The first time I saw him at the Eagle I came alive again, and knew this one could be important in some way.  But the moment was so unexpected that I was really able to do no more than sip my tired scotch to keep myself from gawking.  He was something sweet to look at in the face: clean-shaven, with the short black hair and young angel’s trusting eyes that would have pleased Caravaggio so much that in my mind I named him Angelo instantly. At the same time he was also a big, statuesque man, 6’4” or so, with the broad shoulders, trim hips, and nipped-in waist that motorcycle jackets seem designed to shape – except it was one of those warm, balmy nights San Francisco gets for about a week in May and another week in September, and above his tight black jeans and seasoned, polished boots he wore only a close-fitting plain black t-shirt that made his chest and arms look as if they'd been pumped up by Industrial Light & Magic. He sent those innocent’s eyes on a quick bar cruise and they didn’t come to rest on me, maybe because I was wearing sunglasses and maybe for all the other reasons I was not yet ready to be seen.

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I remember the colors your living room featured long after dinner the April evening when we met. You lounged in the deep blue sofa facing the fireplace; I waited on the edge of a soft rose chair beside you. The yellow candles had long since guttered and our amber brandies glinted in the light of the logs’ orange embers. A waning moon the color of butter presaged dawn beyond the windows at my back, and lit the bones and hollows of your face so boldly I could almost feel your flesh.

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D A D D Y

When I was a callow young man I was sure I'd make a good father because I was soo-o-o fond of little kids. They were inherently sweet, I often said, full of possibilities, and innocent as clouds. Some of my friends who were parents regarded me as a unique sort of loony, as if I'd just announced for the presidency; others believed I was merely infantile or uninformed. A few ignored my romantic effusions altogether. Eventually someone would remark on the economy, foreign hostilities, or reincarnation, and conversation would resume.

When one spring I finally did get married – the last of my crowd to do so by a half-dozen years – the love of my life and apple of my eye presented me with a bouncing pair of ready-made two-year-olds, one pink and one blue. This, I asserted with my cheeks flushed and my eyes aglow, was what I had been born for: Daddy. Somehow the word just seemed right.

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B E A R

The zoo is nearly empty on this still, hot Friday afternoon in autumn, as if the city’s humans, like their furrier brothers now tucked out of sight in caves and shady roosts, have stayed away in favor of some cooler place, or else are hibernating, saving themselves for a busy weekend to come.

I like the park this way: so nearly private, it feels safe. In the solitude I grow soft and languorous. In your arms I lean back lazily against the slatted wooden bench and watch the honey sun in dappled bars fall streaming through the eucalyptus leaves, go threading through the needles of the giant evergreens, glide on motes like a thousand gentle fingers teasing through your warm black curly hair and glinting there like eyelight on the blue steel bars of a cage in the night as you bend over me, blocking out the sun, and settle your hot lips on mine.

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T H E   M A G I C   M I R R O R

A number of years ago, and without any formal purpose, I became a collector of mirrors.  I began with just two I inherited from my parents when they died, which simply for aesthetic amusement I positioned opposite one another on the side walls of my entrance hall so that to the left and right they created the visual effect of a kind of infinite regression. Later a friend broke up his house and asked if I would store a few of his more valuable belongings, among which was a mirror I liked so well I asked if I might store that piece on my wall rather than in my basement. My friend of course said Yes, and I hung his mirror also in my entrance hall, facing the door, so a visitor might be confronted first with his own image and next, if he looked to either side, by his image once again in the midst of the infinite regression which could, itself, be seen obliquely in the third mirror which, of course, he had seen first. Later, when I had my flirtation with neo-Victorian sex practices, I had a variety of mirrors installed in the bed and bath rooms, and then mirrors just seemed to proliferate throughout my house…

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M Y   L I F E   A S   A   W I F E

When my mother used to speak of being chained to her kitchen back in the days of six kids, three dogs, one cat, and two husbands, we all knew it was just a metaphor: her way of complaining without complaining about the meatloaf tedium her formerly champagne-and-oysters life had become. So after my neighbor Renée graduated from Wellesley and told me that she wanted me to be her wife and planned to keep me chained to her kitchen, I assumed it was a kind of family in-joke.   

