My First Job After High School Was At The Gay Meeting Place

After high school I worked as an usher and projectionist in our town's movie theatre. There were matinee showings with names like 'Chrysanthemum Under the Sun', twenty minute shorts. The audience was older men alone. Men who liked men, young men play wrestling on the sand. I sat in the back, watching the men, watching men move to sit beside each other. Usually two shorts were shown before noon, 'Alone at School'.

One day I saw my uncle walk in and take a seat in the rear of the theatre, after the movie started about some guy discharged from the Navy, a body builder type with a tiny loin cloth at the gym, a man went and sat beside my uncle. An arm thrown over the shoulder, a head and shoulders disappear. I saw the man leave, he worked at the Package Stop and had a reputation for being light in the heels.

Over the summer I set up and ran and watched a couple dozen movies during the matinee hours. Same men from the week before, young men nervously waiting to be invited over, slumped in their seats making out, men bent over and then coming up for air.

I learned thru the black man that cleaned the theatre that the owner had a room with a velvet red bed behind his office, where young men visited for an hour or too. I Never got hit on or m****ted, I did my job and watched but never participated.