What I'm reading tonight

In the afterword to my erotic short story collection Too Beautiful and Other Stories, I told readers that if they lived outside a large city and wanted to live out their sexual fantasies, they had two choices: start their own scene, or move someplace like San Francisco where, I wrote, there really are people like the polyamorous, polysexual people I depicted in my stories. There really are sex parties here; there really are s-m lesbians, orgiastic gay male sex bashes, experimentally minded bisexuals, couples who live in daddy/boy arrangements, and so on. Comely young people with rebellious attitudes and artistic callings leave their home towns and come someplace where they can be among other rebellious, artistic folk. Their willingness to experiment in writing or art extends to experimentation in relationships and lifestyle, and so the bohemian scene that began in San Francisco after World War II is sustained to new generations.

When I first came to San Francisco in 1979 to be part of the postmodern dance scene, I quickly met these bohemians, and some of my first lovers were former strippers. But it took a two year stint in the late 80s living outside the country to make me realize how much I missed the city's anything-goes atmosphere, and when I came back I was ready to plunge into the underground.

I gained my real initiation into the sexual demimonde as so many have: I became a San Francisco Sex Information phone volunteer. At the same time, 1990, I started my magazine Frighten the Horses, and I joined Queer Nation. Suddenly I was part of a network of creative sexual revolutionaries. I met strippers who did performance art, sex writers who worked in galleries, prostitutes with zines or rock bands, polyamorist activist Ph.D. students, and painters who bought art supplies with the money they earned lap dancing on weekends.

Among these cheerfully transgressive youths was a woman in her mid-20s, Stephanie. I met her in Queer Nation's bisexual affinity group, and when I learned she was a comix artist I asked her to do some illustrations for Frighten the Horses. So it was through this connection that, after knowing each other for a few years, we became lovers.

In addition to being a comix artist, Stephanie also worked at the Lusty Lady, a somewhat unique strip club in North Beach. The unusual thing about the Lusty --aside from the fact that it is unionized and owned by its workers, is that unlike most of the strip joints around town, the workers don't perform lap dances or have physical contact with the customers; instead, they dance and pose behind thick Plexiglas.

While Stephanie and I were going through the same getting-to-know-you flirtations that all lovers do, I asked her about her work at the Lusty. I didn't want to come off like a typical slobbering male, so without actually saying so I tried to make the conversation sound more like I was doing research for my writing or for Frighten the Horses. I asked respectful, sympathetic questions about hours and working conditions, the relationship between workers and management, the ins and outs of working in the "booth" where dancers had one-on-one encounters (albeit still separated by Plexiglas) with customers. Of course, behind the polite façade I hid behind, I wanted to know what any man wants to know about a stripper's job: Is it a turn-on, or is it just like any job where you feign interest for the customer's sake? Is it interesting or even arousing when men masturbate in response to a dancer, or is it merely objectionable and gross? And most important of all, is there any reality to the pornographic stereotype that the girls turn each other on and have hot girl-on-girl action in the locker room?

I wanted to know all those things, but I didn't have the nerve to ask them at first. It took quite a while before I finally satisfied my curiosity about the ins and outs of working at the Lusty. By then we had been lovers for months. If I arrived early to pick Stephanie up at the theater at the end of her shift, I walked around the theater mingling with the customers but reveling in the secret knowledge that I was not one of them. I wasn't just a customer; I was getting what they only fantasized about. Listening to her talk about work, I came to share the perspective of Stephanie and her co-workers that the customers were, more or less, to be looked down on, or at least pitied. In our intimate conversations, and once at an offsite spoken-word performance organized by the dancers, I laughed with them at the customers' foibles, at the gulf between the customers' stereotypical fantasies and their schlubby reality.

The most flattering confirmation of the difference between them and me came one day when I was, as usual, early to pick up Stephanie. I wandered into the one-on-one booth, put a twenty into the slot, and began chatting with the performer. I didn't say anything about being a dancer's boyfriend, I just chatted as if I were making small talk at a party instead of talking to a naked chick under glass. After dubiously making sure that I really wasn't there to jack off, she relaxed and just started chatting with me. After a few minutes she said, "You don't seem like a regular customer," and then I admitted that I was, in fact, in the boyfriend category.

Only after several years can I see the irony of this situation. Secure in my knowledge that I was somehow different than -- even better than -- the men who were the run-of-the-mill customers, I presented myself as different. The performer, in response, treated me exactly as she would have any other customer: She confirmed and reflected what she assumed was my fantasy. And I had, in fact, paid her for this. So by attempting to set myself apart from and above the louche customers, I had done nothing more than become one.

