We’d never met before, and now we were being asked to dry hump on top of the basement bar in front of—at best, 25 homos, but still. The idea terrified me. Not just because this was maybe my third time go-going, but also because the moment I saw Brian...Well, you know that feeling when every single part of you is drawn to someone? When it’s something beyond simple physical attraction and it’s more like your cells and your soul are caught in someone else’s gravitational pull? It was like that.
Of course, everyone fell in love with Brian. I found out later it was an occupational hazard of knowing him. He was all beautiful body and tattoos; not your typical go-go boy. He was more Lower East Side than most, more Motley Crue than Madonna. And he had these sleepy, smoldering eyes. He was the kind of guy you expect would break your skull in a mosh pit. I hate myself a little for admitting it, but his total lack of any discernable fagginess—other than the tiny bikini-cut undies he usually wore— was probably his most attractive quality. He looked like a bad boy. He looked like everything I wanted in a man.
The boners never actually happened that night—not with each other anyway. Brian sort of kept his distance on the bar, concentrating his attention on the guys slipping their hands up his thighs to deposit sweaty dollars under the elastic waistband of his briefs. He wasn’t exactly cold toward me, just otherwise occupied.
He’d glance over at me and roll his eyes at some drunken dude or smile about the DJ’s song choice.You know, the way any veteran would treat the new hire.
It wasn’t until we started working together at The Cock that we became friends.A mutual friend of ours DJ’d the bar’s Monday night party, and he hired us both to dance. Usually we’d alternate weeks, but every now and then we’d end up dancing on the same night.
Brian and I were very different kinds of gogo boys. I was scrawny and probably had no business dancing on bars at all. I was doing it for fun, for the thrill and, OK, for the attention. I’m pretty sure Brian was doing it for the money.
But sometimes—usually on Monday nights at The Cock—he was more relaxed. The DJ would play some cheesy hair metal or some weird ’80s gem like “Goodbye Horses,” and Brian would smile and break into this weird, lazy version of The Twist that no other go-go boy could do and still look sexy. Those moments were magic, and they were the reason why I’d go to The Cock on nights when I wasn’t getting paid and get up on the bar and take off my clothes just to dance with Brian.
Unfortunately, these moments were rare. More often than not, Brian was distant and moody. If I hadn’t been so blinded by his seismic sex appeal, I probably could have seen where this was all going; he was just way too Jordan Catalano for words. And of course, there was his vanity. He was conscious of his good looks, and I think he depended on them a lot. They made him money, but they also made him distrustful of people.
I think he had trouble seeing the difference between the people who were genuinely interested in him and those who couldn’t see past the sex-on-legs go-go boy shaking his ass. He always seemed to assume that his friendships were tainted with a vague sexual desire, that beneath it all was a crush that would one day bubble up in a teary confession of unrequited love.
And he was usually right.
I knew from the start that I wasn’t Brian’s type. I knew his ex, a DJ/go-go boy who was almost a carbon copy of Brian. They looked like they’d been grown in a lab somewhere, built from the same DNA.
“You’re gonna need to put on 20 pounds of muscle,” friends would tell me when I’d ask them about my chances with Brian.
Still, I had this romantic notion that if I could just get in a little, past this wall of jaded disinterest he’d built around himself, if we got closer, he’d see how I felt about him, without me having to tell him.We’d go from casual acquaintances to best friends to something more. And then one night, we’d be up on the bar and he’d look over at me and smile, and that smile would mean he was mine.Then he’d kiss me, right there in front of those leering, cynical drunks.
But no matter how much we hung out, no matter how I tried to get close to him, Brian still treated me with a sort of fond disregard. That’s how they do it, these mythically beautiful boys. They wrap themselves in sullen mystery. They keep you at arm’s length so that even though you’ve seen their nearly naked bodies glistening with sweat a hundred times, they still have that tantalizing pull of the unknown. Familiarity can’t ruin their allure. And maybe that’s the most valuable thing a go-go boy can learn: You can’t have us, even if you’re one of us.
I remember once Brian and I were at a party in Soho, at some rock star’s loft. All around us were club kids who’d made names for themselves in the mid-’90s and had gone on to various levels of fame and fortune. I made a joke about whether we’d still show up to each other’s parties when we got famous, or if we’d have to say we knew each other when.
“No, you’re here for good,” he said and put his arm around me.
In that moment, I was more terrified than that first night when Ronnie told us to give each other boners on the bar. Because I could feel that stupid, selfish crush swelling inside me, warmed by this rare flash of genuine affection. But I could see that his smile didn’t mean I was his and he was mine, at least not in the way that I wanted it to. And whatever unknowable longing lurked in my heart, I’d have to keep that to myself.
John Russell is a freelance writer living somewhere between Bushwick and Ridgewood. Every now and then you can still find him dancing on bars around the city.
