The Sexual Outlaw Read online

  Other Books by John Rechy

  CITY OF NIGHT

  NUMBERS

  THIS DAY'S DEATH

  THE VAMPIRES

  THE FOURTH ANGEL

  RUSHES

  THE COMING OF THE NIGHT

  For all the anonymous outlaws.

  And for the memory of my mother.

  Copyright © 1977 by John Rechy

  Foreword copyright © 1984 by John Rechy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rechy, John.

  The sexual outlaw.

  1. Homosexuals, Male—California. 2. Prostitution, Male—California. 3. Sexual deviation—California.

  I. Title.

  HQ76.2U5R43 1984 306.7′43′09794 83-49452

  ISBN 9781555847326

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  10 11 12 13 14 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  FRIDAY

  11.07 A.M. The Apartment. The Gym.

  1:04 P.M. Santa Monica. The Beach.

  2:25 P.M. The Pier.

  VOICE OVER: Promiscuous Rage

  3:48 P.M. The Restroom by the Pier.

  MONTAGE: The City

  5:12 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard.

  5:39 P.M. Selma.

  FLASHBACK: Selma. A Year and a Half Ago.

  5:55 P.M. Selma.

  6:17 P.M. Laurel Canyon. Someone's Home.

  VOICE OVER: Interview 1

  7.01 P.M. Selma. The Hustling Bar. Selma.

  8:05 P.M. Dellwith.

  9:08 P.M. Downtown Los Angeles.

  10:32 P.M. Greenstone Park.

  FLASHBACK: Greenstone Park. A Year Ago.

  MIXED MEDIA 1

  10:34 P.M. Greenstone Park.

  11:48 P.M. Montana Street. Hanson Avenue.

  12:10 A.M. The Apartment.

  VOICE OVER: Interview 2

  12:35 A.M. Montana Street. Hanson Avenue.

  12:47 A.M. Sutton Street.

  1:15 A.M. The Street and Alley Outside the Hawk Bar.

  VOICE OVER: Selective Sins and Exhortations

  2:22 A.M. The Alley and Streets Near the Target Bar.

  2:51 A.M. Outside Andy's.

  3:05 A.M. The Garages, Yards, and Alleys Along Bierce Place.

  VOICE OVER: Four Factions of the Rear Guard

  3:40 A.M. Albertson Avenue.

  FLASHBACK: A House. Last Week.

  3:46 A.M. Terrace Circle.

  4:12 A.M. Greenstone Park.

  VOICE OVER: Cops and Muggers

  4:16 A.M. Montana Street. Hanson Avenue.

  4:24 A.M. The Apartment.

  SATURDAY

  10:08 A.M. The Apartment. The Gym.

  11:05 A.M. Greenstone Park.

  12:23 P.M. Griffith Park.

  12:34 P.M. Griffith Park. The Hill.

  FLASHBACK: Griffith Park. Ten Years Ago.

  VOICE OVER: Consenting Adults, Explorer Scout Girls, and Glittering Bisexuals

  1:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Hill.

  1:38 P.M. Griffith Park. The Road. A Path.

  1:47 P.M. Griffith Park. The Isolated Cove.

  MONTAGE: The City

  2:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Road. Another Hill.

  2:47 P.M. Griffith Park. The Arena.

  3:05 P.M. Griffith Park. Along the Road.

  4:04 P.M. The Movie Arcade.

  MIXED MEDIA 2

  5:02 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard. Selma.

  FLASHBACK: Christmas Eve. Two Years Ago. Selma.

  5:08 P.M. Selma.

  5:25 P.M. Roo's Home.

  VOICE OVER: Hustlers, Clients, and Eminent Psychiatrists

  6:56 P.M. Griffith Park. The Twilit Road.

  7:14 P.M. Griffith Park. The Lower Areas.

  VOICE OVER: Getting Involved

  8:44 P.M. Greenstone Park. The Area of the Garage on Oak Street. Greenstone Park.

  VOICE OVER: The Gay Parade

  11:47 P.M. Selma.

  VOICE OVER: Beyond the Fag Hag

  12:31 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  12:38 A.M. A Side Street Near West Hollywood.

  12:51 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  FLASHBACK: The Beach at Night. A Week Ago.

  12:55 A.M. Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  VOICE OVER: The Gay Sensibility

  1:09 A.M. The Lots and Alleys Near the Costume Bars.

  2:17 A.M. The Garage on Oak Street.

  FLASHBACK: The Garage. A Year Ago.

  2:21 A.M. Oak Street. The Garage. The Tunnels. The Shed. The Street.

  VOICE OVER: The Gay Threat

  4:08 A.M. The Apartment.

  SUNDAY

  7:34 A.M. The Apartment.

  FLASHBACK: Griffith Park. An Early Sunday Morning.

  11:07 A.M. The Apartment.

  12:02 P.M. Griffith Park. The Isolated Hill.

  FLASHBACK: Griffith Park. Nine Years Ago.

