I came out with a lie. I told my friends I’d fucked an older dyke in the bathroom of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. I’d snuck into the Gladstone before and knew gay people hung out there. So the lie seemed plausible. And it mirrored some other coming-outs I’d heard about—tales of older men picking up teen boys and turning them out. Luckily, no one pressed me on the details: the what exactly with who specifically. Coming out this way felt easier than holding up the declarative statement “I’m gay” to the close scrutiny of people who knew me neither as straight nor gay, exactly, but mostly as a virgin.
A couple months later, the lie became true. I got my first girlfriend. She was a year younger than me, but in the same crew. Shag haircut, lip ring. Soft butch.
We were young and horny. PDA was our rite. I can’t remember being wildly turned on before her. It seemed like desire and pleasure originated from our bond. The result was fucking. All the time. Everywhere. Unbounded by social rules like: not beside your friends at the sleepover; not in your parents’ beds; not in the Blockbuster parking lot in broad daylight. I remember gazing at her with eyes that wanted to devour, my brother right beside me.
At first, fucking in public was a teen necessity. We lived with our parents. We fucked where we smoked pot: in the empty playgrounds, parking lots, and strip malls of suburban Ontario. We told our parents we were sleeping elsewhere and slept instead in her little green hatchback, the back seats folded down into the trunk to make what was almost a bed.
Even in the heat of her body something lingered just outside the frame. Something I’d learn later in my women’s studies classes to call the male gaze.
Outside our town’s Cineplex, a kid asked his mom, “Are those lesbians?” and the mom replied, “No, that’s just what boys look like now.” Occasionally, we looked up from making out to find a man above us, watching or filming us with his phone. Two men chased us down the main drag of our hometown, leering out their pickup window. We hid inside a Mac’s Milk until they left.
At the end of that summer, we moved to Montreal and grew bolder. The city had rooftops, alleyways, and library stacks. The city had gay bars, backrooms, afters, and parties by the train tracks. We fucked at a crowded CocoRosie concert, we fucked in the alley behind Lab Synthèse, we fucked on the STM 55, my girlfriend’s jacket draped over our laps, fingers creeping past American Apparel elastic.
*
So there’s the leather dykes. Then, there’s the anarchist punk group over there. And there’s fist fuckers of America over there. And they all have flyers up in every fucking cafe. And you can’t text someone for the address, right? You can’t look it up online. You just have to follow these crumbs and keep your ears open and start knocking on doors, really.
And back then there were plenty of women’s-only play parties, but there were also plenty of mixed events and things were fluid. The leather scene was just so accepting of everyone who was exploring anything with their identity and sexuality and gender in some form.
—Michelle Handelman, artist and director of BloodSisters, talking about the highly politicized scene in San Francisco in the 1980s
*
The first gay sex party I went to was remarkable only for the fact that it was my first.
Contre Le Mur had a DJ and a dance floor. No backroom, though the organizers tried to provide some spaces for fucking. It was the early aughts; someone wired a tent up with a live feed, which projected—as pixelated images—what you were doing inside the tent for those outside. Exposed brick walls were segmented into half-cubbies by wooden planks—like the dividers in urinal stalls. That’s where my girlfriend and I fucked.
When we got home, we pillow talked about who watched us. By then, our relationship was open, but, as in so many trainwreck open relationships, there was one person I was absolutely not allowed to fuck. My girlfriend was sure that person had watched us. There was jealousy and possession in her voice. We were no longer the only two lesbians in our small suburban town. We lived in a scene now, and we wanted to fuck others. Talking about how other people wanted us was a backdoor way to assert this desire to each other. I wanted to fuck and be fucked by others. I also wanted to be with her forever.
One day she dropped by the porn theatre where I worked. We split a cigarette and she told me it was over. I don’t remember her exact words, but I do remember saying But what about sex? not fully understanding she’d solved that problem with someone else.
