No Church in the Wild
a hypomnema of hypersexuality

Chapter 4

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Peaches Christ

Before Claire, I was drinking no more than an average professional, I suppose, given my age. I was at the office far too often to socialize on a nightly basis, and wouldn’t dare indulge if it were one of the many days of the week and weekend where I would have to wake the next morning and begin plugging away at work. But, more than that, I’d had little desire to get wasted on a non-social basis.

I’d never had much confidence in my ability to seduce anyone, but through a long line of relationships that turned on a friends-first dynamic like the one I’d had with Jamal, I got laid on occasion. I wouldn’t have listed chastity among my life gripes. And I’d fallen for people before Claire, of course. At one point I’d found myself so overwhelmingly impressed by one of my business school classmates, and seen so much in common between our playful lifestyles, that I’d even tried desperately to convince him that our Jamal-like sex-only relationship should be more. I daresay I made a huge fool of myself before realizing that he just wasn’t that into me. But because people, and men in particular, so often reacted to my personality with a decided lack of understanding, I couldn’t remember going into a courtship with any hope that understanding was forthcoming. Really, I’d had few courtships. People hit on me, but I was never sure how to hit on them (absent significant alcoholic motivations), and so my trial romantic interactions tended to be with people who didn’t interest me all that much. There were, of course, plenty of good people with interesting lives and substantial intellect among them, and I knew it was hardly their fault that whatever I was happened to be more than they could identify with.

It was only with Claire, who was, in hindsight, sort of rude and rather inconsiderate, that I felt the novel tug of the potential for understanding, and that in itself intoxicated me to no end. When I was forced to acknowledge what Claire really was, that potential evaporated before my eyes, and I was left unreasonably despondent in my withdrawal. Never despondent for having lost her as a person, but despondent for having lost an ideal. My time with Jamal shortly thereafter had solidified the feeling that romance was utterly hopeless for me. Then, I’d wholeheartedly adopted the lifestyle of a barely-functional alcoholic, not that I then could put my finger on why, or on what I so desperately sought to escape.

For the weeks after I’d parted with Claire, most of my outings were to bars. I could usually dig up a friend to join me, and I found that there were suddenly many days when I spent part of my workday hugging a cup of coffee with my head down on my desk. There was one exception, though.

San Francisco’s symphony was among the features of my City I enjoyed the most, and for reasons essentially opposite to the rest. The mood, the outlook, of the City and its festivals fed my taste for wild abandon and my hunger for vice, for experimentation, for investigation of the lascivious elements of humanity. The symphony, the ballet, the opera, these gave me respite from these abundant external stimuli and an opportunity to simply sit and think about what life was and why.

So, since moving to the City, I had been thrilled to expend my golden-handcuff funds on symphony season tickets. I’d bought two seats under the impression that I’d want to bring along anyone I was seeing at the time, but I ended up scrambling in a desperate search for any friend, any companion, to accompany me with every ticket. Sometimes I took good friends, sometimes not so good friends, and sometimes I ended up going alone. Over time I’d found that the companions I chose didn’t seem to get what I got out of it, didn’t want to or couldn’t discuss it on the terms I did by instinct, or perhaps that they simply didn’t enjoy this particular exploit in the way that I did. I consequently grew more comfortable with going alone, and by Halloween I rarely bothered to invite anyone to join me at the symphony at all.

The Friday after Halloween, the image of the pretty girl with brilliant eyes I’d talked to at Trigger still lingered behind my eyelids, and every time I saw her there I chastised myself for failing to properly learn how to approach someone in public and strike up a conversation. At that point, most days of the week I chastised myself by drinking self-destructively. But that Friday I had a symphony ticket, and I wasn’t so forlorn as to ruin the potential of that experience with alcohol.

It was Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, among other pieces that interested me less. I put on a dress, donned my glasses to better see the movements of the musicians’ fingers, and sat calmly in my seat, warming up a bit as the strings did, and listened to the reciprocal notes of piano keys. Bach toyed with me, with us, I knew it, his keys taking one step forward and two steps back for what seemed like ages. My mind cleared, and there was neither Claire nor Jamal nor bars nor alcohol, only the focus on following the composer’s journey through the piece. Why did these notes frustrate me? It was Bach’s frustration, not mine, or it should have been. But why did he teeter so on the edge of progress and then backpedal? That wasn’t Bach, it was me, I realized. I felt myself always teetering. I was ready to match the notes at the very moment that their tempo sped and I felt Bach’s urgency at resolution, ready for him to offer me my own resolve. But, where my thoughts were wholly consistent with the teetering introduction, I found I could not follow Bach to his resolution.

I’d asked myself why, asked myself what was holding me back. I can’t progress because these people I’m courting don’t understand me, I’d thought. But, as the pianist’s strokes grew more and more rapid, as the notes blended against one another and I felt the unified melody rise, I had another thought: Maybe I can’t progress because I don’t understand them.

