Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After

This book provides a look into the pre-Aids world of San Francisco. I found it fascinating to see what it was like back in the 70's before everything changed forever.

Kevin Bentley's remarkable memoir, Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries And After, is set in San Francisco during the late 1970s and is based on Bentley's personal diary. In 1997 he was 21 years old, bookish, exuberantly promiscuous, laughably romantic, terrified new arrival. A young gay man arrived in the "gay mecca" that was San Francisco, a place where he would stay until his fortieth year. Here detailed are the gay bars, baths, a quirky old financial district book store, a funky apartment building on Nob Hill, street fairs, and side trips to Monterey, Santa Fe, and even West Texas. But it is the stories of love, sex, self-doubt, friendship, and unapologetic partying that comprised the basic elements of the gay lifestyle that truly grab the reader's total attention. Wild Animals I Have Known is an autobiographical "picture window back through time" offering a dramatic, vividly portrayed, and legendary gay milieu.

The entries that Kevin Bentley has chosen to publish from his "Polk Street Diaries" of that era are primarily about sexual adventures, often comic misadventures. Anyone who does not want to read about men having sexual encounters with men should steer away from this book. Like Renaud Camus's TRICKS from the same pre-AIDS era, or Ricardo Ramos's FLIPPING about that time in San Francisco, Bentley was finding out who the men he met were through sex: what they did, how they did it, and the places they lived. It was often the books (or the total lack of books), the recorded music (LPs then),, and the artifacts in a trick's room or apartment that made incompatibility obvious. "Getting laid" was a focus then and there for gay men (and for most young men most of the time in other eras and locales). However, it was necessary to make a living to have a place to live and to pay bar cover charges (and, perchance, to eat, bhough that was a low priority at the time). The gay novels of Manhattan/Provincetown/Fire Island sex, drugs, and disco elide this, leaving readers to guess how the characters acquired money. Something I particularly appreciate in Bentley's book is his chronicling the difficulty of making a living. It also chronicles what the Swedish investigator Benny Henriksson dubbed "the risk factor of love" (reducing "promiscuity" and having unprotected sex with an HIV-infected partner). Like the fictional inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane, Bentley paid no attention to politics (gay, HIV-prevention, or any other kind). Less sexually adventurous than Bentley, and writing in a "family newspaper," Armistead Maupin in his well-known "tales" only hint at what life was like for gay men during "the golden age of promiscuity." Written at the time (though culled recently), these diary entries tells it like it was--without apologies, without shame, and without the chauvinism of "lgtb pride."

If you liked Armistead Maupin's fictionalized tales of 70s-era San Francisco, you'll find Kevin Bentley's memoir a fascinating complement to them--or a wonderful stand-alone read. Bentley's diaries detail his coming of age and his hunt for Mr. Right and Mr. Right Now in San Francisco's glory days. Funny, graceful, dirty, and moving--what a great mix! I highly recommend this.

Too much gay writing these days tries to ignore the very thing that makes us gay - men having sex with men. Kevin Bentley's frank diary entries puts gay sex where it belongs, right in the center of his narrative.Memoirs of gay life in San Francisco's golden age - between Stonewall and AIDS - are precious and few, in part because so many of the men who lived during that period are dead. "Wild Animals I Have Known", in my humble opinion, is the best memoir of 1970's San Francisco gay life that I have read so far. Though Bentley is as apolitical as most gays then or now - he ignored Harvey Milk and spent the White Night Riots getting the clap from a trick on a rooftop - by living an openly gay life he acted out the ideals of gay liberation. Bravo, Kevin!