A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Seven

7

We always gathered on the morning of our rite, letting things unfold however they would as arrivals continued. We had a light lunch, then laid out snacks to graze on without breaking the flow of the afternoon with another mealtime. Our long, slow foreplay ramped up from early afternoon till almost sunset, though we’d discovered the importance of taking time out, curling up for a nap or settling with a plate of food in a corner. In the winter we’d teased Jake for skulking off with a book for two hours. Tomorrow, like the second day of all our gatherings, would be languid, slow, sensuous: the lovemaking relaxed and unhurried, a long diminuendo from the crashing chords of our release after months of containment. 

 

We never began our foreplay after lunch in full certainty we could conjure the magic again--always a little anxious that maybe this time it would all just come to pieces, a daydream best left as fantasy, an attempt to relive the memory of something that could only happen once or twice. Around the room I saw around the room I saw everyone looking tentative, starting slowly. Luke and Hank, Rajiv and Kurt were propped on cushions against the wall in a corner, talking easily and only beginning to touch themselves or each other. Then Rajiv leaned up against Luke, an arm flung over his shoulder, massaging his upper arm. Kurt pulled Rajiv’s calf into his lap and began massaging the ball of his foot, then set it back on the floor and leaned forward to lick at the broad, flat nipple on Rajiv’s massively sculpted pec. Rajiv’s head sank back in a first flush of pleasure; then he laid his free hand on the back of Kurt’s head, drawing him in closer.

 

“Houston, we have contact,” Billy whispered into my ear from behind, his hand on my shoulder, just before his lips opened gently on the nape of my neck. I slumped back into him, giving in to the surge of energy mounting up my spine. Billy slid his hand down across my chest, pressing his palm into my belly and curling his fingertips into the knot of the sarong I’d wrapped around myself before lunch. His teeth grazed my neck a little where he licked and sucked under my jawline. The cloth around my hips dropped to the floor, and the tip of his middle finger pressed into the indentation between my pubic bone and my stiffening cock. I looked down to see it bobbing in rhythm as he applied pressure and released, the sight of it as arousing as his touch.

 

I wanted this to go on forever. His mouth on my neck, and the loopy sensation and sight of my cock waving in front of me like the loose end of a live wire, might be enough to finish me off if he kept up what he was doing. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to turn around, catch his nipple ring between my teeth, and jack us both. I took a deep breath to stay in the moment. I reached around behind me, found his balls and cupped them in my hand. He groaned softly as his hand moved down my belly to wrap around my shaft.

I was dangerously close, if a new distraction hadn’t claimed my attention. Kurt draped an arm around my neck and clamped his mouth over my left nipple. He started with the gentlest licks, all around the edge, much as I’d just seen him do to Rajiv, but I knew from experience what would follow, as soon as he had the least cue from me that I wanted more. An electric circuit flashed between my chest and my crotch as my two lovers worked on me. Kurt took my accelerated breath as his cue to suck harder and begin grazing the tightening tip with his teeth. Then he paused, withdrawing  to look into my eyes and confirm his instinct. “Stick your finger up his asshole,” he told Billy, and then went back to work on me while Billy complied. I came apart at the seams. My knees started to buckle. The pressure of Billy’s hand positioned under my perineum held me up as he opened me with one finger and then another.

 

Eventually all three of us sank to the floor. Kurt rearranged himself so we could sixty-nine each other’s chests. His nipple began to taste of salt and iron: capillaries were bursting just under the surface of the thin, sensitive, puckered skin. Probably not the safest thing we could be doing, bringing blood to the surface, I thought, but I couldn’t pull my mouth off his chest any more than I could will myself to push him back from mine, though by now I was surfing an edge between agony and pleasure so intense I started to float free of my body. Billy sprawled across my flank to take Kurt’s Prince Albert between his teeth.

Kurt and I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t take any more. My cock went limp, all the intensity of my awareness concentrated on one ravaged square inch of flesh on my chest. I barely registered that Billy had pulled his finger out of me and started gently massaging my shoulder while he watched Kurt and slowly caressed himself. I lay back gasping. Kurt went on sucking and biting, till I finally pushed him away by the shoulders. “No more,” I said to him and Billy both. “I just need to chill for a while.”

 

We lay there spent and curled together, until eventually the two of them began playing. All I wanted for the moment was to stay there at their side: as long as my lovers were making out with each other, somehow I was making out with them whether I had the energy to join in or not. I found myself thinking about Pete, wondering whether in some other realm, he knew we were all having sex on his behalf, still having sex, somehow, with him, saying yes to life in just the way he’d most wanted to experience while he was still with us. 