I’d left the symphony that Friday secure in that latter thought, and secure in the notion that I should try to understand where others were coming from more than I ever had before, but without any concept of how I’d go about obtaining that understanding. I’d laid down in bed, sober, still trying to figure out how I myself could seek the understanding I was so vain as to expect in others.

And then, the dream again:

I only hear a drip, drip, drip around me.

I curl my toes on Neptune’s borders and step forward toward the first stall of Pompeii’s Suburban Baths. I have this dressing room all to my naked self. White gleams in marble around me, and on I walk, my neck trailing over as I pass the scene and stall marked “I,” with a fresco of a woman riding cowboy on a man. As I stare at the still painting I realize I’m hallucinating the figures to move, to writhe.

Their motion draws my eyes to stall II, where the fresco betrays a woman lying facing me, waiting for the man behind to enter her. I feel myself stepping with their movement, almost without will, warm air hugging me.

And III, a woman fellates a man, his hand pressing downward on her head, her cheeks prickling.

IV, where a diminutive slave boy eats the pussy of a grand bejeweled woman.

But as I step toward stall V, I wake, squeezing my eyes.

"That’s the third time I’ve had that dream this week," I thought.

Groggily, I looked over at my cell phone to find matching text messages from my two best gay boyfriends.

One of my texts that morning was from Jackson, my gay husband, my oldest friend. Jackson had texted, “Joan bailed on Peaches tonight. Know anyone who’d want the ticket?” Peaches Christ, I’d learned recently, was one of the City’s more notable Drag Queens.

Jackson and I had gotten along famously since we were children, and we knew one another far too well. I knew of his youthful mischief, born of endless frustration with the inability to express his sexuality. There was no hiding my past from him, either. He knew I had been a fat kid. He knew what car I drove when I was 16. He knew my parents, the guys I’d kissed first, the girls who first hit on me. He was at the party I tried to throw in high school for New Years, when my parents were out late and my friend blew chunks all over the living room, and we drunkenly tried to clean it up, wringing the mop in our laundryroom slopsink, leaving a seeping cesspool of chunks that smelled of tequila for my parents to find. He knew the lie I told them that they didn’t believe about the dog being responsible and he knew they hadn’t believed it. He knew my SAT score. He knew how excited I got in Calculus class when the curves started to spin, and shared my disgust with our well-meaning but vapid teacher who could do nothing but copy the examples she didn’t understand from the book onto the whiteboard. He told me he liked men when we’d parted to go to college, after I’d watched him have serious, slowly-progressing relationships with a few boyish ladies.

He was the smartest person I knew from Mississippi, named even for his father’s pride in that armpit of a state. Our post-grad-school reunion in the City was one of the happier coincidences of my lifetime.

He was, simply, beautiful. Sharp-featured and honey-voiced, a lingering, slow accent. He wasn’t paper thin, but not bulky either, not short, but not particularly tall. People regularly commented to me that there was “just something about him,” and that something was reflected in the parade of hot, impressive, rich men who routinely followed him around like puppies. Women had always followed him too, but that meant substantially less to him.

Incidentally, I also woke to a text from my business school friend Ben merely asking, “What’s up today?”.

Ben hailed from New York, specifically the Longer Island, but he had fallen for San Francisco just as I had and had refused to leave it, too. I’d suspected for years, as had most of our mutual friends, that the reason why was a certain taste for cock, and I was elated to hear his confirmation after what seemed like decades of suspicion. As with most “gay” men, his first confession was one of bisexuality. I’d mentioned Jackson, actually, and how he was elated at the possibility of fucking James Franco, as Ben and I sat watching the Spiderman movie together.

“Yeah… I think I would too.”

I sort of cocked my head toward him and looked him in the eye, waiting.

“I mean… I’m open to that, too.”

I nodded and said, “Cool, cool. We should hit the Castro.”

“Yeah,” he offered, timidly, “I could be down for that.”

Of course, that was his way of saying “I want cock,” and I knew it. His getting it was another matter entirely. He was bashful, at least in matters not to do with intellect. I suppose he couldn’t deny the relative supremacy of his intellect. Jackson would later comment to me that Ben was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, and I tended to agree. Ben looked down often, shying from personal conversations, though he could hold a conversation with anyone about virtually anything.

Ben’s James Franco confession had come less than two months earlier, barely before my stint with Claire began, and, despite more than a couple of Castro visits since, including our Halloween, I hadn’t seen him getting any cock. Certainly it was coming. There was so much cock to be had. But he’d seemed so reserved when it was in reach. After he’d confessed his interest in men, he’d gone to New York to work on a deal for over a month, and we’d had little occasion to talk since, both of us inundated by our jobs and me wallowing in discontent, with my hole where the hope was, to boot.

