Gay Erotic Stories

The album was a shock. I’m not talking about a family album of Christmas pictures. By today’s standards, I suppose one might call it an album of art photography. Well, that is only if one considers the work of Maplethorp as artistic. There were over six hundred black and white prints of men and boys, mostly nude. Some were erotic, quite a few were pornographic by any judge’s standards and a number of them were portrait shots, remarkable for their evocative rendering of personality and mood. The dates must run back to pre WWII, I thought, and continued up to the bell bottom days of the early seventies.

That meant the old man was still “shooting” past his sixties. He must have retired his camera about the time he retired from the bank. From what I knew of his later years, he’d grown reclusive and become a hermit in his decrepit farm house. He sent old Harold into town with lists and carefully typed checks, never ventured out himself. It was a grand gentleman’s farmhouse at one time, but suffered neglect over the years. I instructed Harold to ship me all Granddad’s personal papers and small belongings, and gave him written permission to continue living in the house for as long as he chose.

I wasn’t keen on being a landowner in Mississippi, two states away. We were not close, Granddad and I. My father left Mississippi when he got out of the army just after the war, settled here in Atlanta and married. On family holidays we drove to visit his hometown a few times, but dad never seemed sentimentally attached to his father or to his old friends. We were tourists, just driving through on our way to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. The stopover to see Granddad was more a formality than a homecoming. After Dad died, then Mom, I really forgot about Granddad except for the perfunctory birthday and Christmas cards. He was ninety one when the phone call came from Harold to give me news of his passing. I wasn’t exactly surprised but it touched me, the last of my family passing away and leaving me singled out. I’d never married; I had no brothers or sisters. My mother’s parents and her spinster sister were long buried. I was alienated, with no blood ties that I could name, the extreme form of being orphaned. At forty eight, I felt very much a lost child. Why had Harold decided to send me these pictures? I couldn’t correlate the action with his reserved and prim composure. Why didn’t he burn them? If he valued them, why not hold onto them? Presumably, he knew many of these men and had known them for a long time. He’d been housekeeper and companion to Granddad since the late fifties. He not only sent me the prints but the boxes of cataloged negatives, as well. Did he know I was queer, too? Funny, I’d no clue how he might guess. I hardly knew myself. I truly didn’t know when I graduated college with an educational certificate and began teaching high school. As I became unsure of my own trustworthiness around underage boys, I went back to school for post grad work in history, then moved my career into collegiate instruction. The gray halls of scholarship might allow for extremely close friendships, even roommates, so long as discretion was a priority, but gay? Not at my school. I thought of moving to a community college or at least to a more liberal university, but tenure and salary and the accustomed decorum stayed me; one might say, enslaved me, if one were given to dramatics. I am certainly not. That Granddad and Harold were a couple had been a certainty from my earliest impression of them. It was not a subject for our dining room table, but neither of my parents spoke with disdain about gay people. I grew up to understand “we” should be accepting and tolerant, but never interested. I’m quite sure that issue was the cause for the distance between Dad and his father. They just didn’t see the world from the same perspective. Even Granddad never opened the topic for conversation, not in my hearing. My whole concept of being differently oriented was wrapped in that fabric of silent sighs and mute understanding. I never wore purple. I abhorred parades. I imagined gay bars as the lowest expression of bad taste, desperation and poor breeding. My closet door was solid oak, steel bolted. Ergo, the album embarrassed me. It also fascinated me. It induced waves of a tactile shame I thought I’d long outgrown. It disgusted me. It excited me. It angered and frightened me. My first thought was to destroy it. I wondered how many of these men were haunted by the knowledge of its existence. How many times did every one of these models regret their indulgence of Granddad’s little hobby? Suppose someone held photos of me when I was foolishly young, naked and aroused; could I ever sleep, again? The thought of exposure and threat loomed as an invisible stormy shadow over each picture. I began to think of the camera as a loaded gun, aimed at these men with casual menace. At least fifty different individuals were chronicled, here; a fairly large percentage of the male population of a small town. I studied the faces. Which of them were now teachers, or husbands and fathers? Which were policemen, town councilmen, and church elders? The insidious evil of the collection produced a palpable gloom whenever I opened the leather covered jacket. I determined to destroy it--soon. Just the presence of such a thing in my house made me anxious. I hid it under my bed inside a valise, and then moved it daily. No hiding place felt safe. I imagined elaborate scenarios in which the Atlanta police, mistaking me for a drug dealer, came to search and found this implosive device. I had never been burglarized but the odds must be building against me. As I pondered over the album’s mysteries, some anonymous drifter may be casing my house for the electronic portables amid wino dreams of stashed family jewels. Would the bottom of the clothes hamper be safe? The back of the vegetable bin? The underside of the sofa?

