The Man On the Roof

Recently I was cleaning out the basement and came across some of my old boxes of porn. For those of us of a certain age, the box of porn is something familiar, something we all had stashed away somewhere or another. Though I still prefer printed porn over all other media, I’ve since stopped collecting so the boxes are archives. I hold onto the boxes of porn for nostalgia, and also because I still like to peruse the old mags from time to time.

In one box alongside the Playgirls, Men and Freshmen magazines was a little blue vinyl photo book. Damn, I’d held onto this! It archived photos that I’d taken some twenty odd years ago while in college in one of those situations that just sort of present themselves.

I’d just finished classes for the day and returned to my apartment. Through the door and into the living room, I looked out the window across to the neighboring building and what the hell? On top of the roof of the neighboring building was a porn-hot stud of a man working on the roof. I couldn’t believe it.

So what to do? I was barely out of the closet and not even close to having my sea legs with all things gay, so just stood there thinking of what to do. I called my friend Chris, who had been out of the closet long enough to be thoroughly jaded – he’d know what to do. His reply: “Take pictures!”

I grabbed my 35mm camera, and fortunately it was loaded with film (remember this is twenty years ago, so pre-digital). I crouched down to the floor, got as close as I could to the window without being seen, and snapped away.

Go talk to the guy, try to cruise him? No, not me back then. I was so intimidated to talk to other guys, the best I could do would be to leave a note on their windshield, which believe it or not sometimes worked. But this time I’d settle for getting my photos and calling it a day.

A couple of days later I picked up the photos from the pharmacy and gave one set to Chris. “These are kinda cool, how they show the edges of the window panes,” he said. “It looks very surreptitious.” If not stalkerish! But I agreed. The photos had a certain arty quality that was not by design, just by circumstance. I bought a little vinyl photo book to store the photos, but given that I was not out to many people, the photos remained mostly unseen all these years.

So twenty years later, out of the porn box, onto the scanner and up onto the web. I wonder what the guy looks like these days?