>>24653620
>The layout of the club comprised a series of oddly laid-out areas that became progressively darker as one ventured to the back of the building. The décor incorporated every masculine cliché: polished chrome, black vinyl cushions, and murals of bodybuilders. The spaces towards the front were the most elaborate while the ones towards the rear comprised almost empty rooms painted black. At first, I stayed in the bar area which opened up into a rather ingeniously designed shower and sauna. Like the separate looker-room, these were theatrical stages on which gay men subconsciously played-out the trauma of boyhood; where the merciless teasing we endured after PE class by swaggering boys was somehow redeemed in this form of group therapy. Here, for a night, the confusion of childhood almost disappeared. But a similar hierarchy from the schoolyard persisted with the physically impressive remaining in command. Rejection existed, but is was subtle. And everyone, even the sagging and aged could find their match. In a worse case scenario, in the backrooms, there loitered men who only wanted a male body with blood rushing through its veins. Only nothing went deep enough. Like the ridiculously elongated dildos sold in every gay porn shop, nothing could reach inside and touch what was really hurting. I remembered a friend who had an incredible capacity for fisting; he fantasized about the day he could take a man beyond the elbow. This was almost a bizarre reenactment of Aztec human-sacrifice in which the priest reached into the body and pulled out the still beating heart of the hapless victim. Gay sex was a mixture of pleasure and torture. A form of self-flagellation where newly inflicted wounds never healed and older ones tended to be forgotten. And in their desperation, everything becomes a sort of tragic melodrama: men are tied up and tortured like a pornographic role-play impersonating early-Christian martyrdom. Except there is no release from bondage through redemptive suffering. So everyone pushed a little further.
