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THE MEN PASS EACH OTHER SILENTLY as they stroll through the dark nighttime of the city park, exchanging wordless glances drenched with meaning. Some stroke their crotches with their fingers. Others signal their desires with seductive licks to their lips. Every few minutes, two or three of the silhouetted figures seem to merge as if into one, then disappear into the marshy underbrush. Some time later, the men come out, now separated, faces aglow with moonlight and sodomy. It is a timeless tableau.

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But strangely, not all the denizens of St. Louis's Washington Park have men on their mind this humid spring evening.

Ralph Redly is only 100 yards away, on the far side of a copse of diseased Dutch elm, past the picnic area's crusty public barbecues. But in his thoughts and intentions, Ralph might as well be two centuries in the past and a thousand miles northeast. The muscular 19-year-old carries a long rope as he creeps deeper into the park, shooting furtive glances with every step. The stage is set for drama. Does Ralph seek a lost pet dog who ran loose earlier that day? Is he a sadistic mugger plotting to leave his victims bound to trees, bereft of cash and credit, at the mercy of the park's feral squirrels? Let us pray he has not come in a spirit of depression to hang himself from a sickly elm.

The answer is none of the above. In a few moments, a strange truth will be revealed, as Ralph Redly approaches Washington Park's eponymous centerpiece-- a giant statue of George Washington astride a horse. Ralph's pace slows as he nears the patriotic monument. He pauses in the murky darkness, assuring as best he can the coast is clear.

Suddenly, the night air whooshes. Ralph's rope proves to be a lasso, which he throws with the verve of a Marlboro cowboy, catching the ex-president expertly around the neck. In the twinkle of an eye, Ralph rappels up the monument's granite plinth, ascends a hind leg of the executive gelding, and hoists himself onto Washington's lap. Face to face with history, he wraps his hands securely around George Washington's head, erects, unzips, and-- never losing his balance-- pulls out a 7-1/4-inch uncut penis, hard as the copper in his hands. Low moans soon fill the air as Ralph rubs his throbbing love meat across the tarnished, pigeon-stained head of America's first president.

"Georgie, let me be your marshmallow, your Martha, your Monica," Ralph pants into a green ear, welded to a face that seems to soften under the romantic entreaties. With throaty passion, Ralph groans as his cock pulses rhythmically across the smooth verdigris of the statesman, slave-owner, and American hero. Time passes as if into another dimension, where boundaries melt between past and present, art and life, flesh and metal, ninth-grade American history and seventh-grade biology.

Off in the distance, there is a fire engine. It is coming closer. Closer. The siren's wail crescendos just as the pearly proof of Ralph's satisfaction douses the visage of America's founding father. Is it just the eros in the air this warm, early-April evening? Or did the presidential lips, sculpted into an expression stern but serene, actually part slightly as if to swallow Ralph's load?

"Any guy can make it in Washington Park," says Ralph later, as we relax over beers in his apartment, which has more than its share of yellowed presidential busts. "But it takes a special kind of man to make it in the park with George Washington."

MICHAELANGELO. DONATELLO. RODIN. Anonymous. To most us, these are names redolent of some long-forgotten art appreciation class. But to the fraternity of men in the sexual underworld of statutory love, these monikers carry the aroma of sexual bliss.

Most gay men mine movies and TV shows for their fantasies, making erotic quarries out of people like Jeff Stryker, Keanu Reeves, or Joey Stefano. But statuphiles, as they are known technically, sculpt their erotic daydreams directly from mines and quarries-- from marble, bronze, granite, or copper-- and the famous and/or beautiful people memorialized for all time in these durable materials.

"To be statuphile is to connect in a profound sense to human history, to mankind's finest work in the plastic arts," says Harold Zublinksi. A balding 46-year-old and Curator of Old-Time Antiquities at a new Los Angeles art museum, Zublinksi waxes almost mystical when the subject turns to his passion.

"To practice statutory love is to give yourself over to sculpture," he expounds, "to engage its mineral hardness with your fleshly softness, to partake for a time of its hardness, and finally to mediate between the softness and the hardness with a wetness."