That evening, Peaches Christ was producing a drag review called “Silence of the Trans,” and Jackson and I were in happy possession of tickets. “Trans” was, I suppose, misleading nomenclature. “Trans” could mean “transsexual,” as in a person who had taken hormonal and/or surgical action to switch his or her gender, or intends to, or potentially that such a person identifies more with the gender opposite the one listed on his or her birth certificate. It could also potentially mean “transvestite,” or a person who enjoys dressing as one of the opposite gender. Straight men can be transvestites, but gay male transvestites are the only “Drag Queens.” As Ben had been on the East Coast for a while, I thought it fitting that he be welcomed back to the, er, flexibility, of San Francisco by Peaches. Jackson was amenable, so I extended the invite, which Ben accepted.

Later that evening, Jackson and I had joined the long line that formed in anticipation of Peaches Christ, which began at the doors of the Castro Theatre and wrapped around the corner. Peaches encourages her fans to dress up for shows, and in this City that meant more Drag Queens all made up in the line, tall and sequined, women in black with white-painted faces, the grandest gauge earrings I’d ever seen. Certainly enough patrons wore simple t-shirts and jeans, as Jackson and I did, but in general the line had a strong scent of San Francisco on it. We didn’t wait long, noting the more remarkable costumes (a full Hannibal Lecter straightjacket and mask, a dominant leather male, a gold Drag-bikini) before Ben walked up to me and said, “Hi.” He wore a simple Gingham plaid shirt and jeans, his smallish nose hardly poking out between his gray eyes, a mop of dark brown hair thick on his head.

“At long last,” I started, “I have the chance to introduce two of my favorite people. Jackson, Ben. Ben, Jackson.”

“Hiya. Heard many good things,” Jackson said as he reached out to shake Ben’s hand.

Ben accepted his hand and said, “My pleasure,” and I heard something almost flirty in his voice that I’d never heard before. Throngs of summery hipsters swirled past us on the sidewalk, and more costumed patrons filed into the line behind us.

Ben’s eyes fixed on Jackson for a moment before he said, “So… how are you liking our fair City so far?”

Jackson beamed. “I love it. I mean, I miss having space sometimes, but – well, there’s no place like this. This is like gay Disneyland,�� and he swept his hand demonstratively across the line.

“Amen to that,” I chimed.

“So, what part of New York are you from?” Jackson continued.

“The part where people are angry.”

Jackson cackled, “That doesn’t help me...”

Ben smiled. “I know, I wouldn’t have thought most were angry before, but here… anyways, I was born in….”

And so they went on making small talk, with almost no input from me, until Ben was citing some book to Jackson he’d recently read about how dense urban environments, particularly welcoming ones like this, fostered high degrees of creativity. I’d read the book, and I added a note on its thesis, which I suppose reminded Ben that I was there, and I suppose in turn prompted him to take a good look at my grim countenance, because suddenly he said, “Bacchus, are you okay?”

“That’s a loaded question,” I replied.

“I think that’s a ‘no.’” The emphasis Ben placed in the center of his sentence was precisely the sort of intonation our mutual friends had seized upon in the past when they predicted he’d turn out gay.

“Ha, I missed you, man.”

“So what’s up?” He looked over at Jackson as though Jackson might answer for me. I suppose he might have.

“What’s up? I mean… weltschmerz. I suppose,” I replied.

They both shot me a quizzical look.

“I just happened upon the word, but it is hugely appropriate. It means ‘Depression caused by recognition of the difference between reality and the ideal.’” Based on their faces I assumed they’d understood the implication – I didn’t really have a good reason to be depressed – but I don’t think I really got the implication myself at the time, that you could add ‘irrational’ to the beginning of the word’s definition.

Ben looked down. “I’m familiar.”

Jackson broke his silence now and looked pointedly at Ben, and he betrayed by his comment that I’d told him quite a bit about Ben already: “Your spot’s the toughest. It gets better. Have you told your parents?” Jackson and I had always made a habit of discussing the progress of those who were turning toward “gay.” It occurred to me suddenly that that very process, the process of “turning” gay, had the potential to answer the question I’d posed to myself the previous night. It was, after all, a process by which someone became acquainted with a new pleasure, a process through which they would come to understand something different and grapple with what that newness meant to them. I needed to understand that process more, I supposed.

“No, I haven’t told them yet,” Ben mumbled, jerking me back into the moment I’d retreated from in my own head.

“How do you think they’ll react?” Jackson looked straight into Ben’s eyes, and there was an immeasurable pause before Ben answered.

“I really don’t know. I hesitate to tell them until… well until I have actually done something,” Ben said, self-criticism writhing in his voice, ripping himself from Jackson’s gaze to stare down at the table.

