SD Pride
On July 17th, we went to Black’s Beach, which is a nude beach where a bunch of gay men congregated (very few women!!) for the final day of Pride. I didn’t eat that morning, so I laid in the sun and hung out.
I made eye contact, looking through someone’s giant Gucci sunglasses, with a guy sitting alone under an umbrella. He walked up and introduced himself to the group I was with, before chatting with me and Ariel. And then he gave us a tour of the beach: the “Bamboo Bathhouse” and the “Trail of Tears” (pronounced ‘tares’).
We walked over to the “Bamboo Bathhouse,” where men hooked up. And we walked up the “Trail of Tears” where a crowd of men stood in silence, enacting motions of intimacy. I, tired and hungry, watched with an empty mind, thinking of a form of animal intimacy described by Georges Bataille. Our tour guide yelled to break the silence.
I ended up meeting a guy named Jay, but I thought he said Jake, so I said, “Our names rhyme!” “What?” he said, and I asked for his name again: Jay. “Oh, it’s like a near rhyme,” I said, and he returned a blank stare. “Oh, okay” I said, and he called my mustache cute. We ran out into the freezing ocean, and kissed between waves in the late afternoon light. He was short, so we jumped over the waves, like liquid walls from the horizon. I was cold. I left. He followed out, inviting other people back into the water. He loved the water, he said, before talking about the sex party he had returned from the day before.
Our tour guide, the man in the Gucci sunglasses, continued to drink all afternoon. He swirled around me, flirting with every person next to me, while brushing up against my side. He asked to kiss me; I said “No.” He passed out in the sand.
We left the beach, hiking up a cliff. Although I thought I caught a cold from fasting the entire day and jumping into the freezing water, I really got COVID the next day, but not from the guy in the water. So I sat in bed, without the interest or capacity to reflect on pride, except that David Wojnarowicz’s writing seemed tame compared to Black’s Beach. That’s it.