Harlan's Race

I know you scorn fashion,” he said, fingering my beard. “But isn’t this going too far?”
    ‘Who’s Mario Vitti?”
    “His dad owns half of Jersey City. He and Vince are probably getting high at a house party right now. They hit the discos late... make a grand entrance.”
    “How late is chic these days?”
    “Around 2. Did Steve talk to you about the other problem?”
    ‘Yeah.”
    ‘You gonna put your move on Vince?”
    “Politically, I’ll do what I can.”
    “One Vince shooting people will set us back five hundred years. By the way, I need you for a march coming up. We need every gay who is nationally known to —”
    “Forget it,” I interrupted him. “I need time out from being a target.”
    “Other people will lose their Billys, and their Bonnies, if enough of us don’t fight.”
    “I’ll write stuff, do fundraising. Even lick stamps. Anything but the podium.”
    Rayburn shrugged, and walked off.
    Just after midnight, our quartet walked onward into Cherry Grove. In those days, The Grove was smaller than The Pines — gayer, noisier, artsier, more women, more drag queens, more people of color, more of whom were viewed as “trash” by some upscale Pines gays. Grove houses were tinier, homier, funkier, crowded closer together. There wasn’t even a police station in The Grove. We checked out the Blue Whale. Then we killed an hour in a small disco, the Monster. Vince didn’t show up.
    As we walked, Steve and I explained things to Marian. Like the bandanna tucked in right or left hip pocket — a signal for top or bottom.
    “And over there, in those trees,” Steve told Marian, pointing, “is the Meat Rack. At 4 in the morning, it’s like opening day of deer season in there.”
    As thunder rumbled overhead, flickers of lightning lit that distant maze of trails and brush. There, men who’d been denied the full sex life that every straight male claimed as his birthright would be braving poison ivy and disease to cleave unto each other in wild anonymous sucking and fucking. Marian looked at me, wondering if I’d ever visited the Rack.
    “Not any more,” I told her.
    Our guided tour made me think how times were changing. For many gay males, there’d been a wistful traditional glow about hoping to love a good man forever. In recent years, this had chilled into new-wave rhetoric about throwing off oppression and restraint. Our looseness separated us from the lesbians, who were more circumspect. In the late ’60s, I had tasted my own wild time. Passion was the next visit to the bathhouse or the Rack — the next warm body waiting. The fierce pleasure of anal sex meant that many guys wanted to bottom. As a top, I’d been one of the guerrillas who roved those thickets. But by the early ’70s, when I was coaching at Prescott, one warm body too many gave me a double whammy of clap and crabs.
    And that was another reason I’d reined in — health. As a campus athletic director, I was a fanatic about health, and knew that sexually transmitted disease was getting out of hand among young people. It was definitely to the wildfire stage with straight “swinging singles”. These days, gay doctors were charting the same spike — everything from genital warts to amoebic dysentery. My doctor, Cal Jacobs, kept talking about new diseases that can’t be cured with antibiotics, like herpes II.
    Steve’s voice cut into my thoughts.
    “It’s almost two o’clock,” he said.
    As we headed for the Ice Palace, my knees were shivering again.
    To Marian, Steve explained, ‘The Ice Palace is the mother of all discos. The concept started right here ... in ’70, I think it was.”
    Ahead was the large spotlit clapboard building, with its adjoining Beach Hotel and pool. At the disco door, music grabbed us — that pumping, relentless, rambunctious, high-energy new kind of music. I hated disco as much as I hated hard rock, but had to admit that the driving new beat had become the anthem of our Life.
    With the jaundiced eye of a non-smoking non-drinker, I peered in. The mirrored walls that reflected the dancers, the blinking lights and turning glass balls, the massive sound system — such a new idea then — created a lightning storm of sensation. Here, only a few souls were synching out the Hustle — most were hot-wired into the sexier Boogie. To the side, a packed crowd watched a young male who was go-go dancing on the bar. People were blowing whistles and beating tambourines in time to his