“Why?” I asked. I must have interrupted Jackson, who stopped a word in his throat.

“Well I mean if I start dating a girl, there’s no point,” Ben explained. Now his voice was more familiar – I daresay it was his work presentation voice. Well-rehearsed.

Jackson and I looked at each other, briefly. The line began to inch forward, and we shuffled along with the boisterous crowd.

As we approached the theater, I looked back to Ben and asked, “Is there a particular girl you’re into?”

He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Then he said, “No not a particular one. But I do still like women. I have a very particular type. Of woman, I mean.” I’d only known Ben to sleep with one girl in our whole acquaintance, an Ethiopian beauty with a tiny waist and plump breasts. I’d been jealous.

We offered our tickets to the usher and dug up three seats together, settling with Ben between Jackson and me.

The theater was built in the early 20s, and the era still wafted inside. The venue spread on two separate levels, under ceilings flowering in Gaudian art deco swirls and a rich mauve color palette, reliefs of daring classical figures adorning either side of the stage.

“What do you like about women?” I prompted Ben as we sat, looking upon mauve goddesses.

Ben sat silent for a long moment before offering, “I like the grace of them, and the calm.”

Jackson laughed out loud, which bordered on rude, and sarcastically chimed, “I feel the same way about Ella Fitzgerald.” Now I was giggling. Jackson, for his part, had long ago foresworn any lingering interest in women. We’d often joked that if he had any interest whatsoever, or if it were 1955, we’d be legally married – as opposed to philosophically married – already.

The surrounding attendees looked up at our laughter, and Jackson looked at me. “So he hasn’t yet been the subject of your proselytization.”

“Not really, he’s been far away for a while and has just recently hatched from the closet and all,” I explained.

Ben sounded annoyed when he said, “I’m sorry, did you have some measure of enlightenment to offer?”

Jackson sighed, “I hope you realize what kind of can of worms you’re opening right now.”

I reached across Ben to smack the side of Jackson’s arm. “Bitch.” He smiled, as did I. “Ben, dearest friend. Where to begin? I suspect your interest in women is likely marginal, at best, or at least more aesthetic than romantic.”

“And why would you think that?” Ben asked me.

“Because you admit that you are attracted to men.”

“I would think you of all people would understand an attraction to both,” Ben whined, calling me out.

“Indeed, I do, and I actually think that’s more common for people of both genders than their only having interest in one sex. I believe you have some attraction to women. If you were a woman, I’d be totally prepared to call you a ‘bisexual,’ much as I hate that word. But you grew up in an environment where the vast majority of the community believes that any attraction to men denotes exclusive attraction to men, an environment which, I daresay, criticizes exclusive attraction to men in some way. If, deep down, you believed that you could be happy with a woman, I don’t think you would have admitted any attraction to men. At least, probably not to anyone but me. With girls, admitting the attraction is less dangerous because it doesn’t necessarily quickly change your identity to ‘gay,’ especially in San Francisco. But, I admit, if a woman socializes with lesbians all the time or, like, doesn’t partake more than once, that’s a pretty good indicator that she’s really only into men.”

He sat quietly for a moment, then muttered in a weak voice, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the assertion that other men can be attracted to both genders but I am so obviously not into women just because I’m willing to come out. I’m not sure I’m, like, done with women. Are you with her on this?” he asked Jackson.

Jackson replied, “No, I’m not, not entirely. I think she makes more of everyone’s experimentation than she should. Realistically, I find a woman sexually attractive every once in a while. But objectively the idea of pussy grosses me the fuck out. How do you feel about the sex organs?”

“That’s always been the hard part,” Ben said, catching Jackson’s eye again and getting stuck there. Jackson looked back, unabashed.

“So to speak!” I said, cackling. Try as I might, I could never ignore the opportunity for a juvenile, dirty joke.

“Touché,” Ben said, “but I’m not buying. I get that you’re saying some sort of cultural sensory deprivation is at work here, and I know that sensory systems are continuously shaped by experience – like if you don’t use the sense in a way it will sort of atrophy, and so depriving someone of the use of their senses, well except for the sense of smell, will affect perception with that sense going forward.” Jackson’s eyes fixed a giddy, curious stare on Ben as he spoke, probably in awe that this banker spouted recent neurological studies, “but even given changes to a psyche that might result from depriving that psyche of something, some people are demonstrably totally gay, and some people are decidedly straight, and I think that comes from something immutable about them,” Ben said.