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C I V I L I Z A T I O N   A N D   I T S   D I S C O N T E N T S

I’ve been gazing at the underwear models in the latest catalogue from Victoria’s Secret, trying to see beneath the satin and lace where subtle shadows trace their nipples, and inside the soft elastic bands where their professional bikini trims stop and their narrow pubic patches start. Since I was eleven or twelve I’ve liked to look at human ads for women’s underwear, and these frilly garter belts lapping Victoria’s slick-teddied honeys are much more what I ever had in mind than the massively corsetted bras and boxerette shorts that were plugged in the Sunday Supplements of my 1950s adolescence. 

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P O N Y B O Y

One year ago I was still a married man, a slave in principle to a gorgeous wife who didn’t turn me on in a marriage of convenience I could not afford to leave. I had the old family name her daddy wanted, she had all the money I wanted – and then she had all the money, period. When my picture showed up the in a local gay paper the week before the Folsom Street Fair I was summarily escorted out of the family business: oops, so sorry. It had all been such a joke! Except, of course, the joke was on me.

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S T R A I G H T   B O Y

Back in the bad old days, when rubber was what your Corvette laid in its five-second skid from zero to sixty, I used to get my kicks at the Eiffel Baths in San Francisco. Things were so loose for a while in that town that the place even ran suggestive ads in the big city dailies, and now and again some Bette Midler impersonator made a local splash singing a run of "boy" songs: Water Boy, Drummer Boy, Danny Boy, and the like. Since I kept up with the music scene, the bath house concerts and the bath house itself became part of my Sunday Supplement consciousness.

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I N C U B U S

The summer sun has set already.  Its fading light, reflected off high scattered clouds, shines bronze and gold and burgundy on your mottled skin.  You stand before me naked, limp as you can go, head fallen, eyes closed, and breath gone slow, fingers now unclenching one by one without relinquishing their hold on the white ash bar suspended just six inches above your head.  Your wrists remain cuffed to it, and your ankles, kept apart by a similar bar, are cuffed to thick ringbolts sunk deeply into the woodwork of the archway framing you. 

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F I R E   I S L A N D   1 9 7 4:   A   B E D T I M E   S T O R Y

Look: tinted pink in dawn’s early light, the failing moon is falling like the last mnemonic remnant of a brain, long since torn from its gray stem and twisting imperceptibly toward the near horizon in a brief, irregular ellipsis. Yet, we are still awake. That is your doing. I wanted to lull myself to sleep recalling a story of erotic indulgence that was true, as if any erotic story were not, however flagrant or pedestrian. But stories are stored, as they are conceived, in recall and other imaginative data, so their truths must lie in those most miscible grounds where what was so and what was not become the equal property of anyone who makes a claim on history. 

Remember Rashomon? Seven different people recalled a single murder in a grove in seven different ways, and all were telling the truth. I will tell you the truth in these last moments of the night, and maybe we will sleep at last. It is up to you to find the other witnesses – unless, of course, you want me to be them too. 

The story I will tell takes place on Fire Island, New York, in July of 1974.

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J A S O N’ S   C O C K

What I love most about Jason’s cock is not its size but its grace, in every sense. I like to lie with my cheek on his belly and introduce myself to it over and over again, getting to know it for the first time every time, brushing it over my eyes, my cheeks, my nose, my mouth, trailing it down my throat inside and out. It always stands up for me like a sentinel, ready to serve, eager to please. The skin is soft and smooth as a tropical breeze signaling monsoons in days to come. It darkens and flushes, pales, darkens and flushes again as if it were a special landscape of flesh the clouds pass over on their way to rain. It smells like a summer beach at sunset after a long day of lying in hot sand anticipating everything forbidden. It pulses slowly with the steady beat of his life and sometimes with a less steady beat of its own, and if I press it with my finger underneath his balls it dances like a tap dog and his balls begin to steal away as if they’re tip-toeing out the door at midnight when they promised to stay home at ten, and if I rest my ear against his sac I can hear the single odd-nailed floorboard creak with almost every other step.

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T R U S T

The stone floor turned cold beneath my naked feet and I felt the great relief of knowing that if I had ever had a chance to turn back, that chance was surely lost by now.  The air itself became cold, and then a frigid gust of wind nearly sent me sprawling. I recovered with difficulty because the shackles that held my wrists were tightly chained behind my back, and the shackles that bound my ankles were also chained and hobbled me, and the hand that held the chain leash locked to the collar around my neck pulled me along on this blindfold journey even as the icy wind whipped my bare skin and the floor itself turned to pellets of ice and gravel, freezing and cutting sharp.

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