The Mineshaft, the Navy, and
pissing in the wind…
Wet Dreams, Golden Showers
Gay reality often reads like fiction. Mainly because the gay sense of adventure, that sense of openness to experience, causes fantasy to turn into fact and, once turned, that fact is often so outrageous in its reality, it sounds like fiction to people too chickenshit to pursue their fantasies. “What,” they ask, “would happen if you actualized your fantasies? There’d be nothing left to fantasize about.”
Wrong. There would be new fantasies, one-step-further fantasies, push-the-limit fantasies. There would be bent, sick, twisted fantasies, and new lost horizons to celebrate.
A man without fantasies is a man of the First Kind.
A man afraid to actualize his fantasies is a man of the Second Kind.
A man who acts out his fantasies is a man of the Third Kind.
BACKROOM BARS: STAND-UP SEX
The backroom bars, watering holes for night bloomers, are phenomena of the Third Kind: Contact. They are native to San Francisco and New York. They began as literal backrooms, spontaneous, in bars like The Tool Box, The Folsom Prison and The Ambush. They came out on their own as The Covered Wagon, The Anvil and with increasing intensity, The Zodiac, The Toilet, and the latest infleshtation The Mineshaft.
GREENWICH VILLAGE:
THE MINESHAFT EXPERIENCE
After midnight, after the lights go down low, a man of the Third Kind can see what the boys in the backroom will have: fantasy actualized a la carte. New York’s Mineshaft is the current frontrunner. Up a steep stairway to the entrance, and then down a steep stairway, The Mineshaft offers “The Lourdes Room,” featuring a full-length white porcelain bathtub suitable for baptizing and initiating any man who dares.
Any given night, a man can climb into the tub for nonstop Golden Showers. Fairer faucets, major and minor (less than seven inches), than he ever dreamed of, turn on — literally — to him and all over him. Saturday nights, especially, on three sides of the tub, men press in, six or seven deep. Men nearest the tub unbutton their Levi’s, unsnap their leather codpieces, or go for their meat by peeling down their jocks. They are the front line of the Third Kind, pressed from behind by dozens of others chugging their beers as they press forward toward the tub.
BATHTUB PISS ORGIES
A single red light illuminates the dark Italian faces of Renaissance laborers from the 15th century, the blond moustaches of Vikings, the bared chests of nippling Jews wet with the humid cellar sweat. Often, a man of no patience drops to his knees to drink the piss of a man three rows back from the tub. The pissers move around the private scene toward their target: the man, laid back in the white tub, sometimes naked, more often wearing only construction boots, athletic socks, a piss-soaked jock, maybe a USMC fatigue hat.
One night, a perfectly groomed dude climbed into the tub wearing wingtips, a Brooks Brothers dark wool suit, Ivy League tie, a white oxford-cloth dress shirt which, when he pulled open the suit coat, exposed holes cut out over his large nipples on his hairy chest. His hands found his crotch and fished his own cock hard from his white jockey shorts. On all sides, he looked up at the fifty or so piss-filled men looking down on him. A guy in full leather hawked up some deep spit and flumed it down on the dark suit. His baptism had begun.
The ritual runs nightly the same. The dozen men closest to the tub rim are in various erect stages of pissing. Some unbuttoning, some whipping it out fast. Others teasing it out slowly. One peels back his lip of heavy foreskin through his full hardon. One stands, muscular arms folded across his thick pecs, eyes closed, waiting for his piss to work its way down from inside his tight belly to his dick hanging out of his jeans: untouched, untouchable, but willing to piss down hard and heavy on the right motherfucker laid back in the tub. One by one, then in pairs, building to four and five at a time, they join together in a waterfall of piss.
Each chooses his own target. A man in the tub can study how some guys choose to piss on his boots. Others on his jock. Many on his chest. Most on his face and shoulders. The streams come thick. Some with firehose force. The hard ones piss straight down on his body. The thicker soft cocks rain down in a curved arc of beer-rich piss.
Ordinary to great bodies climb into the tub. Every body looks better hosed down with gallons of shiny piss. The look of the wet skin. The sound of hot piss splashing on warm flesh. The feeling, from celebration to humiliation, of aiming cock to piss on another man’s cock and balls. The feel, to the man in the tub, of twenty streams of piss hitting him at once. The hot energy trade-off, man to man, in a communion of piss.
