Glory Glory Hallelujah
By Walt Appel This time, the subject is "glory holes". You have been warned.
"So, Larry, are you queer or what?"
"I've been wondering for two years when you were going to ask me that."
If you have read any of my previous posts, you have probably guessed that tact is not one of my stronger points.
Larry was a Registered Nurse who worked in the Emergency Room of the hospital where I was smack in the middle of my janitorial career. He had a relaxed, easy smile and exuded warmth. He was fun to hang out with and made me laugh like hell at his stories. It didn't take us long to become close friends.
It took a long time for me to figure out that he was gay, though. Not that it mattered to me. I had never been around any gay people. About all I knew on the topic was that when growing up, if someone called you a queer, well, "Them's fightin' words you sonofabitch!"
I have since come to realize that for me, gay guys are a good thing. A *very* good thing in fact. One of my recurring daydream fantasies is that every guy on the planet (except ME, of course) is gay and all women are horny and straight and desperate. Desperate enough that even I look GREAT!!!
Ok, back to Larry.
I had known him for a couple of years and never really put together all the things that I would notice these days. What finally clued me in was a poster that he had in his living room. It was from a San Francisco bath house. If you are thinking that I'm not all that bright, bingo! On my best days I have a fairly good grasp of the obvious, but those days were a true rarity back then.
Sometime after that brilliant revelation, he told me about the enormous number of anonymous sexual encounters he was having. This was back before AIDS was invented. It was the eighties and the word of the day was "excess". He would tell me that having sex with six men he had never met before, all in a single day, was commonplace.
No way did I believe that!
This was in Austin, Texas and if you have been there in recent years you have almost certainly heard of their party strip downtown--Sixth Street. Years ago, Sixth Street was a different kind of place. It started off as a seedy, run-down street with its collection of transvestite hookers, drunks, and other interesting sorts. It started transitioning into a party strip with loads of decent bars and little oddball shops. During this transition there was a porn shop called "Mr. Peepers".
According to Larry, the real attraction at Mr. Peepers was not the porn. It was the "peep shows". A peep show is a small, closed booth (2 people is kind of squeeze) that has a small TV screen and a coin slot. You drop in quarters and the porn starts playin'. For gay guys back then, it wasn't the porn that was the attraction. It was the fact that there had been some legal ruling that as long as you kept feeding quarters into the slot and kept the porno flick going, then you had an expectation of privacy and the cops could not enter without a search warrant. That was one attraction.
The main feature was the "glory hole".
Chances are that you have heard of glory holes before. After all, skydivers and BASE jumpers, in my experience, are not ones to miss many opportunities to think lewd thoughts. I had heard of them before when I saw a description of them in Al Goldstein's Screw Magazine.
A glory hole is a round hole about the size of a tennis ball in a partition or wall between two booths or stalls where men tend to hang out. For example, the partitions between restroom stalls or, in this case, peep show booths. Not surprisingly, glory holes tend to be somewhere around crotch height.
Anway, Larry was telling me that on Friday and Saturday nights at Mr. Peepers, there were many dozens of gay men blowing each other in these peep show booths and that he could easily have anonymous sex with a dozen men in a night--men who he had never seen. Usually, they didn't even exchange names and, often, didn't even see each others faces.
"Yeah, right! Larry, you have *got* to be making up that bullshit. Who the fuck would do that kind of crap?!!!"
"If you don't believe me, let me know if you're not doing anything on a Friday or Saturday night and I'll show you!"
"Don't hold your breath!"
I've mentioned before that me getting bored is a truly bad thing. This was one of those times that helped me realize just how bad a thing it was.
A few weeks later I was sitting around bored on a Friday night. I decided to call Larry's bluff. I just knew he was full of shit, but proving him wrong would be kind of funny and a good excuse for us to have a couple of beers.
"Hey Larry, I'm calling your bluff. Let's go to Mr. Peepers!"
He laughed, knowing he was going to see some really priceless looks on my face that night. I went over to his place and we headed downtown.
Walking into Mr. Peepers, or simply "Peepers" as the regulars (Like Larry) called it, it looked like I would guess just about any porn shop would look. A wide selection of hardcore mags, vibrators, lubricants, and just about any kind of sex toy you could imagine. I didn't see any big throng of gay guys, so I was really sure at this point that he was full of shit.
That was about to change.
There was a curtained doorway with a sign above it saying "this way to the peep shows" or something like that. Ok, let's check it out.
We went through the curtain and I just about shit!!! It was packed and many of them were looking at me like, "Hmmm. Fresh meat!!!". Had I not had such enormous trust in Larry I would have run like hell.
Larry was getting a kick out of this. He told me not to worry--nobody would screw with me; just stay close to him.
"Deal!"
He then launched into a sort of tutorial. A very weird tutorial.
Remember that legal ruling about peep show privacy? They had signs around giving the details and there was some sort of indicator (a light, I think) outside of each peep show both that lit when the movie was running. Larry uses this to find an empty peep show booth. Being a regular, he had brought plenty of quarters.
So Larry finds an empty peep show booth, we go in, and close the door behind us. He fed some quarters into the slot and some cheesy-ass porn flick starts playing.
Larry got a big grin on his face, pointed to the "glory hole" and then got down on his knees to look through.
"You look through the hole to see if you like the action on the other side", said Larry. "If you do, you then stick your fingers through the hole and give sort of a 'come hither' gesture."
Apparently Larry liked the action on the other side because a few seconds later a big, hard penis comes through the hole.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider this to be anywhere near the realm of the "every day" experience. At least not in my world. I was starting to freak. Larry, on the other hand, was thoroughly enjoying watching my reaction.
There's something about watching one of your close friends blowing a cock sticking through the wall that just screams of being out of the ordinary. I wasn't in Kansas anymore. That was for damn sure.
After a few minutes, Larry gets up, whips it out and sticks it through the glory hole. Now this just looked downright silly.
It looked like he was fucking the wall and having the time of his life. He was laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation and at me, since I was pretty much in a state of shock by that point.
We left after that, which is good because I don't think I could have taken much more. He normally would have stuck around longer to rack up a few more "numbers" but understood that it just wasn't my thing.
Larry and I stayed friends and I never, EVER accused him of bullshitting me again.
Walt
