Del LaGrace Volcano

How did you get into outdoor sex?
I was basically still a kid when I first started to explore sex in the great outdoors. I remember getting up to all kinds of things with boys in the neighborhood when I was seven or eight. It was totally consensual, never, ever abusive. I was just curious. I really wanted to play with girls too, but it was much more complicated and I found most girls a bit boring.
Ha! Why?
They just wanted to stay inside and I wanted to go into the hills and fields. I wouldn’t call it cruising. We were kids playing with each other, along the lines of, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’. I found male genitals extremely fascinating and it was fun to make them get hard. When I was 14, I went to a movie with my best friend, picked up two guys and went home with them. My friend had long ago lost her virginity but I just needed to get that virginity thing over with. It was a non-event.
That tends to be the case.
I was like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I just kind of remember the room and I remember my friend had sex with one guy and I had sex with the other. Then we ran away from home together. After that, I became extremely promiscuous. You know, when I was 14, 15, 16, I worked in an amusement park in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the summers. They called me “She-Wolf”, for my voracious sexual appetite. I don’t know what kind of sex these guys were having with their girlfriends but it wasn’t the kind of sex they were having with me.
Was it good for you too?
I had orgasm-free sex with men and boys for a good three to four years before I met the sweet hitchhiker who taught me exactly what to do when I wanted to come. I was just 17 when a boy and I both got picked up by a camper van at the same on-ramp while hitchhiking north on Highway 101 in California. We were alone in the back – it had a bed and naturally we started fucking. I can’t remember his name or his face but I will be forever grateful to him for teaching me that I was fully capable of orgasm when, where and with whomever I wanted.

And then you moved to San Francisco, right? What was it like for you then?
I come from a small coastal area, roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the late 70s, San Francisco was truly the queer capital of the world. I’d hitchhike to the big city and since I wasn’t old enough to go into the bars I’d just hang around outside them.
Is that when you got into leather?
There was one person – a leather daddy type who I became obsessed with and followed around. I was attracted to their outlaw look, for sure, but mostly because I had no idea if they were female or male. A few years later we met at a leather event and I discovered she was a hardcore butch dyke, twenty years my senior. Our fling lasted a few months and it was my first BDSM relationship. Before that, my sexual experiences were with bi-curious or straight girls who didn’t know a freaking thing about sex. Men were easy, available and reliable, well before Viagra.
How did you meet guys?
As a teenager when I felt horny I’d walk down to the highway and stick out my thumb. Not cruising exactly but similar in that anything could happen. It was both a challenge and an adventure. Remember, we’re talking the 1970s and serial killers – like the Zodiac Killer – were driving up and down the same highways and byways as me. I was fearless and thought I was invincible. I loved it when I was picked up by big rigs, you know, 18-wheelers who were looking for conversation, company and sometimes more.
When were the photos in your new book, ‘Queer Dyke Cruising’, taken?
None of us can quite remember. We were probably all stoned out of our minds and even the date listed – 1988 – is contentious. I had four pictures with four different dates on the back. The two couples in the photos remember being with each other in the early 90s.
And you were placing dykes in traditionally gay male environments?
Yeah. The thing to understand about that time is that dykes were looking after our brothers when they were dying. So many of the men I’ve known, loved and worked with photographically from the 80s and 90s died of HIV/AIDS. It was a terrible time and looking back, I think that there was a sense that we were trying to take the space of free and open sexuality back, not just for ourselves but for our brothers as well.
Why do you think you took so many cruising photographs?
My work is not about shooting pictures, it’s not about making a product. It’s about the adventure. You know? You can’t just read the pictures as us going out to find a nice location. It’s about taking back our space, it’s about being on top of the world, it’s about performing our various kinks or sexualities without shame or censor. But mostly it’s just good dirty fun!

Your film ‘Pansexual Public Porn’ shows dykes and trans guys playing with cis gay guys in Hampstead Heath, traditionally a cis gay cruising spot. How did you end up making that?
It was Evergon, a queer Canadian artist – who’s even older than me – who took me into the cruising ground featured in the film. He’s this bearded bear of an artist who was working with Polaroid 665, which is a super fine grained black/white, negative/positive, medium format film that is no longer produced. Three decades ago, he was being sponsored by Polaroid to make black and white images of what was left behind in the cruising grounds. But I wasn’t that interested in what was left behind but very interested in the sexy activities going on in the bushes.
What was the vibe like in Hampstead Heath then?
The vibe was different every time. There was always a bit of a frisson but nothing dangerous ever happened. At first I was sure I’d be told to piss off, but I never was. Before 1995, which was when I let my pre-T, intersexy beard grow out, I had no success at all. As I became more masculine-presenting I’d get a bit of action but I never let them touch me. No doubt due to fear that I’d be rejected. It wasn’t until I brought friends along that I felt safe enough to really enjoy and get into the experience and not take rejections personally.
Was ‘Pansexual Public Porn’ intended as more of an art film or as porn?
Neither. I didn’t set out to make a porn film and even though ‘PPP’ is explicit in some parts. I don’t see it as a porn film in the sense that my intention was not to get people off but to create a space where sex with strangers in locations usually thought of as belonging to gay men was possible. It was more than a document but a bit less than either an ‘art’ film or porn film, as I define them.
It does seem like an arbitrary distinction.
That said, ‘Pansexual Public Porn’ is available on Pink Label TV, a porn distributor in San Francisco and some people say they have jerked off to it. It’s also been bought by Princeton University and there are two queer academics that I know of who have based their PhDs on it. In 1999 it was seized by customs in New Zealand and then, when they released it a year later, they wrote a report about it and ended up saying it was a film all New Zealand queers should see!
Wow! So what else are you into?
I also like exhibitionist sex so, of course, I’ve been to sex clubs. I hung out in New York City, in the Hellfire Club and in a couple of other clubs. That was in 1981. I’d driven cross-country on my motorcycle with a friend who was also an erotic dancer called Juanita and her lover and my lover were both called Sarah. We all went to Hellfire together. Sometimes Sarah gave permission for other people to play with me, fuck me and this included men.

Did you have a favorite sex club when you moved to London?
There was a club called Sadie Maisie at the time and it was, as far as I know, one of the only queer, BDSM clubs that was very mixed. You millennials have the words, but we had the action. We were poly, we were pan, we were experimental in a way that felt liberating at a time when Section 28 and the Thatcher government were hellbent on making us social pariahs.
You know, within the dyke kink scene in London now, 80s and 90s leather dykes are still the reference.
Because we were sizzling hot! (laughs) Our motto at the lesbian leather club Chain Reaction was “Permission to Play”. There was a playfulness to it that maybe there isn’t so much today. It was more about being associated with rebels, not letting ourselves be pressed into a cookie-cutter kind of lipstick lesbian shape that would have been acceptable. A lot of people who were considered butch back then have transitioned. But at the time, even if we were using prosthetics – dildos – we called it “playing” or “gender fuck”.
Do you think you’ll take more cruising photographs?
I could easily make another ‘Pansexual Public Porn’. With social media, we could probably flood a cruising zone with dykes and trans people. We could hand out flyers to the boys that are there, saying, ‘If you don’t want to be caught in the deluge…’
There was a lesbian fisting tree situation in one of the forests around London recently.
Really? Who organized that?
I don’t know. I’m in a WhatsApp group for leather dykes and there’s lots of stuff going on.
I mean, would that be interesting to you?
It’s cold! I’m much more indoorsy.
It’s not always cold. There is this thing called summer, you know.

Queer Dyke Cruising is out now via Climax.