On my own for a while, I could indulge the pleasures of voyeurism. Across the room, Hank had set up the massage table. Jim sat straddling the head of it. Rajiv’s back rested against his chest while his legs sprawled over the foot of the table. Luke had started massaging his calves; Hank kneaded his shaft in one hand and slowly, deliberately circled his chest and belly with the other, watching Rajiv’s face for the effects. Rajiv directed all three of them, taking in the visuals, mesmerized  by the sight of every momentary fantasy coming true as he looked down the length of his own body at men doing whatever he asked of them. He looked up and returned my gaze.

 

The mist of intoxicated lust across his face cleared a little as his eyes met mine, warily at first, but then giving way to understanding. We were in this together, even Rajiv and I, even Rajiv and Jim when they were fucking each other like mink and oblivious to the rest of us. My cock started to swell once more at the strangely comforting thought of it, something I could take on faith even if the how of it wasn’t clear. Rajiv’s gaze went soft, and that amazing, sexy smile played over his face as he watched me begin to caress the crown of my cock lightly with the flat of a spit-slicked thumb. He welcomed being watched; welcomed me into his experience from across the room; took heightened pleasure in seeing me touch myself in response to his own arousal, as though encouragement to sink deeper into our own skins was flowing back and forth between us in some metaphysical loop.

 

Then the moment of connection passed, as Hank found the insides of Rajiv’s thighs and his head fell back onto Jim’s shoulder.

The ramping energy pulsed up my spine, across my chest, and up to the crown of my head. I needed nothing in the world but the freedom to touch myself and let the fugue of it all play out. I was aware of every part of me my lovers had touched--the nipple Kurt had savaged, now sensitive to the merest whisper of breeze blowing through the room; the patch of my neck that Billy had sucked; my asshole stretched out taut just above the floor as I sat cross-legged. The rhythm of my hand on my prick felt like an eternal given. I can go on like this for the rest of my life, I thought, watching these men get it on, always climbing towards the peak, never reaching the top, never wanting to come down. I’m nothing but a dick with legs and arms attached. I’ll go on sitting here till all I am is my cock and the breath that keeps it alive. I’ll go on stroking myself,  here in this room, with these men, till I let go of it all and join Pete in one never-ending climax, the infinite cockspurt of heaven, a Milky Way we’ll all surf together to the ends of the universe.

Blessed Rage

 

The Whitney Museum in New York has currently dedicated its fifth floor to a retrospective of the work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), "History Keeps Me Awake at Night." It continues to the end of September.

Wojnarowicz stood at the epicentre of the culture wars incited by  Senator Jesse Helms and the allegedly Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association against art deemed blasphemous by religious conservatives. His photograph of a crucifix overrun by ants was one of a number of his works Wildmon coopted out of context to create a pamphlet entitled “Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art’.” (Wojnarowicz subsequently won a suit against Wildmon for infringement of copyright and damage to his reputation. He was awarded damages in the amount of one dollar. He insisted on a cheque signed personally by Wildmon, which he never cashed, and which is included in a display of ephemera as part of the Whitney exhibition.)

 

An abused kid from New Jersey who fled to the streets of New York and survived by hustling, and later mentored by photographer Peter Hujar, he became a self-taught member of the East Village art scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, and Keith Haring. His was a voice of outrage over the silence and indifference of the government toward the suffering of the marginalized, over the inhumanity of American brutality abroad, over the callousness of unchecked capitalist greed. You can read many of the same images that provoked the ire of the Christian Right as witnesses to the solidarity of God with the poor and abject.  His work often references his own suffering as a queer man at the hands of established power structures. But those works make it abundantly clear that he understood himself as standing with the other wretched of the earth whose cry for justice is one. In contrast with the hypocrisy of the fundamentalists who decried him, his was a genuine hunger and thirst for righteousness.

 

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Six

6

So it did go on. We rented the cabin again and gathered in memory of Pete at the autumn Equinox. A chill edged the air that time, despite bright sunshine, as we assembled on the deck. We couldn’t get past the gap in the midst of us, where Pete had been, to decide who should take his place on the table. Finally we understood that nobody could. That’s how the bronze Tibetan singing bowl that Pete had left Jake first became the solution, a vessel to hold the joy we’d gathered to make with our bodies. The momentary confusion about what came next when we’d filled it, and it still gave off a living warmth in our hands as we passed it around, lasted until Jake dipped his fingertips into it, like a kid lost in wonder with his first set of watercolours, then turned to his right and pressed his hand to Billy’s heart.