Back in the theatre, I cried while I handed the men their tickets, coffee, and packs of Kleenex. The gender divide at Cinema L’Amour was simple: The women worked the lobby. The men went inside. The men were mostly regulars. Mostly grandpas. They’d hang out in the lobby and discuss ailments and grandkids before disappearing behind the swinging red vinyl doors that led into the theatre. The porn that played was straight. The men, on the other hand, did whatever they could with whoever was there. The theatre smelled like ancient semen.
I spent that summer avoiding my ex and her new girlfriend, no small feat in a small scene. An older dyke brought me to a play party in Villeray. This party was invite-only at a private apartment. There was a cheese board and soft lighting. I got whipped. The sting felt good and I liked the marks she left. Later that night, we fucked on a parked car’s hood. I imagined my ex passing by on a bike and being hurt, turned on by what she saw. I ground harder against my lover’s thigh.
*
It was out of time; there were no clocks at the baths, none, on any floor, so you got a sense of never knowing what time it was—could have been day or night, you know—the windows weren’t open. It was like a true vacation to escape from the world into a place like that where pleasure was first.
—Vito Russo, in an interview with Esther Newton in her book Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town
*
The sound of laboured breathing fills the theatre.
Then—images flicker. A man bound and gagged in a closet. Men with suntanned butts. Men in skin-tight jeans, shirtless, embrace in a golden field. The buzz of a 1970s alarm clock pulls us from our reverie. But the dream continues. A man rolls over in bed, teasing his lover: It’s “time to get up.” The doorbell rings. A moustached stranger with a package. The two lovers are in their towels. As the delivery man walks away, he looks back—catches one lover’s gaze. No words are exchanged but there’s no doubt what the gaze between these two men means. The delivery man disappears down the hall; the movie jumps to the street.
Men with aviator glasses and handlebar moustaches, leather jackets, jeans, or flannel walk down the street, lean against storefronts and lampposts. These men have the same stare as the man in the hallway. In Times Square, the Castro, Sunset Strip. On Main Streets across America. Through the Meatpacking District and into the derelict Chelsea Piers.
Ask Any Buddy is a feature-length film made by historian and archivist Elizabeth Purchell out of salvaged and cut-up reels from the golden age of gay porn. The film ran for a week in 2019 at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives, each screening paired with a full-length vintage gay porn. The week’s selections were hard-core, but also delirious and dreamy. In one, a man slowly puts his hand down the rip of another man’s jeans—the rip grows wider and wider until it becomes a portal to a whole other world. Leather daddies balletically hang and spin from chains. In another, a man locked up in Alcatraz pens romantic letters to his younger lover, who waits for him outside. The letters narrate the couple’s life before his incarceration, and the film shows us their gay world in full colour—the leather bars, the house parties, their rented San Francisco apartments.
Both Purchell’s film and the ones she selected are filled with images of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay life. There’s footage of early gay liberation marches, a real-time police raid of San Francisco bar the Market, the Cockettes’ bejewelled faces on Halloween, the bathhouses, gay porn theatres and glory holes stitching together a mythos—a national gay male identity finding itself on freshly liberated territory.
These films were an entryway into a specific time in queer history. Places I’d only read about in books like Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue or John Rechy’s City of Night were suddenly alive. I wasn’t looking at Alvin Baltrop’s beautiful yet static photographs of the Chelsea Piers in a gallery—on the screen in front of me, people were fucking in the abandoned warehouses, the Hudson River moving muscularly behind them. I was entranced. I was turned on. I wanted to step into the world onscreen.
*
Rider: One thing I couldn’t stop thinking about when I was watching your film selections at Anthology was how a lot of these films seemed to be shot on location. And because of that, it felt like a specific entryway and experience of queer history. For instance, I’d never seen footage of actual cruising at the Piers before, or there’s Variety Theatre, and they’re fucking in the theatre.
Elizabeth Purchell: Unlike straight porn, the gay films were practically poverty row productions, filmed in the actual bathhouses or the actual theatres or the bars or the piers. There was this New York company, for instance, called TM Productions, and they were a film studio, but they also ran a gay porn theatre called the Big Top. And then across the street from the Big Top, around Times Square, was the Broadway Arms, a bathhouse they owned. They’d shoot their movies in the Broadway Arms and then premiere them at the Big Top. The movies were advertising the bathhouse, so you’d go see the movie and then you’d want to go to the bathhouse and try to make the movie real.
