Authors: Penn Jillette
“You are so not fucking gay. You are so far from gay. You’re going to be a straight guy walking around Club Baths.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You’ll walk around Club Baths like a fucking farmer.”
“There are gay farmers.”
You notice I didn’t deny I was going to walk around like a farmer. There was no denying that. I walk like a cartoon farmer. I lumber. I have an awful walk. You can hear me walk. I have horrible flat feet and I’m so fucking big that you can hear me dragging my ass from a mile away.
After Teller and I were on the Emmys the first time, my dad said, “They give you that wonderful introduction. They say nice things about you. There’s a big band playing. The camera sees you looking great in your fancy tuxedo, and then you walk out like a farmer.”
Of course there are gay farmers, but there aren’t gay farmers who walk like me.
I made it clear I was going with Charles to Club Baths. It turns out
Tracy knew a lot about being gay. After we split up several months later (totally unrelated to my gay adventure), she started dating nothing but women. She has lived happily ever after as a lesbian. (Although I don’t think any of her girlfriends ever walked like farmers.)
Anyway, there were still a few days to wait and I was bragging to everyone that I was going to Club Baths. I was going to be Charles’s date. It was going to be great. I was nervous. I was excited.
I told my good friend Bernard that I was going. He felt competitive.
“I wouldn’t be bothered by going,” he said.
“You would too. You’re a nice breeding homophobe.”
“I am not.”
“You are too. You talk a good fight, but you’d be just a scared little pussy if leather daddies with those hats were fucking all around you.”
“Would not.”
“Would too.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No you’re not, I’m going with Charles. He’s my date. You can go out with Tracy that night. Go hang with her and your girlfriend. The three of you can go to a movie or something; I’ll be out watching guys fuck.”
“I know Charles too. I’m going to ask him if I can go. I don’t need your permission.”
I decided that I’d better ask Charles first. He was a little insulted.
“I’m not running a field trip to the faggot zoo. This is a bad idea. Fuck you. We’re not going.”
Charles and I talked for a while longer and finally decided that Bernard could come with me. He would make it better. Charles wouldn’t feel like he had to babysit the breeders. He would leave us, go off and get fucked, and we could keep each other company. It is pretty stupid to go to Club Baths with a straight guy as your date. This was the best plan. Charles would lead Bernard and me to the edge of dick-munchin’ land and we’d be on our own.
As the day approached, Bernard and I talked to our girlfriends. We talked about it all the time. We wanted to be ready for anything. I told Bernard, “We don’t want to be cockteasers, right? These are guys who are
there to fuck. By walking in the door, we’re saying we want to fuck. We don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. We don’t want to lead anyone on. That’s a douchebag thing to do for any sexual orientation. I’ve told Tracy that if my cock gets hard, I’ll fuck something.” I was still trying to one-up Bernard. I wanted to be the coolest. Even if my farmer DNA wouldn’t allow me to walk the walk, I was going to talk the talk, and, if the vibe was right, fuck the fuck. Bernard kept right up with me. He said that if he got hard, he’d fuck too. We were both ready to prove it all night long.
Sunday finally arrived. It was time to go. It didn’t matter what we wore; we’d be stripping to go in anyway. It didn’t really matter what our hair looked like; we’d be in baths, right? Steam rooms and shit. Nothing mattered. This was all men. The cockteaser issue bothered us a bit. We didn’t want to lead anyone on, so Bernard and I would be a couple. We would stay close together. We would hold hands. Our gay brothers would figure we already had our hookups, and so we wouldn’t lead anyone on. It was a perfect plan.
Tracy thought it was stupid. “So, you gay losers are going to hold hands?”
“Well, you know, to signal that we’re together.”
“Why don’t the two of you stay here and fuck each other and save a hundred and twenty bucks?”
“I guess I didn’t mean we were going to hold hands.”
“I’m sorry, what does ‘we’re going to hold hands’ really mean? Is that gay code? What color handkerchief goes in what pocket to signal you like to hold hands?”
“You know, I mean, we’ll be a couple, so we’re not sending off the wrong signals.”
“That’s so nice of you to let the whole gay world down gently. You two are complete out-of-the-closet assholes.”