  MONTAGE: The City

  1229 P.M. Griffith Park. The Roads. The Hills.

  1:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Beginning of the Invasion.

  1:28 P.M. Griffith Park. The Invasion.

  3:54 P.M. Griffith Park. The Detention Compound

  MIXED MEDIA 3

  VOICE OVER: Imaginary Speech to Heterosexuals

  4:58 P.M. The Movie Theater.

  6:06 P.M. The Afternoon and Early-Evening Bar. Another Bar. The Turf Bar.

  FLASHBACK: Somewhere in Los Angeles. Last Summer.

  VOICE OVER: The Ugly Gay World

  7:16 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard. Selma.

  FLASHBACK: Selma. Ten Years Ago.

  7.23 P.M. Selma.

  7:45 P.M. A House in the Hills.

  8:30 P.M. Selma.

  VOICE OVER: S & M

  8:59 P.M. The Baths.

  10:35 P.M. Outside the Tool Bar. The City. The Lot Outside the Turf Bar.

  VOICE OVER: S & M vs. “S & M”

  11:26 P.M. The Parking Lot Outside the Turf Bar.

  VOICE OVER: Contradictions, Ambivalences, and Considerations

  11:44 P.M. The Tunnel Near Sutton. Hollywood Boulevard. Santa Monica Boulevard. Selma. Terrace Circle, Bierce Place, Greenstone Park.

  VOICE OVER: Attack!

  1:06 A.M. Outside the Tool Bar.

  1:23 A.M. Outside the Turf Bar. A Parking Lot. The Alley.

  2:08 A.M. A Deserted Part of the Beach.

  VOICE OVER: The Sexual Outlaw

  2:42 A.M. The Orgy Room.

  3:44 A.M. Selma. Greenstone Park. Montana Street. Han son Avenue.

  4:15 A.M. The Garage on Oak Street. The Tunnels. The Garage. Greenstone Park. Montana Street. Han son Avenue. The Garage.

/>   FOREWORD

  I conceived of this book as a “prose documentary.” The stark style I attempted—different from that of all my other books— and its “black-and-white” imagery are intended to suggest a documentary film. The “essays” function as “voice-overs” and speak at times in affirmation of Jims actions, at other times in questioning, still others in argument, even opposition. The deliberate fluctuations and “contradictions” are essential to the meaning of this book.

  In writing The Sexual Outlaw, I attempted what I consider a new approach to the so-called non-fiction novel: I arranged random “real” experiences so that their structured sequence would stand for narrative development. Although there is a protagonist whom the book follows intimately, minute by recorded minute for a full weekend, there is no strict plot. Although there is a vast cast of characters, most are nameless and appear only briefly as their lives intersect with the short segment—virtually “pastless”—of Jims life isolated for attention here. I wanted to create characters, including the protagonist, who might be defined “fully”—by inference—only through their sexual journeys.

  This book was composed in two main parts: the “experiential” passages in which the protagonist, Jim, sexhunts throughout Los Angeles for three days and nights; and various “essay-style” sections. The “experiential” chapters were written first, straight through, with only noted designations of where a certain “essay” would be inserted later. Then I wrote the individual “essay” sections.

  Since the initial publication of this book, some changes have occurred and new, profound dangers have emerged within the world it describes; and so this book remains today as a “prose-documentary” reflecting a certain time, one composite weekend in the mid-1970s.

  Because several of the “essays” are identified by definite dates—all in the 1970s—I considered revising parts of them for this present, new edition: But reading over those “essays,” I realized—sadly—that in far too many instances the dates identifying journalistic stories or headlines might be brought forward in time, and the same documented outrages would still reflect today's troubling realities.

  John Rechy

  Los Angeles, 1984

  “Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.… It is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing.”

  —ALBERT CAMUS,

  The Myth of Sisyphus

  “And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see…. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

  —HERMAN MELVILLE,

  Moby Dick

  11.07 A.M. The Apartment The Gym.

  HE PREPARES his body for the hunt. A dancer at the bar. A boxer in the ring. Prepares ritualistically for the next three days of outlaw sex. The arena will be streets, parks, alleys, tunnels, garages, movie arcades, bathhouses, beaches, movie backrows, tree-sheltered avenues, late-night orgy rooms, dark yards.

  The city is Los Angeles.

  Beyond the window of his apartment, yellow-green palmtrees stand aloofly. Later they will watch distantly as he prowls through the floating sexual underground.

  He is stripped to sweat-faded cutoffs. His pectorals are already pumped from repetitions of dumbbell presses on a bench, inclined, flat, then declined; engorged further by dumbbell flyes extending the chest muscles into the sweeping spread below the collar. His “lats”—congested from set after set of chin-ups—slow, fast, wide-grip, medium-grip, weights strapped about his waist for added resistance that will allow him to do only half-chins as the muscles protest-flare from armpits to mid-torso. His legs are rigid from squats held tense at half-point.

  Round, full, his arms are hard, hard from sets of curls, the dumbbell an appendage of strength and power in his hands. The horseshoe indention at his triceps is engraved sharply by repetitions of barbell extensions.

