Category: The Dating Game

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Meat Rack and Manpower


Tonight the Major and I saw a vintage soft-core porn film at YBCA, The Meat Rack, a sort of cinéma-vérité style homage to, believe it or not, Who Killed Teddy Bear, but minus an Elaine Stritch or Sal Mineo. I don’t even think the actors were listed in the credits. Aside from some great location shooting in San Francisco, it was exactly the kind of movie that I expected someone to make in 1968, and disappointing for precisely that. All of the gay characters are retched people: a chubby cross-dresser moaning about having to pay for sex; renegade drag queens shooting porn at knifepoint…

The depictions of that underbelly of society have always annoyed me, primarily because there’s no balance, so few positive portraits. And this was by the underbelly! I’m reading a book now, Full Service, by Scotty Bowers, about his experiences as a hustler in post-WWII Los Angeles. He has sex with, arranges for his friends to have sex with, or claims to have had sex with all the usual cast of Hollywood characters (and Walter Pidgeon, which was a surprise for me). I got read the Riot Act this morning from a friend who said he was sick of these kinds of tell-all books and invasions into private life, but I disagree. I love hearing about gay people enjoying their sex lives during a time that we associate with so much repression, finding ways to express themselves within the restrictive structure of the studio system and the public condemnation of homosexuality. I think it exposes the hypocrisy of the time and normalizes gay experience.

I watched Manpower last night, starring George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, Eve Arden, and Alan Hale, directed by Raoul Walsh. Yes, I bet you’re thinking the same thing I thought, What a cast!, but man, what a stinker. It was interesting to see a drama centered around the men of the electric company, (“Power and Light”) which I’d never seen before—maybe this is the only one of this particular genre—but Marlene Dietrich just can’t act and Walsh unfortunately is no Von Sternberg, he gave her actual things to say, and without fuzzy closeups and smoke billowing out of her half-opened mouth. All the guys were drunks, all the dames stoic and motherly. I guess that heterosexuals, too, occasionally suffered the indignity of unsavory representation.

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The Dating Game: New Revelations

There was a new contestant on my Dating Game last week. Pablo. He’s like a slightly oversized munchkin, you want to just hug him. I want to emphasize that You would want to just hug him, I would want to roll him down the Yellow Brick Road and into a field of poppies and smother him with kisses. We had a great day together, first tea at Samovar, then walking out near the old Sutro Baths, then munching down the overpriced munchables at Louis’. He kissed me when he dropped me off, and I felt a really nice connection forming. Very easy-going, uncomplicated…

The next night he came over for dinner and a movie and after-the-first-date possibilities, and noticed a picture of my Foreign Correspondent. “Hey, do you know Blah Blah?” I answered yes, and immediately felt it coming, the moment I’d warned my Foreign Correspondent about during my several edicts of General Amnesty issued after the discovery of each successive indiscretion, the ones he wouldn’t tell me about and whom I warned him would eventually pop up. I felt no validation in having my long-held suspicions confirmed—yet again—just a profound sense of disappointment. I had tried so hard to create an atmosphere where honesty could flower, so sensitive to his issues and needs… but my own needs just kind of discarded. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Plus Pablo and I had just watched the world end. In The Rapture, Mimi Rogers’ faith—and, let’s admit it, slight impatience to get to heaven—lead her to kill her child (who keeps begging, annoyingly, to go to heaven anyway, Pleeeeease mommy!). By the time He does come around—and it’s just like in the Bible, with the Four Horsemen and trumpets and stuff—after she’s killed her child and lost her husband (David Duchovny, in a senseless office killing), she’s so shaken by what she’s been put through, that she says No to God. She just couldn’t be with someone who could do that to her. The film ends with her alone, in darkness… forever.

I would have tried to work it out with God, told him how his behavior made me feel, see if he could change. We’d be friends for a while, but every once in a while I’d succumb to that deep voice and let him have his way with me, then we’d fall back into old patterns, Listen, God, I really just want to be friends, then he’d beg me over and over and over to stay and not leave him, that he could change, just give him once more chance…

So Pablo left, and then sent me a message saying he looked forward to being my platonic friend. This kind of annoyed me, that he couldn’t relate to what I was feeling, seeing red flags instead of potential. But what can you do? He feels what he feels. I suppose this told me more about him than I could have learned talking to him: that intimacy, real intimacy, that is, sharing what’s really going on, isn’t something that he can relate to or seems to be particularly interested in.

Giancarlo restored my faith in men in general, briefly, the following weekend, with a fabulous lunch at Camino, then a tour of the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. The columbarium is bathed in a rich golden Pre-Raphaelite light, the architecture a delightful early-modernist take on gothic themes, arrayed in a multi-level labyrinth, each room landscaped with flowers and babbling fountains. Giancarlo is a sweet man, really a treat to be around, but I can’t tell yet if there’s any heat there. He has adopted a visual style reminiscent of another time, a style that unfortunately for me conjures an image of the emasculated middle-aged man of early 60s TV sitcoms—more Ward Cleaver than Don Draper.