Though I learned that it was not, of course, true that the dancers had pornographic interactions in the locker room, they did have relationships of various types outside the club. The spoken word evening that I mentioned above was only one example. They'd go to dance clubs or the Folsom Street Fair or 12-step meetings together; on one occasion Stephanie told me of going to a local sex club with several other dancers to celebrate one girl's birthday. They went to each other's art openings, performances and readings. Some became lovers. Stephanie had an on and off affair with a woman who worked at a massage parlor; I'd introduced them, and on two memorable occasions the three of us went to bed together.

Even our one-on-one affair was enough to blow my mind. Stephanie was a perfect lover. She was generous with her affections to the point of self-denial; she was experimental and willing to do anything I proposed. When I told her, early in our affair, that getting a blow job had never been my favorite way to come, she took that as a challenge. We did s-m; we did role-playing; we went to sex parties together; we had sex on drugs; we had threesomes. She never said no, and she came up with plenty of ideas of her own. She was the lover every man fantasizes about.

Perhaps the best story I have from those days is about a co-worker of hers. "There's a girl at work," Stephanie told me one day. "She's a dyke, but she said once in a while she feels like getting fucked by a real prick. I told her I was with someone who was cool and would respect her boundaries. Do you want to do it?"

Did I want to do a threesome with two bisexual San Francisco strippers? Well, sure I did. But while my first reaction was to grab Stephanie by her shoulders and shout "When?! Where?! Can we do it right now?!" I sensed that if I acted too eager I might not be considered cool enough to participate at all. It's the old rule: if you want someone, act like you don't.

So I said, "Oh... sure... sounds like fun. Yeah, sure."

Typically for modern San Francisco, it took us a few weeks to iron out everybody's schedule. During this time Stephanie would check in with me on a certain date, and I would answer back in the laconic voice I'd chosen for this particular interaction. I was so successful in maintaining my cool that she even asked me if I really wanted to do it, so I had to assure her I did, still maintaining my cool all the while. Eventually it was all arranged, and we had a curious ménage a trois in which our dyke guest consented to penetration by my cock -- "It's so warm!" she exclaimed in surprise, having gotten accustomed to silicone and plastic -- but would not kiss me, went down on me but would not let me go down on her. Her own girlfriend, she said, had requested these limits. Stephanie had no limits imposed, however, and fisted the girl while I watched.

It's difficult to recount these events without seeming boastful. Mostly I was simply appreciative of all the affection and outré experiences Stephanie bestowed on me. I tried to enjoy it while it lasted, and it did last a long time. Each of us plumbed the depths of our desire, coming up with new positions, new partners, new fantasies to enact.

But after a few years, we'd done everything we could think of, and then what do you do? What do you do when all your sexual fantasies have been fulfilled, when there are no more barriers to push through, no more taboos to transgress?

The answer is, you do the things that you don't particularly want to do, but because everyone else talks about them, you do them. It may surprise the reader to find that, in our case, this was no more than buttfucking. Anal sex is something that I'm sort of neutral on and she had never learned to do or appreciate, so we had never gone there. But in the last months of our affair -- when, as in any long-term relationship, the little annoying things were mounting up, the unresolved arguments and hurt feelings, making it harder to be together -- she seized on the idea that things weren't going well because she hadn't broken through this particular barrier. So we tried, and as usual when neither person really wants to do something, the result was a failure. And the worst part was that, after all the crazy outré stuff we'd done together, this act -- the act that neither of us really wanted to do -- was the first time we were actually embarrassed.

The other thing about getting to a far point with a lover is that you tend to take for granted all the great stuff you did on the way there. At least I took her affections for granted -- she never did. When we broke up after four years, she told me with great bitterness, "You don't know what you're giving up."

She was right. Only since our breakup -- two years after which, she died in a traffic accident -- have I come to know what I'm missing. Because while this is San Francisco, and there are still plenty of artistic, polyamorous bisexual people around, I'm in my late 40s, and all those youngsters are with each other. I increasingly feel like part of an older generation that has been passed by.

I still visit the Lusty Lady from time to time, partly to keep in touch with that memorable affair, but also because it's one of the few places where I can go and talk to someone like Stephanie, sexually open, willing to participate in any fantasy. But now I am, like everyone else, just a customer.