PROMISCUITY

  
Sex was a shadow we cast wherever we went, which traveled at our speed, like the calm shadow of its wings that an airplane inevitably projects onto the fields and forests below, that assumes the shape of the changing landscape and yet remains constant. None of our friends would have said we were "obsessed." That was a word heterosexuals used, or older, envious homosexuals. We thought having sex was a positive good, the more the better. A straight guy I'd known when I was an office worker and whom I kept up with, said to me, "You fags are so fuckin' lucky, always getting laid. You know what a fuckin' pain in the ass it is for us? We gotta wine and dine the chicks and dish out all this sweet talk and they still don't always fuckin' put out, whereas you fuckin' horny bastards just grope each other in the public
crapper or at the back of the fuckin' movie thee-yay-terr without so much as a 'thank you ma'arn.' Not that I could fuck some hairy guy's hairy asshole, for Chrissake, I like that sweet honeypot pussy." He pronounced it "puss-say."

We believed that women held out in order to force guys into the servitude of marriage, that pussy was scarce so men would have to work for it, and that religion conspired to make men believe they were doing the right thing when they put on the iron collar and manacles. We thought that if women were as horny -- as disinterestedly horny -- as men, then everyone, straight or gay, would be having sex on every street corner.

We were free. We didn't fall for any morality bullshit -- anyway, the Christians had already assigned us to hell just for looking at men: the thought was as bad as the deed and the offending eye had to be plucked out. Before we plucked it out, we wanted to wink with
it. If we picked up a case of clap the cure was just one shot away. Courtship was a con, again part of female culture. If we loved one another it wasn't something we confused with glandular deprivation. Even "love" was a suspect word, smelling of the bidet. Guys just sort of fell in with each other, buddies rubbing shoulders. We wanted sexual friends, loving comrades, multiple husbands in a whole polyandry of desire. Exclusivity was a form of death -- worse, old hat.
If love was suspect, jealousy was foul. We were intent on dismantling all the old marital values and the worst thing we could be accused of by one of our own was aping the heterosexual model.

I went to bed with a straight man, a young hippy writer who thought he should try sex with another guy and chose me because he liked my work. He treated me as he'd obviously been trained to treat women, with little fluttering kisses along my brow, a tender tracing of my erect nipple, jokes whispered in my ear. We smoked some grass laced with PCP and when he found himself fucking me brutally and slapping my ass, he was horrified by his violence and my pleasure that he hurried into his clothes and still half-undressed, half-erect, ran away, never to be seen again.

We equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn't the Stonewall Uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of "gay culture," but those of us thirty or older knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to suck as many cocks as possible. "Promiscuity" (a word we objected to, since it suggested libertinage, and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word "adventuring") was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn't agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched the more we itched -- except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema. For us there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a backroom and plundering body after body.

There had been no radical break with the past (we'd all heard about the orgies in the navy during World War II), but at least since I'd first come on the scene in the 1950s three things had changed: in New York City the cops weren't closing down our bars any more or harassing us if we held hands on the street; we now had a slogan that said "Gay is Good," and we'd stopped seeing shrinks in order to go straight; and there were more and more, millions more, gay men with leather jackets and gym-built bodies and low voices and good jobs. We used to think we were rare birds; now the statistics said that one out of every four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched up Fifth Avenue every June there were hundreds of thousands of gay women and men, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them the regular kind of people we liked. These were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982 in New York, then that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my twenty years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be getting laid more often. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he heard from his patients, even from the real satyrs: they weren't getting as much tail as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim, aghast, "You know Liz has been married five times!" If my marriages had been legal, they would have been legion.

Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy. For those who never lived through that period (and most of those who did are dead), the phrase "anonymous sex" might suggest unfeeling sex, devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having opened it up and wrung it dry, to lie, head propped on a guy's stomach just where the tan line bisects it, smoke a cigarette and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his unhappiness in love, your money worries, his plans for the future -- well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. The best thing of all were the random, floating thoughts we shared. Just the other day a black opera singer, who's famous now, sent me one of his recordings and a note that said, "In memory of that night at
the baths twenty-five years ago." The most romantic night of my life I spent with an older man on the dunes on Fire Island, kissing him until my face burned from his beard stubble, treasuring the beauty of his skin and his warmth and every flaw as though it were an adornment. When he walked me home through the salt mist floating in off the sea and the sudden coldness of dawn, we strolled arm in arm as though we'd been lovers before the war, say, any war, and were reunited only now.

-- Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony