studio audience looked on with puzzled expressions on

their faces. My mother and my siblings watched along with me. “Those are men?” my mom asked, shaking her head. My older brother said, “Yes.” “Son jotos?” she asked. “I guess so,” he responded. People called in to the show, some expressing their support, others condemning the guests, calling them abominations and quoting Bible scriptures. I tried to imagine what my own face must have looked like to my family as

I focused on those men in fancy gowns and high-heeled pumps, their skin and makeup flawless. They didn’t look real to me. I knew I was different, but I was too young to articulate

exactly how I was different in a way that went deeper than my disability, deeper than my skin color. What I came to recognize by watching talk shows like The Phil Donahue

Show—which not only featured female impersonators but

also self-proclaimed gay bashers, gay activists, and men

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ALEX ESPINOZA

who lived together as couples—was that the gay community, by and large, was establishing itself as a resilient force.

The sexual freedom of the 1970s provided gay men myriad opportunities to free themselves from the repressive shackles they had been born into. It was a decade of exuberant and uninhibited pleasure seeking, where they took control of their sexuality and cruised openly, from the docks and leather clubs of New York City to the parks and beaches of Los Angeles. Gay bathhouses and sex clubs opened and didn’t hide their intentions but flaunted them proudly

before the public. Throughout the 1970s “fuck-anythingthat-moves ethos,” bathhouses evolved “from often-dingy

run-down haunts to plush shag palaces.” Cruising was in overdrive, and it seemed like the entire world was catching on.

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