Swish (18 page)

“Nah, I just like doing the show better that way.” I apologized for not having any Viagra and he turned to Paul, another go-go boy, who was a publicist by day. “Can I use you for inspiration?”

“Sure,” came the answer, and Michael reached out and stroked Paul’s chest with one hand while working himself to a state in which he could enjoy the shower show with the other. The fourth go-go boy, whose name I never caught, turned out to have the same problem as Michael; Paul helpfully did something interesting to give him the lift he needed, and then it was time for us to go onstage, at which point I found out just how icy cold the showers at Splash really are. A bizarrely nonsexual element pervaded our interactions—these three guys just understood the difficulties inherent in their job, and did what they could to help one another out. As I left the bar, I felt proud to be a member of such a good-hearted group of people, and it took me three days to realize that the guy running the party was never going to call me.

Finally, after weeks of agony, Daniel asked me to help him with a film festival he was organizing and I said yes I would be happy to but
big breath pounding heart shaking voice trembling hands
I wanted him to hire me to dance at Splash as often as he felt comfortable with. He said that would be no problem, and I almost started crying, and then at that week’s radio show he told me he’d gotten tired of being micromanaged by the guys who ran Splash so he’d quit.

He hosted a party Saturday nights after the radio show at a bar called Eastern Bloc; I danced there a couple times, but it was nowhere near as satisfying as dancing at Splash. The go-go boys at Eastern Bloc were simply part of the ambience, like the too-loud music and the too-red lights hanging from the too-low ceiling. Nobody paid any attention to us and the tips were terrible. Then one day Daniel said that he was hemorrhaging money and so he was just going to have each week’s Eastern Bloc go-go boy do the radio show beforehand as well.

I was being laid off from a job appearing on the radio in my underwear.

I tried not to despair but it was seeming more and more likely that I would never again experience the joy that had filled me during my engagement at Splash. “I’m throwing a party at Scores next Sunday, though,” Daniel said (Scores being a notorious heterosexual strip club). “It’s the first gay party that’s ever happened there. Do you want to help out?” Of course I did. This would undoubtedly turn out to be another defeat to add to my burgeoning store, but the alternative—giving up—was unthinkable.

I assumed I would be dancing, but when I got to Scores and took my pants off I learned that this was not the case. The other go-go boys working the event were going to be dancing—well, technically, they were going to be stripping, the only difference between that and go-go dancing being that they would start this party with their clothes on—but I had a different role to play. Once each go-go boy had finished his featured performance, he would make himself available to interested patrons for lap dances, which was where I came in, as the lap-dance monitor.

My ostensible job was to make sure that none of the patrons and strippers had sex in the lap-dance rooms, but of course my real job was to make sure that the Scores bouncer didn’t catch any of the patrons and strippers having sex in the lap-dance rooms. I was also instructed to stop the lap dances after ten minutes, sex or no, so that if a customer was sleazy the go-go boy didn’t have to spend too long with him. Shortly after the party started Daniel instructed me to keep anybody who wasn’t getting or giving a lap dance from coming upstairs. I wanted to say that I was the least appropriate person within a hundred miles to have been assigned these tasks, since they involved disobeying a burly authority figure, keeping track of time, and telling people “no,” but before I could open my mouth he was already gone.

I felt as if I were in a Sartre play. There were sixteen guys at the party in their underwear; fifteen of them were being paid to strip while I made sure everything ran smoothly and helped them out with anything they needed.

I was a go-go intern.

After one go-go boy and his customer left their lap-dance room I opened the curtains to turn the light back on and saw a smear of semen on the leather couch. Though I wanted desperately to pretend I had noticed nothing, I also felt very strongly that the next person to pay for a lap dance in the room had the right to an experience unsullied by the previous patron’s ejaculate, so I got a paper towel and, grimacing, wiped the couch clean. I reacted similarly half an hour later in another room when I saw a condom on the floor that had obviously fulfilled its intended purpose. I have taken some unpleasant gigs in the past, but picking up used prophylactics left behind by men who kept having to empty their underwear of cash while I ran frantically around saying “Okay, guys, time to wrap it up” loudly enough to be heard over the patrons’ preorgasmic groans but not so loudly as to dispel the mood may be the worst job I have ever had. When the party was over the go-go boys were supposed to share their tips with me, and every one of them forgot. (One guy did PayPal me the next day but then when I joked that I was shocked he had sex with people he met online he e-mailed me a confused “Why? Doesn’t everybody?” and stopped writing me back.) As I was on my way out, Daniel said, “Hey, do you feel like dancing naked at a party tomorrow night?” and, though all I really wanted at this point was to become a eucalyptus plant so I would never be required to have feelings again, I could not summon the psychic resources to turn him down.