Charles, Bernard, and I arrived at Club Baths, one very attractive, fit, confident, sexy, young gay man and two dipshits. I don’t remember much about the building. I’m sure the web has all the details of the building
and every room and what it was like back then, but I want to do this from memory. I remember we went right into the locker room. Charles stripped naked, grabbed his towel, folded his clothes, and locked his valuables up, and that’s the last we saw of him until we left five hours later. Bernard and I stripped naked, put our clothes in clumps in our lockers, and struggled with our towels. It seemed that the men used one towel each and chose its placement carefully. If they had a great chest, they tied it around their waist; if they had a great ass, they just put it around their neck. It was a very easy decision for me—the towel didn’t fit around my waist, so I had to represent a great cock and ass. Bernard tied his around his waist.
Bernard and I gave each other big smiles, held hands, and walked together into Grand gay fucking Central station. I was trying not to walk like a farmer, but I don’t have a choice. It’s nature and nurture. We looked around. It was a bathhouse. There were baths. I remember a really nice steam room and a Jacuzzi when we first went in. It was all very
Logan’s Run,
if Farrah had a faucet. There’s this comfortable hateful cliché that anonymous sex is sad and lonely because no one is smiling or laughing. Very few of the men were smiling and laughing, but it didn’t seem sad and lonely, it seemed intense. There’s a difference. They weren’t there to flirt, they were there to fuck. All your
Playboy
foldouts will talk about laughing in bed, and funny men, and how important a sense of humor is in a man. I’ve enjoyed giggling before, during, and after sex. But there are other kinds of great sex that don’t involve any laughing. There are kinds of sex that are focused and intense, and make you not feel like making little jokes. There is sex where the sex itself is all that matters. Playful, fun sex is great, but serious fucking is good too. Club Baths was nothing but serious-fucking fucking. They were more than cruising, they were prowling. There were some intense fuckers in Club Baths that night. Everyone knew why everyone who was at Club Baths was at Club Baths.
Bernard and I didn’t have any idea at all why we were at Club Baths. We sat in the steam room, held hands, and told jokes. We giggled together. Bernard jumped into the Jacuzzi and splashed and we laughed.
We were the only ones who were laughing. We were the only ones holding hands. It’d be easy to spin this as we were the ones enjoying life, the ones full of joy, but that would be wrong. We were the ones who weren’t going to have any real honest fun that night.
Charles was upstairs on the floor that had little individual rooms where couples or trios of men would go in to fuck and be fucked. I think you could also go out on the rooftop if you wanted to blow a guy in the warm San Francisco night. Bernard and I walked up and looked around, but we were more comfortable in the steam and bath rooms; we liked the bigger rooms better. There was a very dark little theater downstairs running gay porno. There was a weight room, where people could act out YMCA fantasies. There was a little snack cart with apple juice and muffins.
Bernard and I held hands and walked from room to room. Keep in mind that I’m huge, and Bernard is average size and thin. We both had unfashionable haircuts. We were both wet from playing in the Jacuzzi and one of us was walking like a naked farmer with a towel around his neck. We were there a long time. We went into the weight room and actually used the weight machines. We didn’t bend over the bench press rack to get fucked. We tried to lift a little weight. We’d never lifted weights before, we were just playing. On the floor we were on, a few people were fucking in the corners, but there wasn’t real sex out in the well-lit open. We didn’t really watch anyone fuck; they were kind of around us, but no one was displaying it. I’m sure other nights that happened, but this wasn’t a crowded night. This was Bring Your Sexually Remedial Breeder Coworker to the Club Day.
We went into the little movie theater and watched the gay porn for a long while. We were the only ones watching. There were couples all around us fucking, sucking, and jacking. We had only the reflected light from the screen so we couldn’t see much, but gay sex was happening all around us. We certainly saw more sex than a gay guy would see from a straight couple at a downtown McDonald’s. It sure didn’t bother me. I would have proved my point to Charles, except Charles was a couple floors above us getting the living shit fucked out of him. There wasn’t
much gloating for me to do, so I nonchalantly squinted at blow jobs in a gay theater. Bernard and I were no longer holding hands—we thought that whispering jokes quietly to each other in the little gay movie theater was enough of a hint that we were spoken for.