Possible hiding places became, all, ridiculous. My panic reaction subsided after a few days. I spent hours contemplating my own fears of exposure and tried to see how these men, in their lax vulnerability, challenged me and threatened me. I am a rational man, albeit my irrational fears. Damn Harold! Why didn’t he burn them? The following weekend, I stayed cooped up with canned soup and frozen dinners and the collection. I literally immersed myself in the materials of lust and vice just as I had learned to dive into research materials on Martin Luther and the Reformation. I was reminded of my first confrontation with the paintings of Carravagio, the Dark Angel sonnets of Shakespeare, the writings of Andre Gide. The romantic gloss we paint on lust was all but stripped away by such genius, leaving behind a starkly defined weakness of nature, a flaw in the reproductive design of human evolution.

Exposed by art, the body is illuminated as master over all reason and rationality. It’s a staggering concept, especially to such men as me who struggle with tight bottled genies. I spent Friday night flipping constantly, page by page, hardly pausing over a single image. I wanted some total impression to emerge, some unified philosophy of man as object, of sexuality as a weapon against society. I wanted to know the most negative impulse my grandfather had felt to assemble this caustic armada. Did he blackmail these men? The thought recurred.

He was a powerful man in that small community, a banker with authority to give or to withhold credit. He determined which accounts required foreclosure, which might have the benefit of an extension. That he may have used such power to exploit desperate men was an idea I accepted as given. I imagined a leering, mustache twirling dastard from silent movie characterization. I was not amused by the thought. If these documents were distanced by culture and time, by centuries or by nationality, then perhaps I could be objective in the examination, perhaps I could discern a value in their depiction of men stripped more naked than bare flesh, stripped of personal privacy and decorum; man as animal lust. However, I was not distanced. This was the compilation of my own grandfather. My genetic connection made me participant and co-conspirator. Guilt plowed at my belly. I paged through quickly, afraid to pause and see the accusation from any eye stare back at me. I fell asleep late. With Saturday morning coffee, and a headache, I opened the book, once again. Today, I would burn it, erase its witness and testament. But, first, once more… A frequent face from the earliest section suddenly grinned at me. It was a quite young Harold. He’d been a handsome boy. I always knew him as a short, pudgy but dignified man. As a youth he was very slender and elegant. His heart shaped face was an easily identifiable feature. He was smiling and seductive in most every picture. Harold! I should have known he would be in the album, if I’d thought about it.

For the first time, the pictures made me smile. Old, stogy Harold! He of the constant polishing cloth and the distracted, satisfied manner. He was a spirited boy, from the evidence. He exuded a joyous glee, a playful glance, a sprightly posture. Old Harold. Well, I’ll be damned. I recalled the several times I’d felt pity toward him as a lifeless appendage of my grandfather. I was enchanted to be allowed behind that facade, to be given private access to the inner fires of his personal habitat. Is that why he sent me the pictures? Who else might share in this secretly composed chronicle of his delight? Was I something of an heir to him? I knew almost nothing of his history, had never found the generosity to wonder at it. Uncle Harold floated at a distance as the last chance at family continuity and connection. I would phone him, or maybe write him. If I met the pixie he was, at this time, I could be easily attached. He fit almost exactly the pattern I held to each boy I saw through the eyes of my inner longings, eyes that glanced quickly away whenever I found a similar icon.

