Bijou Boy To The Rescue

The Bijou... a Chicago landmark blessing the wonderful Windy City since, well, a long time. If the Bijou does not ring a bell for you like other famous landmarks of Chicago like the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, or the Picasso Sculpture, you are not alone; however you are missing out on a bizarre and wonderful paradise that exists 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For a mere $18 you may spend up to ten hours exploring the exotic crevices such as "The Pit", "the mine shaft", "big dick blvd", and the unavoidable "circle jerk theater" of the fantastic palace located on North Avenue, appropriately named The Bijou.

For those of you not savvy in the French language, Bijou in French means "the jewel", and once I was lucky enough to step inside this seedy palace, and once I was hit with the overwhelming stench of open asshole mixed with mansweat mixed with cum, I realized that the Bijou is truly the jewel of Chicago. However there is one very sad truth about the Bijou... it is only open to men. You see, this paradise is a men's bathhouse, a place where men go to have anonymous sex with one another, and until recently, to my knowledge a female had not stepped inside it, at least not one with the purpose of writing about it.

That cold January night, I transformed. I started out the night a lovely lady; however after gluing on some fur for sideburns, and a small strip of velvet to create a pencil line mustache, with the addition of a mesh trucker's cap and a large flannel shirt, I transformed from boring Meg McCarville, cursed for life to be a lowly defective woman and never to be let into the heaven that is The Bijou, into my alter ego. Much like many super heroes in the past I became someone different, someone better, I became BIJOU BOY, and my new super power was to finally be allowed to go through that turnstile, past the room of porno rentals, and into the place that I have always wondered about but never thought I could see.... the male only bathhouse known as The Bijou.

It was very easy to get in. There was no question as to weather or not I was a man. I was accompanied by two of my male friends that were interested in what lay inside, but unlike me, had not been previously excluded from this man playground and thereby developing a bizarre obsession and extreme excitement to see what lie in the building with the pink cursive neon sign outside. After going through the turnstile, we immediately entered a theatre showing gay male porno on a huge screen. I had already called, so I knew what films were on the program that night. They were showing two. When I walked in they were showing some Spanish documentary on the making of some guy's gay porno films. (A side note about the Bijou: If you ever get the chance to call the Bijou's phone number, I strongly advise you to do so. There are graphic reviews of the gay pornographic films that are to be playing there each week and they are always brilliant and hilarious, and provide some type of redemption for we females, who are not allowed inside, without being pathetic enough to develop an alter ego in order to enter.)

After sitting down for a little while and watching the porno, I was giddy with childlike excitement to see what awaited me behind the door beyond the "Circle Jerk theater", as it is properly named. . Upon exiting the Circle Jerk Theater, we entered a room full of lockers with a bathroom. There were two toilets in the bathroom, however no doors. And it was in this downstairs bathroom that I had the extreme pleasure of viewing my very first glory hole! Mind you, I was trying to go undercover, so I had to hide all of this excitement and try to act like I was supposed to be there. So I could not scream out in excitement "GLORY HOLE!!!!!" like I wanted to so badly.

Little did I know, there was so much more to be seen. A single spiral staircase led up to the next floor where I found an entire maze of glory holes. On this floor was a series of doors and rows of 4X4 closet type rooms each with large holes in the walls, not just for a penis to fit through, but one could have anal sex through these holes because they were about 2 feet high and 2 feet wide, although splinters seem like they could be a problem considering the wood was rather rough. We were there on a Thursday night, and I really am not yet familiar with the hours where it becomes very busy, but it wasn't particularly packed that evening. When I walked down "big dick blvd" to "pick up alley" I noticed an older man, and this was the first time I experienced the type of communication that is used in the Bijou. I do not know if this is the way it works at other gay male bathhouses, but at the Bijou, there is no verbal communication going on between clients. I had an older man look at me and I made eye contact with him and he then made a head motion towards one of the rooms with the glory holes. He obviously wanted me to meet him on one side of one. I figured the best bet would be to look down. So I did. No hurt feelings. We both just parted and went our separate ways. There is no rejection that I could really see at the Bijou. As the night progressed, these looks happened to me a number of times and I would look down each time and the men would move on.

This was all fine and dandy so far, but I knew I still hadn’t experienced the best of the Bijou had to offer. My friends started to get annoyed. They did not realize that I was no longer Meg, I was Bijou Boy, and the did not share my pathetic, childlike fascination. We reconvened downstairs and they expressed that they wanted to leave. But since I had seen the website, I knew that there were other parts of it that I was missing because there was a dungeon type room that I had not yet seen. I suggested that maybe if we waited awhile it would get busier and therefore more interesting, so we decided to sit in the Circle Jerk Theater for a little while and then go back upstairs. So we did, and it was the second trip upstairs that we all witnessed something greater than any of us could have even thought up in our sick, retarded minds.