“I agree!” I said, exasperated. I was used to Ben busting out a hugely relevant counterpoint, and it hadn’t phased me. “It’s just that –”

Peaches Christ took this opportunity to interrupt us with the beginning of her Drag Review. The lighting in the theater darkened, and the applause rose. “To be continued,” I whispered to Ben as the Emcee in a black garter belt introduced the story and the players, urging Peaches Christ, who played Trannibal Lecter, out onto the stage, and together they introduced “the lesbian” Clarise, a professional-looking queen in a power suit, who accepted her introduction in a voice crafted with baritone and lisp to imitate Ms. Jodie Foster. Next came Madame Senator and her chubby drag daughter, and the introductions closed off with the announcement of Buffalo Jill, played by an up and coming drag personality made famous on reality TV via RuPaul’s Drag Race. Buffalo Jill was the lankiest of the bunch, though hardly the castmember with the most egregious stage makeup. A video of credits followed the live introduction, allowing each “lady” in the cast the opportunity to make another joke about herself and the cinema-inspired premise. Toward the end of the video, the Senator appeared giant on the screen, eye makeup facetiously suggesting that her eyebrows rose at the very top of her forehead, before Buffalo Jill was given accolades appropriate to her premiere.

In the break of darkness that followed the video, while the bare sets were supplemented with the accouterments of an asylum, I began my response to Ben, not bothering to whisper: “I believe some people are only attracted to the opposite sex and some people are only attracted to the same sex, I just think those types of people are actually the minority, that most of the population has, like you do, some attraction to both.”

“She just hopes that’s true of most straight girls, really,” Jackson added.

“I guess I do hope that. Generally I just think women are more likely to admit an interest in both sexes when they have it, because for some reason people then think of them as extra-sexy, while if a guy admits to liking guys everyone is generally going to assume he is just totally gay. But I maintain that you’re more likely to find happiness with a man, now, Ben.”

“Well, I’d agree with that, at least,” Ben conceded, “but I’m not sure I’m ready to buy that most of the population is attracted to both.” Something went awry onstage, and the darkness lingered longer than it should have.

“I’d certainly give you that most of the population that is attracted to both doesn’t admit it,” I said, defensively, “but if you’re blindfolded and some unnamed person starts doing a great job of blowing you, you’re going to ejaculate regardless of whether the mouth happens to belong to a man or a woman.” The stranger to my left looked pointedly at me, but I continued, slightly more hushed, “the mistake I think people make is assuming that the response to sexual stimulation is physically dependent upon a partner’s gender. It’s not. It’s more dependent upon your perception of that person’s sex and how that perception fits into your worldview, shaped by your upbringing. And of course your perception of whether that person’s sex should turn you on. So if you think someone shouldn’t turn you on for whatever reason, you may not ‘feel’ attracted even if you have the biological backings for attraction.”

Jackson cut me off. “Bacchus, you can’t deny that perceiving someone you find beautiful, of a gender you find beautiful, plays a part in arousal.”

“No, I won’t deny that,” I said. “I just think what you respond to is partly a consequence of your upbringing. Imagine your parents had insisted throughout your childhood that any man who dressed as a woman was Satan – could you enjoy this show as much?”

The Emcee interrupted us as the stage lights rose. S/he called out Clarise, who began meandering through the staged asylum, making her way toward Trannibal Lecter’s voluminous bright-orange hair. As Clarise conversed in euphemisms with Trannibal, another inmate whipped her dick out of her straightjacket and started to wag it at Clarise.

A brief change of scene brought Buffalo Jill tricking the Senator’s chubby daughter into a van. When the scene closed, the lights dimmed and restarted quickly, bringing us into the lair of the infamous Buffalo Jill, a lair that appeared strikingly similar to the asylum.

But now, roasting spits fit for a luau were perched at each corner of the stage, loaded with some unidentifiable pieces of plastic. Whited-out mannequins peppered the display, and on the floor lay bloody, obese corpses. As I leaned over to ask Ben what was on the spits, the production answered my question with a song.

If the song had a title, it must have been “Delectable Buttocks.” Twenty or so chorus queens filed out onto the stage and joined Buffalo Jill in singing the praises of buttocks, asses, glutes. Delicious, they were. Scrumptious. Delectable. The actors began to mime chopping off one another’s glutes with stage cleavers. As it occurred to me that the spits were roasting plastic bubble-butt insertions for pants, the chorus queens fell en masse onto their backs and held legs in the air, shaking their asses to the crowd, singing “delectable buttocks” over and over again.

When the lights rose for a break, Ben said, “Holy fucking shit.”

“Indeed,” replied Jackson.

“Speaking of perception supporting stimulation…” I began.

“Oh I’d hardly disagree that perception plays a role in arousal,” Ben said. “This does not arouse me.”

“Thank god,” Jackson said.

“But there are aroused people here! What I’m trying to say is that perception is malleable too. I think even Jackson will agree with me on that.”