A few days after Daniel had first asked me how I felt about dancing naked, remembering what my friend Jim had said about go-go boys dancing with hard-ons, I made an appointment with my primary-care physician. Stuttering with feigned embarrassment, I told Dr. Weinstein that I was suffering from erectile dysfunction caused, I suspected, by my antidepressants. He obligingly wrote me a prescription for Cialis and sent me on my way. And so, the night after the Scores party, I had the appropriate supplies for Daniel’s event at Thai One On, a restaurant in the West Village. I knew from Jim and from Go-Go Boy’s blog that the evening was likely to be a tawdry one, but beyond that I had no idea what to expect.

“Go-Go Boy says you get paid more if you come,” I told Mike as I popped the Cialis on my way out.

“Good,” he said, “because the electricity bill was high this month.”

I arrived late at the restaurant and found Daniel standing by the clothes check in the vestibule. “The other guys have all already done their sets,” he said, pointing to the party room, “so just go on in when you’re ready.” I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to be naked here (the people milling about were clothed) or only inside; to be safe, I kept my underpants on until I got into the main room, at which point I realized I didn’t know where to store them, so I just threw them in a dark corner and hoped they would still be there when it came time to leave. I got up on a platform wearing only my sneakers and socks, and, following the lead of the other dancers already ensconced in dimly lit niches about the room, manipulated myself into a suitably entertaining condition. I looked up at one point to see Go-Go Boy heading toward me from across the room; I hadn’t realized he would be dancing at the party too. “I didn’t know you’d graduated,” he said affably.

“Yes, well,” I replied.

Some of the guests were fully dressed; others were shirtless; still others wore only their underwear. A man in jeans and a button-down shirt came up to me, folded a dollar bill in half, put it in my sock, reached up, and squeezed me a couple times.
Oh, dear,
I thought,
I didn’t realize that was part of the deal,
after which I spent half an hour artfully toying with myself in such a way as to prevent anybody else from toying with me. Then I realized that the other dancers, less fastidious than I, were getting much better tips, so I gave over and let the patrons handle the goods (though when one guy made as if to taste them I backed away and laughed in friendly admonishment). Several times during the evening Button-Down-Shirt Man importuned me by repeating the squeezes without the cash incentive. When I rolled my eyes at this, the dancer next to me whispered, “I hate the guys who think a dollar gives them the right to grope you all evening. Just tell him you usually charge a lot more for what he’s already gotten.” I couldn’t figure out how to do this without making Button-Down-Shirt Man dislike me, though, so I held my tongue.

While dressing for the event I had not thought carefully enough, and so instead of long, tight socks I was wearing short, loose ones. This meant that money kept falling out of them, as if I had been blessed by a crone in some twenty-first-century X-rated gay fairy tale. I kept having to collect the bills and put them with my things in the clothes check.

Sometimes guys wanted to talk. One tall fellow with a Vandyke kept coming back to engage me in further conversation, tipping me each time. He asked what I did when I wasn’t dancing and I told him I wrote musicals.

“My partner wrote musicals,” he said with a rueful smile. “He died a few months ago. You remind me a little bit of him.”

I recognized a few people from places I’d danced before. One of them, a shirtless man in his forties with a limp, told me that people never seemed interested in him at these parties and asked me whether I had a boyfriend. I told him I did and he looked around sadly at the room full of flesh and sighed, “All the good ones are taken.” I realized he had come here searching for true love and I wanted simultaneously to hug him and to flee.

“Joel!” said another man I had met in my underwear the previous week. “I was hoping I’d get to see you with fewer clothes on.” Dave was tall and stocky, with a shaved head and sharp, handsome features. I smiled at him coquettishly, delighted that he had remembered my name.

As the night wore on, the party guests became more adventurous. Every once in a while I would glimpse somebody kneeling in front of somebody else in the shadow of a table, or eventually in the middle of the room, and there were dark figures doing God knows what in the alcove behind me. I became more adventurous too, and lifted myself to hang upside down by my legs from the heavy pipes running across the ceiling. This did not feel as thrillingly Caligulan as I had expected it to, but I was nonetheless gratified by the smattering of applause that greeted my dismount. One of the other dancers, who looked vaguely familiar, urged me not to risk such a maneuver again, in case the pipes weren’t strong enough to support me. I bristled at the implication that I was fat but then I realized that the reason he looked familiar was that he had appeared, impressively, in one of my favorite porn movies, so I forgave him the slight.

