Sex Spots 1

My name is Wilma and I have been having public sex for…*counts on fingers*…about nine years. Well, unless you count the time in high school where I gave my first blow-job to Rodney up by the water-tower in my hometown, and the cops came and knocked at the steamed-up window. But it wasn’t until 1996 (or so) that I gave into the temptation to enter through the doors of a full-fledged sex club. It so happens that it was the Docks in Paris late one winter afternoon. Things were a little rough between Titi de Paris and me at the time. It must have been, now that I place it chronologically, sometime shortly after the December, 1995 strikes that famously paralyzed almost everything in Paris except for the Catholic high school where I was working as an English assistant. Since I was still somewhat unsure about negotiating notoriously complex French politics, I remember listening with dismay to the scornful reactions to the strike by the obviously right-leaning colleagues I had to share the smokers’ section of the teachers’ lounge with.

So given that setting, maybe it was my craving for a little social anarchy that I felt like I was missing out on in the streets that brought me through the doors of the club. Maybe it was a long un-indulged interest in leather. Maybe it was the disjunction between my love for Titi de Paris and what we were able to get up to in bed. Maybe it was all the ads for the Docks in the freebee queer rags around town with their setting of empty post-industrial space and all that my mind fantasized could go on there. Maybe it was the fact that it was close to the neighborhood where Titi de Paris and I had recently moved and I could easily swing a late-afternoon sex stop into the rhythm of my life. Whatever it was that ultimately brought me through those doors—and I remember, specifically, hesitating in front of the church that is right across the street, watching, heart pounding, to see who was going in, telling myself that if I was into one of them, I would go, no doubt didn’t go the first several times that I tarried—I can’t say that I regret a thing.

I can’t remember everything about that first visit, but it’s remarkable to me how clearly I do remember some things. I remember that I was still wearing my scarf as I began to walk like the cruisers do back and forth in front of the booths (the bottom picture of this page). I remember boldly entering into an occupied one, only to have the man in it gently shake his head no, and I remember understanding that the scarf was too silly for the macho man inside. I remember thinking I’d have to work on how I looked to have much success at a place like this. I remember going into the dark back room. And now that I think about it, I think that was the real discovery.

How warm it felt to be suddenly covered with hands. How nice it was not to have to see. How impersonal sex could be. How comforting it was to lean back onto an utter stranger and feel him leaning on someone else that I couldn’t see. How free I felt—free from whatever gnawing neurosis kept Titi and me from caring for one another, free from all my mother’s admonitions against the dangers of germs, free from worrying about what I was doing sexually because sexually it was just going on, free, perhaps most importantly, from most of the ways I had thought of “myself” as being until the moment I allowed myself to open and close my eyes, hands, and mouth in this dark space filled with bodies making inarticulate sounds.

I don’t think I gave anyone a blow-job that first time. I think I was just taken care of—by a welcoming mouth or two or three, by caresses, by warmth. I know I didn’t get fucked, though I also know that, at the time at least, they would give you a condom when you paid your admission and had others in a turned-over hard-hat at the bar. I would have to wait to discover those anal pleasures—as real pleasures—for a shift of scenes to the Bay Area, the perfect setting to discover your asshole should any of my readers be so sad as not yet to know their own. Though any setting will do, I’m sure. It’s just that my asshole’s memories are particularly attached to that place.

Titi de Paris and I were young when we met, and we had always had at least a theoretical agreement that our relationship was an “open” one. I’m sure we nonetheless had difficult discussions around my visit to the Docks. And I’m sure that we needed to have those discussions to keep becoming what we were not yet but are pretty happy to have become today. We now have a Sunday Docks ritual that we respect with varying degrees of fidelity according to our moods and weeks. It’s not often that it’s as good as that first time, but often it’s just fine and good enough.

Comments

[spinster]

I am eager for more (and for more of this voice).

[principessa]

Apologies about the links: apparently the Docks site is set not to allow direct links to their various categories. Their ads from various years are in the link to "Museum" and the photo of the uncharacteristically lit-up booths are on the lower left-hand photo of the second page of the "Free Tour."