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JOE WALKING THE STREETS ALONE: I walked and meditated on my availability for sex, remembering my lessons from John Rechy's writings a decade and a half before. Rechy a hustler in Manhattan, and other cities, served as a sort of archetype for me, the male hustler. I was determined to just be present to the people and the action on the street and in the theaters. I was thinking: "How many people are walking around here alone, even passing me by, looking for sex either to sell, buy or share freely? I wanted to mark those days in the glory of my male adulthood so that I'd never forget the presence of myself as an available sex object on the Deuce. JOE WALKING THE STREETS ALONE: I said it over and over and didn't speak to anyone. When some guy would give me the "I'm available..." look, I'd mirror it to him, and if someone seemed to be buying, I adopted the air of one selling, and if someone was playfully there for anonymous sex and not interested in money, I mirrored that I was there for sex for free, too. In centering silently this way I was in a different state of awareness than those in heat. I systematically had abstracted myself from the situation in order to absorb the TRUE ATMOSPHERE of the sex rich region of Manhattan. I succeeded in absorbing the emotions, scents, rank odors, feeling of prostitution and seduction, and I filed it away in my writer's mind, my writer's notebook (the next day) and lived among the vibrancy that was Times Square before it was "cleaned up." I also met and learned of a very broad human condition that most of us never encounter. These were the people at the heart of a dynamo of societal evolution, a nexus of new cultural norms being forged out by brave secretive souls.
I only knew through Rechy's eyes then what was happening, added to that the information I had from experiences like I write about in SEPTEMBER AT ESPLANADE (Lulu 2011), and I drank in the atmosphere until I was filled with it, and took a break by going to see the first showing of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, and in the theater was approached over and over in my solitary seat by ghosts of the sexual underworld that filled the aisles of the theater. It wasn't like the Apollo theater where there were orgies in the doorway of the bathrooms, and guys kneeling in front of other guys all over the theater, with roaming individuals like dancers or creatures on some Merry-Go-Round circling the seated patrons...but sex was everywhere in the movie house. On the street again at the Public Library along the rows of reading tables were glancing eyes all meeting my look with subtle lifts of an eyebrow, or someone proffering their lap's bulge by leaning back in their chair as I walked by. The Public Library bathrooms smelled of male/male sex. The parks had an odor. The world was filled with teaming creatures seeking and offering sex. Mykola Dementiuk tells of this world in a way that makes sense of it for the individual seeking wholeness.
Nowhere had I read about this sex-world other than the section of John Rechy's CITY OF NIGHT and some of the sections of Bruce Benderson's USER. Also, SAUL'S BOOK gave the view from the hustler, but no where had I read of the "average guy" trying to "find himself" and doing it in the 42nd Street zone of Manhattan, but I knew there were many JOE(s) WALKING THE STREETS ALONE.
When I picked up Mykola Dementiuk's books I found the voice of the Deuce, the voice of persons in the 1950's deeply involved in sex and sexual exploration and it was a flood gate of sexual activity that Mykola described. It was the 60's that Rechy described, and similarly Benderson. However, Mykola Dementiuk takes us back to the really original New York sex scene of the 50's when guys would bring their "dicks" to the Deuce and 42nd street, and in theaters and in parks figure out where they belonged in society by following where they were lead sexually. No one talks about the quantity of sex these days unless they are referring to health issues, but there was a time and it is clear in Mykola's writings, that there was a purer time when sex was abundant and there was a secret world formed around the sex in the public places of New York's Times Square area. Sex was a vehicle of self-knowledge, Mykola shows us.
Mykola Dementiuk's TIMES QUEER is a story that floods the reader with sexual activity. It is presented almost as a dance, meeting and negotiating, approaching and avoiding, holding and shoving away, and for some, discovery of a sense of belonging and having found their true selves...a sort of development of the people who belonged to one another by virtue of their revolutionary defiance of social norms, and their revolutionary acts of sexual liberty.
What most writers don't do is show the development of alliances and even love between the persons who meet anonymously in parks and toilets, but many of the loners who prowl the streets of the city looking for sex are finding mates who are of like mind, like spirit, like emotional status, and who understand each others promiscuity, and do not condemn because of the promiscuity.