  Now the barbell—chrome, red-collared—rests at his feet. Dark weights are balanced harmoniously on each side of the bar. He bends over, jerking the bar widely in one move to his shoulders, and barely pausing, lifts it over his head and lowers it behind his neck. The deltoid muscles waken in welcome shock. One repetition, another, and another. Eight. Nine. Ten. He reverses the motions, places the bar at his feet. Breathing deeply, he moves away from the bar for thirty seconds only. Sweat coats his body like oil and stains the cutoffs at his groin. Deliberately he avoids the mirror on the wall. That crucial encounter comes only at the last.

  He does another set of standing presses with the loaded barbell, heavier now with added dark round plates. Seven sets in all, decreasing repetitions, adding weight each set.

  He lies on the bench, declined, his feet strapped at the ankles with a belt at the upper end. He raises his torso only a few precious inches, hands at his back, crunching the abdominal muscles until the ridges ache. Seventy-five repetitions. His stomach demands to stop. Twenty-five more. Muscles strain against the flesh. Twenty-five more.

  He jumps off the bench. He's panting, his body is electric.

  He looks down at the loaded barbell. He will attempt one more press. He adds plates to each side. He raises the bar to his shoulders, begins to lift it over his head. Muscles protesting, the weight pauses midway. His will insists. He challenges the moment's stasis.

  Breathing orgasmically, he exhales and with a thrust of his hips he raises the bar over his head.

  Now in its mysterious rite of destruction and construction, the body is rushing fresh blood to pulsing muscles, making them stronger and bigger, preparing them for the next, heavier onslaught, the next steel workout. Tomorrow his muscles will be larger than today.

  He stands before the mirror. His cock strains against the sweat-bleached cutoffs.

  1:04 P.M. Santa Monica. The Beach.

  He parked his car in the lot near the crumbling pier. Here, tribal crowds thin into exile territory. Near a squat, short restroom, men on towels watch new arrivals to the beach.

  As he walks on the hot sand, he carries a beach mat and a thermos full of protein to feed his muscles throughout the day. He's wearing his workout trunks over a very brief bikini which snaps at the sides. His already copper tan is rendered deeper by a film of oil. From behind blue-tinted sunglasses, he surveys those gathered here, intercepts looks—but he moves along the sand toward the ocean. Like the day and the sky, the ocean is blue and magical.

  At the edge of the beach, huge, rough rocks separate this portion from another. He climbs over them, toward the fire-gutted skeleton of a pier. Decaying boards slant toward the sand. The beach extends in a lapping tongue; men lie singly in that parabola of sand—the more committed in brief bikinis, or almost naked—genitals sheltered only by bunched trunks.

  Locating his beach mat, Jim strips to the white bikini; he pushes it up even farther on his thighs. He drinks from the thermos of protein. Now he stretches on the sand, eyes closed, aware of prowling figures rehearsing for the balletic cruising already commencing mutely under the shadowy pier.

  Not yet. For him, not yet.

  Jim—he calls himself mat sometimes, sometimes Jerry, sometimes John—removes the bikini, lies boldly naked on the sand. Because of a mixture of Anglo and Latin bloods, his skin quickly converts the sun's rays into tan; the tan turns his eyes bluer; long-lashed eyes which almost compromise the rugged good looks of his face, framed by dark hair. The sun licks the sweat from his body.

  As he lies passive to the sun's indifferent love, he imagines how his body looks to others: naked, tanned, hairs gleaming, muscles sequined with sweat on oil….

  He wakes abruptly. A youngman is squatting next to him, hand sliding along Jim's muscled body toward the hardening cock.

  A few yards away, an old fisherman, his wife huddled on the shore like ragged flotsam beside him, throws his line into the restive ocean.

  2:25 P.M. Th
e Pier.

  Jim twisted his body away from the youngman's spidery touch. Not yet. He wanted more sun; he lay longer like a sacrificial warrior surrendering to it.

  Now he's ready. He drinks again from the thermos. He puts on the sweat-faded cutoffs, leaving the bikini, his sunglasses, the thermos, and the beach mat in a secluded place. He looks at the gutted pier.

  Years ago it supported a carnival street, brazen in its garish tackiness, a discord of colors and “architecture” waning furiously. Tattoo parlors with butterflies, hearts, nude women; arcades lighting up neon pinball mazes; imitation-foreign restaurants with patchwork faces. Then came the rock groups and their followers, the flowers in their hair soon to wilt; summer radicals drove out old sailors and derelicts. Inevitably the dinosauric demolition machines came crushing everything into dust. The shells of buildings remained, as if the pier had been bombed. Then came fire. And another fire. The pier became a blackened skeleton. Below it, a subterranean world thrived among falling posts and dank sand.

  A gladiator, Jim stares at the arena under the pier. The sunlight stops sharply at the mouth of the rotting wooden cavern. An invisible boundary observed by the light. Beyond the twilight opening, the mouth darkens deeply.