The Major is still around. I’ve made it clear that I’d like to just be friends, but every time we’re together I have so much fun and just want to have sex with him. In the movie of my life, we’d probably end up together. But we’d only have to spend 120 minutes together. Not being able to share Antonioni or Fassbinder with him makes it hard to imagine any real life-partner compatibility. I mean, he walked out on The Romantic Englishwoman—that kind of guy. I am very glad to have him in my life, though, as the corner that he occupies is a very sunny happy place to visit.

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7,300 Sunrises

20 years ago, around this time in the morning, Manny died. Manny was my first lover, my great obsession. We had been together for 8 years. Over the years, I’ve tended to recognize these markers on the day we met, or his birthday, rather than the day he died: Manny would have been X years old, Manny and I would have been together for X years, etc, etc… But this morning I can’t avoid observing the immense span of time that’s passed since his death, particularly since the pain associated with his loss seems, suddenly, so fresh. The whole time he was dying I comforted myself by saying that I’d forget this time, I wouldn’t remember him like this. I remember his beauty and vibrance, but I remember the horror of seeing his body covered in lesions, his legs swollen from edema, the indignity of dying so young.

Young is a relative term. He was 34 years older than me, so today he would have been 80. I can’t honestly say that I could imagine that sitcom, but I also can’t imagine loving him any less.

Every day I think of him, his voice is so alive in my head. I can still feel him and smell his hair. How can he not be here, when my sensory perception of him is so acute? Here comes the sun, just as it did after he died, just as it has every day since.

In the movies, when someone dies, it’s like the end. The music swells, the tears fall, and the screen goes black. Finis. But the theater lights come on, you dry your tears, and walk out of the theater into the blazing light of day.

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Ricky & Toby & Eddie & Liz & Me

Ricky, an old buddy from high school was in town last week. A few weeks before he sent me a cryptic note on Facebook, using a different first name and 28 years after I’d frankly thought about him, asking if I remembered him. I said I didn’t know Ricky Blah-blah, but I did go to school with another Blah-blah. He was indeed that other Blah-blah. There were only something like 30 people in my graduating class, so it’s not that difficult to remember any particular one of them. He was a sort of Totoro, hovering in the background with his big smile and jiggly belly, occasionally saying something really smart or witty. I remember entertaining a brief attraction to him, but then he had an eye operation and disappeared before graduation, and that was that.

In the intervening 28 years, he’s sung with opera companies, unknowingly lived two blocks away from me for a few years, bought a house in Atlanta, was a steer-wrestling gay rodeo star, plays countless instruments, sustained an intimate encounter with Eddie Fisher, and is now a systems engineer doing one of those jobs where my eyes glaze over and I start thinking of the laundry I have to do when being told what it is. So what he does, despite his generously dumbed-down layman’s explanation, remains a slight mystery, although it is now taking him practically around the world, a world he’s never explored despite his extensive and interesting life experiences.

When he told me his Eddie Fisher story I nearly had a heart attack. “You had intimate relations with someone who had intimate relations with Elisabeth Taylor??” (I’m paraphrasing here.) He seemed so blasé about it, yet I fired question after question about the details and mechanics, about Carrie and Debbie, if Eddie was gay or just impaired… “I met him at a dinner party at Armistead’s.” Armistead again. Again, my mouth dropped to the floor. “???” “I don’t kiss and tell.” Well, it was a little too late for that, I was already blogging in my mind. His list of celebrity encounters was impressive, the closest I’ve come to intimacy with the stars.

So then he tells me that he had a crush on me in high school and, get this, lived alone! The clouds parted and the sun’s rays beamed me back to those sexually frustrated years and I imagined having sex every day, like, every day, with a real person and not just the imagined someone of the better part of my youth. Maybe we’d be married by now and I’d be a gay rodeo star, too.

Maybe I’d have left him for Eddie Fisher.

We spent a few days together munching and touristing around the bay area, and I developed such an instant and deep fondness for him. He’s from a part of my life that’s supposed to be over, how cool to have it resuscitated. He’s still a big teddy bear, only now he carries one around with him, a real one, named Toby, who’s accompanying him on his travels. Toby is a posturpedic, or is it orthopedic?, something -pedic teddy bear designed to be both furry companion and pillow. Sort of like a mini-Ricky.

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The Dating Game: The Major and The Birds

Saturday, the Major and I drove up the Sonoma Coast for the day, stopping at Tony’s in Tomales for barbecued oysters and clam chowder, then on to Bodega to visit the schoolhouse in Hitchcock’s The Birds, pastries in Sebastopol, then back to the CocoPlex for a screening of the Hitchcock classic.

