I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Gaped lads fisted up to the Shoulder of Brian. I’ve watched lube packets glisten in the dark room whilst blokes masturbate. All these moments lost in time like spunk down the drain... time to die. 

When I found out last September that I had failed my first year of uni and would have to go back and redo the worst part of it again, I was faced with the unenviable task of trying to find employment in a post-COVID job sector. In all my previous five years of work experience, none of the several positions I held ever brought me joy. Be it the sixteen hours I spent routing customer service calls out of an Ipswich industrial estate to the thirty months I spent shifting petrol, fags and booze for Esso, I had always longed for even the most minimal amount of excitement in my work.

Trawling through the job sites I naturally found myself drawn to the bustling bars of Soho. An entertainment district known only in infamy, it offered all the lights, sights, and perverse delights a promising young fag like myself could desire. Out of all the times I’d visited London before moving there, I’d been limited to the tourist traps of Tussaud’s, Tate Britain and Trafalgar Square and I was eager to get a real taste of the capital. It wasn’t long until I took up a trial shift at some poncy cocktail bar on the arse end of Chinatown. The first few hours passed by with no issue, the customers tipped handsomely and the atmosphere was comparatively nicer than the heterosexual wine bars and pool clubs of my hometown. And then happy hour began.

For two hours I fought an onslaught of scantily clad twinks and their glad rag hags as they hammered me with their shrieking volleys of orders for passionfruit martinis and Long Island Ice Teas. I struggled to keep pace. The only “cocktail” I’d ever made before then was some sickening blend of K Cider and Glen’s vodka at a high school house party. By nine o’clock, my clothes were stained with gomme and the flesh of various bar fruits and I stumbled into a dank stairwell defeated and proceeded to have a panic attack.

Back to the drawing board!

A few weeks had passed and my overdraft was running on fumes. I’d been no closer to employment and the prospect of my autumnal student loan still sat a while away on the horizon. Walking out of a seminar one day I bumped into an old uni mate and we got talking. Over coffee, he began to rave about the new job he snagged as a bar back at a vivacious cruise bar in Central. The more he spoke, the further my mouth gaped in shock. It sounded like the polar opposite of my former role. I could swap diesel for amyl, pumps for pumps, or to put it more succinctly, I’d be working at a place where the phrase “do you come here often” had more than one meaning.

Within hours of contacting the bar I’d been given a trial shift and a few days later I ventured down into its depths. Entering the darkness I was greeted with a somewhat familiar stench; a bittersweet blend of PE changing room, public urinal and local boozer cramped into two-thousand square feet of lecherous activity. A chorus of groans and curses filled the air, occasionally synching with the pulsing Ibiza club beats like a DJ Assault track on Tina.

It hit me that I had almost no knowledge of the culture of cruise bars, my mind previously holding the idea that such a place would be illegal. Now despite my cluelessness, I still had some understanding of the practices of cruising.

Who could forget the sensationalist headlines when George Michael got caught in a tryst amongst the hedges of Hampstead Heath? Many a gay man knows the thrill of anonymous sex in public. I myself had spent many midsummer afternoons in woodland car parks on the outskirts of town offering masturbatory performances to whichever Tom, Dick or Harry would saunter into the tree line. This is undoubtedly an experience of many rural gay lads like myself who had little to no sexual peers of equal age and would thus have to resort to their first fumblings being with men sometimes twice or thrice their senior. At least here, the patrons were safe to do their business without the prying eyes of the Met or the pawing hands of perverts with no concept of consent.

Snapping back to reality I was quickly given a set of tasks, the first of which being collecting empties. Piece of piss in a regular pub, but here you have to dodge an army of stark bollock naked blokes in various displays ranging from solo voyeuristic masturbations to full-on ten-man scenes straight out of an old-school Triga movie. Whilst the lads I worked with were accustomed to such sights, the most naked men I’d been in a room before that night was a poorly planned five-man orgy in a Newmarket cul-de-sac several years back and it would take some adjusting before I could manage the hordes of hundreds divesting their fluids onto these tiles.

The hours flew by and before I knew it I was on the N53 back home to Lewisham. Sitting up top with my 2 am Tesco meal deal, I gleamed at the wad of cash that now blessed the lining of my jacket pocket. Since moving away from Ipswich, this had been the first hard-earned cash I received and my mind was a flutter about how I would spend it.

When I awoke the next morning I sprinted to the shower to try and rid myself of some of the filth that had congregated under my nails. When I got out I FaceTimed my parents to tell them about my new occupation. Mum’d been proud her boy finally had a job and was eager to hear all about it, but as I meticulously detailed the finer points of working in a cruise bar her smile shifted suddenly from a joyous grin to a puzzling maw.

Her shock whilst not unwarranted did come somewhat as a surprise to me. Since I came out ten years ago, I had always tried to be open with them about every aspect of my life. The basis of any healthy relationship is communication and I had always felt safe telling them about anything and everything. Sometimes this would result in me oversharing, like the onetime I told them whilst Christmas shopping in Asda that an ex-partner of mine once used goose fat as lube on me after we realised we had none in the house.

