ODESSA, IN WEST TEXAS, feels like the remote edge of something in the way you might imagine Vladivostok: far from anywhere, exotic, but not the kind of exotic that attracts tourists. It’s an oil town, mainly. Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is flat, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big deal in Odessa is, famously, high school football. West Odessa, bleaker still, is the scrubby outskirts where they put the “adult” stuff that Odessa doesn’t want.
So. West Odessa. April. Early Saturday afternoon. The parking lot of the A&R Adult Bookstore, a windowless concrete rectangle on a dusty strip of nothing-much: auto body shops, storage units, little outfits in some part of the oil business, with a lot of space between. No neighbors to annoy, or horses to frighten. A couple of hours earlier I’ve dropped my friend Cowboy off here; now I’m back, waiting in my rental car. Cowboy’s still inside, long past the time he was supposed to come out. (Re Cowboy and me, for now, just this: he lives in West Texas; I don’t. He’s attracted to places like the A&R; I’m not.)
I’ve checked out the store, a little. As you enter, there’s a roomful of racks: video porn and magazines wrapped in plastic (mostly straight, some gay or bi), plus a long counter with assorted sex toys on view. In the back, an aisle with cubicles for coin-operated peepshows; a sign says they’re currently inoperative, no reason given. On the side, a doorway to a tiny theater (where Cowboy’s gone), with a five-dollar entrance fee and a sign that says “Ladies Free.” The only live lady is the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who seems to be doing inventory: this is a place where men come for porn and often, in various ways, to encounter other men. In the parking lot, never a large number but a steady turnover: pickup trucks, dusty old cars, a few SUVs, nothing fancy. The men entering and leaving are in their twenties to their fifties, ordinary West Texas guys, not much to look at, mostly white, a few Latino, a lot of paunches, unshaven faces, boots, and ratty baseball caps: mechanics, oil workers, maybe some ranch hands, whatever’s going in the local economy. Inside the theater, according to Cowboy, there are this afternoon, over a couple of hours, about fifteen guys at any time. Projector, beam of light, screen with old generic straight porn movies. Maybe seven rows of seats, thirty or so in all, plus some free-standing lawn chairs. An area of darkness at the back, illuminated only when the entry door opens. Of the fifteen men, two sit unmoving with eyes fixed on the screen; the rest move around, check each other out. No two guys in adjacent seats: when one guy tries to sit next to another, he’s silently waved away. (Only one connection is made during Cowboy’s visit: two guys quickly leave together, though after awhile one returns alone.) This is, as you might expect, a very slow time for the A&R: the crowds come at night, on weekends especially. According to a friend of Cowboy’s, guys suck and fuck each other in the theater with little or no privacy. Any non-participants staring at the screen would certainly know what’s going on around them. “An orgy room,” I say. Cowboy agrees. For West Texas men seeking men, local options are limited, and the A&R seems at the moment the premier attraction in Odessa. Cowboy’s heard there’s one gay bar, reportedly small and “very nelly” (according to an Internet search, validity unknown, there are in fact two bars, one called “Miss Lillies Nitespot”), but bars wouldn’t be a congenial or practical setting for much of the A&R clientele. Bar cruising takes time and doesn’t get started till late, and guys who meet there need a place to go. Plus, you have to put yourself out—sipping beer, making small talk, showing your face in a light that’s a lot brighter than the A&R. (And there’s no deniability: “I just came for the movie, officer.” No harm in that.) Other than bars, there are a few parks in and around town where some cruising is reputed to go on, and rest stops on the interstate where locals are said to connect with truckers and others. And these days, there’s the Internet. Another search pulls up websites where a few Odessa men post sex ads, offering among other things to drive from 300 to 1,000 miles for the right guy. Although Cowboy has been back in West Texas for over a decade, he doesn’t follow media much and his memory of gay-related news is fuzzy. There was a murder, two rich guys who picked up the wrong trick; a Metropolitan Community Church met for a while in the nineties; maybe some gay events that made the papers and got attacked by preachers—all sputtering out by the turn of the century. Odessa’s in America, everybody gets cable, so there’s the gay stuff in the