What is any tale of existential ennui without sex? Yet it's difficult to talk about sex, so intimate, so personal, I'm not just afraid my family will read it, I don't even want my friends to know the horror I go thru. Old age is ugly but it gets even uglier when the libido rears it's one-eyed snake's head, especially when everyone looks thru you like a cracked piece of glass. Yet sex is at the centre of the soul's maelstrom and the picture is incomplete without it, so I must gird my loins and confess the misadventures of the flesh I am prone to.
Many a portrait has tried to cover-up the sordid details of "other" sexuality, such as "The Boy from Oz" where Peter's egregious faggy activities get glossed over in the rush to eulogise his bullshit marriage to Liza and song and dance routines, for in the mainstream world homos are still declasse, THEY even get Hets to portray them in theatre as the real thing is too much . But I'll try to be a bit more honest than that, tho too much confession only brings opprobrium.
Sydney has long been a ribald homo city, from convict days when there were few women, and then as the major pirate/sailor South Seas port where the homo action has been thick and fast. For the young there are the countless bars and clubs where they chat up and liase with no holds barred but for the oldies, say past forty, there's very little except desperate trawling of faceless internet chatrooms, dark parks and badly lit sex-shop backrooms. On Saturday night the urge for sex suddenly swept up from my crotch to my limbic system like an out of control Kundalini force and I wandered the streets of the inner-city at a loss as to how to satisfy the compulsion. Yet another fantasy movie was not gonna do it for me, I needed something tangible and so I turned in the direction of the Chinatown Bath-house, even tho my few previous visits were a frustrating let-down, for no one there likes me and I don't like them.
I demurely kept on my T-shirt as I wrapped a towel around my naked decrepitude and crept up the slippery stairs to view the whirlwind of try-hard sex addicts and lonesome doves. The crowd were either sallow-skinned Asians looking for the great white fuck, who having left their eye-glasses in their lockers, rushed continuously up and peered myopically into one's face, then ran away in disappointment, over and over till I felt like slapping the next squinting face that got in mine. Or they were geriatric white guys, huge, sagging bellies, bald, grey and wrinkled, stooped and bejowelled, toddling laboriously up and down the three levels, ever on the move, rarely seeming to settle, never finding Mr.Right, around and around, dizzy and lost.
When I tried to walk about I would constantly bump into someone in the tight, dark corridors and feel their clammy flesh against mine, and I'd shudder and push past, trying to find somewhere to sit to get out of the whirlpool of frustration. And when I did find a refuge, unbeknownst to me, I sat near a glory hole and a wet, disembodied hand came out of nowhere and grabbed me on the tit so that I shouted in fright and slapped the hand away, it flapped like a beached fish before withdrawing and I moved on, looking for impossible sanctuary in this shit-hole of Utopianist sexual freedom, disco music thumping thru-out like a demented orchestra from Hell.
Then over a loudspeaker a voice roared, "It's nudie night for nubile naughties, fling off your towels! The doors will be locked in 7 minutes and there will be no escape, so get ready for the ultimate in flabulous fun!" Towels dropped to the floor, every freak was suddenly exposed in all their unaesthetic horror, each body more lumpen gross than the next, no perfect athletes here, and no shame, a free-for-all orgy in the making, good luck to those who wanted it but it was not my cup of tea, so I fled, not up for feeling heaps of clammy, flabby flesh piled onto mine. And I just made it thru the doors as they clanged shut, like the Pearly Gates for some desperadoes but giving off a sulfurous whiff of Purgatory for me.
I found myself on the floor of the Swedish dry sauna downstairs, pitch black, unloved and unbidden but safe and at rest. At least I could sweat out some toxins, and there was always the fantasy movie showing in the Cafe theatre, "Beach Party Psycho", reflecting the milieu of the bath-house I guess, but with no real, tangible flesh to come apart in one's hands in this sweat-box. I watched it for a few minutes, too silly and camp even for a fuckwit like me, and so I left, as frustrated as ever but glad to have escaped. I had 7 boyfriends here in Sydney once, but they grew old with me and dropped away or dropped dead, a few call in on me in a blue moon, usually I'm not up for it but the attention is nice. Saturday was an amazing full moon night and I howled like a were-wolf as I rode my daggy push-bike home, I was better off masturbating to get rid of the tension, that's all there is about it.
