Episode 14 ❤️🩹 1976 : Blame it on Beauty & the Beast
Or How I Came to be Sleeping in a Gay Bathhouse
2025
I don’t know much about little boys or grown men either, but I do know about little girls and how we’re raised. We’re fed bowls and bowls of those sugary, stars-in-your-eyes fairytales that permeate childhood, Disney, and the advertising of just about everything.
Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. Pretty, well-loved ninnies whose real lives began when they were rescued by a charming prince. That’s the basic plot, innit?
Nah, bruh. Look deeper.
Cinderella was an abused & ragged orphan whose life changed when she succumbed to a man with a foot fetish.
Snow White, a teenaged half-wit runaway and the only female living in a commune of midgets, was poisoned, “died,” and was saved by a necrophiliac.
Sleeping Beauty was shuttled off to a foster home, “for her own good.” She succumbed to the lure of the needle, and fell into a coma, it took being molested by a somnophiliac to save her.
Disney made a fortune with these stories, but none of them are mine.
I didn’t believe in princes coming to the rescue, there’d been no evidence of that in my family.
I wanted one who kept me safe by scaring everyone else away.
I want one who needs me.
If you need me, you love me1.
I roll to Beauty and the Beast.
In a nutshell, if you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know the story: to save Daddy, Beauty volunteers to be Beast’s hostage, Beast is the biggest bad in town, but her Love turns him back into the Prince. She gets castles, riches, a husband, saves Daddy2, and lives happily ever after.
Beauty and the Beast ruined me; that story can be blamed for just about all of my bad romantic decisions and with only one or two exceptions in sixty-plus years, my romantic decisions were almost all bad, rarely romantic, or even actual decisions. I wasn’t looking for handsome or charming; I wanted a prince that was damaged. I wanted the Biggest Bad.
1976
The head of Ace’s cock peeked out from the white towel he’d wrapped around his waist. The Continental Baths3 offered an extensive variety of penises, but Ace was, well, unique.
I knew Ace from the Chalice, before Speedy, before Frankie even.
He was dark and dangerous—olive skin, rippling belly, thick lips, soft dark hair falling into his eyes. Tempting the way teenage boys ripe in their burgeoning man-ness are, hormones flooding everything all the time, sex straining to get out, express itself, explode.
He really wasn’t much more than blip on my timeline, the only thing worth remembering is the first time he touched me. He’d walked up to where I was sitting — by the cigarette machine at the foot of the stairs. I love a corner seat with easy access to let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here, a view of the shenanigans, and at least one wall to lean on.
Ace leaned in to kiss me, sliding a strong hand down my thigh, my calf, into my boot.
He grabbed the knife I kept in my boot…
A knife in my boot because…you never know and wearing it made me feel like a badass.
In a few years, in the loft bed of my own apartment, I’ll start sleeping with a skinning knife wedged between the mattress and the wall and realize too late that the blade isn’t long enough to kill, only to anger. He was a thick man, it was a short blade. I’d come away from that rape blaming myself for not having had a knife big enough to pierce his lungs. Blaming myself for not seeing it coming, he’d been a friend, after all, until that night. I didn’t have a very high bar for friendship. Or romance.
…I let Ace take the knife. Instead of kissing me, he pressed the knife to the soft of my belly, leaned in closer and smiled. The cut was deep enough to bleed, but not enough for scars or stitches.
So much for my badassery.
I can hear how crazy it sounds now, but I knew when he cut me, that there was no way I wasn’t giving Ace a test drive. Angry and dangerous got to me in a way nothing else did. It was Beauty and the Beast. I still have the Golden Book. I would tame the beast. All the beasts. Turn them into the princes they were meant to be.
I know now that the OG Beast I wanted to charm, the OG Beast whose attention I craved and would never have, was my father. Beauty and the Beast was just another version of “Someone has Daddy issues.”
But I didn’t know any of that, then.
Later, that night, or another night, the three of us were alone. Me. Ace. And what Lenny Bruce would’ve described as looking like “a baby's arm with an apple in its fist.” If all my holes were laid end to end, I couldn’t accommodate what Ace was working with.
He was built for gay porn and worship, but not for actual sex with anyone other than a few old size queens.
I spend a lot of time wondering what happened to this one or that. Some I can track, others I can’t. You didn’t always use your government name. Names are changed on a whim—this was pre-social media, the internet, permanent files. Before easily accessible records, before FOIA. People could just…evaporate.
I don’t want to be face-to-face with most of the faces from my past, even if they’re still alive. Is that arrogant? I’m still here. But a lot of people got sucked into the vortex, died in the 80’s AIDs plague, overdosed, were murdered. Evaporated. Or maybe they got sucked into obscurity and dullness and would have nothing more interesting to say than, Remember When?
And here he was again, Ace, standing next to the waterfall in the Continental Baths, in his towel.
