Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Truckin’ at the Trucks

1970s picture of the trucks in the Village

I heard about the trucks my first summer in New York, in 1967. One of my older friends from Julius’s informed me that guys went to a certain street on the west side of the West Village “to suck cock. It’s sometimes called, ‘the Express,’” he informed me. So you might hear men say, “I’m taking the Express tonight.” Meaning, they were dispensing with all the folderol of going to the bars, and just getting down to business at the trucks. 

It’s kind of hard to imagine, in this age of the very yuppified West Village (we’re talking $7 mil duplex apartments on West Street) what the area was like when it was still working class, you could buy a whole building for $70,000 (the going rate in the mid-60s), and there were warehouses along the waterfront, which necessitated working loading docks for—what else?—trucks.

The interesting thing I always thought about the trucks was that they were left open at night after they were unloaded, so guys could play in them. I didn’t actually go to the trucks until somewhat later, after I had joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, when GLFers used to leaflet them. This was again another interesting aspect of “the trucks,” a generic term that specifically referred to these huge open empty Mack rigs where scores of guys went to congregate and have sex. (In other words, you had “the trucks” just like you had the “tubs,” another simple term for the baths.)

Anyway, another interesting aspect of the trucks was that lots of men went to them for social purposes as well as the obvious sexual one.

This was certainly a part of gay life in the 1960s and into the 1970s, when sex and being social commingled nicely. The hard-core ruthlessness of cruising had not become set in concrete, and one of the great side effects of any gay sex situation was that it was also a good place to connect with multitudes of queer men. Thus GLF and GAA (the Gay Activists Alliance, another early gay liberation group) used to leaflet at the trucks, passing out information about demonstrations, meetings, and other activities.

There were several locations for the trucks, but the one I remember most was off Washington Street, close to the West Side Highway, not very far from a large white-brick apartment building on Christopher Street that became known as the Leather Flats. The Leather Flats was a favorite home for guys into bondage and leather who liked to hang out at places like Kellers, one of the great lost leather bars on West Street, in the building that later became used for Bailey House, a shelter providing housing for people with HIV.

Kellers was also in the vicinity of another famous leather bar, called Dirty Dick’s, that had closed by the time I got to New York. Dirty Dick’s was one of the legendary bars of 1950s-60s New York queer life, and I’ve been told that a lot of equally legendary men liked to go downtown to “slum” there, including Leonard Bernstein. It was a guilty pleasure, and fun if you didn’t get too serious about it.

Kellers though was a serious bar. It was not for nelly posers who only liked to look butch. On my first trip there when I was 19, a guy in his forties in full leather approached me. He looked me over, and asked, “How d' you feel about being tied down?”

I told him I wasn’t interested in having a lover.

He laughed. “Lover? I just want to tie you down, squirt!”

I beat it out of there.

So the trucks were in proximity to Kellers and several other studly queer bars on the Village's far west side. By the early 70s, the trucks had become extremely popular. As in, there might be 100 + guys there on a Saturday night, either milling around outside the trucks, or inside them doing things. Catching diseases at the trucks became a concern, because unlike the baths, there was no place to wash up afterwards, and washing up after sex could prevent some STDs, like penile gonorrhea. “G.C.” as gonorrhea is called clinically was passed around like movie popcorn at the trucks, and it was not that unusual to see the same guys you’d notice at the trucks a couple of days later at the public health clinic in Chelsea on 9th Avenue, being treated for it. But in those days, the popular wisdom (always a mistake to believe) was that G.C. was an easy thing to get rid of, and something not to worry about.

A scene in William Hoffman’s 1985 play As Is takes places at the trucks, and I remember an earlier New York-noir Frank Sinatra movie from 1968 called The Detective with a scene at the trucks as well: so the fact and whereabouts of them was fairly established.

