Fire Island
By John Thursday • Jul 15th, 2009 • Category: Erotic Philosophy by John Thursday, FeaturesI came upon it unexpectedly, somehow forgetting what day it was.
There were girls exposing the stars painted on their breasts. There were buff beefcakes, hairless and shiny, wearing bright blue boy shirts to show off the bulge.
Then there was the sculpted boytoy with surfer shorts hanging halfway down his bubble-toned ass; all of it accompanied by a ubiquitous electronic thump, the unofficial sound of the gay national anthem.
It was Pride in San Francisco, a day when you can climb out of the Civic Center BART station to the sight of a man in nothing but Calvin Klein underwear and ankle boots, yes, ankle boots.
What did I feel as I stared at that Calvin Klein clad bulge? Nostalgia.
It’s true, Pride reminds me of childhood. It also brings on a strong desire to sleep with an older woman. Allow me to explain.
In the early eighties my father, a lawyer, was representing a client who was accused of importing 30,000 tons of marijuana. For those of you with lesser math skills that’s 60,000 pounds.
For those of you used to buying an eighth of an ounce – times 8 by 16 ounces to get a pound and then times that by 60,000. That’s 7,680,000 eighths. This man was my hero.
The client owned homes all along the Atlantic coast that he used to off load the drugs. One of those homes was on Fire Island. When he ran out of money he deeded that house to my father as part of my father’s fee. Suddenly, we owned a mansion twenty feet from the ocean.
The mansion was in The Pines. The Pines is a beautiful community full of large wooden weathered beach homes with huge plate glass picture windows and swimming pools and a gourmet market. It is also 99.999% gay. The Pines is queer as a three-dollar bill.
There are things you don’t often see as an 11-year-old boy. A man wearing see-through pants and a ring piercing the tip of his penis is one of them. I was a short 11-year-old and I can still see the image from about eye level. It looked painful. I kind of wanted to reach out and touch it, but that didn’t seem right.
Then there were the neighbors behind us. They were naked all the time. One of them had a tattoo of a snake that started as his ankle and wrapped around his leg until the head appeared on his inner thigh reaching it’s forked tongue out towards his sack. He had a series of brass balls studding the length of his penis.
His partner had rings in each nipple and liked to wear a bar across his chest connecting the two. They would take walks on the beach. The one with pierced nipples holding a leash connected to the collar around the neck of his partner. The tattooed neighbor in turn holding the leash for their dog.
None of this is particularly shocking when you are young. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why anyone would want to do any of these things is a mystery. Rumor had it the neighbors also had a sound proof dungeon.
My young mind spent years pondering the use of this dungeon. What on earth would you want with a dungeon? If you’re going to go with the castle motif why not a turret or a drawbridge and moat, or a throne room, but a dungeon? And why sound proof it?
The Pines’ harbor was home to the Botel; a hotel with a huge outdoor bar that served colored drinks called Blue Whales and hosted High Tea.
Since there are no cars on the island everyone uses little red wagons. How often I would walk by the Botel pulling my little red wagon looking at all the beefcake in their leather boy shorts and Freddy Mercury mustaches and ball hugging speedos with blue drinks in their hands and poppers in their pockets.
That was an average weekend. Then there was the weekend of the invasion. That was the day that 200 men got on the ferry in the neighboring, wilder community of Cherry Grove. Every single one of them was dressed in drag. The ferry would dock and the invasion would begin.
And wouldn’t you know it I happened to be in the harbor, pulling my little red wagon, when the invasion began. 200 drunk and beautiful drag queens swarming all around me as I tried to get to the market. They just thought I was the cutest thing in the whole wide world.
So you can understand how encountering Pride would make me nostalgic for my youth. Walking by City Hall I could feel the little red wagon’s handle in my hand.
But why, you may ask, the desire to sleep with an older woman?
Being a mecca for gay men The Pines was a very safe beach for women. More to the point it was a safe beach for women to go topless. When you’re 12-years-old this is amazing.
When you’re 35-years-old this is amazing.
My brother and I got a hold of a pair of binoculars and would sit on the deck of the house and wait. Bird watching can kiss my ass. While this was awesome there was a downside. There were no girls. It was a gay community.
I was left to ogle grown naked women and ponder the way their breasts fell flat when they laid down on their beach blankets and then gathered round and full when they sat up.
I was left to wait for one of them to take pity on me when I, oops, just happened to be right next to them as they lay naked on the beach. I was banished to a summer of fantasizing about older women illicitly taking me into their bedrooms and showing me the way.
This was the origin of my theory that we should have a cultural tradition of older women initiating young men.
Alas, it never happened. Years later, I found a girl my own age. I didn’t like her all that much but was kind of digging her mom.
(If you’d like to see what a ferry full of queens looks like go here – at one minute 45 seconds.)
Related at Good Vibrations:
Shopping Guide for Gay Men
LGBT/Queer Erotica Books
John Thursday >> John Thursday was born and raised at Harbin Hot Springs, unaware there was such a thing as clothing until he was 15. He has since renounced all things Hippie. He earned a doctorate in Erotic Philosophy by defending Kant's lesser known The Critique of Pure Fellatio as a seminal work. he was hit on by Allen Ginsburg twice but not even once by Sami Beinstein, a non-hippie jewess. He currently beds a shiksa named Misty.
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I love your writing. Such a great story teller! But didn’t you mean 60,000,000 pounds not 60,000? I’m thinking you got it right and someone else dropped some zeros.
I wish my childhood had such a unique learning experience!
What a lovely story, John. I like that your childhood memories are conjured by something as un-child as Pride. You are a fine writer, but not so much a mathematician. 30,000 tons is 60,000,000 pounds, not 60,000. Did your dad get the guy acquitted?
When I was about the same age my family’s house was a few communities over, in Fair Harbor. Fair Harbor was a very different kind of community. I had a lemonade stand by the pier. There were no brass penis balls in Fair Harbor.
But I had my own thing going on. I was twelve years old and very horny and a little big exhibitionist, and some part of me just didn’t give a fuck. When my parents went to the beach I would stay home and masturbate in our living room in front of a big open window, in full view of the boardwalk and plenty of foot traffic. Very little could have made me happier.
I think if our house had been in The Pines like yours, there would have been Unexpected Consequences. I’m glad there weren’t.