Erotic Crime Thriller
Cruising, 1980
It's just a flimsy mattressin a hookup motel on a nightwhen the moon is a single studin a leather sky. Just a bedsmelling of spilled poppersuntil two men enter the room,then it's a story: one man layshimself naked, face-down, offeringthe bones of his wrists, anklesto be rope-knotted, the thrillof seeing what can exist afterencountering extremity. Forgive me,I start with desire when I shouldthe movie's first image: a handfloating in a helpless river,cross-fading into a couple of malecops forcing two queer sex workersinto trading their painted mouthsfor freedom. Ask the mattressif it regrets its past life in the flashof crime scene photo. All sex isa body trying to tell a story with a handover its mouth. Because this iserotic crime (there's dick and death),what follows is hours of leatherbardancing, the ass-and-ball-sweatsmell sulking off the celluloid,and plenty of interrogation, too,and a killer who apparently jumpsbodies, as first one nondescriptactor, then another plays him,until the undercover cop at the end [End Page 147] seems to have caught the serialvirus, this being 1980, the endof innocent beds, of innocuous jocks,foam parties and no-condom trade,as if the director, godlike, in tryingto conjure the end of taboo by lookingat how us freaks make love, seeseverywhere instead bloodstaingathering its terrible bloom.I mean in trying to see us gorgeousin strobe light, gorgeous in dimurinals, in park bushes, underthe spinning doom of moon,in trying to make us subjecthe subjected us to our next ravage.I can't help feeling if only theycould have seen one of usas human instead of victim,it would not have happened,the plague. My friendsays I'm being dramatic, saysyou can't blame art for historyor epidemiology, either. Forgive me.I have come here to the river,to the bed, to the edge of foamingtime, to 1980, a year beforethe first reported cases, I havecome with my one good handand all my blood and I will sayanything to save us. [End Page 148]
James Allen Hall's first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in New England Review, A Public Space, and Ploughshares. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Hall is also the author of a collection of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, which won Cleveland State University Press's Essay Collection Award, judged by Chris Kraus. Essays appeared in Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cutbank, Redivider, Bellingham Review, and Bennington Review. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College, where he serves as an associate professor of English and directs the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
