CHAPTER I
In August of 1958 the thermometer hovered close to 100 degrees for days on end. As a
matter of fact `The heat was on` in more ways than one. During those dog days several of
Manhattan`s most popular gay bars were raided and the tight-panted young male patrons
arrested. The homophobia of the fifties with its emphasis on gays as `a threat to national
security` was linked to the `red scare` that outlived its psychotic progenitor, Senator
Joseph McCarthy, to the end of the decade and well into the sixties. Not to say that
homophobia isn`t alive and sick to this day, despite the post Stonewall fights for gay
rights.
I`m an old man now--almost as old as Paul Kleist was when I first met him that unbearably
hot summer day in 1958. My memories of that day and its aftermath press upon me more
urgently than ever as I stagger through the final phase of my long life--my wonderful
terrible life with my two Bobbys.
I am not in the least clairvoyant, which I would have had to be to know that that fateful
day would be the beginning of the end for Bobby #1--the Bobby I loved with all my sex and
soul who could only love me platonically--until he became Bobby #2--or `Bobby Paul,` as I
came to think of him.
I was dawdling in the shower long after I`d soaped and rinsed and shampooed my hair three
times. I was trying to insulate myself against the sweat and strain and grime I knew the
stifling day would bring on my journey to the far end of Long Island to interview the
great Paul Kleist.
Under the steady stream of water my disjointed meditations flowed with an exquisite
freedom from the bounds of logic that is the logical domain of dreams. The kind of dreams
in which the most ordinary, mundane situations turn violent--or erotic--or both--without
warning.
Oft times while showering, I experienced the traumatizing sensation of being ambushed by
my own meditations. Some harmless, pleasant thought would trigger an unsuspected
association that unleashed furies of suffering, helplessness and fear--only to skip
without transition--like switching to another channel on the television--to opposing
images of such potent eroticism that I would spring a hard-on. And when I gave my hard-on
the service it demanded all my rage and suffering and feelings of helplessness got washed
down the drain with my cum. Then I could enjoy some peace for awhile.
That particular day under the shower my disjointed thoughts began with the pleasant
anticipation of riding in an open car with Bobby at the wheel as an alternative to having
to take the train from Grand Central Station. But the moment I thought of Grand Central I
thought of the notorious Men`s Room there. And the moment I thought about the Men`s Room
and what it was notorious for I thought about the tales of police entrapment I had been
hearing about all that summer. How handsome young cops were being selected by the NYPD
Vice Squad and trained to dress like dirt trade and stand in front of urinals in the Men`s
Room at Grand Central with their cocks hard and blatantly exhibited--waiting for some poor
fool to cop a feel--(or should I say `feel a cop?`)--and promptly feel, instead of a hard
hot cock, the hard cold steel of handcuffs.
But after a moment`s rage over the injustice of it all my exercise in McCarthy age
paranoia segued ever so smoothly into a pleasing homoerotic fantasy that began with a
lineup of handsome young cops being `auditioned.` It wasn`t enough for the chosen cops to
be handsome and muscular. They had to be extremely well hung to pass the final test.
In my dirty mind I pictured them already in `costume` for the job--standing before their
chief wearing nothing but jeans so tight they looked as if they had been painted on the
men`s gorgeous bodies.
In New York in the 1950`s skin tight Levis, worn without under shorts, were a dead give
away. Strictly a uniform for cruising. No straight man would dare to be caught dead in
pants that showed off the shape of his ass. So I pictured the cops in the lineup being
ordered to take their cocks out of their `fag-hustler` Levis and jack them to full
erections in front of their chief. I pictured another plainclothes cop going from man to
man with a ruler. I pictured only the men who could flash a minimum of eight hard inches
being selected and the others eliminated.
Then, in a flash, the scene in my mind`s eye switched to the Men`s Room at Grand Central.
The handsomest and best hung of all the Vice Cops is standing well back from a urinal at
the far end, next to the tiled wall. Standing next to him is an equally tight panted youth
who is not a cop. The youth can hardly believe his good luck, for the big butch trick is
obviously offering his incredible dick to the youth--turning toward him--waving it at
him--and smiling--
A moment later the youth realizes it is not his lucky day. He is being marched in
handcuffs through the building, out the door, and into a waiting squad car. What a sight!
A tight panted young man arrested and handcuffed by another tight panted young man.
My God! The two looked very much alike. They belonged together in my 1950`s scenario of
police entrapment--bondage--interrogation--confession under torture--trial and
sentencing--prison punishment by sadistic guards.
I could have terminated my underwater fantasies by jacking off. But I was compelled to
hold off and yield to yet another SM scenario: I recalled a true story (at least I
believed it at the time) told to me by a very sexy guy I dallied with at the St. Mark`s
Baths. It would not be an exaggeration to call it my introduction to sexual paradox in
which the dark delights of sado-masochism anesthetize the unbearables of reality that can
well lead to madness for a sensitive soul.
He was from England and he told me how matters were even worse for gay guys there in the
mid-twentieth century. He spoke from personal experience. But his demeanor as he described
his arrest, imprisonment and punishment for `Gross Indecency` seemed designed to arouse me
sexually. It seemed to me that he was describing his prison punishment as if it had been
the most sexually exciting experience of his life!
We were naked together in a tiny private room on the second floor of the bathhouse. He
reached for my nipples and proceeded to pinch and pull them, giving me sensuous pain, as
he related every homoerotic detail of what was intended to be an ordeal of humiliation and
pain.
The judge ordered the `sexual deviant` to be stripped naked and whipped! Before
witnesses! Every step of the elaborate ritual of an English Prison Whipping he used for
sexual foreplay, seeing plainly that I was swooning under his sado-masochistic spell. Gone
completely was any sense of outrageous injustice--cruelty--inhumanity. I was conscious
only of his husky, sexy voice with its exotic accent as he spoke of ropes and whips and
naked young men while torturing my nipples so expertly.
As he continued I reached for his large protuberant nipples with their hard, penis points
and returned his sweet agony, beat by beat, intensifying our mutual pleasure-pain all the
while.
"You shall be stripped naked and whipped!--You shall be stripped naked and
whipped!--"
He told me that those words echoed in his mind as the English prison guards tore all of
his clothes off and threw him into a cell for solitary confinement--to meditate upon his
naked punishment to come.
To `come` indeed! He already had a hard-on from the way the guards had used their hands
on him when they stripped him.
He sat naked on the cold concrete floor wanting desperately to masturbate. But he dared
not because a guard peered in upon him at frequent intervals.
Through the tiny, barred window of the cell he could hear the screams of other naked
young men being tortured. He knew he should have felt horrified, but he didn`t. The steady
cracking of whips followed by lusty, male screams only fueled his lust.
He was jacking off furiously when they came for him. Too soon! For he was close--so
close--to orgasm. They grabbed his hands, cuffed them behind his back, and marched him to
the room with only one piece of furniture: the triangle on which his naked young body
would be stretched to its limits to receive the kisses of the lash. To add to his
humiliation they tied a stout rawhide thong around the head of his huge, angry cock. And
while one guard grasped his bound arms from behind, holding him back, another tugged and
teased and abused the prisoner`s throbbing erection as he was literally pulled by his cock
to the place where he would be whipped.
And when he arrived he found the room filled with men and boys gathered to witness his
naked scourging! Fathers had brought their teenage sons to observe the fate of youths who
turn to other men for sexual gratification!
| 