Many religions put statuary at their very center, Zublinksi notes. Throughout the heathen temples of southern Asia can be found golden Bhuddas. In Christendom, there are the touching plastic or wood realizations of Jesus nailed to perpendicular poles, bleeding to death. It's not only statue lovers who invest sculpture with significance, the curator contends.

Like many who share his little secret, Zublinksi gravitated toward a profession requiring routine contact with statuary. Less eloquent statuphiles become janitors in art galleries or sculpture gardeners.

Yet despite success stories like Zublinksi, these are hard times for lovers of fine sculpture. Almost by definition, statutory sex falls under prohibitory laws. When not locked in display cases inside well-guarded museums, statues tend to be situated in urban parks and public squares.

They could not be in these places at a worse time. The mid-1990s has seen an intensifying war on gay men's public sexual venues. Parks and other pleasure spots have become litter-strewn battle zones. In the best of times, statuphilia can be a dangerous devotion. Men seeking ultimate erotic highs-- such as oral relations on Mt. Rushmore-- have fallen from their precarious perches, breaking necks, wind, and worse. Other unlucky statue hounds contract debilitating genital lesions from aviary excrement. French-active statuphiles are vulnerable to bronze poisoning, and French-passive ones often prove painfully delusional. But today, statue lovers contend with additional risk factors: police stings involving statutory minors, third-strike-and-you're-out convictions for trespass, and lifetime registration as art offenders.

Ominously, officials in cities across America are working proactively to stamp out the opportunities where men and marble meet. Citing the expense of cleansing semen from city monuments, New York City officials hired a cheap Indian laborer, Christo, to wrap the Washington Square arch entirely in gauze. Their hope was to protect the monument from the lewd gestures and sexual come-ons of neighborhood homosexuals. As it turns out, however, the soft curves of the cotton-covered edifice made it all the more enticing, and did nothing to hide the cum stains. Ultimately the experiment was abandoned, and the arch returned to its former state of provocative undress.

Trying another tack, city officials last December installed video cameras atop street lamps in Washington Square Park, hoping to catch drug dealers and sex fiends in the act.

But video surveillance has only encouraged the park's exhibitionists, and seems to have pushed criminal activity into the surrounding neighborhood. Nearby residents report a number of recent incidents in their backyards involving garden gnomes, lawn jockeys, and the violation of at least four flamingos.

BUT PERHAPS THE MOST CUTTING CRITICISM of statue lovers is from status-conscious lesbians and gays seeking to keep their distance from a group they deride as "tarnish queens."

Statuphobia reared its ugly head, for example, in the unfolding Washington sex scandal involving the Human Rights Fund. Last January, the Lambda Report broke the story about Amazonian caning parties at the plush Georgetown pad of Elizabeth "Birch," the Fund's executive director. At these Beltway whip-fests, prominent DC dykes, from Hillary on down, willingly bared their bottoms to be lashed lusciously by sassy dykelings. The young girls were the Campaign Fund's own "Rainbow Stripers," the high school interns that the Fund recruits to empty the bedpans of senior staffers, who get so lost in their political thinking that they forget to go the toilet.

Birch denied the accusations in a carefully crafted statement. "Number one, there is no whipping ongoing presently at my residence. Number two, we keep our Rainbow Stripers so busy dishing number one and number two that they wouldn't have time to birch all the prominent bottoms of lesbian Washington. Besides, an examination of my posterior lobes would reveal them to be blank hemispheres of polished smoothness with no distinguishing marks whatsoever," Birch told a packed press conference.

"To deflect attention from this deepening scandal, I would like to say for the record that I've always found statuphiles to be our movement's lunatic fringe, and really repugnant," Birch added, slapping her thighs for emphasis. "One thing is certain," she concluded, staring stonily into the cameras. "I won't be beaten down by these stinging accusations, whipped into a frenzy, made the butt of ridicule, or unseated from my sinecure in service to our sacred and solemn struggle: to market our identity!"

But Beltway insiders say statuphilia is rampant among staff at the Campaign Fund and its cross-town rival. The predilection's popularity is a key reason the two organizations situated themselves in Washington DC, what with the Capitol, the White House, and other memorials to dead and decaying politicians and policies.