Finally, at about three-thirty in the morning, I decided it was time to go. What the French call the little death was not required, but after three hours of hard work I would be damned if I was going to leave unfulfilled. Four or five gentlemen were standing around me, including tall and stocky Dave, and, as I accelerated the tempo of the movements in which I was engaged, I made it clear to them through facial expressions and inarticulate noises that I was on the brink of release. I felt a hand on my ass, another couple on my abs, and a few more on various other parts of my anatomy. “Joel’s a good boy,” Dave said to the man standing next to him, and then looked me in the eyes. “Yeah, he’s a good boy.”

He cannot have understood the excitatory effect these words would have on me, but they pushed me over the edge. I figured that sound effects would be welcome, so I groaned loudly as I reached the climax of the evening. I am compelled to admit that it was a spectacular example of its species, the kind that leaves one’s sides aching as one gasps for air. It took me a minute or two to recover my composure, during which time I saw that the fruits of my labor had landed in a pretty even split between the hands of my assistants and the floor.
I am never going to eat at this restaurant,
I thought as I collected my fee from Daniel. My underwear was nowhere to be found—why I had considered any other possibility I cannot say—so I just put my jeans on, waved goodbye to Go-Go Boy, and left.

Standing outside Thai One On, finding my bearings as the door swung shut, I waited for the familiar feelings of inadequacy, hunger, and need to overwhelm me, waited both to loathe myself until I danced again and to fear that I would never be able to do so no matter how much torture I went through. Putting on clothes at the end of the night had stripped me of any armor against the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and I braced myself.

For something that did not come.

Instead what arrived, unbidden, was the thought
I’ve gotten what I need to get out of this.
Accompanied by a sense of ease I hadn’t felt in years.

As I waited for a taxi amid the noise and bustle of the drunken West Village revels going on around me, I tried to figure out exactly what it was that I’d gotten. Why should tonight have been any different from a night spent dancing at Splash or Eastern Bloc or an afternoon at Scores? Why should I be thinking of Go-Go Boy with equanimity? Why should I picture Samara Zinn and feel the urge to whistle?

I could not find the answer.

I also could not find a cab. At four or so, therefore, I gave up and figured I might as well catch the 3 train. I turned north and, stepping languidly from foot to foot, gyrating at the hip, and sometimes running one hand or the other over my pectoral muscles, headed up Seventh Avenue toward Fourteenth Street.

O
N
E
XODUS

“Y
ou’re not the Wicked Witch of the West!” called out the cute, bubbly twink. “You’re not going to melt!” I glared at him and stuck my tongue out. “You have until the count of ten and then I’m pushing you. Ten! Nine! Eight!…” When Bill got to four I jumped; the log, annoyingly asymmetrical, swung me out over the river, and then I let go and flew through the air, suddenly careless. After I landed I had to swim hard against the current to get to where we had left our things, but when I reached the shore I pulled myself out of the river, climbed back up onto the rock, and did the whole thing again.

I was in North Carolina on the bank of the Asheville River, having accepted Rob’s invitation to go swimming. With Rob and me were Louis, Bill, and Greg, all of whom Rob had met that afternoon and all of whom I loathed as soon as they introduced themselves, because Rob might pay more attention to them than to me. Louis, in his forties, was a hairdresser with bad hair; he had checked his voice mail continually during the drive to the river, annoying me more each time. I loathed Bill extra because he was twenty-nine but looked twenty. Greg spoke only in American Sign Language but managed all the same to communicate with supreme hauteur his resentment of me, Louis, and Bill for not letting him have Rob to himself. I had doubtless alienated him further when I introduced myself and misfingerspelled my name as Jopl. I worried about this until “I Will Survive” came on the car radio, at which point I started worrying about the fact that nobody but me could sing along past the first three lines.

I am rarely aware of my physical surroundings. It’s an effort for me to walk a city block without bumping into a telephone pole or poking myself in the eye. When we parked by the river and stepped out of the car into the wet air, however, I actually looked through the lenses of my glasses and saw things: the tiny mountains in the distance, the crooked trees across the river, the dark water reflecting the sunlight, the sharp rocks in the dirt under my feet. Then I went to put my contacts in and realized I had forgotten to pour any solution into the case before I left and in the time it had taken us to get here they had become desiccated husks. Since I couldn’t very well swim in my glasses, I resigned myself to hoping that I would at least be able to tell the humans from the rocks.

