I’m thrilled to announce that my short story “Crotchwatchers” has found a home at Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 11-12.
The issue went live today, and is available for download (free) here.
A word to the wary (or voyeuristic) – “Crotchwatchers” is not erotica. It’s hardly graphic at all. The title comes from one of the characters’ observations:
“The world is divided into two kinds of people: people who check out a guy’s crotch when he walks by, and people who don’t.”
That gem of wisdom (paraphrased from an ex-boyfriend) was calling out to me to be parlayed into a story. It turned into a coming-of-age piece that was influenced by my work with urban gay teens in the 1990’s, and my personal experience.
The setting — New York City’s Christopher Street Piers — was once an unlikely refuge for gay and transgender teenagers, some of them homeless, some of them looking for a place where they could be themselves, hang out with friends and people watch. Gentrification had yet to come to the spare, concrete platforms jutting out into the Hudson River.
In the early 90’s, I was not much more than a teen myself, and my boyfriend and I would walk out to the end, holding hands, and watch the sun set, while the area filled up with a diverse crowd of ‘bangie boys,’ ‘butch queens,’ boys in drag, and ‘baby dykes.’
Around that time, I started working at an LGBT youth center. A lot of the kids spent time on the Piers, particularly the lower income Black and Hispanic boys. There were perils to the Piers. Some kids got involved in street prostitution, and many complained about being harassed by the police. Gradually, kids were displaced from the area due to Greenwich Village residents complaining about crime and vagrancy. The riverfront area went through renovation to become a tidier urban park.
In part, “Crotchwatchers” is a tribute to a vibrant street phenomenon that sadly has no equal nowadays in New York City. Groups of queer kids still hang out on Christopher Street, outside the bars and shops where they are either too young to enter or don’t have the money to spend anyway. The neighborhood very well may be safer, but it’s lost some of its soul.