The Major looks like a former marine but talks and gesticulates with a near-lispy sweetness and gaiety that is just a pleasure to be around.  That contrast is something that has always been very attractive to me.  If the last two left to be chosen for my team were a furry femme bear or a lumberjack, I’d go with the furry femme bear.  Oh, and he calls me “buddy,” which just melts my butter, fueling my Skipper and Gilligan fantasies.

And speaking of Gilligan, my first thought on Sherwood Schwartz’s recent passing was that I never got to ask him how “The Pro-fes-sor aand Ma-ry Aann” became “aand the rest.”

Seeing Suzanne Pleshette all pecked up on her front her steps is always upsetting.  How could Mitch have ditched her anyway?  Soulful and sexy, an educator, and looking like Elizabeth Taylor’s younger sister… The jerk.
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The Dating Game: Florida and My Mister Roberts

Last week I was in Florida, visiting my sisters with my brother and his family. My parents also drove down from Alabama, and we rented a beach house on Indian Shores. The trip this time was very mellow, just hanging out on the beach and with each other, eating grouper sandwiches, bitching about our siblings, building sand castles. And then along came this dreamy bipedal humanoid cryptid whom we shall call Mr. Roberts. Mr. Roberts and I had been conversing online for several months, but having seen only one picture of his fur-ensconced upper half, I had no reason to believe that such a creature could actually exist outside of a fetishist’s CGI enhanced imagination. He lives a few hours away from my sisters, and drove over to spend a day on the beach with me and my family. He was indeed real, and as hairy as his photo suggested, no CGI enhancement necessary. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him, for in addition to looking like something that should be petted, he was just so accessible and welcoming, a 6’2″ shaggy pooch. We drove to Fort deSoto, a beautiful undeveloped island near the mouth of Tampa Bay, and waded and bobbed around and got to know each other better, before heading back to the beach house and a yummy dinner with fish that my brother and brother-in-law snatched from the Gulf that morning. We watched the sun set, one of those spectacular pastel fiery blood orange Florida sunsets, as my family danced in the makeshift cabana/disco they set up behind us. Feigning tiredness, Mr. Roberts asked if it was okay if he could stay the night, so we pushed together the sofas and tried our dangdest to bridge the gap between the two couches, but my sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew kept coming in and out of the room. Like, all night. An exasperated Mr. Roberts breathed “Is your family name Kockblocker??” Somehow we ended up falling asleep, various limbs noiselessly entwined, our interaction unfortunately more Hardy Boys than X-Tube, the next day coming way too soon.

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The Dating Game: Giancarlo and My Foreign Correspondent’s Mom

Giancarlo has dark sad eyes, a permanent 5 o’clock shadow, and an ever-shifting facial hair configuration. He’s attentive and sparkly, talks a mile a minute, and is a super snazzy dresser. We ate at Criolla, a really wonderful new Southern restaurant where the Bagdad Cafe used to be. I call him Giancarlo because he reminds me of Giancarlo Giannini, only cuter, if you could possibly imagine such a thing. After dinner we hiked up to Kite Hill and sat on the bench overlooking downtown and the east bay, watching the reflections of the setting sun in the windows across the water. We didn’t kiss or embrace, or even hold hands, but the comfort I felt from his presence produced an enveloping sense of contentment.

He’s lost a lot of weight recently. And on purpose. The chubby chaser in me can’t bear to look at the before pictures, as they’re so arousing. I bite my tongue, saying “good for you, losing all that weight!” instead of the “oh my god, you were so hot!” that I want to blurt out. It’s not that I eroticize excess body weight—or is it?—and I do want to be supportive of a healthier him, I just think a little belly is so adorable, a sign of a lack of restraint. Enjoy the creampuff already, a tornado could suck us all away tomorrow.

Tonight I had dinner with my Foreign Correspondent and his mom, also at Criolla. She was curious about the food of the American south. She’s here seeking a bride for her son, the man who, until a few months ago, was to have spent the rest of his life with me, Wife #1. I’ve told him that if she asks about the wife and two children of mine that he told her about, I’m going to have be straight with her—I mean, gay. I don’t think it’s my right to interfere with his version of himself, but I’m not participating in a fiction about me. She’s very concerned about her son’s very apparent buttcrack, which he can’t seem to keep from being exposed due to his tight shirts and low-hanging pants. When they came to the Castro last week, the naked guys happened to be hanging out on the street, and the worries about her son’s exposure were put in a different kind of perspective. She’s from a part of the world where women can’t even show their head hair, so seeing pubic shrubbery on the streets is something like teleporting to Sodom and Gomorrah. She’s a dear woman, softspoken, a wonderful cook and very devoted to her son. I would love to have called her mom.

