`lunch’
The sign at the door kindly reminds you that it is a naked club and that you’re to hand over your clothes to the barman, who’s wearing nothing but a cock ring and boots. There are some “first-timers” who usually sit in the back and have to pay R2 more for drinks for not being naked. You notice them immediately because they look odd among the unclad.
The Cosmos Naked Bar in Bertrams where clothing is a no-no looks over the valley from the top floor of an office block. You get a panoramic view of Johannesburg, complete with phallic Ponte City and its throbbing neon Coke sign.
The place started as a leather bar, but soon degenerated. It’s here you can see the real gay SA in all its colours, sizes and lengths. It is here too, where you might find a nervous q.co.za editor, confronted with Calvinist guilt, but rushing upstream with hidden desires. My Ouma, who was born on a wagon in the Western Transvaal, used to say: “You can dance, just don’t enjoy it too much.”
The background music is from the Eighties, almost sentimentally so. Some songs hail from the pre-Aids period, and looking around at all the “barebacking” (the full act without latex) you’d think you were caught in a time warp. Too nervous to close my eyes and sink into sin lest my Ouma’s face suddenly beam itself into consciousness like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. Standing very close to the bar, the family jewels carefully shielded from plain sight, I have the overwhelming urge to say to the muscle man next to me: “Well, I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore,” but change my mind.
As I walk away from the bar I hear Jeb saying behind me, “That’s right, sin your way to salvation” and I nearly swallow a whole ice cube. The atmosphere is thick with smoke and the place is ever so dimly lit.
The erotic video is called Men in Action and the other monitor has clips from musicals. Tony Curtis is reminding Jack Lemmon (both in drag): “Remember, you’re a girl!”
The last time I was in such a dark place was at the Rand Easter Show fun park in 1976. I wanted then too to go into the house of horrors, titillated by the idea of being touched by grisly things in the dark. But also appalled. I remember being fascinated by Frankenstein’s strange sexiness.
I decide to go for another “ride”. The “sling room” is probably the most transgressive of the lot. A man is hanging in it with his rear in the air like he’s about to launch a missile. But he is being fisted. Again I’m appalled and fascinated. It’s a little like watching a horror movie: you both want to see and not to see.
The next ride is less confrontational. The cubicles have the feel of a confessional and you demonstrate your love through a hole in the wall. You have to close your eyes at this point to imagine what physical form is receiving you. The communal activities are too daring and I escape. But you have to go via Frottage Alley with its wall of groping hands, like Catherine Deneuve in Compulsion. I finally understand the movie.
Freshly emerged from the underworld I feel a strange sort of liberation from having stripped in public. Jeb’s promises that “it becomes easier each time” seem to be true. I feel exhilarated and want to tell the world, but whatever will they think?