“I suppose I will agree with her on part of this: your perceptions, the very world you see around you when you open your eyes, is shaped by the environment you were raised in and the descriptors you’ve been given. For example: In Namibia, there are only five words for colors. There’s one word that means both green and blue. And when anthropologists show a Namibian a bunch of green blocks and one blue block, shaped the same, and ask the Namibian to tell them which block is different, they really can’t. They stare and stare and after a very long time they might identify something different about the blue block. Point is, in some sense you can’t even see what your environment doesn’t give you words for.”

“Right, exactly,” I stuttered excitedly. “Like, in Rome, there were no words for ‘gay’ or ‘straight.’ There were, however, specific verbs for every act of penetration that indicated a particular gender, penetrating organ, and orifice. The Romans only thought of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms of actions, active or passive actions, and reacted to those. There was no such thing as an ‘orientation.’ And good luck finding a Latin word for ‘drag queen,’ even though there was plenty of cross-dressing.”

There had been a time when I made such speeches proudly, full of self-assurance. Years of study had generated a compulsion to call out Rome in my everyday conversations, often to the chagrin of my companions. But the progression of Claire to Jamal had me wondering at the inefficacy with which my theories seemed to apply to my world. I was undoubtedly overly dependent on the lessons of Roman ideology. I hoped that I was at least presenting these harebrained theories of mine convincingly to Ben.

“So what?” Ben asked. “The words for ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’ are derived from German?”

“Ha, no. Well, sort of. They were coined by a German about a hundred and fifty years ago. I know of no references to ‘sexuality’ as a personality trait before that, and, believe me, I’ve looked.”

“In Rome?” Ben asked.

“I’ve looked well beyond Rome on that one. No, the first reference to ‘homosexuality’ is thought to be in an 1869 German pamphlet that advocated the repeal of sodomy laws, ironically.” As soon as you name a thing you shape its existence forever…

“That I believe,” Jackson said, “I think she’s been obsessed with looking at that question for a while now.”

I felt defensive. “I just refuse to believe that any necessary characteristic of humans goes without a word for the first several hundred thousand years of human language, so I don’t think we’re on the right track using those words now. I find them grossly inadequate.” The man to my left was staring unabashedly at me now, and I was saved from acknowledging him when the lights dimmed and rose again.

Back in Buffalo Jill’s lair, the Senator’s daughter had been unceremoniously dumped into a huge metallic cylinder, nervously cuddling Buffalo Jill’s fluffy, white, human-sized drag dog as she cowered. Buffalo Jill began a song of triumph, of hunger, of narcissism, posing seductively for a video camera whose feed displayed above the stage, wrapped now only in a light, silk, flowery robe. As she sang, she teased the crowd with flashes of the alabaster form beneath it, which was strikingly feminine when shown in profile, ass cheek and all, to the audience. We watched awestruck as she met the crescendo of this particular musical number by reaching down to tuck her dick between her legs and turned to the audience, opening the robe. Gasps escaped even this open-minded audience, and I was forced to admit that, seeing just the little tuft of black hair above the crotch, this skinny-ass queen appeared to have the body of a flat-chested chick. The crowd roared.

“I can’t believe they just did that,” Ben said as the lights dimmed.

“Neither can I. But I’m glad to hear the cheering,” I replied, and the lights quickly rose again.

Clarise was on the hunt, having made her way into Buffalo Jill’s corpse-laden lair, and she poked around with limp wrists, turning her head to look for Buffalo Jill. Jill jumped out from behind the sets, attacking her, but the attack was halfhearted at best and resulted in Jill lumbering over Clarise and demanding that she “lip sync for her life” to the tune of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Naturally, Clarise accepted. Luckily, the corpses and mannequins rose from the dead in inanimate in support of Clarise’s musical number, a drag ballad of the highest order, dripping with double entendre, and, somehow, singing the praises of dick.

Apparently, Clarise had adequately lip-sung for her life, and she was spared as the show concluded.

We sat clapping in stunned silence as the curtain call lingered on. The Drag starlets were, not shockingly, prima donnas, and each one took five times as long as a superstar opera soprano to absorb her applause – even Buffalo Jill’s human-sized fluffy white dog. Buffalo Jill took a full five minutes, partly to profusely thank the boyfriend and parents that sat in the audience to watch her, partly to regale the audience with memories of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and partly to hear herself talk, I supposed.

As the three of us stood to exit, Peaches Christ sat us back down. As with all of her productions, she announced, the audience was encouraged to appear in costume, and she asked that the costumed queens make their way to the stage to compete for the “best serial killer costume” award.

As they began to gather on stage, Jackson noted that the closest any had gotten to looking like a serial killer was the one who just dressed like Hannibal Lecter in his straight jacket. Otherwise, the twenty or so contestants included a man in a leather speedo and a black wrestling mask, several “standard” Drag Queens in prissy heels, one towering Drag Queen in a leafy gold bikini, and two preteen girls wearing school outfits. Peaches and Buffalo Jill chatted with each contestant, asking the audience to boo their favorite. Why boo, I did not know. Maybe they had communally internalized past boos and hisses and repurposed them, the way the gay community has repurposed the word “queer.”