I stared at his pearly gray and fossilized impressions. I smiled in spite of my sense of intrusion. I dismissed the ghost of my grandfather peering through a lens; Harold beckoned me with his grinning invitation. That was the first time the pictures aroused me to sexual fancy. My coffee went cold while I sat fondling my thoughts. I closed the book. I shook off the masturbatory indulgence. More coffee, a cigarette. I filled the bird feeder and started a load of laundry. I flipped open the book thoughtlessly, drawn by impulse and without the slightest darkening of mood. I sat down, again. I studied with a softened resolve to understand its menace and an easier ability to just appreciate it’s power to defy age and dissipation. If there were pictures of me as a teenager, hidden away somewhere, I would dearly like to see them. I knew a silly regret that I would never have allowed such pictures to be taken. I wished I had. What a ridiculous thought. The barn and the meadow beyond were favorite settings for many of the early photos. I recognized the locales from summer explorations. I knew that angle of the hay loft and the light falling just so from the open loading door high over the pasture. I had lain in that spot with a book, reading one long day. I had lain in the very patch of summer sun as Harold lay, preening in the glory of his skin. Where I read memories of ancient times, he made memories of his own, and granddad preserved them for me, now.

Of course, the barn! My grandmother was still alive, then. I hardly remembered her at all, but she had lived until I was about seven or eight. The old man kept his “modeling sessions” out of the house and used the barn as a safe haven from her. I knew she was an invalid for years, arthritis kept her in bed or on the parlor divan. Dad kept a picture of her on his bureau. I always thought she looked lovely and sweet, I never thought much about her pain and isolation. I was somewhat ill at ease with the knowledge that I had never given much thought to any of these people, my own people. I had a new urge to know them, at long last. Even though they were dead, I could honor their lives by taking interest in their experience and accomplishments. I knew almost as little about my own parents. My own tightly bound ego had always been my primary interest. Of that fact, I was sorely aware. Too much thought had gone into hiding who I was, what I was. Not enough thought had ever been invested to know anything of depth about the people around me. I was suffering a great loss for that poor investment. Forty eight and counting, not a lot of years left to unlearn the habits that brought me to this emptiness of flat response, of muted living and stuffy fear. Harold, old dumpy Harold--how I envied him in that moment.

“Paul, listen. We can explore all that territory with time, we have the rest of our lives, but right now, I need your opinion and advice. Not that I’ll take it. Please. Can you come over here?” “Try and stop me! Hundreds of pictures of naked men? Shit! You burn them and I’ll burn your ass! Put on the eggs, Mother, I’ll be down in a minute!” He slammed the phone with a crash. Paul was the nearest thing I had to a friend, more an old acquaintance. We knew about each other from that twanging gut reaction men have toward each other. We had known for years but worked too close to each other to threaten more than a raised eyebrow. He was too flagrant for my taste. I was probably too stogy for his. We tolerated each other and occasionally tweaked each other about students or other members of the faculty. We had never socialized together. Someone else I had relegated to the fringes of my indifference. At that moment I needed someone with a cool and uninvolved ego. Paul was my only option. God, I’d likely hate myself, later, for this little flood of confidence. I’d worry about that when this central issue gave my brain a rest. I’d put out the brush fires when the volcano was finished.

