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In the late Donald Vining's fourth volume of his Gay Diary (1967- 1975), he writes about his March, 1972, visit to a gay porn theatre to see Boys in the Sand, a then-famous gay sex flicker. The star of the film was Casey Donovan, about whom there is a new book from Alyson. "One thing that was certainly new to me was that in the first episode, the blond came out of the sea with a metal ring around his genitals." And later in the same entry: "It is really incredible that one could sit in a theatre and see explicit sex of any kind, let alone homosexual sex. If this presages the fall of the New Rome, I'm glad I was there for the decay." (It was only a movie, but Vining posits the apocalypse-- some queans go hyperbolic at the drop of a hairpin.)

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Two days later, Vining is still pondering the movie's genital jewelry. In Gay, his local rag, "there was an interesting interview with the producer of Boys in the Sand. Lots of people, it was reported, were turned off by the 'cock rings' as it seems they are called. I see nothing offensive in them tho nothing sexually exciting either." And I will pause a minute before going on to Vining's next sentence, which lingers in my cortex like a burr on the trouser leg of fine corduroy pants. Vining casually notes: "The whole world of the liberated homosexual is amazing."

I was telling my dear friend George (he's about 65) about the suicide of a former colleague of mine (32, gunshot blast to the head). George winced. "Do gay men still do that? I thought that was all over with my generation." His was a sweet notion that things actually change for the better for all as The Nile rises. They don't. But Vining's observations do help clarify how far things have changed from the horrible 50s and early 60s.

I recently got a nice letter from the poet Edward Field-- whose new collection from Black Sparrow, A Frieze for a Temple of Love, I highly recommend. Field reminds me that everybody, but just everybody, was in analysis in the 50s. His variety was group analysis, and as his co-groupers thought homosexuality was a sickness, they all ganged up on him and he had to leave. He writes that meeting Frank O'Hara was terrific in many ways-- one was that Frank had no problem at all with homosexuality, nor did his circle of friends; this was the counter-world to that of the analysts, who, sad to report, never had their Nuremberg Trials. Just getting the goddamn shrinks out of our lives was an achievement nonpareil. Want to buy some Freudian theory? Want an orgone box cheap? Frauds, every one of them. Taking money from faggots to buy fur coats for their concubines-- thus the shrinks. Field, who had an "affairette" with Frank O'Hara, also comments on Frank's impressively long foreskin-- a fact of Frank's physiognomy not detailed in Brad Gooch's great book, City Poet.

For all gay folks, there is the Other Land, the place of the all-too-imagined-but-not-real, the place beyond the unspoken. For me, the world of the liberated homosexual looks rather tame, familiar. The exotic question is: what makes the repressed tick? This is the core chasm between gay folks and the repressed-- who themselves change, sort of, from decade to decade. The repressed are out there on their own, in many cases the majority. I have always been intrigued with their imaginations, literary, political, and esp. sexual. What gets the uptight off? Well, revenge dramas, of course, as we see being enacted in Washington. And campaigns to stop other people from doing what they're doing. For many of the repressed, attributing imagination to them seems a large gesture. But the narrow, the pinched, the crabbed, they have their sexual tensions too, their deadly sins, their psychological goblins, and they try to keep them neatly locked up.

Guess what? It doesn't work like that. The nice thing about the repressed and their imaginations is this: you will often find they do exactly, literally, the opposite of what they so loudly and publicly recommend. When some are caught out, they never bat an eye-- sin and corruption are built into their system. They lack empathy, but I will give them one thing. I suspect their sexual fantasies-- as a group-- are more fascinating, detailed, and intricate than any comparable collation of liberated liberal swingers or hip gay men. When you live it, you don't obsess about it. When it is denied, it is the world, morning, noon, and noche.

Danger, of course, lies therein-- the imagination of the repressed. These are the Kristallnachters of manana, the ones easily led, swayed, pre-programmed for pogroms, and the ones who kill, rob, and burn and-- usually-- never have to pay a price. Has any shrink from the 50s who shocked queers ever lost his license, been brought up on charges, etc? Not one, my dear. Nazi science just changed its mind, what's left of it. I speak as a liberated homosexual, in Vining's phrase, one partial to cock rings. The Big News is the Paradigm Shift; it happened real fast in 1968/1969. I am good at answering many questions-- this is what I am paid to do at my job-- but this one I leave for you: Why Believe Any Of These Up-Tighers Ever Again-- if you ever have? And just maybe, a sweet porno movie will bring down The West-- that West!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com