SIGHTS TRULY SEEN: PISS JOCKS
One dark-headed guy stands at the head of the tub with a dozen orange-and-blue Bike supporter boxes. He opens them slow and deliberate. One by one. Pulling out of each a clean new jockstrap. He opens the first box and throws the jock on the belly of the body soaking in the tub. Three dudes turn their dicks directly on to the new jock. It soaks up their piss fast. The second Bike box opens and the second jock lands in the tub. Again and again. The bearded guy tosses each box to the floor as he tosses each jock on top the man in the tub.
Another guy, one of those blonds with a thick red Marlboro moustache, sticks a finger through a small hole near the neck of his own white teeshirt. Slowly he tears the white cotton, shredding it to strips of rag, revealing his good pecs and smooth belly. He holds the rag of teeshirt balled up in his hand. His other hand pulls out his cock. He pisses long and heavy into his torn teeshirt. His cock hardens as he pisses.
The other men, except for one with a piss-load that won’t quit, stop leaking to look at the big long blond. When his teeshirt is soaked, he balls it up, wrings it out over the face of the man in the tub. Then he pisses in the shirt some more. Two other guys piss toward his cock pissing into the shirt. One hits the shirt. The other hits the blond’s jeans.
Nothing bothers him. Pissed out, he lobs the dripping teeshirt like a wet softball into the face of the man in the tub. He catches it in his mouth and sucks it. Loud. His eager sucking causes six or seven more cocks to piss in his face.
The dude with the dozen jockstraps stuffs one of them into the tub drain. The tub fills up fast. Pisswaves slosh side to side as the man in the tub twists and bobs for all the piss he can handle. As row after row of men moves in, the piss level covers most of his body. Once he slips. In the dripping, shuffling silence his hand makes the squeak of flesh sliding in a wet tub. For a moment, his whole head disappears under the piss and floating jockstraps.
A big fucker in full leather reaches down into the piss and dredges him up by the hair. The man in the tub gasps. Swallows. Wallows. Kneels up. Jerking off. Mouth open. Piss hitting his face. With him kneeling, the tub has room for two. Another guy climbs in for the same treatment. Both of them make gurgling sounds, mouths open, hunched back waist deep in the piss.
The guy with the jocks starts dredging them out. Fully soaked. No reason to wring them out. One at a time he pulls on the dripping jocks until his cock and balls are completely padded beneath a dozen straps soaked with the piss of nearly a hundred guys. He moves off into the darkly lit cellar and is lost in the crush. The second guy into the tub dives for the teeshirt in the drain. He comes up with it in his teeth. The men piss harder in his face. He’s working for it, begging for it, drinking it, as the tub level goes down. Slowly. The last piss swirls, gurgles, and leaves the tub slick. The first man climbs out, helped by the men standing nearest the tub. He’s satisfied. He’s had his turn. His scene is over.
Now the tub is ready for the new guy. He’s busy already sucking the piss off the thigh-high rubber boots of a man who has thrown his fireman-booted leg across the tub. A fresh dozen dicks stream into the changing scene.
Off in another Mineshaft corner, in more private spaces, other men have waded off to bridge waters of their own. Near the bar, a short muscular man pisses into his empty beer can. He hands it to his buddy. They nod. They smile. The buddy drinks.
WET REALITIES: USMC
Camp Pendleton survival training teaches the young Marine recruits that to survive they can drink their own piss twice and eat their own shit once. Navy survival training is even better. For years, in fact, naval officers and cadets have whispered about the Navy Torture Camps: beatings by guards, “tiger cages,” the starvation, and especially the exotic water tortures.
The source of all this cruel, unusual, and hard-on punishment of young American males is not a foreign prison camp. It is the U.S. Navy’s own hard-assed school for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE). Designed to train servicemen to survive the rigors of POW life the Navy’s two SERE programs, one at Warner Springs near San Diego and another in northwestern Maine, lost their secrecy recently when an embittered SERE graduate filed suit against Navy personnel, exposing the SERE training as an S&M reality.
NAVY PISS: SEX ABUSE?