“My Lord! They’re incredible! Your grandfather was a hell of a photographer! I want prints, do you understand? Big prints, enlargements! At least a dozen of these to frame,” he laughed, “and a few to stash in the nightstand! How could you even consider destroying them? You Philistine! This is history, this is sociological documentation, this is... ah, goddamn beautiful!” He was staring at Harold in the hay loft. “That’s Uncle Harold. I told you about him. But, do you think my grandfather was blackmailing these guys? Is this some kind of a sword my grandfather held over the town? Lord, I know it’s great work, the light and everything, but is it ethical? Is. ..” “Ethical my ass!” he cut me off. “Was it ethical for Goya to paint the nude version of Maya’s portrait? Would you burn down the Prado? And Manet’s little whore with the puppy, what’s it called? And what about Wythe’s paintings of Helga? Burn them? You idiot! Why do you think we’ve hated censors since the Inquisition? Did you think it was just a difference of opinion? Shit!” “No, no! I won’t take that! I’m thinking of protecting the poor guys who are trying to live a decent life with this thing waiting to jump out and ruin them. What about them? “ “The censor, dear William, is always trying to protect somebody! If these guys were so threatened by the pictures, why didn’t they take them away from your old grandpa? Besides, they’re probably all dead and buried, just like him. They made the decision to pose, not you! You are not responsible for preventing any consequences of their behavior. What makes you the one to decide?” “I own the pictures--that’s one reason. Secondly, they may have been induced into posing, under duress.” “You mean, seduced into posing, without dress!” He laughed. “Sorry. I know you’re serious about this ethical thing. I just think you take yourself way too seriously. More coffee? I’m still waking up.” “Here.” I poured. “But I think you’re being callous. Pardon me, but there’s more to this than your own sexual sensations. These are human lives and look; these pictures taken in the seventies, these boys would be younger than us, in their late thirties by now.” “And these very same boys ... great coffee, by the way. What brand is this? ... These same boys smoked pot and dropped acid and maybe avoided the draft and stole candy from the corner store and maybe hubcaps, who knows? Everybody does wild stuff as a kid. Why make sex anything more than youthful indiscretion? This is the nineties William, people do not commit suicide because somebody finds an old naked picture of them. Very famous ladies pose for Playboy and high priced jocks strip to their underwear for commercials on TV, for god’s sake!” “But they don’t get themselves photographed sucking another guy’s dick, do they?” “Gee, William, you haven’t discovered the Internet, have you? I’ve seen some extremely famous men ...” he stared at me. “That’s it. It’s the kind of sex that’s bothering you. You’re only wrecked because it’s gay sex. If these were straight nudie pictures of women, how would you feel?” “Well, certainly less guilty, probably less excited!” I smiled. “Ahah! That’s the nearest you’ve ever come to an admission to me! Say it, you are gay!” He clapped his hands. “No, I’m not gay.” “You lie with forked tongue white man!” “Gay is a life style, a philosophic position. I have the homosexual impulse but I choose not to build my life around it. There, satisfied?” “Lord, I’m not that quick to come! Satisfied? Hell, no! Gay means, ‘gets hot for guys’, it means, ‘where’s the beef?’ it means, ‘Walt Whitman is my favorite poet’. It doesn’t have to mean rainbows and bumper stickers and leather bars. Plato was gay and he never wore a tank top. And ...” “No, Plato was not gay! You’re not using language in an effective way, you’re applying ...” “You’re applying shit and calling it shoeshine. I know what the hell ‘gay’ means. You are playing games with words!”, he shook his finger in my face and I laughed. I grabbed his finger and playfully bent it back on him. “Ouch! Stop, you beast!” I laughed, again. “Okay, okay. Sorry. Yes, of course, you’re right. I’m wrecked, as you say, just because they’re doing stuff I find so embarrassing to look at. Lord, Paul. This is the scariest stuff in my life and here it is connected directly to my own family. I knew it, but, you know, we never talked about it. Now, here’s world class proof. I’m just having a hard time facing it.” “Yes, gives me a hard time, too!” he winked and grinned. “But that’s what you want to destroy, isn’t it? The proof that your old granddad churned the butter with a few red neck studs? Proof that you have tainted blood?” “No ...” “Or maybe it’s the turn-on it gives you that you want to burn, is that it?” “Maybe...” “You’re a deep thinker, Willie, which means you lie to yourself a lot. Go think, I heard your dryer buzz. Go fold your clothes, let me just enjoy the pictures a while.” “Okay.” I started out of the kitchen but he called me to a stop. “And, thanks, by the way, for calling ... for the coffee, the trust, the hesitant friendship. I’ll take what I can get. But, thanks, anyway.” “Sure. Thanks for coming over.” I hurried out to the laundry room, avoiding the emotional leakage.