We were obviously not the first people to think of swimming at this spot: a log hung by a rope from a tree on the shore, clearly intended as an aid to swinging out over the river. I scampered after Bill onto the big, flat rock next to the tree; even with my heavily impaired vision I was mesmerized to see that he was wearing what looked like a Victorian bathing costume, one that covered his chest as well as his upper thighs. He chivalrously offered me the log but there was no fucking way I was going first, because what if the river was actually full of piranhas or sulfuric acid?

When Bill dropped into the water, however, he was neither eaten nor dissolved, so I grabbed the log as it swung back—note, please, that this put me
in physical contact with nature
—and watched as Bill climbed out of the river, shaking water from his head like a good-natured dog after a bath.

I couldn’t move. I can tread water fine, and I have a passable breaststroke, so it wasn’t that I thought I might drown. I was just scared of letting go. And then Bill told me I wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West and started counting.

But I am the Wicked Witch of the West,
I thought. When I was five, for my first Hallowe’en trick-or-treating, I had prevailed upon my mother to make me a witch costume, complete with pointy black hat and broomstick; I had run from house to house, swathed in billowing midnight, terrifying all the neighbors with my deep and abiding wickedness and feeling more myself than I ever had before (and, in many ways, than I ever have since).

But this was no time for reverie, as Bill’s count was rapidly approaching zero. After my exhilarating jump on “four!” and the subsequent splash I turned around in the water and looked at the Bill-shaped blur on the rock—and the Rob- and Greg-shaped blurs coming toward us, and the Louis-shaped blur sitting on the bank—and realized that I thought of myself in that moment not as a spy and a liar but as a swimmer, and that I thought of the men around me not as ex-gays but as my friends.

In 1976, during a decade that saw any number of wondrous events, a group of sixty-two people gathered in Anaheim, California, to discuss their desire not to be gay anymore. Many of them had already decided to leave what they referred to as “the lifestyle” but were frustrated by the lack of any community or support network. Others had already left the lifestyle and wanted to share with others the truth that such a departure was possible. Still others came simply to meet people like themselves. Evangelical Christians all, they adopted the slogan “Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,” and since then Exodus, International has grown, according to its literature, to include thousands of people on six continents: men and women who, tormented by their homosexual attractions, have joined with God in a struggle to purify themselves by means of something that has become known as “transformational ministry.” Though many are still struggling, others have triumphed over what they think of as their sexual brokenness and are now married with children, living lives devoted to the Lord Who has saved them.

Yeah,
right.

There’s no conclusive proof of this, but I think—as does everybody I know—that homosexuality is an inherent trait, like height. If you’re short you can wear platform shoes (if you insist), but once you’re done growing, that’s that. Alter your behavior however you like but you cannot alter your biological makeup. If you are attracted only to people with Adam’s apples, nothing is ever going to make your heart leap at the sight of a pair of breasts. Even the comportment of some of Exodus’s leaders raises questions about the organization’s claims: after a few years, Mike Bussee and Gary Cooper, two of the original sixty-two, left Exodus and their wives for each other. In 2000, John Paulk was removed as board chairman after being photographed leaving a gay bar where he had apparently spent forty minutes trying to pick up another man.

So when my editor suggested that part of my book be about something unexpected and subversive, going undercover among the ex-gays seemed the obvious choice. (What he actually said was “something unexpected and subversive, like you could become a fireman,” but unbeknownst to him I had already looked into becoming a fireman, after my boyfriend Mike was late to lunch on the day of the Gay Pride Parade because he had been watching the gay firemen march by, and according to the fire department’s website I was
too old
to join the force. I did not share any of this information with my editor because I want him to think of me as vital and young.) When I went to the Exodus, International website I saw an announcement about the thirtieth annual Freedom Conference, to be held in a few months at the LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina, so I signed up, sent my check in, and started trying to figure out what to wear.

I had spent my youth in South Carolina, a place teeming with evangelical Christians, so there would be no surprises coming from that direction. But I had never met an ex-gay before. I had never even seen the
Will & Grace
episode in which Neil Patrick Harris tries to get Jack to become an ex-gay. There was an ex-gay who used to hang around at the BGLSA meetings in college, but the only things I can remember about him are that nobody talked to him and that he had really unattractive hair.

