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Sex and Isolation
Sex and
Isolation
And Other Essays
Bruce Benderson
www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/
3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 2007
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
1 3 5 4 2
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xv
Pa r t 1
Mode de Vie
Sex and Isolation 3
Surrendering to the Spectacle 60
Fear of Fashion 76
America’s New Networkers 83
Pa r t 2
Men in My Life
Tel Quel’s Gaudy Harlequin 97
The Spider Woman’s Mother 102
Montmar tre’s Blue Angel 114
A Champion in Times Square 121
The Not-So-Secret Life of
Consuela Cosmetic 129
Pa r t 3
Toward the New Degeneracy
Toward the New Degeneracy 143
v
Foreword
vii
That was more than twenty years ago, but by his writing
(not only his shoes), Bruce is still the epitome of cool, dan-
gerous gayhood. Certainly these essays, which cover about a
decade, demonstrate again and again how his life of promis-
cuity and danger has shaped his understanding of the world,
and how his unique vantage point illuminates dark corners of
the American and Anglo-Saxon psyche with startling insight.
Appearing for the first time in the United States, this col-
lection includes two long pieces, “Sex and Isolation” and
“Toward the New Degeneracy,” the latter previously pub-
lished here as a stand-alone book in 1997. A number of the
shorter essays are lively reportages and portraits written as
magazine assignments, like “Tel Quel’s Gaudy Harlequin,” a
profile of the Paris-based, Cuban writer Severo Sarduy;
F o r ew o r d
viii
collection. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any reader familiar
with his work that Bruce’s great love affair is his lasting ro-
mance with Times Square and its denizens. Anyone who has
read his extraordinary novel User, an attempt to capture the
cosmology that has fascinated him so much—the commu-
nity of street people, transsexuals, bohemian junkies, danger-
ous thugs, and hypermasculine Latino hustlers, who popu-
lated Times Square before Mayor Giuliani cleaned it up and
turned it into a theme park for tourists—will recognize his
fictional underworld.
“Toward the New Degeneracy” is a poignant manifesto in
favor of the old city nexus, the “downtown,” which has its
origins in the traditional marketplace, where all social classes
rub elbows and mix, economically and sexually. Refusing to
F o r ew o r d
play the part of the outsider looking in, Benderson claims
the mantle of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro,” who draws
his fierce, sexual energy from the underground classes. For
Benderson, being a gay hipster navigating the tough under-
world is not a posture; it has been his life. After his foray into
the bathhouses of San Francisco in the seventies, accumulat-
ing, to his own admission, thousands of sexual encounters,
he was hit with terror and the fear of punishment when the
AIDS epidemic exploded in the eighties. The period also
coincided with his own midlife crisis. After the furious sex-
ual experimentation of his twenties, he was feeling a certain
kind of emptiness and loss of identity. He credits Saul’s
Book, by Paul T. Rogers, with turning his fear of dying into
a renewed lust for life. The novel, which came out in 1985,
was the creation of a social worker and ex-con who was
later murdered by the Times Square hustler whom he had
ix
adopted. “In Sinbad,” Benderson writes about the fictional
character of the hustler, “I sensed a much more vital and
courageous version of my own despair about AIDS and lost
identity. . . . In the age of AIDS I went on a voyage to find
the world of Sinbad, hoping to recover that sense of the old
‘degeneration’ that had once linked underclass energies with
the underground avant-garde.”
“Toward the New Degeneracy” is the intellectual chron-
icle of that voyage. “I met people who were much more in
danger than me,” Bruce told me, “yet were festive about it. It
was exciting to have sex and find love with macho, real men,
not middle-class homosexual men. It was an opportunity to
intimately know another class.” What is startling in “Toward
the New Degeneracy” is Benderson’s passionate defense of
F o r ew o r d
x
to base an entire sociological identity upon. To brand them
simply as ‘closeted’ is intolerant and presumptuous.”
The character of the macho, straight hustler who turns
tricks with gay men for money, which appears in The Roma-
nian, Benderson’s memoir of falling obsessively in love with
a Romanian hustler, perfectly illustrates that point. For
Bruce, getting involved with Romulus, whom he met in Bu-
dapest during an assignment for nerve.com, was an attempt
to relive the drama of the old Times Square.