Rider: So what’s happening onscreen is not necessarily that different from what’s happening in real life.
Liz: That’s also one of the big differences between gay porn and straight porn. In straight porn, the guys would go see the movies and jack off or be sucked off by a sex worker or a gay guy. Meanwhile, the gay films were kind of a mood setter for what was going on in the actual theatre, right? As the ’70s progressed, the movie theatres became more like sex clubs. The [gay theatres] added lounges behind the screen or glory hole mazes, in the basement, little added attractions to try to be more conducive to what people were going to see the movies for at that time, which was to hook up in the theatre.
Rider: I worked at this porn theatre in Montreal in my undergrad, and it was mostly men over 65. We literally had a seniors discount. I think most of them were straight-ish, but one day I realized they were all hooking up with each other.
Liz: I love the whole idea of just “keep watching what’s on the screen, don’t look down and it doesn’t matter. A mouth is a mouth.”
Rider: What drew you to archival work with the golden age of gay porn?
Liz: For me, it was discovering this whole secret world of underground gay film that’d been kind of forgotten about. These films are really a big revelation for me. These films were not some, like, dirty secret thing. They were major parts of queer culture. If you flip through old back issues of The Advocate, which is the gay paper of record, you’ll see full-size ads for these movies, you’ll see reviews for these movies. You’ll see stories about the stars of the movies. Something I do try to be upfront about is, I’m not really nostalgic for that era. I think people look at that stuff and think, Oh, wow, it must’ve been great to be gay in the ’70s, without realizing that it was not great to be gay in the ’70s for a number of reasons. That’s why I put in those moments that puncture the fantasy. There’s a police raid sequence. There’s the fag bash sequence. And then the fact that at the end of the movie, it’s a dream. It’s a dream within a movie.
*
There’s a difference between cruising and fucking your girlfriend in public. The operative part of cruising is movement: to sail to and from a place with ease. There are cruising grounds, places where cruising is more likely, but the cruise is not the bar, the beach, the bathhouse, the porn theatre. It’s the current running through.
The first time I cruised, I was at Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Beach. We placed our blanket in the sandy woods for shade. J went off to cruise and I waited. I was sure there were no dykes in the bushes waiting to fuck. Men came and went. And then, a Jet Ski pulled close to shore. Its engine shuddered against the water.
I waded into the lake butt naked. The man offered me a life jacket. We rode out to the middle of Lake Ontario and fucked while the CN Tower bobbed in the distance. He dropped me back on shore.
On the ferry back, J teased—“What’s that… Is that… OMG…is that a condom…sticking out of your… OMG!” It’s a testament to his performance that for a second I looked down, concerned everyone could see.
*
I had this German lover for a while. We were in Berlin, at a bar called Ficken3000, with a darkroom in the basement. It’s men’s only, but open to all queer people one night a month. We go down to the basement and it’s pitch black, you can’t see anything. She had me up against the wall. And she’s fucking me from behind when suddenly I felt a man’s hand on my arm, stroking me. And it was weirdly kind of hot because this person doesn’t know my gender, and also the way he’s touching me feels kind of nice. His hand started moving down my chest, but before I let it get to my breast, I roughly grabbed his hand and slammed it against the wall and then I started playing with his chest. Like, pretty aggressively. So, she’s fucking me and at a certain point I noticed her rhythm’s becoming sporadic. We both cum, and go back upstairs.
We’re debriefing over a beer and she’s like, were you cool with that person who was touching you? And I was like, yeah, I ended up feeling him up a lot more than he felt up on me. And she was like, yeah, halfway through fucking you, this guy started fucking me in the ass with his finger and it was really hot.
And what’s super hot to me about gay male cruising is often no words are exchanged. It was all done through touch and through responding to touch. And also, for all I know, maybe one of those men glaring at us when we came up the staircase was one of the men playing with us.
