1.
I fancied myself a little hustler, but not really. I just wanted to have fun. I started in the Pacific Northwest and took my tiny show on the road, dancing in the corners of gay bars from Seattle to New York, LA to Atlanta. Straight bars too sometimes. It was just for a good time and it mostly was a good time. I asked if people wanted to make out and they usually said yes. Once wearing all white and more inebriated than I thought, I fell into a pond outside the cutest neighborhood gay bar in Decatur, then kept dancing with green duckweed clinging to my shirt and pants all night. No one noticed or cared. I made out later under a gorgeous tree with a beautiful medical student visiting from Chicago with dark eyes and the cutest lisp. Another time in Key West, I was playfully pushed backward into a swimming pool and all the gay boys cheered. Someone put a golden crown on my head that fell off immediately. I kept dancing then too, thighs chafed the next morning from the friction of jumping around in wet denim cutoffs all night. I went home to my little island cottage as the roosters started crowing, the sun already up over the flat sea. Margaret Atwood once said, “The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.” I was far from free then, but in this current moment, I am perhaps moving closer. Or maybe I just want to believe that all this loneliness I’m feeling here in the wilderness is for something.
2.
Sex was performative, and I thought I always had to be in charge. I believed it was what my lovers wanted but I never really asked. I was there to please and understood that to be my job. I read “Stone Butch Blues” at the wrong time and took it too much to heart. The people I hooked up with seemed fine with my ethos: no need to touch me. No, really, please don’t. Even when dating women I thought of myself as a fag, and pursued my own idea of that. Something about tender rough-housing and orgasms. Basic kindness was appreciated and I mostly liked staying the night, even though I could rarely sleep, and I always left early. I equated reception with femininity, something I was trying to escape. This was before chest surgery. I had a lot to prove, but I’m not exactly sure why or to whom.
3.
In my 20s and even 30s I didn’t sleep much. I was having adventures, alone and with others. I liked my own company just fine, anyone else was an extra treat. My best friend was androgynous and hot and often up for a debauched or wholesome escapade. We made art and always had an exciting plan in the works and went dancing and were each other’s best wingmen. Except we barely had interest or time for anyone else: we were two boys in platonic love, running around Olympia and New York and San Francisco with the energy of unruly teenagers. There were unfortunate tattoos and spontaneous roadtrips and rolling down the grassy slopes of Dolores Park either mildly or very tipsy. There were cigarettes shared on the dock as the harbor seals swam over to say hi. There were warm summer nights in underwear, watching the stars. There were heartfelt talks and there was trust and there was a feeling of family. There were occasional hookups, just not with each other. In this formative friendship, a seed got planted and it grew: this idea of platonic love, and all it was capable of. I still carry this like a pearl somewhere in my intestines, or maybe in the back of my throat. It was marvelous accountability and endless freedom. It was non-monogamous in a way, before anyone was really talking about that, at least anyone I knew.
4.
Best and worst places for sex, indistinguishable from each other: after a break-in to the only dentist’s office in a humid Costa Rican town that quickly dropped off into jungle; the closed, unlocked visitors center at Zion National Park at night; at the bike shop, behind the upstairs shelving; in church pews, various locations; pushing up and being pushed against the walls of so many dance club restrooms; in the invite-only basement of what I thought at the time was the most special gay bar; at house parties—in rooms and in closets and on the stairs; in that squat above Mission Street we had access to for awhile, apparently best for threesomes or more; at concerts and in movie theaters; at all of the Capp Street parties, and always at R’s house; at various political protests; in so many creaking elevators; on that old mattress left behind in the abandoned apartment below K’s flat; at a dozen different campgrounds–poison oak on the genitals and it didn’t matter until later in the emergency room with an ice pack on my crotch waiting for a steroid shot; late at night moving between trees at the Alamo cruising park ready to offer a stranger a handjob; in that one Castro bar with the same intention but that time I asked for five dollars to see how that would feel, what a deal, and got it; near so many Stand by Me Oregon railroad tracks; and almost but not quite in the upstairs section of the “MEN ONLY” sex club. My friend M had told me about it but it turned out that an actual dick was required for entry and I got aggressively escorted out for even trying, the thick-necked bouncer holding me up from my collar and all but kicking me in the butt with his shoe at the door, Saturday morning cartoon style. I ineffectively yelled, “But I’m a faggot!” as I was tossed to the curb. A gay man who had just immigrated from Pakistan and couldn’t afford the cover and I made out outside, a consolation prize.
5. Then I grew very weary. I thought it was well past time to be “normal” and I wanted some version of that. I had romanticized visions of living with someone I loved, and making a life together. I could not have cared less about one more pride parade, trans march, or dykes on bikes. The thought of any kind of sex party made me want to jump off a bridge. Enough! And maybe will you all just put some pants on? I was tired. I wanted to sleep well, and I wanted healthy breakfasts and saving up together for trips to Italy and a calmer approach to it all, meaning life. I wanted to know exactly who to call if I had an emergency, and I wanted to feel cared about for more than what my body could do. Unfortunately, sooner or later, I grew disaffected by these arrangements. I lived with one of my partners for almost ten years, and though we really loved each other, and it did feel very special to share a home, eventually the familiar existential deadening came for me anyways. In an earlier draft of this, I did my usual throw-myself-under-the-bus thing I do, but in learning not to do that anymore, I’ll stop and say this: for that decade with that specific person, I worked extremely hard the entire time to make it work—I really did my absolute best. However, the end result was familiar. Me: guilty, disappointed, and sad, but on the other side, a sense of deep aliveness once again, which is not necessarily to say happy. It’s eros, but not about sex in the slightest. It’s about what’s underneath everything: an existential openness to life. While I’ve struggled with feeling like a freak and a failure for not being up for these seemingly most normal of adult experiences, I am starting to feel a glimmer of curiosity that I get to come up with something else, even though I don’t have any idea yet what that will be. I do know that it will be very unconventional. That’s what queerness means to me: the figuring out of something more honest and personally authentic, against convention and sometimes against all odds.
6. I have an older friend, in her 80s now, who has been with her partner on and off since the 1960s. They live ten miles apart from each other on the rugged Northern California coastline, each in their own perfect cabin: hers warm, artsy and wild with oil paints and projects everywhere, his a utilitarian and sparse domicile, its most remarkable feature an incredibly well-organized wood pile. But they invite each other over with enthusiasm, and still go on dates, they have shared friends and their own friends, they do their own thing, they come together, they part: daily and weekly and for years. When they were both in their seventies they bought a little house together in Toulouse, where they still live together for part of the year, practice their French at a little table overlooking the countryside, and share perfect bottles of wine with each other and friends. Then, back to the edge of the Pacific for space and freedom and their enduring care.
7. I am thinking a lot about Atwood’s last illusion. As someone who has spent their life more focused on external validation than I would like to admit, maybe this is the next layer, the final layer, of letting it all go. It is Les Petites Morts, but not the kind I was finding in dark cruising parks or on abandoned mattresses: they are the little deaths of things that, regardless of how beautiful they could be, no longer serve. I am still here in this scarred and beloved body, trying not to hide from all this messy realness which is to say, the truth of myself. I turn 51 next month, and am so glad to be at this age in this time. I don’t know if I’m learning more now than I ever have before, but I know for sure that I’m more aware of my learning. And I would not say I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, but through all this pain and wonder, I am perhaps the most alive.
Charlie J. Stephens 