As the day of my departure drew near, I wondered more and more what kind of people I would meet at the conference. I couldn’t expect them all to be hypocrites. Yes, the examples of Mike Bussee and Gary Cooper and John Paulk led me to suspect that the men and women running the show might not all be exactly what they seemed. But this was a conference for the rank and file; why would hundreds of people gather for a week to lie to no one but one another? It also seemed unlikely that they would all be idiots; the Exodus website was full of eloquent testimonies written by people all over the world. And I doubted they would be simple lunatics; I know mental illness when I see it—I have been dating a psychiatrist for four years—and the registration materials I got in the mail were obviously written by and addressed to individuals in relative control of their mental faculties.

So I woke up the morning of my flight with no inkling of what I was getting myself into. By the time I had to leave for the airport I still hadn’t figured out how to dress like an ex-gay, so I just hurled clothing into my suitcase willy-nilly, though thankfully I did have the presence of mind to remove the T-shirt that said
I’M NOT POPE BENEDICT XVI BUT MY BOYFRIEND IS
before I zipped the bag shut.

“Blessing,” said Anne Heche’s mother, “is asking God to interfere and bring somebody into the proper relationship with Him.”

Nancy Heche was speaking at the opening session of the Freedom Conference as a representative of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), a group started in 1998 that apparently modeled its title on that of another organization, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Her point seemed to be that it was a direct result of her prayers that her daughter Anne had dumped Ellen DeGeneres and become heterosexual (though Nancy did not touch on the causal relationship between her prayers and Anne’s claim that as Jesus’ half sister Celestia she enjoyed communicating with extraterrestrials). I opened the notebook I had bought to record my impressions of the ex-gays. “LOVE her skirt/blouse combo!!” I scribbled. “So sparkly, looks great w/ green curtain.”

Nancy told us that when her husband and her daughter had come out to her she had hardened her heart against them both. “But God spoke to me,” she continued. “He said, Nancy, you have to let your heart soften.”

There are people in New York to whom God speaks. You meet them on the subway. God tells them all sorts of things, like that the Jews have hidden cameras behind all their mirrors and that the CIA is stealing their thoughts. Often it is a matter of great urgency that they explain these things to you; a matter of far greater urgency in fact than, say, bathing. This happens with enough regularity that New York City has established something called the Homeless Emergency Liaison Project (HELP), which empowers roving teams of psychiatrists to comb the subway for the craziest of the crazies and take them to the hospital and give them large doses of Clozaril.

But as I looked around the nearly full auditorium in North Carolina it was clear that, whatever problems the people in this room had, their solutions did not lie in antipsychotic medication. I learned later that almost a thousand delegates had come to the conference. During the opening session I estimated that three-quarters of the people I saw were men; of these, fully two-thirds were men I would have expected to see at Sunday brunch in Chelsea, waving mimosas and flirting with the waiter. Almost everyone in the room was white, and I saw more moustaches that night than I had encountered in New York in eight years. There seemed to be people of all ages in attendance: A couple of pews to my left sat a man who looked to be in his eighties. Five rows in front of me was a stunning blond in his midtwenties with tantalizingly low-rise jeans and a YMCA T-shirt worn, I presumed, without irony. But my favorite person so far was the teenager with his hands in his pockets at the end of my row, because his Harry Potter bag had a Slytherin crest on it. “Slytherin kid,” I wrote. “May not want be gay, but other priorities = in right place.”

Onstage the emcee had taken over for Nancy and was introducing the evening’s “worship leader and song receiver,” Dennis Jernigan. “Dennis and his wife have been very fruitful and multiplied,” she said, “and now they have nine children.” This struck me as excessive but then I remembered that I had four cast albums of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
so I figured I could cut him some slack.

A moustachioed man in his forties walked onstage, sat down at the piano, and began playing soft, inspirational music. “I walked out of homosexuality on November seventh, 1981, at a Christian rock concert,” he told us. “The singer said, ‘There’s someone here hiding something. But God sees it, and He loves you.’ I looked around and I thought, well,
you
didn’t die for me.” Dennis pointed at an invisible person who had neglected to die for him. “And
you
didn’t. And
you
didn’t. But”—he looked up meaningfully—“He did.” As he said this the music he was playing changed from meandering underscoring to what was obviously the introduction to a song. It didn’t sound half bad. Then he started singing, in a slightly gruff but pleasant voice.