Guess I’d called the right man. Paul sure told me to my face what I didn’t want to admit. It was my own shame that twisted the knots in my stomach, not the photos. I was concerned with the exposure of the models just as an extension of my own fear of exposure. Destroying the album wouldn’t destroy my fear. It wasn’t that easy. I recognized a sensational relief; I never wanted to burn the damn thing, anyway. Now, I didn’t have to. I folded towels, warm and fresh. Too bad I couldn’t toss my libido into the wash, rinse it clean with Tide, bleach out the stains, and come out of the dryer all straight and fresh to be folded neatly away.

Paul was still perched on his bar stool, bent over the album. “Hey, tell me about the artist. What was grandpa like? Can I get a re-fill?” “Sure, you can reach the pot. Fend for yourself. Want some cinnamon cake? Or a Pop-tart? Let’s sit on the deck; those bar stools give me a pain.”

“My granddad wasn’t a queen, if that’s what you mean. He was always wearing brown tweed and oxford cloth shirts and dark ties.” “Ah, a Tweed Queen, I know the type!” “Don’t say that! You made that up, didn’t you? He smoked a pipe and walked with a stiff sort of lurch ...” “Like you.” “Me? I do not lurch!” “Do, too.” “And he liked guns. You know, hunting rifles, shotguns. He had several in a big case. Made me nervous.” “Afraid of guns, hmmm?” “Don’t be Freudian, please! And he always had a small glass of whisky nearby, sipped at it all day long. Neat. He followed politics and current events, subscribed to the Journal and Harpers and the Review. He was not talkative, I remember him as quiet and reserved.” “Again, like you. Sounds like the original block of which you are a chip. Must have skipped a generation, huh? How was your dad different?” “Very gregarious, outgoing. He wanted to hold a neighborhood barbecue in the back yard every weekend. Hated ties, liked rayon Hawaiian shirts of the most gruesome color. Invited his cronies from the insurance company to the house for cards and ball games. Drank too much beer. Sort of a TV commercial dad, call central casting.” “My, is that camp dripping from your lips? Use your napkin, love.” “Please, Paul! Don’t make too much of Granddad’s tweeds. He wasn’t a conservative man, in spite of the pipe and guns. He was a sort of left wing, Teddy Roosevelt. He was a conservationist, a member of the Sierra Club, you know. He had a large bronze figure of a reclining Ganymede on the mantle and a painting of a young satyr-pan on the wall with a light over it. His oxford cloth shirts were usually pastels, with window pane checks ...” “Yes, we know what that means!” He smirked. “Are you ever serious?” “I’m seriously concerned that you take life too seriously. How’s that? What I meant was, what was your grandfather like? I get the image, but what was he really all about?” “Don’t have the foggiest, my friend! I didn’t see him after I reached college. I never actually knew the man. He never forgot my birthday, never skipped a Christmas. He always put a nice check in the card and signed it, “With Love”. I guess he was considerate, kind, or maybe just terribly responsible. I thought he would always be out there, somewhere, I guess, or I never really stopped to think.” “Now, you miss him?” “I miss the fact that he was there and now he isn’t. I doubt that’s the same thing.” “Guilt soup. Eat it hot. What about Uncle Harold? Will you let him slip away, too? Without ever knowing him? He is family, William. If he was your grandfather’s wife for forty years, doesn’t that make him your family?” “Granddad’s wife? I didn’t think of him in just that way, but it isn’t far off the mark, is it?” “From my side of the table, honey, it’s the exact same thing! I wish you could see it that way.” I don’t know which bothered me most, his use of “honey” in reference to me or his accuracy in the face of my stubborn denial. “Don’t pout.” he scolded me, “Look! Is that an indigo bunting?” He leaned toward the bird feeder, intent. “No, it’s just an eastern bluebird. They’re rare enough in the city, not much hope for a bunting around here. You like birds?” I tried not to sound incredulous. “Yes, always—ever since I was a Boy Scout.” “You were a scout? I can’t believe it. Just can’t see you in khaki.” “There’s quite a lot you can’t see, William.” He didn’t turn from the bluebird so I couldn’t see his expression. There was, however, a note of exasperation in his voice that startled me with its plaintive flatness.

