I’m not necessarily proud I Yogayed, but I did. And I want my friends to know about it.
Actually, I am proud. It was fun to be a hippy again. Wait. I was never a hippy. I grew up in Marin, sure, but I was less organic farmer, and more an Yves Saint Laurent closet case. I was far too pinched and tense to be a tennis playing skate boarder, which, if you haven’t guessed, is what all the guys I had crushes on were. Oh Frank and Martin, where are you now?
Playing on a yoga mat with naked gays was like re-visiting my childhood, only with better lighting. And a lot more cock.
GT
April 2009
Scott Capurro
Yogay beckoned. I had such an adverse reaction to flamboyant balancing gays that my friend Vincent accused me of homophobia.
“What does a Vegan Buffet have to do with asana?” I asked, begrudgingly sipping soy.
“Why not boil some lentils and find out?”
When I arrived at the sprawling Victorian home on a quiet street in San Francisco, I was nostalgic yet apprehensive. I knew the house was a hotbed of gay radicalism. And though I’d attended Solstice parties there, and heated up a few beds myself, I’ve never been victimized. I mistrust sloppy political expounding and I think mythology is for druggies. Yet as I walked up the rickety stairs to the main floor, Radical Fairies, those gender bending, tambourine playing, mother earth loving gay heathens darted about like forest nymphs. My palms perspired. Am I too hip to strip? My yoga mat is by Paul Smith!
After slipping off my brogues, and noticing the wood paneled, cock painted, fern hung homage to the 70s that surrounded me, and which, like most childhood memories, I found both charming and suffocating, I strolled past dark closed doors and a large circular glass shower into a larger room that contained, in the center of the shag, a naked, undulating, bearded white guy. He was on his belly, and his hairless, pale body writhed from top past bottom to the brown underside of his bare feet. He was humping the ground. I wondered how fast I could make it back to my car.
“Hey Scott, what are ya’ doin’ here?”
Around a corner came Richard, a teacher raised in Texas whom I’d cruised locally for fifteen years. Blushing with arms akimbo, he appeared annoyingly fit, even in black socks.
“Vincent sent me. I’m really here for the free booze.”
“Don’t tell that to Yoga Daddy.”
“I brought lactose-free brownies.” I was trying to acclimate, organically.
“Very kitsch. Put them in the fridge but mind the bullets. They make a lot o’ noise when they spill, and this is a safe space.”
Matty, the home’s owner, is a cop who’s ready for the Revolution. That night however, he was disrobed and in full Lotus. Others ambled in, sporting tiny shorts, chatting quietly.
I unzipped my cardigan, then looked around for a hanger.
“I’ll put that on my bed.”
Richard lives here? Can I move in?
He turned back. “Shall I take your tie?”
“Do you need one?” I trembled with angst. I became Julie Christie. I pouted.
“Yoga Daddy’s watching you.”
I turned and saw nothing but a kitchen scene on a laptop screen. Then I heard his solemn, monotonous voice.
“Hello. Can anyone see me?”
A red bearded face pressed itself against twelve inches.
“Uh, yes. I can.”
“Hey Scott. It’s me, Carl.”
Carl the builder? We went sailing together once. He has a tail. Well, an extended spine ending with a patch of hair. So…a tail.
The other boys chimed in, praising Skype and greeting Yoga Daddy, who was in Portland on a gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender-questioning AIDS yogic healing circle.
“I’m sautéing spinach now.”
Yoga Daddy led us bumpily through a series of poses. The sound crackled. So did the wood fire. The room grew very warm. Eventually almost everyone was exposed. Eyes were half closed as glistening bodies swayed and swooned through headstand, shoulder stand and downward dog. Each practitioner moved at his own pace. Some even skipped a pose or two. With Carl in another city, discipline lagged.
Starfairy Trilogy (AKA: Henry.) kept his red jock strap strapped. I retained my white unitard, but then I studied modern dance for one semester. We watched each other without eyeing one another, moving cautiously beneath the stained glass. As we both lay panting at the end, I could almost taste the sweetness of his youth. He smelled like straw.
Yoga Daddy mumbled goodbye and we eagerly ate rabbit fodder. Gays disappeared to the Jacuzzi, then reappeared embracing, giggling and much hungrier. Somehow we all wound up in the triple headed shower, rubbing mint gel on one another’s damp, sinewy backs. Starfairy leaned on my arm, and I caressed his smooth balls.
“I shave them in support of our Muslim brothers in Palestine.”
Genuflecting, I pleaded silently that this might be the evening’s final protest. His lack of circumcision surprised me. He smiled. I thought, ‘He’s kind.’
“Are you Canadian?”
“Yes,” whispered Starfairy, “but don’t tell the Fairies. They’re boycotting Maple syrup. Sapping is territorial.”
As my head bobbed, also in agreement, mandolins strummed softly on the outside deck.