“Sex and Isolation,” the opening essay of this collec-
tion, written a couple of years after “Toward the New De-
generacy” but only published in French so far, opens with
an unforgettable scene of Benderson, now confined to his
computer, video conferencing a mutual masturbation with
F o r ew o r d
a young Egyptian with the tag name “YOUNG WANT
OLD,” who is wearing only a loincloth, which he will grad-
ually unwrap all the way to reveal his genitals. The scene is
both hilarious and profoundly disturbing, as we realize that
Benderson, “in place of countless hunts in the streets of mid-
town New York for sex, ha[s] succumbed to these contin-
uous electronic swaddlings” because he has no other place
to go. The author poignantly laments the disappearance of
human encounters, those informal, unofficial “tête-à-têtes”
that occurred spontaneously—in the street, in the office, or
at school; between the milkman and the housewife, the
teacher and the student, the single man and the waitress;
some libidinous, some innocent, some in-between—that
were neither “mediated” nor “reported.”
Again, as he does in “Toward the New Degeneracy,” Ben-
derson targets the WASP ethic, along with the disappearance
xi
of public spaces and the rise of the Internet, with the increas-
ing monitoring and policing of American life. He argues
that the Anglo-Saxon obsession with disclosure—handed
down from earlier schools of Protestantism—forms the basis
of the American sensibility, making the so-called Paradise
promised by America impossible to achieve. He maintains
that this obsession with disclosure should be distinguished
from the Catholic notion of confession. Born and raised
French Catholic, I was particularly intrigued by his distinc-
tion. For Benderson, Protestant American disclosure is tan-
tamount to a direct and rigid revelation of truth to God. It is
the opposite of what he holds dear: secrets, ambiguity, fluid-
ity, undisclosed encounters, which are much more compat-
ible with the “Latinate emphasis on rhetorical devices that
F o r ew o r d
xii
Of course it’s a conundrum almost impossible to resolve.
How is it possible, after all, for a middle-class American to
truly imagine the destitute’s point of view? William T. Voll-
man is another contemporary writer who tries to give voice
to the underclass. But he seems to do it gingerly, and in spite
of his involvement with prostitutes and the poorest of the
poor, he keeps his outsider’s stance. Bruce Benderson fear-
lessly plunges in, dissecting his own passion as deeply as he
can, and always showing fairness and compassion.
These essays are a passionate plea for openness instead of
segregation, for amorality and compassion instead of judg-
ment and fear, for the noir perversity of the human psyche.
They deserve to take their place alongside Norman Mailer’s
“The White Negro” and Georges Bataille’s anti-surrealist
F o r ew o r d
Documents “against received ideas.”
xiii
Acknowledgments
xv
“Surrendering to the Spectacle” as “Surrender to the Spectacle:
The Value of Entertainment,” in Parallax 11, no. 2 (April–
June 2005): 36–43; in French as “Abandonnez-vous au spec-
tacle,” in Au-delà du spectacle (November 1999–February
2000), and in Bruce Benderson, Attitudes (Paris: Biblio-
thèque Rivages, 2006), 35–53.
“Fear of Fashion” in the column “New York Lowdown,” Purple
8 (Summer 2001); in French as “Avoir peur de la mode,” in
Beaux Arts (November 19, 2004), and in Attitudes, 54–61.
“America’s New Networkers” as “Creative Publicity,” in Vice
9, no. 5 (December 2002); in French as “Les nouveaux in-
trigants d’Amerique,” in Attitudes, 171–83.
“Tel Quel’s Gaudy Harlequin” as “All the World’s a Drag,” in
Lambda Book Report 4, no. 11 (July–August 1995), copy-
Acknowledgments
xvi
“Toward the New Degeneracy” as Toward the New Degeneracy:
An Essay (New York: Edgewise, 1997, 1999); excerpted pre-
viously in the print and Internet magazines Cups, Artnet,
Alt-X, and Dent; in French as Pour un nouvel art dégénéré
(Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages, 1998).
Acknowledgments
xvii
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