A Taxicab Confession

Late-night cable's impact on 90s Queers & our fantasies

Taxicab Confessions premiered on HBO in 1995. This is its history & impact + sex diary entry. Herrera Words covers Queer sex history & pop culture (read the history of Poppers & Madonna’s SEX book). Paid subscribers get audio reading & juicy bits. This issue I also want to boost my friends at GAYLETTER for their gorgeous contemporary journalism! Images by Dalle•2 AI

A Taxicab Confession

1995 - Phoenix, Arizona

It’s hard to fathom now how starved we were for images of Queerness in the mid 90s. In 1995, the internet was in its infancy and I was a closeted teen without a computer. The only time I saw Gays on TV were in special episodes about AIDS or as the butt of jokes. Finding a porn magazine might as well have been the Holy Grail. To find mirrors of ourselves back then, we had to dig until our fingernails bled. 

Except after midnight, the magic hour for pre-Internet Queer kids whose parents could afford (or stole) premium cable. After 12am, cable stations were allowed to show anything short of hardcore. It was a no-mans land of sultry cable access shows, glossy softcore films on Cinemax and HBO After Dark documentaries. Kids in the playground would whisper about “Skinemax'' movies: blonde surfer dudes fondling silicone breasts bolted to the thin frames of redhead secretaries. Then there were the greasy, suntanned swingers of HBO’s “Real Sex,” the documentary series on sexual undergrounds and fetishes like “sploshing,” where chubby girls rubbed cake on one another under hot lights, “Punany Poets” waxing poetic about the power of the vagina, sex dolls hanging grotesquely from meat hooks in assembly lines. Young couples slammed a film slate between segments, “Real Sex! Take 10!” SNAP! Giggling outside of nightclubs, an adulthood which felt so far out of my reach. I waited and waded through these gray waters for a glimpse of another Gay person, maybe one who looked like me. It rarely happened. Then, on a sleepover at a rich friend’s house, I watched Taxicab Confessions. 

There was no silicone or greasy tans, just grainy undercover footage of the inside of a taxi. The credits proudly proclaimed the four “lipstick” sized hidden cameras pointed on folks riding in the after hours of New York City. Drunk, heartbroken, horny, sometimes all three. A patient, professional taxi driver asked them about their lives. Couples argued or had (censored) sex with cigarettes in hand, drug addicts confessed they were headed to their next fix, teeth barely hanging on on their way to CBGBs. But it was the raspy-voiced Latina transexuals, the drag queens and hookers who mesmerized me, who patiently explained the difference between drag and transgender life to curious cab drivers. I only saw folks like that on Jerri Springer, who trotted out their stories for shocks and hid all of their humanity. 

The drivers were butch dykes and school teacher types but it was the younger men and dad types who held my attention the most. Their curiosity and embarrassment when they asked about sex operations, the way they tried to keep their eyes on the road when couples fooled around. They aroused me more than any surfer dude. Just the notion of a taxi ride was foreign and exciting to me in the urban sprawl of Phoenix where everyone had cars. I’d never been in a cab or even alone in a car with a stranger. 

Then there was New York, a city which barely got going at the time this show was on. Between rider segments were cut scenes of skaters at Washington Square Park at 3am or gangs of Queens on the way to a Vogue ball. Bodegas and liquor stores and dive bars of the East Village. A pre-Guiliani New York whose change in this time would be lamented for decades. A few years later HBO presented an aspirational New York in Sex and The City, glamor without danger, where Samanta unironically called the cops on the kind of trans sex workers who rode the taxis in Confessions. Confessions introduced me to that American yearning for “Old” New York.

It wasn’t until they were dropped off that the passengers were told about the filming and made their decision to sign the release form. The ethics of recording drunk people then asking them to agree feels questionable now but New York was a one-consent state and only one party needed to know they were being recorded. 

HBO scrubbed Taxicab Confessions and all of its late night programming a few years ago, claiming there was no demand for it. The decision was no doubt influenced by the acceptability politics of streaming, the abundance of free porn and the liabilities of secretly recording drunk people who are using 90s vocabulary.

But there’s no starving Queer children now. Now we’re hungry for more than images. If anything, we crave to be a little less visible again, to be able to confess our sins to a driver who we will never see again, who can’t rate us on an Uber app. It’s ironic a candid camera show ended up being a record of a dying anonymity. 

“From 11-6 the people who take taxis are very interesting people. You’re really on the edge of hanging on to that day and wanting morning not to come. And those kinds of people tell the best stories. Anyone clinging to a day is like someone on a life raft.” 

-Sheila Nevins, executive producer of HBOs “Golden Era of Documentaries” in the late 80s and 90s, which included America Undercover, Real Sex, Hookers at the Point and Taxicab Confessions. 

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2010 - New York City

“Ya have fun tonight?” 