Mykola Dementiuk's TIMES QUEER is not just about sex. It is about relationships: the very profound loyalties and subtle emotional ties that do form and exist among the street sex crowd as they go about their sexuality-centered days. The dual lives that these promiscuous characters live include not only the public sex with strangers, but sex and bonding with other inhabitants of the Times Square zone that become their "friends" or "lovers." IT is often possible to find a book about a sex worker and his pimp and how they may have a lover relationship, but there are thousands of individuals without pimps, people who take their sex directly to the adventurous arena of the streets. These otherwise ordinary individuals are initiated into secrets of clandestine sex, for sure, but they begin to discover the community of "friends" and sometimes "lovers" that pop up next to them as if by chance. TIMES QUEER shows just such alliances and MALE/MALE bonding. It is about finding meaning in the midst of sexual exploration that Mykola writes. The end all and be all is not the sex so much as it is the resultant QUALITY OF LIFE that following an openly sexual path engenders. The sexual explorer moves from a position of introverted isolation to extroverted relatedness. That alliances form so deeply that even persons will sacrifice their lives for one another on the street is dramatized in Mykola's writing.
SO, you can read TIMES QUEER for the pornographic element, but then you miss the heart and soul of a people and a "place" as real as any nation or state. The sexual world of Times Square in the 50's was a place where people went to discover who they were in a world that otherwise ignored and forbade such knowledge. I find the writings in all of Mykola's books to focus on the "soul and spirit of the individual" trying to find right relationship to self and others. It reads like a sex-exploration but it leaves an atmosphere of individual heart's cherishing one another. Secret alliances and friendships link isolated persons often in their first non-isolated relationship with others. It is a sad commentary on our culture that just the middle of the last century boys and young men could not openly discover who they were sexually, and had to enter the "Twilight Zone" of the Deuce and the Times Square area of Manhattan. However Mykola Dementiuk takes the building blocks of what most see only as promiscuity and anonymous sex, and he systematically, page by page, chapter by chapter emphasizes not only the existence of a geographically defined sex-zone, but emphasizes the existence of an inner world where otherwise isolated individuals are interacting in a way that generates a culture. It is a culture separate from the standard society, but it is a culture that has the element that gives meaning to human existence: identification and cohesiveness with a group of like minded individuals. The magic of Mykola's work is that he takes the seemingly isolated clandestine sex act and shows how it forms MEANING for individuals. Persons who felt cut off from society act in sexual secretive unions which produce new valid identities. It was the cumulative action of the secret sexual underground of the 50's that laid the foundations of what came to be the sexual liberation movement.
Dementiuk appears to be telling tales of sex the whole while he is subtly showing the formation of courageous character. It is not for the weak of heart to enter the sexual underworld and thrive. It takes daring to enter, but after repeated encounters Mykola's characters take on heroic aspects. They sacrifice their lives for one another. They look out for one another. The learn mentor one another. They mother one another. They have a life, and an acceptance in "community" that was denied them in the larger society.
This underground shocks only those in denial. Only to "outsiders" is it shocking that the sex-underground characters do thrive. It is true ignorance to deny the existence of "TIMES QUEER" in every city and town of this country. Mykola's TIMES QUEER is about a geographic region and it's sexually active inhabitants on one level, but on the profound symbolic level Mykola's TIMES QUEER is a place within each of us. Those who are aware of it, and who live with an knowledge of this, their shadow selves, are essentially whole and free compared to those who deny that there is a TIMES QUEER within. Looking within and finding this region of self takes enormous courage. It is a journey inward that requires the hero's tools, and the magician's luck in order to survive and integrate into a whole person. It is interesting to read TIMES QUEER while sensing one's true inner response. The path taken by the protagonist would terrify most men. It is presented as such an everyday reality that it seems to be no big deal, but once you close the last of the book and lay it down, you will find aftershocks within you that if you attend to them will lead you to self-knowledge. Beware, however, it is self-knowledge that demands the ultimate price: That your eyes open and you see all around you what is really going on! --copyright 2012 by Roy Kirby Chaudoir
