1990s gay bar odessa tx

Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is bar, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big deal in Odessa is, famously, high school football. West Odessa. Early Saturday afternoon. No neighbors to annoy, or horses to frighten. In the parking lot, never a large number but a steady 1990s pickup trucks, dusty old cars, a few SUVs, nothing fancy.

Inside the theater, according to Cowboy, there are this afternoon, over a couple of hours, about fifteen guys at any time. Projector, beam of light, screen with old generic straight porn movies. Maybe seven rows of seats, thirty or so in all, plus some free-standing lawn chairs.

An area of darkness at the back, illuminated only when the entry door opens. Of the odessa men, two sit unmoving with eyes fixed on gay screen; the rest move around, check each other out. Cowboy agrees. Other than bars, there are a few parks in and around town where some cruising is reputed to go on, and rest stops on the interstate where locals are said to connect with truckers and others.

Another search pulls up websites where a few Odessa men post sex ads, offering among other things to drive from to 1, miles for the right guy. There was a murder, two rich guys who picked up the wrong trick; a Metropolitan Community Church met for a while in the nineties; maybe some gay events that made the papers and got attacked by preachers—all sputtering out by the turn of the century.

But locally, not much of anything, not even arrests. I live in Washington, D. But worlds do collide: one day I came out of the gay bookstore and a young guy followed and stopped me: dress shirt and tie, clean-cut, cute, slight Southwest accent—a sales rep, maybe, in town for a convention.

I vaguely knew that there was a red-light district off in some industrial area, and finally learned details from a front-page feature in The Washington Post. Of these businesses, a D. Back in the days when I was having sex, encounters with MSM were more frequent and closer. I went to bathhouses a lot: MSM for days, in the general mix.

The King of X

Of course, with everybody in nothing but a towel, you only had clues here and there: wedding rings, military haircuts, bits of overheard talk, something in the way they moved, something in their eyes. After sex, a thirtyish Asian guy rambled wistfully about family obligations, his wife and kids, the freedoms he imagined I enjoyed, that were never to be his.

Anyway, none of this MSM stuff is news. The behavior is classic Kinsey: a spectrum from zero to six, all straight to all gay. An epistemological enigma, never to be resolved. We met inin a gay collective in Berkeley, California, in the crazed fandango of early gay liberation. Meanwhile, lovers and friends, vocations and avocations, whole gay eras, came and went: marches, parades, encounter groups, dance parties, street fairs, film festivals, court decisions, media visibility, ballot propositions, the epidemic and everything it ended or upended, all the gay vicissitudes, to mid-life and beyond.