Men in Uniform

If you've read my earlier posts, you know that I was outed by the police when I was in high school back in the 1960s. Over the years, I've had other events in my life that involved men in uniform; some fun, some funny, some more serious. Like a lot of gay men, I've always had a thing about men who fill out uniforms nicely. It hasn't ever reached the fetish stage, but my sexual fantasies haven't been totally bereft of them.

I've never been lucky enough to pick up a man in uniform, per se but I did have fantasies about my Uncle John who was in the air force in the 1950s. He was stationed in Kaiserslautern in West Germany. John was and still is a very handsome gay man who gladly and willingly served his country in uniform. My mother had a wonderfully sexy picture of John (her younger brother) in his air force uniform. Talk about a hunk.

In the early 1960s my family drove cross country from Oregon to Michigan for a family reunion. John was there, as were all of my maternal grandmother's seven children. I found myself trying to spend as much time with John as I could but I was a gawky teenager who had an obvious crush on him. He was kind but didn't spend a lot of time with me. But the day we left to drive home to Oregon, as everyone was saying goodbye, I was anxious to give Uncle John a hug and say goodbye. He was trying to get out early too and was in the shower when we started to leave. In a desperate but calculated act, I ran into Grandma's house calling his name, and ran into the bathroom to say so long. I caught him standing in the tub drying off. Naked. Plumb naked. I could hardly speak but managed to mumble goodbye and backed out of the room. I held on to that image for years.

Later on after we both came out to one another, I had the opportunity to visit John at his Ft. Lauderdale home. We had a great time visiting and he introduced me to a friend who rented a small apartment that John had converted from the garage. It was my first introduction to a real, live, hunky, bear cop. The day he appeared and John introduced us he was in full uniform. John had to poke me to get me to close my mouth and be polite. The Florida State bull was a gay man's wet dream and I was ready and willing to go to jail to see him naked. Unfortunately, since I wasn't into leather or the leather lifestyle, I was out of luck.

Back in Portland and a few years earlier, my underage friends and I were out late one night cruising for older men. One of the areas we liked to hang around was a block that held one of Portland's better bars, Roman's. As usual, we weren't having a lot of luck but it was close to 2:30am, bar closing time and we were hopeful. We were in Stanley's Buick and as we circled Roman's block one more time, we witnessed a couple of men smashing the front entrance to a jewelry store that was located on the NE corner of the block. The men, after smashing through the door, ran in, grabbed as much jewelry from a display window that they could, ran out of the store and literally dove into a waiting car.

All of this took place in split seconds but we knew exactly what was happening. As the get-away car took off, Stanley tried to follow it but was foiled at the first stop light. The car disappeared into the night. As we returned to the jewelry store, the cops had already arrived. The three of us in Stanley's car, jumped out and excitedly told the police that we had witnessed the whole thing. That was our first mistake.

None of us could agree on the color of the car. None of us had an inkling of the make or year of the car. We weren't even on the same page when it came to how many people we had seen. I'm not sure but I have a faint memory that we may have been stoned and should have just kept our mouths shut.

You could tell the cops were frustrated with us and it was clear they didn't think much of the veracity or clarity of our stories, but decided to take us over to police headquarters to look at mug shots to see if we recognized any one. We were ecstatic. How fun would this be?

Unfortunately, none of us could point to any of the mugs in the pictures and truthfully say we recognized them. But before we left that night, we did have a bit of a surprise. As we were perusing the mug shots, we did recognize two or three gay men who we knew from our time on camp. They weren't really friends but what a surprise to learn that men that we'd been hanging around with were known criminals.

In the late 1980s I had a small studio apartment in Vaseline Flats. It wasn't the nicest apartment but it was clean and had a view of of the street. I didn't particularly like the manager of the place but we got along well enough. He was a heavy smoker and reeked of smoke whenever I was near him. One night he fell asleep smoking in bed and caused a small fire in his basement apartment. He put it out before the fire department arrived but they still showed up. None of the renters, however, knew anything about the fire because the fire alarm never went off. We were roused from our beds by firemen going from room to room and telling people to evacuate the building until they could be sure there was no danger.

I woke up with a start when someone banged heavily on my door and yelled something about getting out of the building. I jumped out of bed and pulled a cover around me (I sleep nude) and opened the door to find one, gorgeous hunk of a fireman standing there giving me orders to get up and get out. He was everything I had always fantasized about when it came to firemen; tall, hunky, with short hair, a mouth breather, fat-free and in full fireman uniform. Baby oh baby, he could have put out my fire anytime.

But it was in East Berlin, in 1981 that I had a real run in with a fantasy inducing soldier. Luckily, I came out of the incident without getting arrested but it was close.

I was traveling with a good friend, Carol. We were both studying in West Germany at the time and had decided to visit Berlin together. She had a relative in East Berlin and we were going to deliver some paper diapers to her as a gift. Before we actually crossed into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, we visited the famous Museum at Checkpoint Charlie and I rather naively bought some books on the "Wall" and famous escapes. Well, let me tell you right off, the east Germans did not like visitors to their country bringing in that kind of propaganda.

As I presented my passport to the butchest female guard I had ever seen, she asked what I was carrying in the paper bag. I told her and she asked to see the books. When she saw them, she looked at me, took my passport and the books and left the area. She had already let Carol go through and she was watching all of this on the other side of the barrier. Another east German guard told her to keep going and told me to step out of the line and wait. Carol gave me a rather weak smile and wave and mouthed that she would wait for me outside.

I waited for almost 15 minutes before the border guard came back followed by a male guard carrying a machine gun. He told me to come with him, pointing the way out of the area with the barrel of his gun. At this point, I started getting really scared. I couldn't see Carol anymore and I had no idea how long this scene was going to last.

I was escorted into a small interrogation room with no windows. There was another uniformed man sitting behind a small desk waiting for me. I was flabbergasted to realize that he was probably younger than me and he had one of the most beautiful faces I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything beautiful about his demeanor. He ordered me to sit and to empty out all of my pockets. He examined everything I was carrying including a small notebook in which I kept records of all of the photographs that I had been taking since arriving in West Berlin. In fact, the last five or six entries were notes on pictures I had taken of the wall and the no-man's land that separated the Eastern sector and the Western sector of Berlin. The notations included descriptions of guard towers and the dogs that were tethered to wires so they could run lengthwise but not leave the area.

My baby-faced interrogator insisted on knowing why I had notes on the guard houses and the dogs. I kept telling him they were simply notes on pictures that I had taken the day before. He was also insistent on me telling him to whom I was taking the books that I had with me. I told him that they were for me and that I was sorry for bringing them in with me. I even offered to leave them with him so I could leave. This evinced even more beligerency on his part. Why would I spend such money and be willing to leave them behind? Well, by this time, I knew I'd better just shut up and let him do the talking. By the time he finally gave me back my possessions (sans the forbidden books) and told me that I could leave, I had spent more than an hour with this man. As I gathered up my stuff and started to leave, he came up behind me, patted me on the shoulder and told me to be more careful the next time I entered East Berlin. As I looked at him, he flashed me an absolutely angelic smile and winked. He'd been playing with me for an hour, giving me a hard time just because he could.

When I finally got outside of the guard house and found Carol, I was ready for a drink. She was almost hysterical, thinking she was going to have to go back to Tuebingen and tell the program director that I had been arrested in East Berlin. We made our way to the Rotes Rathaus, the East German city hall and drank ourselves into a stupor. She never forgave me for the fright I gave her, but we still laugh when we recount the story. For my part, I can still see the beautiful face of my interrogator and to this day relive the hour in his office with him wearing a few less clothes and with a really big gun!