Upon returning upstairs, the first place I was able to find that I could not find before was a terrifying, completely dark little corner with a couple of rooms which stank of cum and ass more so than any other part of the Bijou. There was an old sign above it that was dimly lit that said "blow job alley." This place was completely empty, and very dark and I did not want to stick around there AT ALL, for fear that one of the men that had given me looks previously would think I was looking for something, and then my true identity would be revealed, and oh it would have just been such a mess. "Blow job corner" was very intriguing but I could not take it for more than a minute. I was happy I had found something I missed, but I still remembered this dungeon type room that was advertised on the website that I was somehow unable to find. So far I had seen "circle jerk theatre", "blow job corner", "gypsy blvd", the "meat market", the "mine shaft", and I had traveled up and down "big dick blvd", but had not yet experienced "the pit", which was what I was looking for.

By this point in the night we had been there for maybe two hours and the two men that had accompanied me were getting cranky (even though one of them was gay, but he was finding no one that took his fancy) and I was of course blown away (no pun intended) by what I had seen, but I felt like something was missing. Then we found "the pit", which seemed to be where everyone was hanging out at that time..

I will outline the room first. There was a leather swing on each side of the room and a bench against the wall. There was one older black man straddled in his underwear in one swing and the other swing was at first empty, but later occupied by my homosexual pal that accompanied me. The main feature of the room though, which I had not seen on the website, was a huge wooden X with leather handcuffs attached to each corner. It was being used when we entered the room. It would have been exciting enough to see this merely being used by anyone, but the people that were using it made the Bijou the jewel that it truly is.

The person handcuffed to the X was a very bad looking transvestite/transsexual. I really could not tell. The person looked to me like a wiry man with long hair wearing a dress that was way too big for him or her. Then the person who was "torturing" this transsexual creature was this man with long hair and a short sleeved shirt, and fully tattooed arms. When I looked closer at his arms, I noticed that all of the tattoos were of swastikas and various white power symbols... a rather odd type to see in a gay bathhouse. I figured maybe he was an ex Nazi, or even more interesting maybe he was like a grand wizard of the KKK but secretly gay and sadistic and he was living out his secret life right here in front of me at the Bijou! My Bijou Boy radar went with the latter definition. There was loud 80s type rock music playing in this room, which was a huge shame because in between the songs was the only time I was able to hear the screams of the writhing transsexual and the faint dialogue going on while the Nazi man attached clamps to the transsexual's nipples an tugged them hard. The Nazi man was also whipping the transsexual.

As if everything else weren’t weird enough, there was, sitting on the bench, and overweight WOMAN (and all along I thought that I was revolutionary since I was the only woman to ever enter the Bijou). The strange part was that she was obviously familiar with the place and I'm sure she was involved in this sex act, but she seemed more sad than anything. Again I used my Bijou Boy reasoning, and since she kept tending to the needs of the transsexual and actually looked as if she pitied him and wanted to help him, I deduced that she cared about him in some way and was not participating in the whipping and torture of the wiry transsexual. Perhaps he was her husband testing out his fantasy... who knows? The transsexual definitely seemed like someone she cared about. All I know is that it was one of the most interesting and bizarre things I have seen in my whole life. And I have seen a lot. It was almost a Christ-like scene. After seeing Mel Gibson's "The Passion" I can compare it to perhaps Jesus being crucified and tortured. But instead of the Messiah on a cross, it was a transsexual on an X. I suppose the overweight woman on the bench could have been Mary, mourning the torture of her son.

Mind you, all of this stuff was just what I deduced as Bijou Boy. It was probably just all routine and probably quite boring to most of the regulars, but for me, knowing I was observing something I had always wanted to see, it was beautiful.

After witnessing this, my male companions were quite impressed and glad that we had stayed and found "the pit.” But it being only Thursday (which I guess isn’t that crazy a night at the Bijou) the action started dying down pretty soon thereafter and we decided to leave. I did manage to take a lot from the surreal experience. What I saw as Bijou Boy was amazing, but just to think that this place is open 24 hours a day 365 days a year blows me away (again, no pun intended).

Now when I’m bored and have nothing better to do, I let my mind wander to thoughts of the Bijou, and I wonder what is going on there right now? The fact that a place like that exists – a place where a man can go and have random sex with another man at any time and it’s not even prostitution -- absolutely amazes me to the point of envying it. Why aren't men there all the time? And more importantly, why are these places not available for women? I feel like I could use one.