The Gay World's Leather Fringe

Do homosexual males consciously seek danger?

In Manhattan they go by names like the Eagle's Nest, the Spike, the Mine Shaft and the Anvil. In San Francisco they are called the Brig and the Ambush. They are all homosexual "leather" bars that cater to macho style and sadomasochistic taste. Along with some bathhouses, sex-gadget shops, magazines and private clubs, they make an increasingly visible subculture in the gay world. That leather fringe is now also visible on movie screens, as the backdrop for a film that has been denounced and picketed by homosexuals: William Friedkin's Cruising, the story of a gay murderer in New York City.

Some patrons of the leather bars do not seem to mind Friedkin's deadpan, nonjudgmental look at their world; hundreds of them hired on as extras and played themselves onscreen. "The most positive benefit of Cruising," says one extra, "would be for it to make gay men examine their promiscuity, the areas they frequent, the type of sex they seek out, even the thrill of danger. The life we save may be our own."

But other homosexuals remain touchy about the idea that gays consciously seek danger. They insist that only between 1% and 5% of homosexuals lean toward leather. Says Charles Brydon, co-director of the National Gay Task Force: "There just is not any evidence that gays are into S-M any more than straights are." Though they admit that activities at the bars are remarkably exotic, gays insist that the possibility of bringing home a dangerous sex partner is remote.

Despite these disclaimers, homosexual homicides are frequent--and often gruesome; dismembered corpses (as in Cruising's first killing) and mutilated genitals are common. One explanation is that homosexual male sex is likely to be more aggressive than heterosexual sex simply because two men are involved. Sex researchers generally endorse Freud's finding that "the sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggression, of a desire to subdue." Indeed the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes sadism and masochism as almost exclusively male perversions.

C.A. Tripp, a pro-gay psychologist and author of The Homosexual Matrix, thinks sadomasochistic practices are rare in heterosexuality and virtually nonexistent among lesbians, but relatively frequent in homosexuality because of "the additive effect of two males together." In Tripp's view, the average heterosexual who wants to play sadomasochistic games with his wife or girlfriend will be disappointed. Despite the male fantasy of a masked, booted, whip-wielding beauty, most women seldom want anything to do with SM. In male-to-male relationships, there is no such shortage of players, and leather bars make them easy to locate.

Many of the S-M practices take place at the bars, including handcuffing, whipping or urinating on a masochistic patron. Gay Writer Arthur Bell calls it "consensual grossness." Recalling a visit to the Mine Shaft, he constructs an unconvincing apologia: "What is happening around you smacks of decadence. But not of evil. These places are not hellholes of murder. There are no victors and victims. It is all theater, and these guys are pussycats." Well, not really. In various Village Voice articles on the leather bars, Bell has made the point that many homosexuals, far from being pussycats, seem to crave danger along with their sex. For example, one of the most popular trysting spots for New York gays in the mid-'70s was a rotting pier in Greenwich Village, where homosexuals regularly risked mugging, fire, police raids and the possibility of falling into the Hudson River through holes in the pier. Why? One theory is that oppression by the straight world has taught many gays to connect sex with guilt, shame and danger. John Devere, editor in chief of the gay magazine Mandate, believes that living underground for so many years has given homosexuals an appetite for the underground. Says he: "The taste for an after-midnight world of exciting [violent] sexuality is not anything to be derided, or taken lightly. It is by now an intrinsic part of many gay men's psychological makeup, and gives texture and meaning to a great many gay lives." Adds Anthropologist Edgar Gregersen of Queens (N.Y.) College, who studies sexual mores: "If you make your first sexual contact in a public toilet or in the back of a truck where the guy next to you may be a cop ready to arrest you or a psychopath waiting to hack off your genitals, Leather Gulch is an ideal ambience."

In their book Homosexuality in Perspective, Masters and Johnson report that homosexual males have more violent fantasies than heterosexual males. But they concede that their survey was small (120 subjects) and completed in 1968, before the Gay Liberation movement began, and thus may not be representative today.

Devere, who acted as an extra in Cruising, said he was "conscious-stricken" in the role "not because the movie was being made, but because the violence the movie depicts is uncomfortably close to anyone who frequents the night world in any gay area." Says he: "The enemy is not Cruising; it is not outside. The heart of darkness is within, after all. I'm saddened by that, and frightened for us all."

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