True Confessions

TRUE CONFESSIONS  13

By Mighty Mouth

    I swear to you, dear reader, that everything I say is true and without exaggeration. In the late sixties, before the computer age, the Village Voice began to accept personal ads. I quickly indulged, with a series of intriguing and cleverly written ads. In the first ad I stated that I sought a muscular guy who would display his body, but I stated that I realized there was no such thing as

a free lunch. I got a bunch of answers. One guy who replied said he fit the bill. He was a photographer, he said his name was Howard, and wrote his answer on a postcard that he had printed with a photo of a graffiti-splattered subway train. I liked his answer and agreed to meet him. We met in SoHo in lower Manhattan, where I went to see an art exhibit of glory holes before his arrival. I waited for about forty-five minutes on the designated corner, but he didn’t appear. I was just about to leave when I spotted a guy approaching who fit the description that he had given me. He was everything he said he was. I invited him for coffee to get to know him. After about ten minutes, I decided that he wasn’t dangerous and agreed to his price. It wasn’t much, but I told him, "This is the money for my cleaning lady for the week, I’ll have tell her not to come." He believed it, but it was a lie.

We went to his apartment on Avenue A. He showed me his weightlifting equipment, then proceeded to put on gravity shoes and hang upside down and nude in the doorway to the bathroom. He was a fan of Philip Glass like me and put on a tape of his music while I was watching. What a turn-on. When he let himself down from his perch, he had apndtw2  hard-on. I reached out, but he said, "No, you can’t have it, I have a lover." We never had sex, but became good friends.

    Howard  told me that he had been a hustler on Third Avenue in Manhattan’s upper Fifties, a well-known cruising spot at that time. He had a customer, a notoriously gay New York State senator, whom he  saw frequently. The senator was later involved in a big sex scandal, and had to resign. Howard eventually moved in with his swishy lover in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.   Howard was very macho, so I don’t know what he saw in the other one.

    Besides being a photographer, he was a painter, but a terrible one. He created canvases of gigantic size that filled half a room. He invited me to an opening of his work in a gallery in the  the meat- packing district. He begged me to buy but I refused. He did give me a magnificent photo of the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights on a snowy winter day. I treasured it and it hangs in my apartment in São Paulo to this day.

    In the early 1980s, I read about the AIDS crisis in the newspapers. I had no close friends who died from the disease. While I knew that one of my neighbors on my block in Brooklyn and many of his friends died from it, some of my friends knew many people who caught it. My sex life came to a screeching halt. From that day to this, my n sexual contacts have been restricted. I didn’t stop entirely, but reduced my activities by ninety percent.

    While walking the three blocks from my house to my office one day in the middle 1980s, I passed a black guy in his late forties who licked his lips in a provocative way. I thought, "Why the hell not?," and took him to my office. I was just the recipient. He began frequenting my office regularly. I devised a strange plan for him. Every Sunday morning, at about 6:30 a.m., I would get out of bed, go downstairs, unlock the door to my house, and crawl back onto the bed nude. Shortly afterward I would hear the door open and someone come up the stairs. I feigned sleep, to be "awakened" by a mouth on my prick. We both loved this fantasy, and it lasted for several years. Then, suddenly, he stopped coming by. I knew that he hadn’t lost interest, and that he must have died of a heart attack or have come on to the wrong person on the street. I never knew his name nor where lived.

If anyone wants to read a free copy of my book, “Memoirs of a Gay Rights Maverick,” I’ll send it to you as an email attachment.  Advise me via email: [email protected]

Mighty Mouth