Man was I wrong! Once inside the pitch-black theatre I was greeted by a bouquet of furiously agitated dicks about to spout, nothing censored, by some poorly synchronized but very audible orgasmic grunts and groans, and by the same damn weighty silence I’d recognize anywhere. Since it ­really was pitch-black I waited behind the velvet curtain that screened the door until my eyes grew accustomed to the dark before I took a seat. I was afraid of bumping into a spectator in mid-fantasy or, who knows, if Montreal really is becoming a den of iniquity, into a couple in mid-action. I felt a little weird just standing there at the door, afraid to move, watching some spectacularly handsome musclemen horsing around in the cubicles of a public toilet from which the doors had been ripped off, perhaps in the course of the action, and with holes punched in the walls for the easy ­passage of a coveted cock. For the first time in ages I felt involved in a porn film and it was almost embarrassing. This kind of sexuality wasn’t the sort that interested me now. It’s been ages since I’ve gone in for those frantic orgies where you don’t know which way to turn and where the individual partners are less interesting than how many of them there are.

Someone opened the door on my right and bumped into me. We apologized simultaneously. He walked past me but stopped after a couple of steps because he couldn’t see anything either. Two blind men surprised in an unfamiliar environment. We were planted there, both of us, eyes glued to the screen, not daring to move. After a minute the other man held out his arms, took a few timid steps, bumped into a seat and stopped short. I got the giggles but tried to hold it in. Two guys came running out, allowing me a better look. The theatre was almost empty. I slipped into the first empty seat, which was much closer than I’d thought, and ­transferred my attention to the screen.

Truckers in jeans and T-shirts, the leitmotif of all the American porn films, were cruising beautiful young men—another constant—on a powdery desert road. Every sequence was totally predictable, and proceeded exactly as anticipated: looking, touching, stripping and fucking ­followed in order with an infuriating lack of inventiveness. But you don’t go to these movies for a feast of the imagination and good taste . . . Every fantasy that’s been part of American homosexuality and picked up years afterwards by the colonized French who live and breathe America was there: the leather you knew was aromatic, the longish ­mustache, proof of virility, the conspicuous basket to show we weren’t kidding, the inevitable cock ring that seems about to separate the penis from the rest of the body, while giving it a semblance of life, the public toilets, the trucks, the beer and the poppers.