Riff-raff to the Lions

The new year reminds us that the more things change the more they stay the same.

In Nashville over Christmas, I was cruising a peep show when I heard German spoken. Since I speak that language and one of those speaking was a hunk, I joined in.

The hunk--an atheletic nineteen-year-old--was polite but informed me he was after "big black cocks."

"The last time I had sex with a white man was when I was twelve in Berlin. No dark meat was available," he confided.

The other German was a handsome but decidedly elderly man. He wanted to chat in his native tongue. He'd been in Nashville since "fleeing" Germany in 1945 (a clue!).

"All that crap about the lavendar triangle and gays being persecuted like Jews in the Nazi time is bullshit," he insisted. "I was in the Hitler Youth and had a ball--but of course we did it behind closed doors and with none of this flaunting you see now. When I was a young army officer, you have no idea how easy it was to get into the pants of enlisted men--especially at the front. I was in Russia, and those long, cold nights were made for love!"

I told him of my student days in Berlin in the 1960s when I visited one bar reputed to belong to a cousin of Hitler's. The owner was a drag queen, married to a butch lesbian. They lived as man and wife and kept the bar open throughout the war. "I know that bar" (neither of us could remember its name) "but that wasn't the only one. There were two others--one was called the Landlady's Table.

"The point was to be absolutely discreet. You dressed and acted like men! Or if you had to dress up like a woman you just became one! Of course that wasn't for me. The ones who got into trouble were the riff-raff, the real perverts, like men who went for young boys, or hustlers or outrageous queens. Of course queers got arrested in parks or toilets for offending the public morals." I did not ask him whether he considered peep-show sex offensive to public morals. "So the true degenerates were swept up as they are today in America or as they should be in any society. Of course the concentration camps existed, so some of them got burned in the fire along with everybody else. But it wasn't persecution of homosexuals as such, you understand."

We were interrupted by the entrance of a new cruiser. He looked fourteen, but must have been older, though IDs were not checked and there were more youths in this sex arcade than one usually sees. I tagged him "the Dutch Boy" because of his rosy cheeks, blond hair and a neat sailing cap. He wore a long coat under which he appeared to be jerking off.

My ageing German broke off in mid-sentence to follow him around the circuit. So did just about everybody else. I was reminded of the time I was being interviewed by Randy Shilts at a Castro Street outside cafe. Shilts had just asked me whether man/boy love was really a "gay" phenomenon, when two georgeous fourteen-year-olds pranced by, creating a chorous of oohs and ahs and turning every head in the place.

Dutch Boy was an enigma. He just stood there--not looking at anyone, not responding to the nods and glances of the varied patrons--from tall, macho blacks and willowy white teens to truck drivers in sweatshirts, older bankers in business suits, and a couple of aging fairies in make-up and semi-drag. Breaking the usual protocol, I asked him what he was looking for.

"I don't know."

"Are you gay, bisexual, or straight?"

"I don't know."

"Why are you standing here so long?"

"I don't know."

He sighed audibly and looked as if he was about to cry.

"Would you like to join me to watch a movie?" I finally found a definative "No." By this time he was trembling visibly. Yet he smiled and became more relaxed when we talked about non-sexual things. He obviously did want to talk. He wasn't afraid of me; he was afraid of himself.

Today, America's gay movement is proud of its achievements. There are a handful of gay elected officials. Gay rights ordinances in twenty or thirty jurisdictions make discrimination in these areas theoretically illegal. There are gay institutions from churches to legal aid societies and health clinics, in addition to thousands of bars and other commercial establishments. The gay market involves billions of dollars, eagerly sought by upscale corporations.

Meanwhile, suicide among teenage boys--many gay, most "sexually confused"--has skyrocketed and is the leading cause of death in that gender/age group. Admission to mental hospitals for youth has also soared, and health workers say sexual issues and drugs are the main reasons. Most chilling, the number of gay men--and even gay youth--incarcerated for long periods for sex is at an all-time high in the US.

This is part of a general trend not limited to homosexuals. Mental illness, especially depression, is at epidemic levels. The treatment de jour is Prozac--which, incidently, also keeps down erections for millions of boys and men.

The US now imprisions more of its people than any other country--counting jails as well as prisons, about three million at any one time. Overwhelmingly, these prisoners are young and male--and a very high percentage is either exclusively homosexual or bisexual in practice. About one third of all prisoners are locked up for "sex crimes," according to the Law Enforcement Administration in Washington. Given continuing rampant homophobia (and the devaluing of woman "victims"), men accused of sex with boys or men are liable to be arrested, convicted and sentenced to longer sentences that thoses accused of acts with girls or women. A recent trend is to add "youthful perpetrators" to the list of devils--with thousands of boys between seven and twenty-one arrested in 1993 for sexual "crimes" including such outrages as mutual masturbation with boys a few years younger than themselves.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with gay rights! These people are not being persecuted for "homosexuality, as such." The 1994 federal crime bill, which effectively raises the age of consent in many instances to eighteen, which mandates public registration of all sex offenders, inviting vigilante attacks, and which would even hound people who engage in consensual sex abroad, was heartily endorsed by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign. So-called "child pornography" laws, which call for lengthly prison time for mere possession of photographs of nude (and in some cases even clothed) persons under eighteen, also have nothing to do with gay rights, we are told. It is only an accident that many, if not most, of those arrested under those statutes will be gay men.

And gay teen suicides? Why, right-wing Governor Weld of Massachusetts has a whole gay/les bureaucracy to help gay youth fend off suicide! Yet the Quislings who run it can't offer explicit sex-positive sex education. Meanwhile, the AIDS panic and the child-sex panic combine to traumatize "sexually confused youth" everywhere. When they sit in elementary and middle school sessions which warn about the henious crimes of "adult and youthful perpetrators" and urge vigilance and squealing on these "riff-raff," their own sexual urges and behaviours are demonized and repressed. It is possibly harder today to come to grips with one's sexuality, or merely to play around with sex than it was for almost all previous generations. The psychic terror is enormous.

The hypocrisy and self-hatred of the former Hitler Youth and the confusion of the modern "Dutch Boy" in the Ashville peeps are nothing new. Perhaps one thing is new: the ghetto-ized definition of "gay," coupled with the absolute taboo about childhood sexuality extending into adolescence, has labeled every same-sex act "gay" and every youth-adult interaction "abuse." What in previous generations would have been unselfconscious playfulness has become the brand of the queer and/or the molester. It is a pity that these trends are growing today, not receding, and that the gay community is so poorly prepared by its so-called leaders for the coming right-wing onslaught.

The good news is that youthful lust will find a way and that sexual energy is both resilient and resourceful. Just as threats of God's wrath could not keep the altar boys and the priests away from each other, so also the new morality of social workers and therapists will eventually lose its force. Maybe a good dose of the old-fashioned American family values will do the trick to shock the liberals out of their new Puritanism; orphanages, after all, were far more hospitable to cock-sucking than today's closely-monitored classrooms and isolated nuclear families.

By Tom Reeves
This first appeared as part of "The State of Gay Liberation," in the March, 1995 issue of The Guide.
From a recent Usenet post.