One evening in the fall of 1978 I was at the Empire Baths. It was a rather slow evening as I recall and I was in the showers thinking I might head out when I noticed a bearded middle aged fellow just my type with a very impressive penis. Shower cruising is of course an ancient gay male art as old as showers themselves and it was always accelerated when taking place in a gay bathhouse. There was no need to worry about offending any straight male sensibilities in such an establishment.
The ensuing sex was great and as was my want on the occasion I tried to get the fellow to reconnect with me soon outside the bath. He was very hesitant but I was at my persuasive best and he reluctantly agreed to come by my house the next evening. And did I mention that the sex was pretty damn good!
I initially assumed, correctly, that he was married to a woman, which was the only option in those days. That however was not the reason for his reluctance. He did relate that he would look much different and when I pressed him on this he said he would have all the hair on his body shaved off when I saw him the next evening.
This turned out to be the case and I assumed it was not a part of a sexual scene at all, especially since I did not do any of the shaving. He said he was going to Texas the next day to take part in some sort of “experiment” in a sensory deprivation tank though I never got many details on this and did not push it since my main interest was getting this man in bed again.
The house I lived in and a couple of my roommates whom he met that night were I think quite foreign to him. We were that rare breed of “queer hippies” into the Grateful Dead and the communal décor of the house was eclectic to say the least, largely furnished with alley cast-offs. I do remember that he made a point of opening a briefcase he was carrying before we went upstairs. In addition to papers and a few personal effects there was a large handgun, which I remember he made a point of making sure I saw.
I elected not to comment on that probably thinking I hope he fucks me before he shoots me. The sex again was great and he was really more naked than a jaybird, not a hair anywhere to be found. He did not spend the night and I did not see him again for many months after that. I recall a few details of our subsequent meetings but they involved the cultivation and nurturing of a loving friendship outside the bedroom that lasts to this day. I learned that he was involved in a business on the Western Slope that ran river raft trips and had a wife and several adopted children. Oh and he was a conservative Republican. Remember though that conservative Republicans of that day were similar to the centrist Democrats of today. There was certainly a mutual sexual attraction but I think he thought of me as truly exotic in many ways other than in bed and I thought of his right wing worldview as quaintly misguided but tolerable.
In the fall of 1979 he persuaded me to come visit and do a raft trip down the Yampa River. I brought along several friends perhaps because I still was not totally comfortable visiting a gun-toting Republican on his turf by myself. The trip was a several day affair and very much fun. I slept in his tent and the rather unbelievable story presented to his crew was that I was his personal nurse and he was not feeling well. No one I think bought that story for a minute. The sex of course remained wonderful though I did learn the hard way that river sand and Vaseline are not a good combination.
The relationship continued albeit sporadically and the next year I met the love of my life, David Woodyard, and he moved in with me in a shared house here in Denver in the Five Points neighborhood. These were peak Radical Fairie years for me but even that level of esoteric queerness did not seem off putting to my western slope Republican friend. He loved being in the company of openly gay men and in the late summer of 1982 organized another raft trip of several days this one involving a larger group of friends. The first trip had been a gentle float but this one involved some real white water rafting through Desolation Canyon in Utah on the Green River.
I was happily partnered on that trip and not having sex with my friend though several of the folks I brought along I think accommodated his needs just fine. Being 1982 AIDS was still on the horizon especially for Denver so this trip proved to be quite the debauched event. My friend loved entertaining a large group of campy queens and there was plenty of fucking, booze, what passed for good food in those days and LSD to go around and though I was off the hallucinogens by that time many others were not.
A running joke amongst the group to the innocent confusion of the largely straight crew centered around a cooking shortening called Fluffo that was used to fry every meal it seemed. I don’t think any of us had heard of Fluffo before but we quickly incorporated it into our ongoing gay banter when we realized it was a cheap knock off of Crisco. Crisco was of course a lubricant of great renown in certain gay male circles at the time.
The final evening of the trip was a big party involving some very bad gender fuck drag and tasteless camp. This event was immortalized on our own return in a large spread in Out Front Magazine in an article called The Fluffo Flotilla accompanied by several photos. It helped of course get this sort of publicity by having the editor of Out Front at the time along on the trip.
Before eating and posing for pictures in our bad drag, and holidng a can of Fluffo strategically in the middle of the photo, my dear friend the raft company owner humored me and helped organized a group reading of selected poems from James Broughton’s just released Graffiti for the Johns of Heaven. To this day I wonder what several of the young straight crew thought of Broughton’s bawdy gay verse celebrating Nipples and Cocks, along with many other irreverent tomes, being read aloud in the Utah wilderness of the banks of the Green River. I would like to think it fostered future tolerance of gay people and perhaps even facilitated a coming out or two.
About the Author
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I am currently on an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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