One of the mysteries of gay life is handkerchiefs. Two lean, white, upscale, artsy, naughty, half-dressed, flashy young men pose on the cover. He named his book that - The Culture of Desire. Writer Frank Browning figured gay culture was a culture of desire. This couldn’t, he has said, be the whole picture. Gomes says gay culture appears to be lean, white, upscale, carefree, artsy, naughty, and flashy. From magazines, mainstream movies, and popular images that are upwardly mobile, middle class, and white-market oriented. The Reverend Peter Gomes, professor of Christian morals at Harvard University and minister of the Memorial Church there, wonders if there is such a thing as gay culture. From what I can make out, the only man wearing a red hankie is me. No music ribbons the mundane, only the soundless videotape overhead, the muted voices and the hushed smack of pool balls caroming off each other. I am familiar with its sour odor of spilled beer, the dinging stink of cigarette smoke rising in the dark, that known air of listless inutility, of bodies passing in and out of deep shadow.
I’d pictured a packed house of men and an air of edgy expectancy, but the place is friendlier than I’d imagined. A couple of women dump together in indigo comers. Like Bernard, men are going slow on their drinks. As I watch, the woman, in slow rotation, kisses one man, tenderly touches another, and says something to the third that draws a toothy grin.īehind its tar-black front door and blue entry light, the Eagle isn’t much more than a midsized room with two cramped toilets at the rear. They are an odd group with leather and Levi’s the uniform of the hour, this foursome in casual cotton duds shrieks outsider. Three men in their 30s and a lean, plain woman with long hair and glasses hover near the pool table.
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Much of the room is sunk in inky shadow, with spots of illumination offered only by the monitor, the low lights of the bar, and the light over the pool table, where dark green felt blazes like a patch of lawn at noon. “Did we take a wrong turn?” It is nearly ten on a Friday night, and the bar, even with its air of furtive encounter, has a neighborly quality, more like a seedy English pub than the hotbed of outlaw sexuality I’d hoped to find. But if this teddy bear of a man, outfitted in the standard black leather jacket, is to serve as my Virgil, and if the Eagle is meant to parallel the first Inferno stop in our Divine Comedy, I ask myself. Thus Bernard Watkins represents a minority within a minority. The ambiance encourages behavior for which we believe ourselves not wholly responsible.īlacks are not strongly represented in the gay leather scene. With little to lean on and less on which to sit, customers keep moving while they scope out the place. Cued by the faceless flesh-parade overhead on the monitor, patrons also pose, offering their bodies for appraisal. The fact of few barstools means most customers stand in shady anonymity. Here the lights are low, and a suggestive video plays nonstop overhead. The Eagle in North Park is not just a bar but a gay bar-and not just that: this is a gay leather bar. For one long moment they ache like crazy. The water is so chilled, my teeth feel as if they’re sprouting tiny, mean hairs. The evening might stretch the length of the bar’s polished, dark-wood surface. Moving my arm to catch a stray beam of light, I check my watch. “It all depends on what you’re interested in,” he says, and takes a deep swig. He turns back, shrugs, and grabs his bottle of beer by the neck.
Bernard cocks his head to the side, a pigeon casting a glittering, incurious eye up at the screen. Without faces, I say, the men have no identity.
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The TV sends radiant light over the left side of his brown face, across the shoulders of his black leather jacket. On the barstool next to me, Bernard Watkins slouches over his beer, gazing into the dim mid-distance.
I turn away from the monitor, suspended from the darkened ceiling.
Now, on the TV angled overhead, each headless torso is no more than a soft-porn close-up of nipple, crotch, and butt. Before the video camera cropped them at neck and knee, these were living beings. Near-naked, their bronzed muscles stretched by steroids and molded by Nautilus machines, a cross between Popeye, Mister Clean, and the Michelin Man. Where are their faces? Friday night, and dozens of headless musclemen on video, strutting at some outdoor gay-pride event.