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Dating Game: The Major

The shaving thing really bugs me. The Major came over last night and unveiled his barbed pubis and clipped chest. This guy is my Lou Grant; big bushy eyebrows, thick furry thighs… and then this pink area. Pink, and stubbly. The significant reduction in sensual possibilities confounded me.

I met him over the weekend, brunching at Tangerine in the Castro. He’s adorable, easy to talk to, with furry hobbit knuckles. After brunch, he grabbed me and kissed me on the street in front of the crowded-to-capacity Tangerine’s picture windows. It was so exciting, to be pounced on so publicly, and with such apparent urgency, but totally and completely embarrassing in front of all those brunchers. The various stimuli increased the signal output from a part of my brain called the para-ventricular nucleus. The signals then passed through special autonomic nerves in my spinal cord, pelvic nerves and the cavernous nerves that run along my prostate gland to reach the corpora cavernosa and the arteries that supply them with blood. Despite my slightly befuddled state, somehow the muscle fibres in the corpora relaxed, allowing blood to fill the spaces between them. Muscle fibres in my arteries relaxed as well, and there was suddenly an eight-fold increase in blood flow. The increased blood flow quickly expanded the corpora, then stretched the surrounding sheath (the tunica). As the tunica stretched, it blocked off the veins that normally take blood away from my corpora cavernosa. This trapped blood, the pressure becoming very high and the result quite erect. He kissed me again, as passionately as a kiss on the street in broad daylight could be, then fled, speeding away on his scooter, leaving me with my hands in my pockets and a fraught 6-block walk home.

Impulsively, I texted him later and asked if he wanted to come over the next day to pursue a sudden increase in noradrenaline production from nerves in our genitalia, to trigger and contract the muscle fibres in our corpora cavernosa and the supplying arteries. Hence the encounter with the clipped and snipped pink sector.

For the moment, I’m afraid I can’t see the forrest for the tree is bare. But stay tuned, it’s bound to grow back…

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The Dating Game: HoHo, Heff, Pinky and JB

Since my most recent paramour and I have separated, I’ve been flirting up a small tempest. I’ve lined up a gaggle of eligible bachelors to appear on my Dating Game, and thus far have personally interviewed four: HoHo, Heff, Pinky, and JB.

HoHo is from the midwest and has a warm welcoming smile, a big furry body, and twinkling eyes, like something Hanna-Barbera would have created for me to snuggle up to. Tonight we met for drinks at Sens in the Embarcadero Center, with a spectacular view of the Bay Bridge. We spoke of blackberry jam, gin, stepdads and gardening in a mild-winter climate. He’s cautious about steamrolling into a new relationship, so it’s an unpressured delight to be with him as he slowly reveals more and more of himself. Little Heff is everything but little, with a bounteous reservoir of wit and intelligence. This weekend we Kabukulated* and noodled** in Japantown. He’s a great guy to talk to, and it’s always about something that no one else is talking about, or even thinking about, actually. Pinky I thought was going to be this sex-crazed pervert, but he’s a mellow former hippie type who is sensitive, politically and socially aware, easy-going, and just a complete pleasure to be around—someone your mom would love to smoke pot with.

JB is married, which in the San Francisco bear world means that his heart belongs to his husbear, but the rest of him is up for grabs. Well, he is so cute I couldn’t resist grabbing some myself, and spent the better part of yesterday afternoon and evening with him in a mostly non-vertical configuration. And what a lot to grab onto: milky white skin as soft as a baby’s butt peppered with downy black fur; a full black beard on a solidly square jaw; and those big dark eyebrows that absolutely drive me crazy. He was very anxious and self-conscious and at times I wanted to shake him and scream Don’t you realize you’re one of the most desirable men in this time zone, and quite possibly in this hemisphere? What on earth do you have to be anxious about? Just relax and let Dr. Coco treat this nervous tension with his magical elixir of love! but instead performed my thoughts in an arduous four-hour interpretive belly dance.

After the elation of our ecstatic encounter, and upon dropping him off at home, a deep sadness overwhelmed me. He had been very clear about the parameters of our encounter from the get-go, that he was in a serious relationship and nothing, not even regularly scheduled get togethers, was possible beyond our limited engagement. Of course, during our brief relationship we had talked for hours, sharing a depth of experience and ideas, aspirations… oh, and he did that porn talk, you know “Yeaaaah, uh huh… oh yeaaaaah…” but anyway, so there we were, with all these restrictions, but completely open and vulnerable, sharing everything there is to share. I could have easily told him I loved him. I could hear my heart splinter as he shut the door. Whoever coined the term “little death” got it right.

* To kabukulate: to partake of the communal baths and steam facilities at Kabuki Hot Springs
** To noodle: consume mass quantities of Japanese noodles in a sophisticated urban eatery