We’d been there a few hours and not only had my cock not gotten hard, but we were bored. Really bored. We had promised to leave with Charles, and time may fly when you’re getting reamed, but it drags on and on when you’re walking like a farmer, drinking little bottles of apple juice, and holding hands with a straight guy from Jersey.
It was time to address the very well-hung and well-groomed elephant in the bathhouse. We didn’t have to be holding hands. In the hours we’d been there, we had not teased one fucking cock. We hadn’t gotten our asses grabbed, no one had bent over and offered us a man pussy, no one had asked us if we came there often or lived with our folks. No one had said a fucking word to us. No one had made eye contact with us. These guys are horny animals. They will fuck anything!
Go to the web, and you’ll find gay sites for fatties, hairy guys, hung guys, small-dick guys (those sites don’t jump to the top of Google but they must be there), sissy guys, butch guys, leather daddies, drag queens, twinks, bears—the list goes on and on. There’s someone getting hard for everyone. And this was 1981; no one really knew enough about AIDS to be scared and careful. This was a fucking gay bathhouse! There was no stigma to being gay. There was no gay-bashing in there. No one would ever be called “faggot” without irony or some sort of BDSM turn-on humiliation scene. If one single patron had had the slightest desire for us, there was no downside to letting us know. There was no reason to be discreet. These were guys who desired anything. Listen to any preacher talk about San Francisco gays. The word “discerning” isn’t used a lot. These fuckers weren’t known for being picky.
I was a little hurt at the rejection, so . . . I started cruising. I let go of Bernard’s hand and tried to make my feet less ducklike. I tried to not walk like a farmer. I tried to tighten up my little ass. I sucked in my stomach, I fluffed up my cock. Goddamn it to fucking hell, these
guys would fuck anything, and I may not have been Wham!’s George Michael, but I was a subset of “anything,” right? I left Bernard alone and I walked up and down. I made eye contact with every guy in the place. I tried smiling, I tried looking intense. I tried winking. I brushed up against other men. I worked it, girlfriend. I did that for about an hour.
Nothing.
I went back to holding hands with Bernard. At least when I was holding hands with Bernard the gay world had an excuse for not wanting to fuck me. If gay marriage had been legal then, I would have married Bernard and promised to be exclusive. Anything to not face the truth of universal rejection.
After about five hours of fighting off and disappointing not one single solitary gay soul, Charles finally came back downstairs. He had been fucked. Wow, had he been fucked. He had been used up. Every guy who hadn’t wanted us had had Charles. He had been rode hard and put up wet.
“How did you do?” he asked, like it was a fishing trip.
I started to tell him about our evening. He cared as much about my take on the Club Baths as the other gay men had cared about my hot little fuck holes and swinging dick. Completely sated and satisfied, Charles got dressed quickly. He had been through a lot of towels that night. Mine was still around my neck. You’d have felt safe sending a three-year-old to bed with my towel. It hadn’t seen any action at all. Bernard and I got dressed. We had gotten a lot of steam and hot water, and the cold early, early morning air of San Francisco felt great.
Charles lived close by, but it was a couple miles back to where I lived, and Bernard and I decided to walk. We needed to talk. The two of us had held hands and talked at the club, but it was time to really talk about the experience. It didn’t take long for me to say to Bernard, “You know the expression ‘You couldn’t get laid in a women’s prison with a fistful of pardons’? Well, we couldn’t get eye contact at Club Baths.”
“Fucking no one wanted us. Not at all.” Bernard and I were really rejected and hurt.
“Yeah, asshole, straight guys are always saying, ‘Man, if a fag ever came on to me, I’d punch him out.’ Well, if they aren’t a lot better looking than us, it’s never going to happen. Or maybe it’s just us.”
“Did they know we were straight?”
“Did we just not give off the gay vibe?”
I don’t know. I still don’t know. I’ve told this story to a bunch of friends—gay and straight—and they just laugh in my face. I guess I’m that butt-ugly, or there’s a straight smell or something.
As we walked through the San Francisco night, we were completely perplexed and very hungry. We decided to stop at Clown Alley for some burgers.