It was certainly established by the cops of the West Village, who could be a pesky bunch. They often raided the trucks, usually with the intention of breaking up what was going on, on the grounds of trespassing, without arresting people—although some arrests did take place. The interesting thing was that since the trucks were intentionally left open to be used for some sort of purpose, it was hard to establish trespassing—so again, it was left up to individual officers to decide how hard-assed they wanted to be about arresting anybody.

A favorite truck story of mine concerns myself and Jerry Hoose, one my favorite GLF brothers.

Jerry, like a lot of us, liked the trucks, and used to visit them often. I, too, liked them but not so much for sexual gratification (OK: I admit that did happen—who the hell am I, Laura Bush?) but I really loved the whole ritual of them: dozens of guys very quiet and seriously pursuing sex, and lots of sex going on very close by. There was the wonderful smell of it—sweat, cum, piss, heat, etc. (I am a big sexual smell fan)—and also the extended reverie of it: like you’re in a deep nocturnal dream, except it’s real. "Reverie," by the way, was a Victorian term for masturbation, and Victorian queer men often asked each other if they were "fans of reverie,” as a means of establishing who was approachable.

Anyway, I was there with my friend Jerry and we were at the back opening of the trucks with lots of guys “doing it.” I was perched on the ledge of the loading dock, either watching or just thinking about what a great night it was when the cops in a flashing squad car pounced. Suddenly a frantic rush of guys flew out of the trucks scattering into every direction, including Jerry. 

But I didn’t move.

I decided that if I wasn’t doing anything, what could they get me for? At the worst, trespassing—and I wasn’t even in a private place, just the ledge of a loading platform. So what could they do? A few cops bypassed me, shrugging, and left me alone.

Several minutes later, the cops were gone, and the guys came back. Among them was Jerry. He started screaming at me:

“You’re SICK, Perry Brass! SICK!!! Anybody who’s not scared of the cops is sick!”

All I could do was just laugh. Or, realize that Jerry might truly have had a point, but I felt at that time in my young life, why be bothered?

One moral of this story was that the trucks had a social dimension often overlooked when you talk about gay cruising areas. I know this must have gone back to ancient Greece, when the older hot guys got together at the gymnasium (remember: gymnasium meant a place where you went to exercise naked), to dish each other and ogle the ephebes (pretty young boys) and talk about what they’d like to do with them. I’m sure Plato and his followers were among them, so touching male flesh had a wonderful, philosophical aspect to it that is now pretty much lost, along with the trucks themselves.

Being a prima facie romantic, I wrote a story that was published in Gay Sunshine, an early gay underground paper from San Francisco, called “The Centaur at the Trucks.”

In the story the protagonist meets a lonely centaur who had just ambled in by accident from ancient Greece to the scene at the trucks, where everyone was so busy cruising and getting down to business (no socializing in this story) that they ignore him. He ends up at the dark back of the truck, where you could not see you hand in front of your face. So no one knows that from the waist down he’s a horse. This means that as guys feel him up in the dark, they find nothing immediately between his front legs, and reject him. (A usual story!) Until he meets the narrator, versed in mythology, who is overjoyed to find him, and who has a great time with him back there and then invites him home. But he has to get the centaur out of the trucks and into the subways—and even in New York, where people are good at ignoring you, this is not easy.

In the end, the centaur goes back to ancient Greece, and the narrator ends up missing him terribly—but I’m sure that does not keep him away from the trucks, where he is now up for anything: after all, you never could tell what you’d find at the trucks.

You can learn more about 3-time IPPY Award winner and gay activist Perry Brass at his website, www.perrybrass.com . You can order his new book The Manly Art of Seduction from Amazon in regular paper format  or on Kindle . You can also learn more about his books at SmashWords, the complete Internet marketplace for all things EBooks and otherwise, and on his Author Page at Amazon . The Manly Art of Seduction was recently named a gold-medal winner of an IPPY Award for 2010, from Independent Publisher. You can reach him at belhuepress@earthlink.net  if you have questions or comments you want to personally direct to him.