Here the lights are low, and a suggestive video plays nonstop overhead. The Eagle in North Park is not just a bar but a gay bar-and not just that: this is a gay leather bar. For one long moment they ache like crazy. The water is so chilled, my teeth feel as if they’re sprouting tiny, mean hairs. The evening might stretch the length of the bar’s polished, dark-wood surface. Moving my arm to catch a stray beam of light, I check my watch. “It all depends on what you’re interested in,” he says, and takes a deep swig.
He turns back, shrugs, and grabs his bottle of beer by the neck. Bernard cocks his head to the side, a pigeon casting a glittering, incurious eye up at the screen. Without faces, I say, the men have no identity. The TV sends radiant light over the left side of his brown face, across the shoulders of his black leather jacket. On the barstool next to me, Bernard Watkins slouches over his beer, gazing into the dim mid-distance. I turn away from the monitor, suspended from the darkened ceiling. Now, on the TV angled overhead, each headless torso is no more than a soft-porn close-up of nipple, crotch, and butt. Before the video camera cropped them at neck and knee, these were living beings. Near-naked, their bronzed muscles stretched by steroids and molded by Nautilus machines, a cross between Popeye, Mister Clean, and the Michelin Man. Where are their faces? Friday night, and dozens of headless musclemen on video, strutting at some outdoor gay-pride event.
