Mansex Agitprop Seattle

The SRI's last public event--last, as in most recent, and last, as in, that's the last of the SRI -- went all right. Contra my fondest wishes and secret hopes, it was just all right.

I had thought -- without thinking it through -- the event would be like this one in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, both in structure and intensity, if not in the actual sequence of variety acts:

Whether it was because my illness grew exacerbated by the incense, or owing to sheer excitement, I felt it wise to slump to the floor so as not to excite my nerves more than I knew they would be excited by what I was about to undergo, and I allowed my head to rest against the boots of a young white gentleman who told me not to think of formality but to make myself comfortable...

"Are you a bosom friend of the Mime?" the young man whispered in my ear. "I feel I am losing consciousness," I told him, "you may have to care for me." But my lightheadedness didn't seem to alarm me somehow or my companion either, who merely went on humming the tunes he heard played on the piano.

....................

While this was going on, I had not realized that the young man next to me had almost entirely undressed me. My overcoat was gone, and my trousers and shorts had disappeared. Thinking he was about to enjoy my body, I turned to question him but he had of course disappeared.

...when the Mime, unable any longer to be standing unheralded in the wings, leaped out and seized Millicent for his partner, and began doing an unparalleled two-step with her, to the fresh enthusiasm of the audience, for it was suddenly apparent she needed only his guiding hand to be brilliant. Indeed, their duo bid fair to be the hit of the season at the Arcturus Gardens when suddenly, from the back of the theater, somebody shouted "Po-lice!" Purple in the face and puffing from their exertions, Millicent and Elijah nonetheless danced on, gliding into a tango. The bluecoats had arrived through the broken front door, with their nightsticks twirling, and, thinking they could only be coming for me, I dashed bare-assed for the fire escape, and then just as I was descending I heard gunfire...

I did harbor a secret desire that our gala should culminate in audience members disrobing, or fainting, or repairing to the gender-undesignated bathrooms, and then finally that the police should arrive, "nightsticks twirling," to bust up our exhibition of this 'unrated' film in which Smith college students re-enact the boys' prep-school novel A Separate Peace.