Shadowman

An eBook By Torsten Barring.

My first moment of sexual self-assertion occurred in a movie theater when I had just turned eighteen. I was at the peak of that stage of frenzied horniness where I was continuously aware of my genitals to a painful degree and compulsively making the condition worse by squeezing myself into Levi's that were quite intentionally two sizes too small. I literally tortured my perpetual hard-on inside my outrageously too tight pants.

I was already aware that I was not like other boys because it was decidedly other boys I was interested in, while they were bragging - almost too insistently - it seemed, of their conquests of girls.

I already had had propositions from the few openly gay males of various ages who were around, and I had turned them all down. It was not that I was looking for Mr. Perfect - exactly. It was simply that I didn’t want to have sex - certainly not first-time sex - with any of the available gay men I had access to in my town in my day. A vital element was missing - attraction - and something else beyond my barely eighteen-year-old comprehension.

I had begun to suspect that what I was searching and waiting for didn't exist. Not anywhere. Certainly not in my own hometown. I seemed to be longing for some kind of impossible romance with just the kind of man who was the least available to me: some supermasculine jock who pumped up his muscles and chased girls!

I seemed to be longing for something even more unlikely than making out with the likes of, for example, Mr. Perfectly Unavailable Personified, of a high school football star!

was yearning with seemingly masochistic futility for what I pretentiously like to call The Mythic More - the pursuit of it - that larger-than-life fantasy - hounded and refined - until life with its limited choices must yield to the fantasy and myth must give up its secrets.

was a comic-book addict, too, and Batman gave me a hint of what I wanted (aside from wanting to be Robin!). Flash Gordon gave me more. No, I didn't want to be Dale. I wanted to be the masculine equal of my blond, muscular, handsome hero or, at least, aspire to emulate him. I wanted to run away into outer space with Flash Gordon and his rocket ship - be his sidekick and constant companion - his all-American boy lover! I wanted at least some real-life approximation of that impossible dream - that Mythic More - and no way was I going to get it from the kind of guys who congregated in my hometown's one and only gay bar.

They all wore suits and ties there. It was considered the chic thing to do. All "chic" meant to me was "not sexy."

I had gone there and drunk beer there and listened and tuned in there and was bitterly disappointed. I could not find one man there I would want to follow in all ways and be willing to lay down my life for. So I read comic books and went to the movies and fantasized and jacked off a lot.

Then came that Saturday afternoon double feature at the Arcadia where I saw on the screen of my neighborhood movie house something that, somehow, explained it all to me. That is to say, explained me to me! All the more amazing and unlikely because movies in those days weren't supposed to tell us anything about sex. They fed us only the acceptable propaganda demanded by the censorship code which said that there was almost no such thing as sex! Even a married couple in a movie slept in twin beds with a space between wide enough to accommodate a table with a lamp on it.

As for gays, or recognizable gay role models, whether "good" or "bad," there simply was no such thing - at all! Except for an occasional harmless, asexual, one-dimensional "sissy," gays in movies, as in life, were invisible. At age eighteen, still a virgin while thinking of almost nothing but sex almost all the time, I felt that I was the most invisible human on earth.

So, as I was completely invisible, I naturally felt almost comfortable in a darkened movie theater.

When I went to the Arcadia, I always sat in the second-balcony smoking section even though I didn't smoke. There was a certain atmosphere way up there among the men who liked to smoke and watch movies alone.

It was very dark up there. So dark that you had to let your eyes adjust for a few minutes before you sat down or risk the embarrassment of sitting in some guy's lap. It was a cool, dark, moist, seductive atmosphere enhanced by smells of tobacco, popcorn, disinfectant, and male bodies.

At the very back of the top balcony next to the projection booth was a short row consisting of only two seats. Nobody else liked to sit there, so it was all mine.

Behind me, against the wall, was a cigarette machine that emitted just enough light to make the various brands readable in the surrounding darkness. Almost always, a man could be seen standing next to the cigarette machine, leaning on it; and a pale half-circle of light would bathe only his blue-jeaned legs, making me wonder what his face looked like. Sometimes a thin beam of light seemed to shine directly on the man's basket, made more emphatic by the way his thumbs were hooked into his Levi's pockets. Although I couldn't see his face, I always knew he was young because of his slim, elegant legs showcased in tight jeans - in addition to his bulging basket. It was not the same man each time, of course. But there always seemed to be one standing there. It was as if the cigarette machine was not complete without a man in Levi's leaning on it.

I thought of them as one - those men. Shadowed from the waist up, they all became, for me, "the man in Levi's leaning against the cigarette machine advertising his basket."

tried not to look back at him too obviously. I tried not to do anything too obviously. Certainly, if I expected to preserve the safety of my invisibility, it wouldn't do to be seen turning around in my theater seat to stare at a man's basket. Even if the man was advertising consciously, he had too much of the advantage: all he was doing, really, was standing there looking at the movie screen, and any man who stared at his basket too much had to be queer!

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