Navy Lt. Wendell Richard Young rejected the secrecy forced on every SERE graduate, telling tales of fetid tiger cages, beatings and jarring judo flips by Navy instructors he called “gorillas,” and a torture device called the “water board.” Young also charged, though not in his suit, that SERE students have been tortured into spitting, pissing, and shitting on the American flag, masturbating on order before Navy guards and, on one occasion at least, engaging in sex with an instructor.
The Navy denied the unsubstantiated charges of sexual abuse, but it did acknowledge the use of water torture and physical punishment in its training camps. A Navy spokesman, Comdr. William Collins, insisted that these activities were mostly “illusions of reality” that were not as dangerous as they seemed.
These “illusions of reality” done in the name of “patriotic military training” sound very close to the “illusions of reality” done nightly in the name of “sleazy sexual ritual.” In America, it’s not what you do, it’s what you call it in order to excuse it.
DON’T ASK! NAVY HAZING TURNS SAILOR GAY
An ex-Navy officer, who was not gay at the time of his SERE training, explained that it was only after he was out of the Navy and had come out sexually that he realized the full implications of the week-long SERE training which he was forced to take on threat of disciplinary action.
He was stripped to his skivvies and boots and made to stand at attention in a line with the other young officers forced to take the San Diego training. They were hooded one by one, “sacked” the guards called it, with a heavy canvas bag tied around the neck. After that he saw no one except for contact with the guards. His hands were tied behind his back and he was locked in a kneeling position inside a small wooden box where he was left hooded, tied, and cramped for twenty-four hours. He figured the large tincan between his thighs was for his piss. Hooded he couldn’t see it. Tied he couldn’t get his cock out of his skivvies anyway. He held back as long as he could, hearing the muffled sounds of the other men isolated in other wooden boxes. Finally he had to let go of his piss which wet his shorts, ran down his thigh, and pooled around his knees.
He found out that his piss was to be the excuse.
When the guards opened his box, still hooded, he could not rise from his cramped position. His boots and socks were wet with his piss. The guards, pretending outrage, lifted him bodily and dragged him across the compound, shouting at him about how even a dog won’t piss in its own box. His legs were pins and needles, useless beneath him. They carried him into a room, unhooded him, and with a guard for each foot and hand, laid him out on a plywood torture board, tying him in place spreadeagled.
A hose was brought near his mouth. He was thirsty from the desert heat and the twenty-four-hour isolation. He drank. They pushed the nozzle closer to his face. He drank some more. They pushed the nozzle into his mouth. A strong pair of hands held his jaws closed. The water flooded his mouth, forced out his cheeks, ran out his nose, into his ears, down his throat. He was drowning, choking, drinking to stay alive. They knew what they were doing. Right before unconsciousness, they pulled the hose from his mouth. He thought they were finished.
He was wrong. The water torture lasted over an hour.
A tube was forced through his left nostril and fed the three-foot length to his belly. The water hose was attached to the tube. His belly filled to full distention. He admits to begging them to stop. Instead, they shoved a water-soaked teeshirt into his mouth, leaving only one nostril free for breathing.
Then a guard posing as a foreign interrogator, climbed up on the board, astraddle his bound waist, and kneaded his bloated belly until he was screaming into the teeshirt. He felt he could take no more. They knew he could. He knew he had to. They continued. The guard, kneading his belly rising and sitting, rising and pushing on his belly, then sitting back across his piss-soaked skivvies, worked him over with obvious pleasure.
Such isolation, torture, and forced feeding continued for the week. And with good reason.
AMERICAN POW’S, COMMUNIST VIOLENCE
Some facts get ignored, because American culture — confused about sex and violence — does not want to focus on the sexual aspect of torture endured by returning American soldiers captured by the enemy. In his clinically detailed book, P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience, Reader’s Digest Press, 1977, research-writer John Hubbell writes of how the enemy attacks the macho American prisoner by belittling his manhood. He exposes how in Vietnam prisoners were forced to crawl through enemy latrines on their hands and knees, left for weeks tied in their own waste and sometimes sexually tortured. Hubbell reports facts that never made the evening news.