I knew that with time she’d be alright with the idea of her child working in such an establishment. My dad’s response was laughter. To the layman, it would seem that we worked in similar industries. Him a stevedore at a container port, myself a barman at a cruise bar. We both found ourselves working with a mob of sweaty groaning men into the small hours of the night so you’d be forgiven for thinking that.

I remember one of my uncles congratulating me on getting the job and asking what it was like to work on boats, to which I replied that I didn’t work on boats but I did have to deal with a lot of seamen.

And so the routine began. Commute, work, sleep, repeat. Mop the shit, bag the shit, bin the shit. An unrelenting tide of men came into this sanctuary to indulge in all the pleasures they could not upon the surface and just like the tides, I’d be there to wash away their detritus, wave after wave. I soon taught myself to treat each shift like a ritual. I’d begin the ceremony with a blessing of my hands in the bactericidal glory of sanitiser, followed by encasing my hands with latex gloves and charging into the depths of battle like a crusader.

Whilst I never stopped sanitising myself, I did develop an immunity to some of the more repugnant things I’d have to clean. For example, I had no qualms about picking up used condoms with my bare hands. As a matter of fact, I would have preferred it to having to touch the half-eaten food left behind on plates at my previous restaurant jobs. But maybe that’s just my eating disorder talking.

As time went on I began to develop an odd comfort in working at that bar. There’s great camaraderie to be found with the lads I worked with and amicability and even friendship to be had with the regulars. I found that if I took my top off during shift, I would garner just as many if not more tips than some of my far more muscular peers.

I’d never had a job where I could use my emaciated form to my own advantage, besides I’m not sure if a twink wearing nothing but cycling shorts flaunting their nipple piercings to a motley crew of bankers, builders and bifurcated husbands would pass the dress code of the Co-op.

It was a wonder how I got to grips with that environment so quickly. A psychologist might say it’s a result of being sexualised from an early age; a consequence of my various dealings with groomers in my adolescence. However, in this instance, I could forgive them for giving my psyche a barrier against having to wipe each of the four humours off the floors, walls and ceilings of a fuck bar on an unceasing loop.

I once remember a mate of mine asked what cleaning the place was like to which I replied ‘think of a bodily fluid and a surface, I’ve more than likely wiped it up off of it.’

Acidic cider vomit in the glories, dehydrated piss up off of the DJ booth, puddles of scat in the changing rooms. Whilst I’m all for releasing one’s inhibitions, I’d rather they did it in a place that was easier to clean.

I remember one time when I was washing my hands in the bathrooms a customer engaged in a post-coital arse wash stretched out his hand toward my face and asked for my number. I felt as though my brain momentarily blue-screened as my nose attempted to process the smell which had been thrust under it. It was times like this when I asked myself why I had to be hardwired to be sexually attracted to men.

I remember seeing a tweet once that said ‘homophobia is understandable, transphobia is not’. 

Whilst I could never excuse homophobia I realise that in some ways I agree with that statement, because at least when trans people use your bathroom to defecate they don’t smear it into the toilet lid and tiles.

As the days turned to weeks and the weeks into months, I realised that my mental health had begun to spiral once again. I’d been sitting on a twenty-four-month waiting list for therapy since the previous summer and found it was misguided to immerse myself in an environment constantly inundated with the very thing I was seeking support for. It’s like if I tried to treat my hay fever by rolling in grassy knolls, although it’s not like I didn’t already do that whilst cruising.

I found myself retreating back into the numbness of my youth. An indescribable feeling of nothingness that invites people to trample over your vulnerabilities. I once again found myself in situations where I was allowing customers at work to grope and assault me; something I thought I grew out of long after I had fled the clutches of my hometown. This naturally led to strains on my personal relationships and I was forced to make a choice between financial security and mental stability.

And so I quit.

In spite of all of this I don’t for one minute regret working in that bar. It played a vital part in my maturity and gave me an insight into my own community that I didn’t have before. We as queers have to create spaces like these to live the life heterosexuals take for granted. On the surface many live the open lives they so deserve, they get married, have children, and thrive. But still, so many people are forced to keep a key part of their identity hidden away, to only be able to appreciate the beauty of sex in hidden places.

Cruising has long been key in the sexual liberation of queer people. Cruise bars are the natural evolution of the back alley buggerings of yore. Whilst we few sodomites still flock to the marshes, heaths and commons of the land, the sanctum of these establishments brings the wonder of homosexual encounters to a whole new audience, away from the societal elements that force them into such retreat.

Perhaps one day we adults could all be free in our sexual indulgences, without the wrath of the homophobia we still see today in our culture. To come together unabashed and without judgement of the things that two or more consenting adults choose to do in private.

Maybe then will we be able to make a better world for ourselves and for those who will one day inherit this mantle just as we inherit the mantle given to us by our queer elders and hidden figures. Without them we wouldn’t be where we are today. They walk amongst us always. Because who knows, the next time you walk past some geezer in the street, he might just have cum on his breath.

Read Brandon’s article in print now in UNDERWORLD 001: SEXXXI+SURREAL