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By Root 1112 0

Stan looked stunned and sat around listening to a 45 called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” I loved him so much but back then no one could defend a homosexual relationship; it was by definition “sick,” spiritually impoverishing, infantile, doomed to repeat itself in a horrid circle of compulsiveness. To the degree that someone was “intellectual” like me, one was au courant with Freudian theories and knew how to torment oneself with extra zeal. At that time I read a book about the Salem witch trials in which the author pointed out that it was precisely the Puritan “intellectuals” who believed in witchcraft. They had the subtlety and instruction needed to detect the presence of the devil in the loony actions of eccentric old ladies and the hysteria of teenage girls. I resented my shrink for pushing me in this direction. Yes, I agreed that homosexuality was second best. But what if I never found a woman as kind and funny and loving as Stan?

I’d never lived alone before. When I’d come home from work to my new solitary apartment, my heart would start to beat harder as I approached the door. I bought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began to prepare elaborate meals, recipes that would sometimes take two days to execute—veau Prince Orloff or boeuf à la cuillère (in which a big square of beef was boiled, cooled, hollowed out, the minced meat then mixed with sautéed mushrooms and shallots and combined with a sauce, then reinserted into the beef shell and covered with Gruyère and heated up under the grill—or something like that; I can’t remember, I only did it once, and it was pretty dry). I realized that despite my therapist I probably wasn’t going to get married, and that I should start giving dinner parties to fill up my lonely evenings.

Much of my spare time was devoted to sex—finding it and then doing it. In those days before online hookups and backroom bars and outdoor sex, when there weren’t even very many gay bars, we had to seek out most of our men on the hoof. Back then people glanced back over their shoulders, though few do it now (or do I say that only because now I’m old and uncruisable?). Then we had to look back or we’d spend the night alone. The whole city was awash with desire and opportunities to satisfy it. Now people can afford to be arrogant and to scurry past one another haughtily, knowing they can always go online later, but then they were driven to tarry and gawk. Typically we’d walk up and down Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street—not with friends, which might be amusing but was entirely counterproductive. No, only the lone hawk got the tasty rabbit.

If you looked back and he looked back as well, you’d pretend to scan the contents of a shop window. He’d do the same thing twenty yards down. You’d keep exchanging reciprocated glances at an ever-increasing rate. Then you might just smile simply and stroll toward him and he’d pull away from his window and the two of you would form your little conversational duo. If you were still afraid of being rejected or arrested or beat up, you might ask him the time or for a light. It was considered especially cheeky to ask for a light while you were already smoking. Usually you’d just say, “Do you live around here?”

If he was willing, you’d invite him back to your apartment, which in your mind you’d refer to as your trick pad, since he was the trick you’d just scored. Sometimes you’d trick more than once in an evening (“Oh, God, last night I was a real nympho, I tricked three times in a row, my cooze was oozing, must have been the full moon”). The way you could tell the difference between your friends and your lovers is that you never camped with a trick. When discussing him the next day, you might refer to him as “she,” but never to his face (“I thought she was so butch, but within seconds she had her legs in the air!”). As one of my friends said, “If God had wanted men to be fucked, he would’ve put a hole in their ass.”

We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but we reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties. I’d clean