For instance, in a torture cell 150 miles south of Hanoi, a Navy pilot, was interrogated in a scene of sadistic bondage-suspension torture as an American “air pirate.” Made to squat on the seat of a chair, the young flier’s arms were tied tighter than a tourniquet behind his back. A rope, knotted through his shoulders, connected to a wood rafter. The chair was kicked out. He swung and hung from his shoulders. Agony. Suspension. Pain. Watching his torturer, seated behind a big desk, watching him. Watching his torturer masturbating during the session where he hung suspended for two to three hours. (Pages 352, 353)
The national conversation in American media — at least before the internet — has never addressed the known sexual abuse of American POW’s from Vietnam or any other war — as if rape, which is about power, happens only to one gender. Men have been raped by invaders and conquerors since Cain killed Abel and moved to Bosnia. It doesn’t mean they or their rapists are homosexual; and it doesn’t give homosexuality a bad name. Homosex like heterosex, both legit in use, can become illegit in abuse. Can TV’s talking heads explain this?
At least the American military tries to deal with this sex-torture. Such in-your-face and up-your-ass realities cause the military to prepare its “Ask-and-Tell” heterosexual men for sexual abuse — and cause some civilian belief in the secret training details coming to light: the gay-seeming “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” spitting, pissing, shitting, masturbating, and powersex all juiced with excuse as preparation for patriotism. “C’mon, maggot! Faggot!” Or is such institutionalized, ritualized survival training just hetero S&M in military culture? So, ironically, if homosex rape is taught as a terrible torture that can happen to a POW, small wonder the military is confused about the pleasure of consensual homosex.
THAT’S STRAIGHT PISS FOR YOU
For relief, comic and cockwise, Burt Reynolds won the Wet Oscar for Best On-Screen Piss in Semi-Tough when he inserted his dick into a rubber hose, strapped it down his leg, and pissed into a metal flask strapped inside his boot. The loud soundtrack outdoes rain on a hot tin roof. Pasolini, in his version of Something for Everyone called Teorema, films the humpy teenaged son pissing off the family balcony. In Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, a classic gay version of The Wild One the lead biker stands on an altar in a church and pisses into the chalice of his helmet, and finally pisses down on all the worshipers gathered around him.
In prison plays and film like Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes or Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, the piss scene is obligatory. Experienced cons usually take to shoving a new dude’s head into the cellblock toilet in an initiation as time-honored as the Hell’s Angels’ initiation of pissing on a new member’s colors. And his leather jacket. And his jeans. From then on an Angel pulls off the road strictly for a good shit. Piss just goes off like a rocket in his pocket.
What we do after midnight at the Mineshaft is a high-flying reality that has naturally to do with male animals pissing on their own territory. Richard Gere, probably feeling on top of the world at the height of his American Gigolo film career, received a citation from a New York police officer for publicly pissing on a Greenwich Village street. The omnipotent media magnate and cup-winning sailor, Ted Turner, pissed triumphantly over the side of his sailing sloop after winning a major East Coast race. No wonder the extra-ordinarily handsome daddy Ted Turner has been dubbed by the media as “Captain Outrageous.”
SOME LIKE IT HOT
Ancient warriors bathed in piss. Victorian athletes rubbed themselves down with piss before a good cricket match. Health addicts for years have claimed piss perfect for brushing the teeth. India’s Prime Minister Norarji Desai announced recently: “For the past five or six years, I have drunk a glass of my own urine–about six to eight ounces–every morning. It is very good for you, and it is even free. Even in the Bible it says drink from your own cistern. What’s your own cistern? It is your urine. Urine is the water of life.”
Some men, always working toward versatility, often take a liking for piss: from beer-clear to early morning thick. The range of preference is an acquired taste; the reasons for taking another man’s piss range from the sacred to the profane.
Some guys start off early in life pissing, as little boys, into the family john with their little brother having races to see who will finish first. Others start later, at college bars, pissing into the same trough. Refinements set in: going off to bars across from police stations to give the porcelain a good lick when the cops come in after duty for a quick beer quickly pissed out; pissing up a guy’s ass before, during, and/or after a good hard fuck; preparing the basic water sports emblem, a piss-soaked jock, tucked into the back pocket.
RECYCLE
Variations on any theme, even Handel’s “Water Music,” are as endless as the inventive mind of man. Run an ad in a sex/fetish newsletter for “Mason Jars of Dirty Bathwater” and takers will beat a path to your P.O. Box. You just can’t out-fetish and out-fantasize and out-actualize all of the people all of the time. But that is The Joy of Water Sports, like the joy of almost everything else: finding out that you as a man of the Third Kind are not alone, and in piss, more than almost anything else, together men sink to swim.