—Kate Huh
*
My friend Ty realized there’s no public sex folder at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. So she made one, filling it with transcribed interviews. Her non-scientific, non-exhaustive study mapped something more spontaneous, more ephemeral, than the place-based histories of gay men’s cruising grounds, and less structured than the butch/femme bar culture memorialized in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues or Audre Lorde’s Zami.
I have, in the archive and in conversation, occasionally brushed up against what I’m looking for. In San Francisco, a lesbian sex club called the Ecstasy Lounge, which operated from 1991 to ’96, where hosts welcomed women to the club and showed them the ropes. Rumours of fisting workshops on Lowest East Side pool tables. A flyer for the Clit Club—a party that ran on Friday nights in New York’s Meatpacking District from 1990 to 1999—featuring a figure in a gimp suit, the text advertising a chance to “Climb into the Tuf Titty Lounge where Kink and Realness reign and give way to the taming of the whip, the sound of her moans, and the inspiration of nasty dyke passion…chocolates, fruit and candlelight ease the pain.” An abandoned parking lot in Manhattan or a staked-out corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, used as something akin to a cruising ground. Spaces that seem most interested in the permissiveness of perversion.
*
I had a friend [in the Bay Area], she really made a thing called lesbian cruising happen. She picked a spot and turned it into a cruising ground. Between 2004 and 2008…we just put the word out. It was on the route between the Mission and SOMA, on Harrison Street between 18th and 19th, and we made sure people were there every Saturday night. There weren’t enough alleys or trees so if people were gonna fuck either they had to be very public about it, which some of them would, like in full streetlight, or go away to find a slightly more private spot.
People did hook up, but it was also a very social moment. People’d just park their bikes there and there’d be 20–30 people hanging out and we’d hit on every woman who went by on a bicycle. We were like this space, this environment, this cloud of homosexuality will be something that all people have to deal with. As much as it was about community and a hangout space and actual fucking, it was also about claiming space in a slightly antagonistic way with sex.
—Annie Danger
*
I like to go to sex parties alone, and describe the feeling of attending one as “being in the mist.” Something might happen, but something might not. It’s up to both me and the night.
I wander the dungeon basement of the food co-op alone until I find someone to wrestle with. A pro-domme invites me to a party at her Chelsea loft. I pick up a girl at NO BAR and take her to the backroom of the Cock. A Callen-Lorde employee and I rim each other on the Spectrum’s dance floor. I watch someone get gang-fisted in the gay woods as part of a talent show. A champagne birthday doubles as a piss party.
The parties come and go, as do the spaces. My anonymity flags. I know you from Ida, from the afters, from Folsom, from Sunday School, from Summer Scum, from Silent Barn, from the alley, from last night and on into the morning. A friend asks another friend to pull her hair. We are feeding each other water from puppy bowls now. We are choking (just a little) on the water now. There is a chain across your neck. Your lover is getting fucked by three on a massage table across the room. She is ecstatic and so, so loud. I am biting the inside of your thigh until a bruise blossoms. Then I slap it and mark it with my nails. Someone else brings your tied-up lover poppers and holds them softly to her nose so she can take more fist.
*
Rider: I remember you telling me about this play party you went to in San Francisco recently, and how you proposed a double penetration thumb war as a way to have some sort of group project to break the ice… Why is public sex important to you? Why create these spaces?
Annie Danger: There’s different forms of public sex. There’s public sex where people of any orientation are just out for the exhibition. It’s breaking a social contract in a way that feels titillating. And that’s fine. And then I think that there’s public sex that is more of a show, that is really just like, look at us, we feel some way about seeing ourselves as these sexual beings doing this public thing. It’s very teen PDA.
