Seventeen
at Heat

In middle school, boys used to take my clothes from the locker room and throw them into a toilet, leaving me to explain why I could not get to my next class. I had spent so much of my childhood being ashamed of my weight and afraid of what people would say about me being gay that I learned to notice the way a room changed when I walked into it. By seventeen, I had lost more than a hundred pounds, and people were suddenly paying attention to me in ways I had once wanted desperately. I had also been taking college classes for years, surrounded by adults who tended to see somebody capable of keeping up with them, and I was eager to believe that being treated as older meant I had finally grown into the person I wanted to become.

I carried all of that with me when I began working at Heat in Washington, D.C., where the people around me seemed comfortable in a gay world I was still learning how to enter. I was glad to spend time with people I liked, and I remember Aeryanah Von Moi along with the guys who already seemed to know their way around the place. Some of the guys felt like friends, and for a teenager who had spent years trying not to attract attention at school, having somewhere he actually wanted to go mattered more than I understood. I knew some of those guys were under eighteen, and I remember that similar pressures reached them, although their private experiences are theirs to tell. What I remember most about our friendships is that I wanted the people around me to like me, and I never thought those boys should carry the blame for an environment adults had created.

James Tate hired me at Heat, and I told people connected with the club that I was seventeen. I remember being told my age did not matter, and I accepted that answer from adults who appeared to know the place and who made decisions about what happened there. I was pleased to have a job and pleased to be included, and it still unsettles me to think how easily that excitement could be mistaken for an understanding of what I was being asked to enter. The adults arranging the work had experience I trusted, and the opportunity meant so much to me that I accepted their judgment.

There were private rooms behind the public part of Heat, which I saw on one or two occasions before the club opened. Outside them was a separate curtained space where someone the staff called a “fluffer” prepared men before they went into the rooms. Customers paid for private access, and when people tried to involve me in that part of the business, I told them I did not want to be touched and refused. I never entered one of those rooms with a customer, and afterward someone offered me a barback position. I remember feeling uncomfortable enough to refuse, but at seventeen I was still trying to understand why the adults who knew my age had offered those choices to me at all. I still resent being put in that position because the people speaking to me knew I was seventeen and left me to refuse something I should never have been asked to consider.

Some of the people who worked weekends stayed in a house in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I was sexually assaulted while I was there. I have lived with that memory alongside the parts of those years I enjoyed, and there were long stretches when talking about work or people I liked was easier than trying to explain what had happened to me in that house. I had wanted the independence and the friendships so badly that even now I find it painful to remember how much of that world I could enjoy while carrying fear from the same period. The people who knew me afterward saw someone still going to school and finding other work, and I often talked about my life in those terms because they were the parts I could explain without having to revisit everything else.

I also remember Lyle Goodman being around Heat and how uneasy I sometimes felt when I found myself alone with him. One night he tried to get me to go inside a nearby pizza or food business, and the panic I felt was strong enough that I stopped working at Heat afterward. The same period contained people I liked and moments I wanted to forget, which was difficult to make sense of when I was still young enough to think that growing up meant knowing how to handle anything put in front of me. I continued with school and later work, yet the fact that I kept going never changed what happened or the fear I remembered.

While researching What About the Boys?, I began reading records in which adults described sexually exploited boys according to the behavior they could see, sometimes leaving the adult decisions surrounding that behavior nearly unexamined. One of the boys in the series, David, was seventeen when he told a Senate subcommittee about abuse followed by running away and encounters with the justice system that treated him as a hustler. His circumstances were different from mine, and his testimony deserves to stand on its own, although reading it brought back the ease with which people can look at a teenager in an adult environment and decide he must understand what he is doing. I thought about the other guys at Heat and how readily someone could have remembered us through a club's public identity while overlooking how young some of us were.

The historical record shows that officials already had reasons to question those assumptions before I ever worked at Heat. A Justice Department bulletin published in June 2004 examined selected police records involving the commercial sexual exploitation of juveniles and found that boys were more likely to be arrested, while girls were more often referred to services. The study cannot establish anything about my employment or another boy at Heat, but I was disturbed to learn that the way a child was classified could affect whether the system responded to him as someone needing protection. In earlier installments of this series, I found much older court and medical records that described boys as accomplices or subjects of inquiry even when the children had reported being harmed. I had spent years looking back at my own apparent maturity as proof that I should have understood more, and those documents made me question why so much responsibility had been placed on boys in the first place.

Another record came from Washington itself, where the D.C. Court of Appeals reviewed a different nightclub that had employed a sixteen-year-old girl in nude entertainment. In 1982, the court upheld discipline against that establishment even though the girl had said she was eighteen and had produced false identification, placing responsibility for compliance with child-protection rules on the adults operating the business. That case concerned another establishment many years earlier, and reading it brought back my disbelief at how casually my age had been dismissed. I had been honest about being seventeen, and I was left to accept the judgment of adults who had been operating in that world long before I arrived. It still hurts to read about adults being held responsible for protecting a child decades before I was expected to negotiate my own boundaries at Heat.

The photographs of Heat are difficult for me to look at now because they show such an ordinary piece of the city, with a sign outside and a business that appeared in nightlife calendars before the whole area was cleared for Nationals Park. The old directories preserved its address and events, while government records preserved business names and permit information, and I am still trying to find the records that might say who put a seventeen-year-old to work there and what they told the District he would be doing. Those documents may establish the adults who made particular decisions, but the absence of my name from the records recovered so far has never made my memories of being there less real. I see the building and think about the boy who would have been thrilled that somebody wanted him there, and I also think about the other boys whose names I will not publish just to satisfy a reader's curiosity.

I have written about Konerak Sinthasomphone, who was fourteen when officers accepted an adult man's explanation and returned him to Jeffrey Dahmer, and about boys who were sent into institutions where adults controlled almost every part of their lives. Those histories involve different harms and different failures, and I have tried to preserve the facts that make each one distinct. What connects them to the questions I am asking about Heat is the authority adults held to describe a child's circumstances, particularly when the child was gay or looked old enough to be treated as a willing participant. I remember how hard I had worked to feel comfortable with myself and how much it meant to be welcome somewhere, and I wish the adults around me had seen that I was still a boy who needed them to take his age seriously.

The affection I had for people I knew remains part of the memory, including the happiness I found in a world that sometimes frightened me. I was seventeen when adults decided my age was acceptable, and other boys around me were young enough to deserve the same protection I did. The part that continues to hurt is remembering how much trust I placed in being welcomed, while realizing that the people with the authority to make those decisions had the responsibility to look beyond how confident we seemed. Sometimes I look at the old photograph of Heat and remember how happy I was that someone wanted me there, and how much I wish one of those adults had cared enough to ask what that place was asking of me.