Great Cities Have Great Downtowns, San Antonio 2013

Suspects: Suspects: Army Corps of Engineers

“Some kind of magic glue…is an apt phrase, since magic involves sleight of hand, the illusion of effortlessness and transformation whereas glue suggests deliberate construction and craft” – Ann Kilkelly

“Do you believe there ever was magic?” Laurie asks Dino pointedly. Dino is attempting to answer in character, as the jovial ringmaster of a 1930s Mexican traveling Carpa, an institution in decay, the end of its era. The ringmaster has to wear a big grin as he eats fire for the dwindling audiences: he can’t reveal his vulnerabilities that soon he and his cast will be out of work. Our production is being performed in less than 2 months, and we’ve only just begun to develop the characters. Dino hesitates in silence and with an intense gaze, contemplating Laurie’s question. The rehearsal room weighs heavy for a few moments. I suspect with what little magic we have left, we called forth an image into a crystal ball: its that Carpa, with its fraying fabric tent, its odd assortment of freakish performers, its financial downfall, and its lack of audience. But, it’s not the 1930s: it's July of 2012, and the undeniable parallels between our current situation and the story that script-writer Billy Munoz has crafted are uncomfortably real. We’ve lost a lead company member to AIDS; we’ve lost a producing director to a more professionally stable career; and we’ve lost our senses of pleasure, artistry, and transformation through internal power struggles and economic pressures wearing our resources thin. All of this, and our landlord knows we inhabit highly valuable real estate in a gentrifying neighborhood. The “magic glue” that company member Dianne Monroe once spoke about now feels old and flaky, eroded and unsupportive. Laurie’s question still haunts me: “do you believe there ever was magic?”

I lay across the black leather couch in the backstage of the Sterling Houston Theater. There, hanging on the green walls, photos and production programs, collages of Jump-Start’s past: 1985 – 2003 (perhaps remembering became somewhat traumatic as Sterling became more ill). I am almost in tears for all that I have missed out on, mourning something I have no real connection to, mourning how terrible we are to each other at this time; how fresh and loving it all must have felt at other times. I know there was magic here; its seems so obvious in the past, but still it lingers quietly and then explodes when I least expected it: most recently, company member Laurie Dietrich and I devised a new community-based performance workshop series, in which we opened the doors to the theater to let artists, dancers, writers, performers, and technicians play and improvise together.

The question of magic becomes political given the current moment—less than a year after staging Carpa, the company is being evicted from the space to make room for more coffee shops and martini bars. About 20 years ago, Jump-Start, through community initiative and capital campaign projects, built the theater from the shells of old warehouses, adding onto it little by little: a control booth, a kitchen, an office, a back-stage. This and other early 20th century industrial buildings of corrugated metal and pale orange bricks were fabricated into DIY art galleries, performance spaces, and venues. The area came to be known as the Blue Star Arts Complex. The Blue Star Lofts and condos were built in 2006, and a systematic removal of the original artists has ensued via extreme raises in rent or direct evictions with subsequent remodeling. After Jump-Start’s eviction, the structure of the Sterling Houston theater will remain; but with no artistic ensemble housed there, a new operating team will host music events and possible performances on a short-term touring basis. It’s unclear whether the space will keep the name of Sterling Houston, Jump-Start’s most prolific playwright who passed away from AIDS-related illnesses in 2006.

“Jump-Start has provided more than a quarter-century of fantastic artistic expression in San Antonio,” [Mayor Julian] Castro said. “While we’re disappointed that they will have to find a new home, we’ve been assured that the theater arts will continue to be a big part of Blue Star going forward.” – Mayor Julian Castro

When Julian Castro and his team announced the SA2020 (San Antonio in 2020) initiative, touted as an ambitious plan to envision a San Antonio “ten years from now,” I’ll admit, I was very excited. I was a second-year college student at a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, so I was relieved to know that the first few public meetings were going to be live streamed online. At said liberal arts school, I was enrolled in courses on the built environment. I immersed my thoughts in the ways designed space affects society; the way racial prejudice and misconceptions have “red-lined” American city neighborhoods and kept communities in struggle; the ways in which labor has structured our built physical reality. I also carried some guilt about having the financial privilege to leave the community for the education I wanted. So, of course, being so infatuated with these studies, I thought stupidly: wow! How great that an elected official wants to change a city based on community needs! Home on summer break, I was excited to go to one of the public workshops of SA2020. I wanted to talk about co-ops, about green energy, about public spaces that truly satisfy community needs of expression and visibility. I wanted to talk about what it really meant to have a diverse neighborhood in thoughts, communities, expressions, needs, and desires. I thought surely others were also there to talk about the ways we could transform our city by transforming our values: with grassroots education, food production, and the ways we could uniquely think of labor in our city as a tool towards everyone’s good and not exploitation. Of course, I didn’t have many answers; I was hungry for a conversation.