“I have a dental appointment, have to be there, they charge me if I miss. You will call Harold? I must tell you, you’ve certainly calmed down since that phone call at dawn!” “It was nine o’clock!” “That’s dawn!” “And I have you to thank for calming me down. I was being awfully silly. Thanks, again, for coming over.” “Call me in any crisis that involves naked men, I’ll be there!” he laughed out the door and waved from his receding BMW. There was an odd silence after he left. My house seemed emptier than before he came. I wondered if I might phone him without a crisis. Would he call me “honey” at school? No, I couldn’t imagine that. Give him credit, he was quite as controlled a character as myself, though he could choose when to drop the facade. Could he teach me that little trick? Did I have anything behind my mask worth revealing? He left me with more questions than answers.

I went back to the album, drawn by it’s magnetic portent. There was a man who reminded me of Paul, had his long chin and prominent nose as well as Paul’s lanky build. I grinned, wondered if Paul had relatives in Mississippi. This nameless man, the almost Paul, veiled his face with a masculine impenetrability that couldn’t be easily faked. I peered into the black and white world, intrigued by this quality of maleness I’d often admired, sometimes feared. No gentle emotion could belong in those eyes. I thought of the eyes beaming their hostility toward my grandfather and his camera, I shivered. He hates this, I thought, so why is he doing it?

There were others. I scanned the photos for that particular scowl and found several. Evidently, they were all from the same session. His hair was exactly the same in all the shots, a wet or greasy shine that translated as black and thick. His sideburns were long and wide, expressing the Edwardian taste of the late sixties. All his photos were in the parlor, too, supporting the impression of a single session. Two images stood out as especially strong for the lighting and mood. One where he stood before the mantle in a pose of chin high arrogance, arms crossed over wide chest, his erection a weapon lifted for battle. It reached me on a deeply erotic level, stirred my impulse to give in to powers I couldn’t withstand. The second image was almost diametrically opposed. He lay on the leather sofa, one arm below his face, the other drooping off to the floor. His back and buttocks were highlighted from the window behind the sofa, his face shadowed and caught in a look of vacancy. Was he defeated strength? Was he lost in pain or repose? I only knew my response was to comfort him, to touch him and wake the masterful character from the trance. It was extraordinarily evocative. I began to slow my glance at each photo, carefully gauging my reaction and the composition of each image. I stopped thinking, began feeling. Not an easy process for me, but pleasant. When the knock came at the front door, I was surprised by the time. It was near six. Company was rare. I hid the album under a pile of magazines. A pleasant but hurried delivery man presented me with a wrapped parcel and asked me to sign his pad. I tried to explain I hadn’t ordered anything, then, seeing Paul’s name on the tag, I signed and let the man go, relieved. “Compare and contrast. Quiz tomorrow. Ever, Paul.” Cute note.

It was a twenty pound book, one of those Italian printed coffee table books. This one featured the work of a Bulgarian photographer who shot the same models, nude, against the same crumbling plaster wall, over and over through decades. They were affecting for the documentation of the result of passing time on beauty, on faces, on bodies and on walls, a sad and harrowing book with little beauty but the bloom of youth in the first few pages. His models were male and female. Some began as infants, some as children, some already adults. Their progression and destruction by time was a hammer blow with each page turn. Skinny girls turned into frumpy women and then to crones with never a smile. Stripling boys with pasty skin passed through a lumpy manhood and hirsute middle age to arrive as pot bellied curmudgeons awaiting an ending. There was no joy. There was no soft ideal, no love, no dreams, no victory; all was loss.

The photographer was a cynical eyeball, truth was razored and cruel. I hated it. My album received me back with soft, warm arms. There was all that mattered to life, here: the momentary flickers of eternity. There was humor and pulsing blood, there was challenge and striving, magic, joy and spirit. There was love that transcended reproductive necessity; there was emotion that defied reason and the passage of time. No comparison. Thanks, Paul. .............................................. comments to jackertoo@aol.com