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FLESHPOTS by Bob Guter
It’s the last Sunday in July, the sun is beating down and I’m surrounded by a welter of sweaty, naked men. What’s a nice crip like me doing in a place like this? Let’s back up.
Up Your Alley, as it’s also known, raises thousands of dollars for charity every year (the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence shake you down at the gate); more to the point, it’s a playground for thousands of leathermen and their admirers. My own idea of leather is a pair of Dockers. Could Buttondown Me be more out of place? Fashion aside, there’s the question of bodies, my peculiar one and their countless perfect ones. Nonetheless, with the promise of a potential BENT story leading me on, I tamp down my misgivings and agree to tag along. Anticipating sun, I grab a hat before leaving home, my forest green billed cap, the one with “Central Park Conservancy” embroidered across the front. It strikes me that this hat must be the most inappropriate piece of clothing I own for this particular occasion, but then, what in my closet would be appropriate? It’s not as if there’s a pair of leather chaps hanging there in wait for their annual outing on hot asphalt. Am I trying, with this hat, to advertise how out of place I’m convinced I’ll be? Setting yourself apart is one easy means of self-defense when you sniff danger (a variant of the old, You can’t insult me because I do it better). My obvious limp and “bad” right hand guarantee that I never need to do anything special to set myself apart anyway. But here’s the thing. After an initial pass through the crowd I’m struck by something unexpected, something I almost never experience. If anything is making me feel out of place it really is the hat, not my body. Usually I’m aware of subtle vibes, explicit stares; here, I swear I feel neither, a phenomenon worth reflecting on.
Why is it that most of the men letting it all hang out are the men who should be keeping their clothes on, not taking them off? These are not the men of your masturbation fantasies. I start out being embarrassed by some of them—or for them; others I’m tempted to laugh at. Why are they doing this? Don’t they see how ridiculous they are? Don’t they get it? Most of the men who do qualify for your fantasies are so intent on showing it off that they end up being unsexy. One guy, tanned orange and oiled like a greased pig, dances solo, with a hardon that won’t quit. I hear myself asking, aloud, “How does he do that?” and immediately feel like I’ve betrayed the mindset of a grandmother from Iowa. “Ever hear of Viagra?” answers someone at my elbow. The dancer’s body is pleasant enough, accessorized with what anyone would agree is an impressive dick, but I’m convinced I detect something mean about his expression. Maybe what I see is nothing more than thoroughgoing narcissism. Whatever it is, it’s libido deflating. But enough about him. What about me? I feel free to stand here and watch, I realize, without feeling watched myself.
OVERHEARD: But is he a pushy bottom?
Lighten up, I tell myself. What’s with the theorizing? Can’t you just surrender to the moment? Seizing the moment, after all, does not mean I’m obliged to line up for the whipping booth, settle in for a demonstration at the fisting sling, or step up to that friendly circle jerk that seems to be organizing itself a few feet away. In this surfeit of bodies I recognize what I am. I’m a sex tourist, like that clueless guy carrying a shopping bag emblazoned with the “Gourmet” magazine logo who’s got to look more cosmically displaced than I do; like the penny-loafers-and-chinos clad man who’s now passed me several times, looking more glassy-eyed on each pass; like the man and wife who, without a doubt, have strayed from the Fisherman’s Wharf-Union Square circuit, already composing postcards home of the “you’re not going to believe this” variety. OVERHEARD: Feel the breeze between your knees. Dress like a manly man. Buy a kilt!
The sun’s too hot. Dore’s charms are fading. Maybe we’re leaving too early, but we decide it’s time to go nonetheless. You might say that Dore Alley writes the perfect compact between voyeur and exhibitionist. From what I’ve been told, ordinary bodies are far more welcome in the interlocking worlds of leather, SM, and Bears than they are in the world of A-Gays. If that’s true it might prove the simplest explanation for my relative comfort here. Maybe it’s only that the naked are soaking up the stares, leaving me in anonymous peace. Or maybe being able to see the full spectrum of gay male humanity makes it easier for me to picture myself falling somewhere along the continuum.
Should I return next year, I vow that I’ll check my bag of theories at the gate. I’m sure I can park it with one of the Sisters, maybe Sister Anal Receptive. In the words of a wise friend, “Dore Alley is about drinking beer and looking at naked men. Period.” So what’s wrong with being a sex tourist? © 2006 Bob Guter / Photographs © 2006 Homo American Picture Works .
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BENT:
A Journal of CripGay Voices/September 2006
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San
Francisco. Fleshpots. The former famous for the latter since the
fabled Barbary Coast. After a ten-year love affair with my adopted
city I’d begun to feel as if I hadn’t been doing my part to support
a local tradition. Was a trip to the fleshpots in order? Were there
any left? But when a photographer friend suggests we pay a visit
to the 
But
first, some on-site observations. For openers, what about those
countless “perfect bodies”? In reality, there’s not a single one,
if you insist on literal accuracy. (Well, OK, that mega-cute kid
with the ideal torso and the killer grin might qualify.) Instead,
what I see is a cross-section of gay urban life indistinguishable
from the crowd I ordinarily find milling around the intersection
of Castro and 18th. It’s just that here there are more men wearing
outlandish (to my eyes) outfits, more men with fewer clothes, plenty
of men with none; but the bodies, well, the bodies are just what
you imagine when you mentally undress those guys in 
It’s
the men with a sense of humor that strike me as sexy, like the guy
wearing nothing but a fig leaf, like the guy with a white towel
wrapped around his waist, the perfect embodiment of all your adolescent
locker-room jerkoff fantasies. Occasionally he pulls the towel aside
to reveal your fantasy realized, in the form of what I now recognize
as one more Viagra advertisement. This guy’s not only got the goods,
he is, clearly, having fun. So I’m having fun watching him. Watching
him makes me feel so liberated from my own body that I forget about
feeling liberated from my own body. 
Threading
my way through the crowd I’m surrounded by bodies that threaten,
in my mind’s eye at least, to break up into their component parts:
skinny arms, impossible pecs, bubble butts and atrophied asses,
cocks cashew-size and cocks salami-girthed. I remember a picture
I saw in an art book, 
So
far I’ve spotted one man wheeling a chair, and one woman. Oh, and
one guy carrying a cane that appeared to be genuine and not a prop,
but after mistaking a leather daddy policeman for the genuine item,
I’m not sure I trust my assumptions any longer. For all my sense
of body ease, the alley is not exactly Crip Heaven. But neither
have I caught sight of any curb-service fellatio or leather masters
walking their human dogs, two of Dore’s sure-fire crowd pleasers.
I
was expecting Bacchanal. The reality is more like a mixture of Carnival
and urban nude beach. That realization makes me take a second look
at the embarrassment and even scorn that initially colored my view
of the paunchy, the saggy and the withered, all eager for self-display.
If “nude beach” is the most apt characterization of what’s going
on for most men here (or maybe nude-beach-plus), who am I to question
any man’s pleasure in flaunting the goods?