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By Root 1159 0

partially glazed Korean kiln-fired plate. They were turned inward, dedicated to self-cultivation, and we were turned outward in vigorous competition with other people. We didn’t care what we ate or how our chakras were lining up. We were hungry for fame. We wanted to be noticed. We wanted to have high-flying careers. Out in San Francisco people spent their afternoon installing wind chimes in their trees or stretching. We didn’t stretch, though we lifted weights at the gym to make a more formidable impression on potential sex partners. Nor did we integrate sex into a larger, holistic pattern. We were abysmally genital and wholly localized. Californians were squeamish about eating meat, some of them not only vegetarians but raw vegetarians. We thought that they were so overwhelmed by their lives and so inept at living them that they believed everything might work out if they could control what went into their mouths. We knew what we wanted in our mouths: steak and cock.

I think we were mostly antipathetic to the locals. For one thing our rhythms were out of sync with theirs. We wanted to score right away; we liked the idea of the one-night stand or bend-over. They were in no rush. Of course they had quick pickups, but nothing was allowed to seem rushed.

I had hired various boyfriends and part-time boyfriends of mine, which would have sounded perfectly normal to another gay man in the 1970s, but today is sufficiently strange to merit a comment. Back then we had no notion of “gay marriage,” partly because so many of us were equally opposed to marriage for straight people. Among the heterosexual artists and bohemians and intellectuals I knew, few got married. Gays were more markedly and deliberately promiscuous, though we didn’t like that word, which is always negative. Were we erotic adventurers because, as the Freudians said, we were too immature to maintain a committed relationship? Or was it, as the Christians said, that we were licentious and vicious and so unnatural that we submitted to no decent limitations to our lust? Or was it, as I thought, that we’d been so deprived sexually in the fifties and sixties (because we’d had so few places to meet each other and were so fearful that we had become almost invisible, even to one another) that now we were glorying in all those previously missed opportunities to couple (and triple, quadruple)? We thought that sexual freedom was the same thing as freedom. We were willing to contemplate the possibility of “gay politics” or “gay culture,” but only if we’d first secured total gay sexual liberty.

Of course at that time sodomy was still illegal in most states, and in a few it was still subject to capital punishment. In New York and San Francisco gay couples walked around hand in hand, but in most other American cities (including nearby outlying districts such as the Bronx and Oakland) they would have been beat up. We ourselves still thought it was pretty strange being gay, and half the time that we were claiming our gay rights we were really whistling in the dark, trying to convince ourselves we weren’t really public menaces or monsters either pitiable or frightening.

As the decade wore on, we became more and more convinced that monogamy—and even the concept of the couple—was outdated. We wanted to hook up with one another in giant molecules of adhesiveness and love and friendship, all distinctions leveled, all possibilities open. Friends of our friends became our lovers. Lovers of our lovers became our fuck buddies. In the bigger and bigger gay discos that were being constructed, we’d get high and show up at two or three in the morning and dance till late the following afternoon in a bright hot wash of tribalism. Soon after arriving, before my drugs kicked in, I’d be appalled by the touch of an unknown sweaty body; by the end of fifteen hours on the dance floor, no one was alien to me and I loved everyone. How could monogamy—mom and pop, the suburban quarter acre, and the isolated agony of long evenings in front of the television or in the basement crafts shop—possibly compete