On a good day, I didn’t know what to do when I ran into someone I’d had sex with—we can define a good day as one when I’m wearing actual clothes. I about-faced back to the small room I was sharing with Speedy.
“Room” being a generous description, it was as wide as the single mattress on the floor, with “walls” that didn’t reach the ceiling. Sex is noisy. Performative sex is even noisier. The Baths had been designed for pleasure, not privacy or discretion.
My back stuck to the red glossy wall, sweat creating suction as I lay on my side, watching Speedy sleep. My body ached. I’d barely slept. Laying on his back, he took up most of the space.
But, I was grateful to be there…
Three Days Earlier
He’d stashed me in his mother’s apartment on 167th and Southern in the Bronx, then went off to wherever hustlers go when they go. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to think about what’s a lie and what’s not.
When he’s with me, he’s with me.
I watched novelas with his mother while she ironed his shirts and jeans and babbled endlessly in Spanish. I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Mama didn’t speak English.
Maybe she hated me and was describing how she’d kill me.
Maybe she was planning our wedding.
But, that’s how I came to get smacked. I needed air that didn’t smell of scorched cotton, the sound of someone speaking English, and something to take the edge off. I found some guys under the El getting high and they spoke English. I pulled up a piece of the sidewalk and made myself t’home.
I didn’t see him. He didn’t say a word until the back of his hand made contact with my face. It knocked me off my feet. The get-high crew got quiet.
“What the fuck was that,” checking my jaw and getting up off the ground.
I wasn’t afraid of getting hit. Not a brag, just a statement—I could take a pretty good punch when I had to. I wasn’t immune to pain, but I wouldn’t let you know you hurt me. I’d been practicing that skill for a long time—mostly emotional pain—but really, words hurt a lot more and for a lot longer than getting smacked.
“What the fuck? What the fuck you say to me? What the fuck you doin’ out here? I tol’ you, stay inna house. What the fuck you think you’re doing?” His face was balled up like a fist, his actual fist pulled back like he was gonna clock me any second. He wouldn’t. He’d smack me, yeah, but he wouldn’t punch a white girl in the face, at least not me, at least not in the street.
“I was losing it. Nobody to talk to. Your sister speaks English, just not to me she don’t. Spani, spani, spani all day, Spanish. Spanish newspapers, Spanish food, Spanish TV. Spani, spani, blah, blah, blah. No one to talk to, nothing to do, I don’t know where the hell you are. I might as well go home…
“Those pendjos. You don’t know…” he grabs my arm and starts hustling me down the street towards his mother’s building.
“I know one thing, maricon. I know I wasn’t getting smacked around ‘til you showed up…I know that much.”
Okay, so I know one or two words in Spanish.
And I’m sure I knew better than to call him queer in any language. It’s just, well, stuff comes into my head and sometimes just sort of falls out of my mouth. So, really, that second smack, I had that one coming.
And that’s how I came to be staying in his room in the Continental Baths that night, the only girl there. My jaw ached, my back was sore, but I felt kinda good because I’d won the argument.
I’ma stick with Speedy for now.
Speedy thinks fucking me means he’s not a maricon.
I think fucking him means I have a boyfriend.
It wasn’t love. I knew that, then.
What we had were Complementary Delusions.
He’s still sleeping. I pull my clothes out from underneath him, shake out the wrinkles the best I can, head up the stairs, and then I’m out. 73rd Street. Sunlight. I can’t handle people looking at me when I’ve been out all night and it’s been days.
I can’t stand being in the light, which is ironic, because all I ever wanted was to be seen.
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This statement will birth an essay of its own one day
For further reading: see Electra complex, Carl Jung, 1913
historical footnote: The Continental Baths lived in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, pre-Stonewall, pre-gay pride. It was glorious—with a pool, waterfall, disco and private rooms. In 1976, it that space became the first location of the infamous Plato’s Retreat. Something about the basement of the Ansonia just screamed sex! Learn more here:
From the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project: Continental Baths at the Ansonia Hotel
From the Guardian: Sex, disco and fish on acid: how Continental Baths became the world's most influential gay club
From Splice: The Continental Baths: The gay bathhouse that birthed electronic music legends
The Splice Playlist
From the Daily News: Sex, swingers and the Mafia: Inside notorious NYC club Plato’s Retreat
Video: Saturday Night at the Baths, 1975
Video: Continental, 2013 documentary
Love it, Jodi! Your stories are always so raw and honest and with the clarity you’ve gained over the years your insights are really poignant. Something about the juxtaposition of the poignancy and the grit makes your writing so strong and compelling.
I listened rather than read, which was new. Cool to hear you tell the story in your voice. The very last part cut off, not sure if that was on purpose or for dramatic effect. Just the last line about always wanting to be seen.
Just about every little chapter of your story could be a whole book. You have LIVED. Love that you’re getting it onto the page.