We were all gathered in the big events’ space at La Villita, with our name tags and fresh smiles. Castro took the stage. I zoned out because I often have a hard time believing much of what he says is actually genuine: he’s a great politician in that way. After Castro spoke, the owner of Rackspace spoke (I don’t want to use his name, I just want to remind you that he is the owner of Rackspace, which now underwrites Luminaria, San Antonio’s “arts night out”). Then, another elected official spoke and he asked us to repeat the refrain “great cities have great downtowns,” to which the whole auditorium mumbled like poorly memorized prayers. Then, someone from a consulting firm from Chicago gave a visual presentation about how our downtown is seriously lacking in residential spaces. I learned downtown San Antonio is nothing like downtown San Diego, and this is something we should be worried about—precisely how far behind we are. Because young people, graduates—they want to live in a place like San Diego: a sunny city full of coffee shops, walkable neighborhoods, and places to court a future significant other to live a happy, romantic sitcom life. They’re looking for cultural experience. The slideshow of San Diego is full of white young couples—there they are at the farmer’s market, and then on bicycles, and now raising a glass of wine in a big grinned toast. Thankfully, this consulting firm was about finding solutions. They gave us a map of the central city, and different colored dot-shaped stickers. Yellow is residential. Blue is an office. Red is a restaurant. Green is a park. My group was eating it up. “Oh yeah, well the San Pedro creek is there, so we gotta have lofts there.” “Right! And of course we need a park by those lofts, and a restaurant.” “Of course! And I think this whole area by Blue Star would be a great cultural area so lots of restaurants, retail and housing.” I had no idea it was so easy to design a city! All you need is different colored dots. This was even easier than the Sim City video game I used to play as a kid—because even in the video game, 3D city citizens would deliver complaints to me, “the mayor,” about poor zoning, environmental issues, ownership disputes (which was least fun part of the game). This logic was really working for my group mates; they looked at the rainbow colored map contently. Afterwards, we were asked to brainstorm brand new ideas for downtown. I scribed for the group. Student housing. Check. Someone in my group thought the San Pedro Creek should be turned into a mini-Riverwalk with housing. Okay, fine, check. And then, an older man, probably in his late 60s, said something in a distinct Texas twang I’ll never forget: “I think we ought to get rid of all the bus stops downtown!”

“Why would we do that?” I asked.

“Well,” he began with a look of obviously and then paused, “we can’t have riffraff on the street if we’re gonna have high-end retail and restaurants.”

I stared blankly at him in awe: “I’m not going to write that down.”

And then, in a strange display of misplaced morals, a middle aged woman in my group lectured me on how we were not there to judge one another as she slid the paper from my hands and reassured him, writing his idea on the page. The Chicago consultant told us our time was up, and our work was done. We had a map covered in dots and a brainstorm paper with ideas for new consumer-based mixed-use development and one classist/racist desire to put our cheap-labor workers out of sight. These are the maids who work downtown to supply fresh sheets to tourists for less than minimum wage. Maids from the Hyatt hotel downtown organized that summer, blockading the street with their bodies outside the entrance of that towering glass building; I stood there chanting as many were arrested. These are the waiters, or people bussing tables on the Riverwalk. These are the people who make the romantic downtown tourist fantasy attainable with their hard work. Sometimes, they are also undocumented. I think about Angel, who I was trying to call that whole evening; I was only a bike-ride away from his apartment and I wanted to spend the night. He leaves every morning at 6 am to catch the bus for the construction site. I always wondered if he needed an ID to get a bus pass; we never really talked about his status, it was just a strange bit of trivia hanging over us in bed. His apartment overlooks the San Pedro creek, which is really just an overgrown concrete ditch. My group wasn’t alone in thinking that creek would make a great urban amenity: county judge Nelson Wolff is excited about the economics prospects behind overturning the concrete slabs, and channeling the valley back into a functional creek that would flow back into the San Antonio River to the South. It’s environmental and lucrative.