"May the circle jerk be unbroken,” Hank had quipped. Our mingled seed had glued us heart to heart with Pete. Now it began bonding us heart to heart with each other. Talking in late October about how we opened up in our times together, how our hearts started to close again when we went back to the usual round of our erotic lives, we made our pact: we’d save ourselves up for each other till the winter Solstice. We’d flirt and have sex in the meantime, but hold back as best we could from ejaculating till we gathered again. Reunited in the bleak midwinter, we compared notes by a blazing fire how we’d perplexed the men we were with. Jake lost a potential boyfriend who gave up in frustration. 

 

Nobody seemed too surprised in late December that we hadn’t all made it through. Five of us had gone over the edge since we’d struck our bargain. Jim and Rajiv, despite every good intention, had lost count of their spills. (Just on the cusp of the breakup, I was simmering with sidelined jealousy by then, though Luke and I reached our own sweaty point of no return more than once on a long weekend’s rendezvous.) But we’d all saved up at least two full weeks of energy.

We made the Big Mistake of the winter by pouring our new sacrament onto the hearth in misplaced homage to the fire. Do not attempt this with your own spooge at home–the stench of scorched cum roasting on hot coals practically drove us out of the cabin into the snow. 

In the spring, most of us had managed to keep the lid on for the full three months with no more than the odd slip. We felt like endlessly horny teenagers again. Twelve weeks without release left us so cranked up, so drunk on the ecstasy of long delayed fulfilment, that without anyone actually proposing it, we found ourselves feeding our seed to each other as the first fruits of a new year, fingers dipped into the nectar of a ritual feast and sucked greedily by the lovers to whom we offered them. 

This summer gathering, a year after Pete had brought us together, would be our last, we’d decided on our final night in the spring, entwined in each other’s arms in a pile before the fire, moonlight streaming through the windows over our tangled limbs. At least the last time we’d husband our lust from season to season like a precious commodity to lavish only on each other.  Jim and Rajiv wanted an untrammeled sex life with each other. Jake longed for a soulmate to share his small-town life from day to day, and we all agreed that his chances were slim of finding someone who’d put up with our singular arrangement any more cheerfully than the guy who’d already thrown in the towel.  

We all found ourselves at least a little relieved at the thought of coming down from the mountaintop; at the prospect of not living most of our waking moments for weeks at a time wrapped in a thick, golden haze of ambient sexual energy. Our experiment had brought us everything we could have hoped for. We’d planned this weekend as the consummation of a year’s journey none of us could ever have anticipated. And we’d hit on how to bring it all full circle, for us and for Pete.

L'Shanah Tovah 5779

 

On this second day of Rosh HaShanah, I can think of no better inspiration to begin anew than therapist Hedy Schleiffer's TED Talk, "The Power of Connection."

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Five

5

If it hadn’t been for Pete, a born-again slut with an Appalachian accent and an enduring taste for ritual and over-the-top gestures, there’d have been no tribe to gather like this.

 

In college he and I lived in adjacent dorm rooms. Music seeping from one undersized cubicle into the next brought us together. Only closeted nineteen-year-olds can get that excited to find their tastes mirrored in someone else’s, or that eager to avoid the evening’s work with a few hours of rambling conversation, the words bearing all the longing frightened boys can’t yet own up to. One moonlit night, listening to Mendelssohn with a single candle and a bottle of wine, we found ourselves sprawled across the room in separate chairs, then later on the same bed, intermittently releasing the embrace long enough to shed one layer of clothes and then another. Well into the night, we squirted the first orgasms we ever shared with another man into the heaving crevice between our bellies. It’d be years before either of us could put a name to what we’d meant to each other.

After college we kept up mostly with letters and later with e-mail. On the odd visit, we took up where we’d last left off as though we’d parted the day before. Imagine Ichabod Crane as a German coal-miner’s grandson with thinning curly hair and a sweetly geeky, open face. Pete stood literally head and shoulders above the crowd in a bar. A Lutheran minister for nearly twenty years, he wasn’t the sort of guy men flock to pick up on Saturday night. The ones who gave it a shot were often scared off by his intensity before the second beer. He had an easier time finding sex in back rooms or at the baths after a joint, his height not an issue when he was on his knees, and conversation not expected. “The sex was great,” he’d report to me on the phone. “I just wish someone would let my head and my heart keep my dick company once in a while.” Then the cancer diagnosis came three years after he’d finally come out to his bishop and left the ministry.