national media and on the Web. But locally, not much of anything, not even arrests. As far as anything public and gay in West Texas, it might as well be the 1950’s. At the A&R, anyway, we’re a long way from the Castro, a long way from weddings in Massachusetts, from identities and “lifestyles.” We’re in the heart of something primal: the low-rent, low-profile territory of what sex educators call MSM: men who have sex with men. At the big gay events, the guys on the dance floor, moving to the beat, shirtless, high on whatever, must surely feel they’re at the hot center of something, gay as it gets, a pure rush of herd-life at its most intense; but the concept of a “center” is not that clear. Some people go to cities, some don’t. Of those that do (and those who were always there), some “come out,” seek love and/or sex, adopt the customs and values of the subculture they find in Chelsea or Des Moines, West Hollywood or Missoula. But in and around cities, too, there are always the parks, tearooms, highway rest stops, places like the A&R, where you find—along with the more-or-less “out”—all the guys who never came out, or came out and went back in, or never conceived of “out” in relation to themselves, never thought of anything but urges and relief, with as few complications as possible. There’s no way of knowing, but in sheer numbers, it may be that it’s these guys who are in fact the center of “gay life” in West Texas, in America, in most of the world—an MSM archipelago, below the radar, in public view only here and there, now and then, when the cops crack down. For all the public noise about gay this and gay that, for all the progress from not-speaking-its-name to the rarefied precincts of “post-gay,” these guys are not much affected: deep-sea creatures, for the most part, going about their deep-sea business, far from storms that roil the surface. To an extent there’s a professional interest, because I’m an AIDS bureaucrat, but in general the MSM world seems as remote to me as West Odessa. The A&R visit is accidental, to accommodate Cowboy (who can’t get out on his own these days). I live in Washington, D.C., a city with a highly visible gay presence: many bars, a gay bookstore, shops with rainbow flags, gay festivals, same-sex pairs kissing or holding hands, at least occasionally, in areas near Dupont Circle. But worlds do collide: one day I came out of the gay bookstore and a young guy followed and stopped me: dress shirt and tie, clean-cut, cute, slight Southwest accent—a sales rep, maybe, in town for a convention. He said, “Uh … is there an arcade around here?” I didn’t get it: an arcade? “You know,” he said, “a place where you go?” It was lunchtime, he was prowling, and Lambda Rising wasn’t the kind of “bookstore” he’d expected. I was no help, but that’s just me: the A&R phenomenon is pretty universal, and he had a better grasp than I did of what was to be found in D.C. I vaguely knew that there was a red-light district off in some industrial area, and finally learned details from a front-page feature in The Washington Post. Buildings in that district will be demolished soon for a new baseball stadium; the Post story discussed problems of relocating current businesses: raunchy bars with all-nude strippers, a gay bathhouse, and an arcade that sounds exactly like the A&R except the porn on view is more gay than straight, condoms are provided, and the peepshow cubicles are operative. Of these businesses, a D.C. councilwoman is quoted as saying, “They exist in their own world down there, and they don’t bother anyone.” And, as in Odessa (as in Everywhere), I gather from the gay paper that there are in and around the city a number of notorious public areas where there are occasional gay bashings and (especially in Virginia) arrests. A key difference between Washington and Odessa is that the Post quotes some habitués of the red-light area by name and occupation. One says, “This is our social life. The feeling is, if it goes here, I don’t know what we’ll do.” But it’s a safe bet that most of the men who find their way to the area aren’t going public in the Post, and that they represent a cross-section that goes well beyond “out” guys (like Cowboy) who prefer the same kinds of places as the guys in Odessa. Back in the days when I was having sex, encounters with MSM were more frequent and closer. I went to bathhouses a lot: MSM for days, in the general mix. Of course, with everybody in nothing but a towel, you only had clues here and there: wedding rings, military haircuts, bits of overheard talk, something in the way they moved, something in their eyes. You rarely knew, and you didn’t really care, if the cock in your mouth or ass belonged to a suburban husband or a Castro party boy, though I’m sure I had a lot of