Kissing on New Year’s Eve: A PDA Manifesto

For a country with such revulsion to public sexuality it’s strange to note the few circumstances in which sexual affection is not only accepted but celebrated. We tease this collective anxiety with mistletoe during Christmas, a small down payment for New Year’s Eve when a public tongue bath is rewarded with confetti and hooting applause. Wedding ceremonies also offer a brief respite from this cultural severity with an indulgent mouth funneling turned into a symbol of fidelity.

Over the summer I attended a friend’s wedding that was presided over by the bride’s father. During the rehearsal the father needled my friend for being over-modest in his lapping felicitations. During the rehearsal my friend consequently took full advantage of the gathered crowd to demonstrate the endurance and diameter of his gaping lovehole for half a minute. As I cheered his enthusiasm alongside the gathering of aunts, bridesmaids, and family friends I suspect I wasn’t alone in hoping to be similarly engaged before the night was too far gone.

And but still there is a special scorn we set aside for those who engage in public sexuality outside of the socially acceptable circumstances. Even the dull initialism—Public Display of Affection—glosses over the salivary exchange by putting it in the vaguest possible terms. Affection is something that happens when I hold hands with my grandmother as we look through old photo albums. When I’m hungrily mixing someone else’s inner fluids with my own it’s not quite affection that’s on public display.

I can understand why it might be distracting for the people engaged in the act to have an audience, but I can’t find any coherent thinking behind the on-looker’s scorn. We know by now that greedily staring at people having sex is among the most popular forms of private entertainment in the world. It also augurs well for the viability of new media forms. Porn was serving people online a decade before any other entertainment conglomerate thought it worthwhile, they blazed the trail for the videotape and DVD markets, and they helped cement the role of the magazine as an entity separate from newspapers. It should be a lucky sign to see some suggestive behavior out in the wild. It would cost good money in most other settings.

My first experience with public sexuality came late. I was nineteen and drunkenly wobbling my way around a college party. I was drawn into a conversation with a friend of my roommate’s. I wasn’t attracted to her but I was making a lousy show of it because not too soon after she grabbed my face between her hands and pulled me into a wet, mostly on-target kiss. It won’t surprise you to learn that, even while not attracted to her, the kiss was a happy pleasure and I lingered over it.

I’m not a skillful seducer of women—indeed, the fact that someone needs to be seduced always seems to me an indicator of some deeper incompatibility—and but still, I’ve inadvertently accrued a modest list of public demonstrations of mutual lust. There was a time in a club, on a sidewalk, on a playground, in an apartment stairwell, a kaleidoscopic variety of bars, a beach, a conference room, taxis, and even a few times on the appointed occasion of New Year’s Eve.

I suppose the best argument against this unflattering display of bodily pleasure is that some innocent child might happen by and be psychically disfigured by the sight of my hips and mouth moving in primal syncopation. Offending adult sensibilities is bad taste, but exposing a child risks unquantifiable damage. The only problem is that most of the available evidence suggests the opposite is true. In America, where nudity is banned on public television and severely restricted in print, there is a higher teen pregnancy rate, younger age of first sexual encounter, and higher rate of teen STD infection than in countries like Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands—all places where nudity is unrestricted and often explicit scenes of sexuality are shown on public television without any puritanical overhang.

A more reasonable explanation for our aversion is that public viewing of sexual preliminaries cheapens the act. Sex is sanctified in our culture, it’s shown in near supernatural terms in film and television, all lidded close-ups and curling toes but none of the physical awkwardness or humor come through. These outer appearances matter, too. It’s mortifying enough to see a picture of myself, transfixed into a two-dimensional caste, the camera flash deepening the bags under my eyes and revealing my yellow teeth.

I wonder if I could survive seeing footage of myself tucked into a corner of a bar, mouth rocking open and closed against the tidal rhythm of someone else’s. All of the thoughts, feelings, precedent conversation, the smells, the lights, the touch reduced into nothing but an animalistic pantomime. The elegance of human love transformed into a body function not so far removed from the gyrations of spider monkeys on the savannah. Can it really be that I too was such an animal, even while it felt like the nimbus of heaven was breaking over me? It’s a good joke and we’re the butt.

I remember being intensely jealous of an ex-girlfriend who’d had many more experiences of public sexing than I’d had. Where I’d made out in cabs and parks, she’d actually had sex in them; bar bathrooms, taxis, a park, and a Macy’s fitting room too. I felt such sweet pain realizing all those heedless moments of young horniness were indeed possible, though I’d never had the occasion to experience them. What a thrill of disjunction it must be to find the naked body of someone you love in the cloudy mirror of a dressing room underneath the buzzing overhead lights. What a perfect heightening of lonely taxicab contemplation to find it shared with another loving body, the motion of the car and forming a kind of counter-rhythm to their movement.

I can still remember one of our last nights out together. We’d met at a bar outside of San Francisco, a big empty lodge hung to the rafters with taxidermy. The bartender kept a pitbull with him behind the bar, he’d put pieces of beef jerky in between his lips and lean over the dog, who’d rise on his hindlegs and delicately take the jerky from his owner. There were two other men along the far end, drunk and hard-eyed. They’d put an entire Pantera record on the jukebox. I’d put on some Cyndi Lauper and David Bowie songs and was a little nervous about how it might be received.

Halfway through our first drink she got up and went to the bathroom. She walked backwards for the first few feet, smiling at me silently before she turned and climbed the creaking wooden staircase that led up to the second floor facilities. I can still remember that torn rag of time (it was “Up the Hill Backwards” that had just started playing) and I still replay it in my head sometimes. It was a nice smile and I took it at face value, a small rush of affection brought on by the prospect of even a few minutes apart (roll eyes if you must, as if you’ve never taken nostalgic comfort in such juvenilia).

She’d smiled at me a million times before, but that smile I still remember because it seemed like an invitation, though I didn’t understand it at the time. It was this moment that embodied of all the jealousy I’d felt towards her previous experiences. Here was an utterly ideal moment to find that disjunctive surprise of love in a public toilet that I’d so coveted. And in the moment where it would have been possible I was blind to it. The thought simply didn’t occur.

When I see people kissing in bars now I find only one lasting reaction: I wish it was me. Sometimes it is. On New Year’s Eve it’s actually encouraged and, for once, it’s given the glittering backdrop of fireworks and cheers it deserves.

*Images via Marco Gomes and Snap Shock