The taxi driver looked like Santa Claus’s slightly younger brother, a yellow Hawaiian shirt, white greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, white beard trimmed for these hot nights. 

I had a nice buzz from the beers I chugged at The Cock.

“I quit while I was ahead.” I said. The East Village sex bar was empty and I wanted to beat the Sunday night traffic to Brooklyn. I hadn’t gotten off and was vibrating with sex.

“What do you do?” he asked as everyone in New York does. 

“I make films…about Gay sex.” I liked testing cab drivers back then. If they were homophobes, they would shut up early. 

“You like doing it?” He asked. 

“It’s a living…sort of.” It was true. I was just scraping by and a taxi ride from the East Village to Park Slope was a luxury.

“Well, does it pay your rent?”

“Somehow.”

“If you like what you do and it pays your rent, that’s all you can ask for.” His thick Jersey accent popped out. 

“What about you, do you like being a cab driver?”

“It’s a living.” He chuckled. 

“I’m Leo.”

“I’m Larry.”

Larry reached back over the partition to shake my hand, breaking the invisible membrane, a rare gesture for a taxi driver. His hands were soft and warm. His wedding ring caught the light of traffic.

“I’m sure you’re seen some shit Larry.” He chuckled again. 

“I have!” He said with pride. 

“What’s the craziest shit you’ve ever seen Larry?”

“Oh you know…”

“I don’t unless you tell me.” We sped over the bridge. I stared at the Manhattan skyline like it owed me money. 

“People doing drugs in the cab. One time a couple started fucking…”

“Ooh what else?”

“A woman tried to proposition me one night.”

“Larry you stud…what did you do?”

“Nothing. She was old.”

I was drunk and feeling like chaos.

“Have you ever been propositioned by a guy Larry?”

“No.” It wasn’t a rude no. And it wasn’t a definitive no either. Something was happening…

“Do you want to be propositioned by a guy Larry?” 

He slid his hands down the wheel and looked around suspiciously. 

“Maybe.”

“What would happen if you got propositioned by a guy?” 

“I would...I would do stuff to him.”

“Do you want me to proposition you Larry?” 

The question floated as we crossed the Barclays Center construction site. 

“Yes.”

I got hard. 

“Then, why don’t you pull up on the Gowanus bridge near my house.”

“OK.” We drove through Carroll Gardens’ brownstones, always a film location. The car stopped slowly on the small bridge going over the Gowanus, a sludgy, toxic canal which stank in the summer. 

He shuffled with something in the front seat, put it in his pocket and opened the front door. My heart was pounding. 

“I have to um, do, get something from the back. You can come up here.” As he walked to the trunk I was hit by a sober clarity: I had just hit on a straight, married man twice my weight and we were alone in the middle of nowhere Brooklyn.

He was either going to come out with a crowbar, beat me like in a 90s movie and throw my bony faggy ass off the bridge…or he was just stashing his wallet. I went to the front seat and didn’t close the door, ready to run. 

In the red car lights, I didn’t see a crowbar. I closed the door. He got in, looking around. He turned off the car.

“What do you want to do Larry?” People like to hear their names, it relaxes them.

“Can I, can I suck you?”

I pulled down my shorts and my erection bounced out. He grabbed it gently with those warm, soft hands and just stared at it for a minute. Our two-party consent was in that pause. He went down on me and his mouth was hot like a fever. He didn’t so much suck it, as sorta just held it in his mouth, holding his breath, more curious than passionate and just terrible at it.

Then I pictured him vacationing in Miami with his wife, she’s drunk on some blue drink, saying “fabulous!” every few minutes, he’s gazing at her lovingly but wondering what else there is. And now he’s here. Almost as if he heard my thoughts he came up for air. He was still facing my belt buckle but I could tell he was frowning. 

“I’m, I’m not going to get sick am I?”

I was confused. “What do you mean?”

“The Gay Cancer.” The Gay Cansah. Oh the humanity!  I tried so hard not to laugh. I hadn’t heard someone call AIDS “The Gay Cancer” since the early 90s.

There was a long beat. I imagined him staring at the ceiling later, going on Web MD after his wife’s gone to bed, searching for “AIDS” and “Blowjob.”

My dick went limp.

“Larry, just so you know, it’s really hard to catch HIV from a blowjob, especially if I didn’t come. And I’m tested all the time.” The truth felt right. 

“OK” he said softly and exhaled.“Listen, I have to return the car. Can I, can I come back?”

I didn’t want to be in bed all night waiting for a married taxi driver who might not return.

“No, but thank you Larry. I’m going to walk the rest of the way home.” I didn’t want him to know where I lived. He nodded gently, staring at the street. 

“You have a good night Larry.” I gave him a fat, fast kiss on the cheek. He smiled. 

I jerked off thinking about Larry five times that night. If he had asked me to sign a model release form, I would have in a heartbeat. 

Watch clips of Taxicab Confessions at links below (paid subscribers only).