“I have to open your whole body to pleasure,” Angel says, as we laid in bed. He lets his wrist relax, his fingers slightly curling under, as I lay under him naked. He trails the tips of his fingers so lightly over my chest, my stomach, my belly button, stopping there to twirl the hairs. His touch grows more forceful as he presses into my pelvis near my thighs; he presses into a hallow spot I’ve never felt penetrated before. He does this for what feels like hours, everywhere on my body. He scans every bit of my skin, the hair that grows in patches from some parts of it, and I sense my body so palpably with a flowing laxity; an impressionist landscape with heavy clusters of oil paint bulging from the surface. This is a tenderness I so rarely experience in sex; did he learn gentleness from someone, or is he actually fascinated by all of me? He begins to penetrate me; I am completely relaxed and he senses any discomfort from the most microscopic movements of my pinky, my chin rising, an eyebrow furling forward.

Every once and a while, I scan the agenda of the historic design and review commission of San Antonio. Years ago, it used to be populated mostly by requests for new wrought iron fences, a Cisneros pink scandal in Lavaca, or car ports on Olmos Park mansions. Now, it is mostly (international) developers appeasing historic aesthetics by adding red bricks or limestone to their otherwise mammoth glass Singapore high-rises. Sometimes, they include interior 3-D renderings of second life penthouses for wealthy white avatars. Then, there’s this online forum of men who follow the commission updates, salivating over the digital models of development, condos, and skyscrapers. They love the bird’s-eye view of the city best; and “skylines.” What’s telling is that many of them, myself included, don’t live in San Antonio anymore. They say things like “this is really gonna turn that area around,” or ask “why not 45 floors instead of 15?” Along the side of the webpage are ads for penis enlargement.

Nostalgia is a strange thing: why am I lamenting skyscrapers in the fictive memories of my hometown, a place I chose enthusiastically to leave? I watch from a far digital distance as the cruising spot where Julio picked me up becomes a multi-use tower; no planned glory holes from what I glean. That patch of unclaimed park where he said the Occupy camp was, which he liked because there was a lot of fucking. I lost the videos of Julio at the riverwalk when years later my phone fell into a real river, the Mississippi. But, I remember them in all of their regal San Anto kitsch: his feet on the sun burnt limestone, his sweat-soaked shirt twisted around his thin neck looking suddenly like a chic scarf, a Bossa nova band reverbing onto the shallow canal from a rich King William wedding. Cut to sunset: dark, hazy pixelated light like the analog lines of VHS. “I’m all cummed out” he says. Julio said he was a model in New York, that he was just back in Texas to clear some warrants. I never saw him again, but he comes back to me when I imagine the cranes, the bull-dozers, and whatever that piercing rhythmic weighted sound is at construction sights. and I realize: I’ve never had a serendipitous experience in a skyscraper.

Now, they’re pouring curved cement barriers and calling it a creek right next to Angel’s old apartment on the west side of downtown. Before, it was just a depressed ditch that would collect algae and plastic debris. But, before, before, it was a natural creek; so, the development plan references indigenous people collecting water, and foresees a future something like the past when there was a vast network of small waterways that made this a fertile Venice. That romantic imagined state of nature before the Spanish, before the Army Corp channeled all the rivers; what’s the apt analogy for the Army Corp, that bureau who wrecked so much havoc in the name of economic ends and that we now cannot raise enough funds to undo their damage — the cement mafia? here: a photo of businessmen and city council members in suits and hard-hats pouring a bucket of water a la champagne on the congealed cement crested with the new branding in pebble text: San Pedro Creek. It was called that even when it was just that ditch, flowing empty next to a 3 story apartment building I biked to on humid summer evenings. Angel’s fridge was always empty, just a couple bottled waters and maybe some take out.

Telemundo was always on, and the fold out bed barely breathed cramped next to the plastic table the television sunk on. When Angel told me that he used to use crystal at those saunas—and how he would dope boys up to fuck them—I became a child, grasping his chest as if to say, simply and sweetly: but you’re so good, please don’t leave me. And it was that precise moment, my arms wrapped around his waist, when I thought for the first time: Is Angel undocumented? Who am I to say that he should not leave me?