Ben, Jackson, and I were effectively trapped in our seats.

“I bet none of the men up there are at all interested in women,” Ben said.

“Agreed,” Jackson said.

“Not necessarily. Those guys up there probably stand to take much more shit than you if they told their drag friends they actually wanted to fuck women. Women with vaginas, I mean.”

“I really don’t understand why she insists on presuming the majority of the population is into both. Other than to make herself feel better,” Jackson said to Ben.

“I insist because you can’t possibly watch the number of women that I have, most of them all the while proclaiming heterosexuality, ‘try’ being with women or actually just switch back and forth to women, and still think exclusive attractions to men or women are the ‘norm.”

“But Bacchus, you live in San Francisco. You know in Mississippi girls aren’t dabbling that way,” Jackson said.

“No, I readily admit that San Francisco makes it easier, and that people in Mississippi are less likely to experiment – though they do. But this is the only place I’ve ever been where any man will introduce himself as ‘bi’ and actually want to make out with me.”

“It’s not just that,” Ben said, “this city self-selects for counterculture. Of course there’s more experimentation, more switching, here.”

“True,” I confessed, “but girls are still willing to experiment elsewhere. I’ve helped them.” I smiled at Jackson, who was present for such an instance once. “Now, admittedly, women are more likely to experiment in an environment like this, where everyone around them totally accepts experimentation as mere experimentation, as having no effect on their identity. But whether they live here or not, once you put the idea in someone’s head that everyone’s fine with them trying it, well, I’m just saying that there must be curiosity, interest, abounding, because once you put people in this kind of environment they seem willing to try ‘gay’ out much more often.”

The gold bikini queen’s face dropped as she received minimum boos, particularly in relation to the two pre-teen girls who’d been introduced before her.

“You’re not seriously telling me you think that the majority of the population would try sex with someone of the same sex just because they got a proposal in a welcoming climate,” Ben said.

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Provided that they are in a mental place to admit to themselves that they want it. It does take some getting used to, the practice of gay sex, even if you want it. It took me a while to drudge up the courage to go down on a woman the first time. But I do think they might just be interested in trying it out.”

“I wish that were true,” Jackson said. “I love me some straight boys.”

Peaches turned to interview the Hannibal Lecter, who muttered unintelligibly through his mask and received pitifully few boos. Eventually, she moved on.

“See!” I said excitedly, “even Jackson ‘gay-or-straight’ Milgrim has dabbled with a boy who claims he’s straight.” A short, halfhearted round of boos rose.

“Okay I’m confused now,” Ben said. “Are you claiming that people have this desire and don’t know it because they don’t have the right words for it, or are you saying that people have this desire and will express it in secret?”

“Both,” I answered. “Of course, some people are more aware of it than others, and probably more likely to express it as a result. Sometimes they just need a little help.” I grinned at Jackson, who smiled and shook his head.

“Booooooooo,” the crowd roared. The auditory jolt gave me an idea. Maybe it was the spirit of all of these amateur drag queens, or maybe it was my new recurring dream of Rome’s sexual options, or maybe it was just that I was bored and wanted something that I could look forward to, that put the idea in my head. “Like, sexual extraction.”

“Extraction of what, their gay sauce?” Ben asked.

Jackson laughed. “I like ‘Sauce,’” he said.

“We can’t call it ‘gay sauce,’ I said. I told you, ‘gay’ is a misleading word.”

“Fine, just ‘Sauce,’” Ben offered, drawing another smile from Jackson. “But I’d like to see you extract it.”

He was kidding, but I appreciated the opportunity to take him seriously: “How appropriately wet. So, extract, like, by prowling the streets of the City searching for research subjects from whence to extract gayness? I will only bring forth the gay as a public service, my friend.”

Jackson interjected, “Well, we couldn’t prowl these streets, could we? It’s not as though the walkers of the Castro are harboring latent sexual impulses. Maybe if we go to Pac Heights…”

I looked at him. “We?”

He shrugged. “This sort of extraction seems too enjoyable to miss…” And he drew his cheeks back into a mischievous, cherubic grin.

“So say our mandate is to extract the Sauce. What would be our gameplan?”

“We need prey. Where do we find the prey?” Jackson asked no one in particular, looking casually around the theater full of gays, mocking me.

Ben apparently felt contentious, and, for once, ignored the opportunity for a joke. “If you assert that a majority of the population is susceptible to this sort of Saucing, how can you even ask? Shouldn’t they be everywhere?”

“Unfair!” I said. “We opened this moment of philosophy noting that most of our majority faces a mental restriction against expressing the Sauce. We’d have to overcome the cerebral obstacles. This is no small task.”