everything. After sex, a thirtyish Asian guy rambled wistfully about family obligations, his wife and kids, the freedoms he imagined I enjoyed, that were never to be his. Anyway, none of this MSM stuff is news. The behavior is classic Kinsey: a spectrum from zero to six, all straight to all gay. Interpretations of the behavior, depending on who’s doing the interpreting, are all over the map: what’s going on in all those minds, conscious and unconscious, and how does it relate? An epistemological enigma, never to be resolved. The guys in West Texas, the amateur-porn stars, the guys in the arcades, all the MSM—even those guys are part of a larger group: the silent majority, as it were, of guys with partially or wholly homoerotic “preferences” or “orientations” or just habits, who’d have to be included in some great gay census in the sky but who wouldn’t register on any instrument that purported to track “the gay community.” Trees in the forest, falling without a sound. Which brings us to the other characters at the A&R, the oddities in the picture: Cowboy and me. Well, not that odd: we’re mirror-image representatives of something pretty common, ways of failing off the gay-world map without actually dying: one who wants to but can’t, one who can but doesn’t want to. We met in 1973, in a gay collective in Berkeley, California, in the crazed fandango of early gay liberation. There’s too much history to bother with: we moved in the same circles, then lived together (just roommates) in San Francisco, didn’t get along and split up, then later, somehow, bonded and stuck, even long-distance. (In the early 90’s, for different reasons, I moved to Washington, Cowboy to Texas.) Meanwhile, lovers and friends, vocations and avocations, whole gay eras, came and went: marches, parades, encounter groups, dance parties, street fairs, film festivals, court decisions, media visibility, ballot propositions, the epidemic and everything it ended or upended, all the gay vicissitudes, to mid-life and beyond. We were there, though neither of us was much for “gay culture” or the stereotypical patterns of urban gay life. Neither of us liked bars much, or had any sense of fashion, or cared for the campy things we were supposed to care for. Both loners, mostly: Cowboy lived with a lover when I first met him, but that didn’t last; I went through a string of wrong-and-wronger guys, never for long. Even then, and always after, Cowboy’s outlet of choice was MSM turf: tearooms, parks, “public sex environments.” He never gave up; even in the fleabite Texas town where he wound up living with his mother, he sometimes managed to hook up: repairmen, MSM he met at gas stations or supermarkets. Aside from baths, I tried a lot of things, but … it’s a long story, like a lot of other long stories that reach essentially the same ending: without intending or realizing it, some time in the 90’s I let it go, withdrew into porn and other vicarious amusements. Cowboy has a friend in West Texas that he’s known since childhood. The guy’s married, a grandfather, in a little town near the border; he’s always been gay, always prowled on the side, even now (he’s the one who told Cowboy about fucking some guy at the A&R). In daily life, Cowboy can’t afford to be gay, and with the meds he’s on, can’t even get a hard-on any more. But when I visited Odessa he still wanted to see the A&R, and in the theater (he says) offered blow jobs to a couple of guys who politely turned him down. He’s eternally resilient and wants me to take him to public-sex spots in another town when I go back to Texas. Cowboy has ideas about the A&R clientele. He imagines they’re basically lumpen hand-to-mouth types—roustabouts and roughnecks, maybe, the lowest rungs on the oil crews—whose consciousness never got raised, living alone in dingy rooms (cheap motels, a lot of the time), drinking and doping, whose only, sad outlet is sneaking off to the A&R for a few minutes of quick-and-dirty intimacy. It occurs to me that this is Cowboy’s way of having somebody to look down on, to pity. Because, you see, the poor deprived A&R guys never had the rich gay life that he and I had: the San Francisco years, all the gay-as-it-gets experiences we accumulated and still carry with us now. There was certainly a lot of it, and it’s certainly shaped us, for good and ill. But it’s like a long hallucination. Unlike Cowboy, I get back to San Francisco now and then, on business trips, and I sometimes wander through the Castro. Everybody I knew is dead or gone or changed past recognition. I’m a ghost from another century, with no feeling for anything. So maybe it was just a phase after all. Laurence Tate, who lives in Washington, D.C., has completed a book-length manuscript, “Forgotten Men,” from which this essay is taken.
