August, 1997
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Promiscuous Pioneers

by Jon-Henri Damski

They say the day before you take chemotherapy, you should not try to eat like a condemned person. Don't choose the foods you like. In fact, pick things you don't care about that much. Because you will likely assume that what you ate the day before contributed to your stomach-churning nausea.

I chose neutral foods, but had a cup of coffee at my last meal, and a cup of coffee the next morning when I came off chemo. Now I never want another cup of coffee for the rest of my life. It make me nauseous (seasick).

So, even though I'm going back to my home Seattle, the capital of coffee consumers, I'm off coffee.

I'm also off reading big books like Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. I had read more than half, had crossed the line of the equator of the book, about 500 of the 800 pages, landed in America, met Ben Franklin, George and Martha Washington, passed through the seasick voyage and was ready for dessert time. But the major characters drink so much coffee, the new drug of the day, that they make me sick. I can't go on.

I agree with Nightlines columnist "Mookie" Spitz, Pynchon while writing this big tome over many years, also seems not to have gone on at times. He must have written it and put down writing it for years. It's steep, but not deep; it's linear, not like a weird helix. It's full of coffee highs, with the drugs of pure tobacco and sugar added.

Our so-called founding fathers were "Star Gazers," an old 17th-century colloquialism for masturbators. Like Mason and Dixon they were consumers of new drugs, utopian seekers of a new word, highly promiscuous pioneers.

Even the puritan ones were not as sour and dour as the neo-conservatives and pseudo-libertarians, and self-appointed moral ministers of our day.

The finding of a new world, the leaving of the old world, the discovering of America, the setting down the lines of demarcation of this wild, wild land was heady stuff. Our founders were much more the pleasure seekers, druggers, and pursuers of happiness than our contemporary corps of moral purists. To have this joy exposed in brilliant stories told like parlor games is a delight indeed.

Authoritarians did not rule then. Some queen named Blinky has been forced into service to bring our Star Gazers to the Cape. Here is how he confronts the Captain of the Ship:

"Capt. Smith replied, 'What's your name, sailor?'"

"By some I be styl'd, 'Blinky.' And who might you be?"

"Attend me Blinky - I am the Captain of this Vessel."

"Well," advised the young salt, "you've got a good job - don't fuck up."

Just as the Star Gazers and Promiscuous Pioneers who left the Old World to found New Worlds played games with authority figures, so we Star Gazers and Promiscuous Pioneers who founded New Town and the gay community two decades ago, cross-dressed and addressed our authority figures. A new Queen in Town could outrank and overpower - for a long night or a fortnight - Chuck Renslow, the Captain of our Ship. Every member in our company had a stake and ownership in our company, in the company we kept underground.

Pynchon further reports that the Dutch, coyly, used their severe-looking religion as a cover. They could give it up with a cup of coffee, a smoke, or a new dance step.

On the Cape, the Dutch installed a "Garden of Amusement," where "[t]he Opium-Girls are kept in a room of their own. That the substance is smoked in a Pipe has put it immediately in favor among the Dutch gentlemen."

At night they enjoyed the pursuits of happiness. "Splashing outside the Church-drawn boundaries of marriage, as across racial lines." Blurring the lines of demarcation, "In Baths of Flesh darker than Dutch (Is this what is meant by Dutch Treat, Damski asks), the dangerously beautiful Extrusion of everything these white brothers, seeking Communion, cannot afford to contain - while their wives - are imagin'd at home, sighing over needlework, or the Bible."

They also built Lodges, one uniquely designed after the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, but reduced in size so bodies would have to squeeze even closer together.

"The sex Entrepreneurs reasoning that the combination of Equatorial heat, sweat, and the flesh of strangers in enforced intimacy might be Pleasurable, - a Nest of Limbs and Apertures and penises, immobilized in a bondage of similarly bound bodies, lubricated with a gleaming mixture of their own shar'd sweat, piss, and feces, nothing to breathe but one another's exhausted breaths, moving toward some single slow warm Explosion ..."

Dutch Treat, Dutch Treat, A night at Man's Country.

Just as the Star Gazers and Promiscuous Pioneers who founded our New World enjoyed the pursuits of happiness, the pleasures of the garden and the lodge, so We Star Gazers and Promiscuous Pioneers who founded what is called today "The Mainstream Gay Community of Chicago," the Home of Ellen, used to enjoy the Garden of the Parks and Lodges like Touche's and the Backroom of Carol's.

Then and then, it was a Magic Time. A golden age, where beneath the Disco lights, we crossed all boundaries and horizons and filled each other with joys that no death, no plague, no neo-puritan moral crusade can take away.

Look for Damski's Queer Thoughts & Mini-Essays in Nightlines every week.

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