“Perhaps…” Jackson began, “well, between the two of us, certainly we have discussed a substantial portion of our friends and acquaintances who yearn to Sauce.”

A queen in a black leather corset screamed at the crowd, seeking boos. They were not forthcoming. Mere drag failed to impress this audience, it seemed.

I let her voice die down before I answered, “Indeed, I’d daresay I know a fine contingent who truly need the Sauce poured out.”

“Then we begin there,” Jackson said, adopting a pedantic, singsong tone all of a sudden, “from those we know to those they know, each in need of an education.” Ben was just staring at him, blank-faced, before he caught himself and turned his attention back to the contestants on stage.

I, on the other hand, was becoming excited about this endeavor. What better way to understand why people sampled one gender or the other than to watch them up close? What better way to get at what I seem to keep missing? “So, I’ll… er… indicate boys with some Sauce to you,” I said to Jackson, “and you’ll suggest your best contingent of bi-curious ladies to me, and then we’ll discuss.”

“Yes, and we will show them precisely what they’ve been missing,” he replied.

“We will. We’ll be like superheroes, but instead of saving humanity from evil beings we’ll save our subjects from a life of sexual confusion.” The thought made me smile.

“Permit me to play devil’s advocate,” Ben said, “but won’t you be creating a life of sexual confusion?”

“You lose fifty points, Ben,” I chided. “Haven’t you been listening? The confusion arises from the chasm between what society tells them exists and what their genitalia respond to. If someone is truly only interested in the opposite sex, we could do nothing. We play only in the recesses between straight and gay, where folks are already feeling curious. I speak from personal experience when I say that you only stop being confused all the time once you realize what you feel for each. We’ll be saving these people from crippling sexual ambiguity.” The drag contest before me seemed suddenly ironic, but I reminded myself that the people on that stage were very clear on what they found enjoyable in life. This theater was full of the happiness that free sexuality conferred. I imagined spreading that happiness around the world, Tinkerbellesque.

“Though it may take a while,” Jackson offered, implicitly acknowledging the challenge in finding persons to Sauce who were ready, willing, and able.

I looked over at him. “I think we need superhero costumes. I have to say my appearance hasn’t seemed terribly seductive lately. If I’m going to be trying to seduce the Sauce out of people I think I need to look a different part.”

“Can there be a feather boa? There’s really nothing like a feather boa,” Jackson snarked, and a man three rows in front of us, wearing a yellow feather boa, turned to throw him an angry look. Ben chuckled.

“I’ve never seen you wear a feather boa in your life,” I told him, pretending for the incensed gentleman that Jackson hadn’t been referencing him, and ignoring the fact that he was teasing me.

At last, Peaches Christ selected three winners for her contest, then asked the audience to boo in confirmation. We braced ourselves.

But Ben had taken Jackson’s boa joke to mean we were speaking wholly in jest. “Okay, I get it,” he said, “you’re not really going to do anything.” Ben almost sounded disappointed.

“Realistically, dude, I don’t have anything other than this … investigation… going down right now, and I don’t have the energy for anything else. I can’t really care about anyone romantically, as far as I can tell, or I don’t want to. I’m just numb. So, if I can please them sexually and show them a new indulgence in life they might enjoy, that’s… that is, of course, assuming that I could pull it off… well… someone told me I should be doing that, recently.” I watched as Peaches crowned the two preteen girls co-winners.
“Who?” Ben and Jackson asked, in unison.

I considered for a moment how to explain to these two very reasonable men that I’d taken life advice from a bum wearing a billion different colors who was surprisingly insightful, and decided I couldn’t. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I will go on a quest for Sauce, happily, assuming Jackson will join me and we can help one another find targets.” We stood as the crowds finally released us from our seats.

“Oh, I can’t fucking wait. I might have to start arranging some visits.” Jackson said. “Even if only to show you you’re off the mark on this whole ‘almost everybody’s bisexual’ business. You’ll see them switching permanently most of the time, I think.”

We began to speculate about who we could try out, but my participation in the conversation dwindled as we poured out onto Castro street to find a bar and Ben and Jackson began to ask one another about their respective histories, comings out, tastes, favorite books, favorite Victorian playwrights, and all manner of personal characteristics, caught up in looking at one another, such that I left the Castro that night feeling distinctly like a third wheel.

But, there, I had created an entertainment for myself, a new distraction, a new something to get excited about. I was going to create debauchery. In some way it seemed my only option. I’d sputtered around for weeks now unjustifiably idle, alcoholic, as though caught in the hole I dug myself. Of course, I didn’t see how unjustifiable my malaise was at the time. It was not until this game ran the course of the Roman sexual storybook recurring in my dreams that I was shown enlightenment, and the game was just beginning.