 

He brought the whole group of us together with a dying man’s dream. The cancer had come raging back only a few months after he’d started to regain his energy from the chemo. “It’s gone straight through me. Best case scenario is I’ve got a few good months, before end game,” he’d told us the night he gathered us for dinner, flying those of us to California for his birthday who couldn’t afford the tickets ourselves. Some of us had never met one another before, lived hundreds of miles apart, had only Pete and the love of men in common. “I won’t see another summer. Before I die, I want to be drenched in life. I’m asking you all to give me a weekend and help make it happen.”

 

His fantasy demanded open minds, bound up as it was with the immanent prospect of his death. Those of us who’d been up the mountain road in Napa with him were the first to get it. As the sexy kink of it took root in our imaginations, and the wine and a couple of joints loosened us up, the rest of us came around. By the time he served coffee, all of us were charged up enough that we stopped ignoring the bulges in each other’s pants and started joking about them.

He rented a vintage cabin for the weekend nearest the summer Solstice, in the mountains of his beloved native eastern Tennessee, with a deck looking out over forest that hadn’t changed much in generations. The ribbon of waterfall to the left of the cabin roared down the slope, in spate from a storm that had swept through the day before we arrived that first time, a year ago.

 

In the warm glow of sunset out on the deck, he lay on the table in the midst of us, eight men crowding in to massage him, three or four at a time, then standing away and massaging the masseurs while someone else took a turn in the inner circle. From a speaker by the door, the Bach violin partitas traced arcs of longing upwards into the air, beseeching some unknown Lover for release. And then all of us at the end oiled each other neck to thighs. Getting hard together, if we hadn’t been before, we splashed eight pent-up loads onto Pete’s prone body–his own made it nine--stoned on a whole weekend’s stockpiled energy, moaning, weeping, or laughing to high heaven while we pumped ourselves and each other for the last precious drops of our gift to the friend we were going to lose. Pete beamed up at us with a grin as wide as his face, semen glistening in his hair, running down his cheek, pooling thick on what illness had left of his poor, wasted chest, his eyes shining, like a man who’d just seen God.

 

When we’d come down off the high, when we’d all embraced around the table, we leaned down one by one to take Pete in our arms, plastering ourselves with a film of the mingled seed he lay so blissfullly awash in. Jake took up the volume of Wallace Stevens Pete had chosen for the moment, found the passage he’d marked, and read:

 

“Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.”

 

Pete was gone before the end of July. When he returned to California from our weekend, a veterinarian friend coached him on how to inject enough phenobarbitol to stop his heart quickly and painlessly, when the cancer progressed as far as he chose to cope with it. He’d left the drug and syringe on the counter for Pete to “steal” while he left the office. Pete chose to die alone. I felt sick imagining his despair till I heard that he’d left a note scrawled on a scrap of paper. “No regrets. Only gratitude.” He’d used it to mark Psalm 139 in his Bible. 

The wake in San Jose was the first time we were all reunited since that weekend in the Tennessee mountains. Maybe two hundred people crowded into the auditorium of the community center where Pete had run music programs for poor kids the wealth piling up around them in Silicon Valley had passed by, in the years after his bishop advised him to pack up at church before he was turfed out. Half the mourners came from Pete’s old church. Another fifty were kids from the center and their parents. I connected with a couple of old college friends I had in common with Pete. Besides the eight of us from the Solstice, our radar picked out a few other gay men, but not as many as you might have thought. A few members of Pete’s family stood around looking a little bewildered in the crowd. Over and over as the afternoon went on, the eight of us gravitated toward each other, then finally found our way together to the parking lot and adjourned to the patio of a gay bar a mile down the street.

 

“I’ve never experienced anything like that weekend in my life,” Jake said.

 

“You mean you’ve never jacked off all over a guy with late-stage cancer?” Hank blurted out, toward the end of an unfortunate second margarita.

 

“You asshole,” I said. “You were bawling like a baby along with the rest of us when we packed up to leave. Pete had the courage to reach out for one of the big dreams of his life before it was over. He gave us back ten times over what we gave him. I’ve been floating on the memory of it for two months.” With the last words my voice started to crack.

 

“I always thought it was kind of pathetic that Pete couldn’t do better,” said Hank. “Now I think he just refused to settle for second best.”

“Wouldn’t let us settle either, it turned out. And now I don’t want to go on settling for it,” said Jim. “Maybe we don’t have to go on settling for it.”  

Everyone turned toward him. Suddenly he went stage-shy. “Why can’t it happen again?” The question came out half as challenge, half wistful plea. 

“My mom can sew the costumes,” Hank mouthed off again. Rajiv smacked him with the program from the memorial.