Yet the harshest criticism of statue-love comes from what might seem an unlikely source. Unlikely, that is, until you come to understand the deep devotional bond that Log Cabin Republicans feel toward their mascot, Abraham Lincoln. The lanky, homespun president, who led America's nostalgia-suffused Civil War, is a frequent subject of monuments, which provoke in statue-lovers powerful stirrings of a different sort. The conflict among the rival Lincoln suitors makes for a vicious love triangle.

"It burns me how these statue freaks defile honest Abe," says Log Cabin president Rich Tafelle. "They desecrate treasures that are part of our national wealth. To me, statuphiles are in the moral gutter along with those South Side welfare queens who steal our tax dollars just so they can eat. America's country club prisons are too good for these monumental scum."

Tafelle takes pains to point out that his hostility to the NEA and statue-love does not mean he's insensitive to beauty. "My husband and I even have a figurine of Michael and Angelo's David on our mantle," Tafelle tells The Guide. "It's not only fine statuary, but a testament to two geniuses and the monogamous gay marriage that sustained them."

THOUGH CONTROVERSY AND RECRIMINATION swirl around statuphiles today like a swarm of june bugs, it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, they practiced the most hallowed form of love, according to groundbreaking queer scholarship based on the work of 19th-century French physicist and math whiz Jean Foucault. In applying Foucault's mathematical innovations to the analysis of ancient texts, queer theorists have written turgid new chapters in homosexual historiography, and made some remarkable discoveries along the way.

"What they called 'homosexuality' in Ancient Greece meant something diametrically different from what we know as 'homosexuality' today," explains Prof. David Halperone, a noted classics scholar at the Mississauga Institute of Technology. "Greek men never desired other males per se," he asserts.

The truth was revealed by analysis of a tiny fragment of a love ode. The poem should have been lost to history, but it was miraculously preserved in an ancient cistern of olive oil unearthed by a Cretan sewage worker in 1977. In a remarkable couplet-- all that survives of the work-- an unknown bard from the 4th century BC extols a youth's skin as being "like alabaster." After digitizing the text and subjecting it to a rigorous Foucaultian regression, Dr. Halperone has proven once and for all the mineralogical foundations of Greek homosexuality.

"We can now read Plato and Aristotle in a new light. Whatever they said, these philosophers blessed only hierarchical love between men and sculpture," the MIT scholar exposits. "The erotic ideal was statuary depicting athletic, nubile youths at the evanescent peak of adolescent perfection, in the golden springtime when the cheeks blossom fresh with peach down, but before the face grows seedy with coarse stubble, like day-old poppy bagels."

The heavy sexual use to which Greek sculpture was put is evident, scholars say, in the frequency of missing limbs and broken noses in the few works that have survived at all. Sometimes even the marble genitals were ripped off due to the violent, Mediterranean passions that were unleashed during the ancient bacchanalia. When classical statuary was unavailable, Greek men satisfied their animal lusts by looking at vase paintings, and sometimes employing the actual vases themselves.

Except in the statuphile underground, the stirring harmonies of the ancient traditions have died away. But a faint echo can still be heard today in the language of GWMs who visit tanning salons to achieve a "bronzed" look. It's ironic, Professor Halperone observes, that people dumb enough to bathe themselves in carcinogenic rays could probably never grasp the subtle hermeneutics needed to see the connection.

"Greek love is distasteful to us now," Dr. Halperone grants. "But it's vital that we gaze down at the past from the Olympian heights of modern, democratic homosexuality in order to appreciate how far our moral and aesthetic sensibilities have evolved."

BUT BACK IN RALPH REDLY'S APARTMENT, it seems like statue-love's golden age has not entirely passed. "I want a man hard through and through, not a gym-buffed twinkie," Ralph explains. "I want a man with history, not someone living only the present. Plus doing it with a statue takes more imagination. It's like reading the novel instead of watching the movie."

In fact, statue-love makes him so erotically lithe, Ralph tells me, that he finds himself stretching into some new roles. Now working at minimum wage as a security guard at a St. Louis museum, Redly is saving his money. If he's not arrested by the undercover cops who ply Washington Park or sent off to the state penitentiary for statutory rape, next summer, Ralph says, he plans to make a pilgrimage to New York City for a bisexual fling with Lady Liberty.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com