He woke up at 6 a.m. every morning to catch a bus to a construction site: then, it was a children’s hospital on South Presa. But now, I imagine him mixing the mortar in that ditch: his worn orange hard-hat, his dirty cream ribbed tank top, his angular jaw-bone sweatily silhouetted by mid-day sun. A mouth that used to project Shakespearian sonnets in Mexican theaters. “I was an actor in Zacatecas,” he said. “But here, I build,” he says gesturing a hammer and nail with his thick, cracking fingers. We were at ACI, the seedy gay sauna on St. Mary’s Street, but I wasn’t a doped-up twink; I was taking a moment of solace away from the lust-crazed middle-aged married men in the pitch black maze. Our eyes met in the cracking bathroom mirror, the fluorescence flickering on his tall, chiseled physique; his thick calves bulging out of black leather boots, black briefs and a harness. He sensed my shyness and across the room tells me I am very cute. Bad club techno is subdued from inside his little sex chamber: a rented room with a plastic covered foam mat stained with old cum and sticky lube. He offered to take me home with him, so I rode my vintage coffee-bike behind his yellow cab for a few blocks, until the driver pulled over and shoved the rusting thing into the trunk. In the back seat, he put his arm around me, his hand on top of mine, his fingers slowly caressing.

I think that was the only time I’d been in a yellow taxi in San Antonio, a tourist in my own town looking for local repressed dick. I have no idea what ACI stands for, but say it to any gay guy in the city, and he’ll crack a joke about horny men walking around in their white towels, a locker key tied around their wrists. It’s the total inverse of some corporate cubicle office where everyone is having polite conversation and ridding the place of any impure desire with Clorox wipes. It's feral wolf energy unleashed, everynight a full moon serenaded by bad techno. Three guys express their desire by clasping my elbow as I’m walking by, and they don’t understand the tug-o-war that ensues as any kind of disinterest on my part. I’m giving one man a blowjob, and then suddenly, there are 6 cocks in my face ready to explode. And then they give you that look of shock when you get off your knees and walk away. People joke that a lot of them are married, choking to death in that corporate office, looking to explode. Trying to find the dirtiest twink to fuck real fast, let loose all that bound up energy, and get home before they have to explain themselves.

From conversations I’ve had with friends, ACI is no different from virtual hook-up spaces. Meaning: if you’re big, brown, trans, or some combination thereof, you can plan on being passed up more than a few times for the beefy-white-masculine-punch-me-in-the-stomach types, or the twinky little blondes like me. In these spaces, the binary of normative gay hook-up culture (dominant masculine top or feminine passive bottom) has rendered a sexual role-play as exciting as flicking a light switch: the orgasm is the sterile and static twitching of a fluorescent bulb. Yet, as unpleasurable as these experiences really are, I still feel the need to act like I’m enjoying it. It's been drilled into me that a good bottom-boy doesn’t complain about pain, doesn’t ask for his desires to be fulfilled. He’s supposed to be as emotionally invested as a living sex-doll. After climaxing in these trying situations, I feel all of the guilt instantaneously, and I flee as fast as possible. Sometimes, it feels like the truly ecstatic experience of the gay hook up is the speedy bike ride away: my whole body shaking on cracked asphalt, feeling anew, feeling shame, trying to pedal my way as fast and far away as possible from the location of shame. Esplanade is my favorite street to speed down in New Orleans, with its tree-lined neutral zone running down the middle, the pebbled road glistening a bright tan color, the sounds of accelerating cars standing in for the crashing of tides from the Mississippi further down (the end of Esplanade).

As I am fucking Antonio in his apartment along that street, I see his face tensing up, his eyes squinting and his teeth grinning with discomfort. “Are you okay? Does it hurt?” I ask him. He shakes his head as we have a clear language barrier between us. “Are you in pain?” I ask, and again I fail to communicate. Making expressions of pain with my own face, he nods “No, no, me gusta.” Topping for me is a bit of a performance; I don’t really get it as a pleasurable sensation, it's much more of a psychological thing. And as I’m doing it, I inevitably think of really raunchy gay porn where super muscled-masculine guys are plowing their fat cocks into some guy’s ass, and you hear that sound of skin clapping against ass cheeks. It's one of those things I find “sexy,” but I have no idea why, it's just ingrained in my psyche. And it’s not until it's actually happening to me that I start to question this desire. I’m reminded of this kind of porn again in a very direct way, when Antonio turns over and asks “Do you want to cum on my face?” I want to ask him how it is that he doesn’t have the language to talk about pain and discomfort during sex, but can ask for a facial. The experience reminds that I learned of such terminology and sexual acts mostly from watching gay porn alone, and then believing without question that topping, bottoming, cum eating, rimming, facials, blowjobs – these are what defined gay sex. Those are the ways to have gay sex, and they’re reaffirmed though countless texts or online messages when guys ask: “what are you into?” How did all it get so coldly mechanical?