And then there’s this other thing. Like in that example—I showed up at an allegedly fisting-themed, dyke-focused play party a few years ago. It was me at the age of 40 and a bunch of like 26-year-old people. The first couple hours of a play party are always awkward. I got there two hours late. It was still the awkward time. So I pulled out my trick bag with all the stuff I brought to play with that night. And I was like, hey, let’s all show and tell. And throughout that, I was like, let’s come up with a group project. My first thought was let’s find someone who can take two fists and we’ll thumb wrestle inside them and we’ll have a thumb wrestling bracket. And they were all weirded out by that. My guess was they hadn’t ever had a group project. They had never been in a play space that was communal or public enough that everyone was focusing on the same thing for a little bit, in a non-spectatorial way. I was trying to think of something that got people involved but was a relatively low buy-in, right? Like to thumb-wrestle someone who could take two fists is a whole level of intimacy. So I improvised a titty gauntlet. We formed two lines. And I announced publicly, for the purpose of the game, everything’s a titty if it’s on a chest, you know, it’s a gender-nonspecific titty gauntlet. And then people had to chant “titty gauntlet, titty gauntlet.” One by one, people got to walk through the titty gauntlet and just get beat up with boobs and chests. That was it. But there’s this joy in that exposure of public sex mixed with the acceptance, right? So it’s a step beyond the thrill of the taboo, and it’s in the realm of like, what are we doing together? How are we seen? How are we transgressing on purpose together in a way that is affirming, in a way that is about group intimacy and collaboration? All of a sudden there’s this rebuilding of a commons, and within that, taking something taboo and making it a commons is a really powerful alchemy.
Rider: I’ve been thinking about what Esther Newton wrote in her ethnography of Cherry Grove. One of the chapters is about public sex, and she said something like whether or not public sex was happening, what was maybe more important was the idea of men being out there under the moonlight, sharing sex as casually as they would share a cigarette, sometimes doing both. And that idea emerged during the 1970s when a national gay identity was being formed. And I guess part of what I’m trying to write about is my own longing for a public cruising culture while not being part of it. And then also being like, okay, but there’s these ways in which it does exist for me. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk with you, because the titty gauntlet is such a beautiful innovation. And it happens—and everyone’s like oh my god we’re all part of this thing and we’re all going to participate and that might lead to different types of intimacy, sex or otherwise, and then it kind of just dissipates, but it stays in the mind of those who were there.
Annie Danger: And then there’s a sort of psychological and somatic experience—I think about this as a performer a lot—where you can create a social environment in which people are empowered to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.
*
I did not want to use this essay to expound on why lesbians don’t cruise. There are theories—about power and money and space, the legal concept of the public woman, historic links to prostitution, the impact of the sex wars and the closure of lesbian bars and the power of the pink dollar and the ghettoization and commercialization of gay villages, and also that troubling concept called “socialization.” These theories might have some truth. You can find them in other texts and decide for yourself. But I suspect that at the seams of our known world—the one created out of both archive and action—is another world. One less obsessed with defining terms. One, perhaps, that makes you work a little for entry.
*
My first handful of grease melted right into his ass. It was like feeding a hungry animal—an animal that talked back….The walls of his guts hugged my hand and forearm, smoother and softer and more fragile than anything I’ve ever touched before. I think I cried. I know I got wet.
—Pat Califia, from “Gay Men, Lesbians and Sex: Doing it Together” (1983)
*
A new date and I are fucking another dyke in the bathroom of a party. She approached us while I was eating D out on a mostly empty dance floor. I can’t remember why we moved to the bathroom. It was 6, maybe 7 a.m. Well, okay, I can’t remember. The sun was out, that I know.
I remember she had a dildo in her purse, and so we braced her hand on the tiles, leaned her over the sink. “I don’t usually do this!” she cooed, and my date—a professional—wagged the dick from the purse “I don’t know…this says differently…” She had come prepared.
What I remember was a three-storey house, a distinct lack of air conditioning, a smoking balcony with a car seat for a bench under a blue tarp to “conceal us from the neighbours” whose windows were eye level with the slate-grey roof we were all smoking on half naked. Two DJs, a bar selling whippets, coming up on my molly in the tiniest hottest crowded hallway while waiting for entry and thinking I might die. My date arrived an hour later, gingham dress and cowboy boots, said, “It’s so hot in here.” Her hands disappeared under her dress before handing me her balled-up panties to prove it.
We started fucking outside the bathroom. We’d actually started fucking outside the bathroom three or four days before, at a different house party after Drag March. And that fucking in a way had led us here, to this party on a drugged-out dawn which did not for us signal a new day.
