A scent for Balkan boys and queer explorers alike

It was October 1987, five to six weeks shy of the last day of Scorpio, my birthday, and the culmination of my 26^th year. I stood on a fairly wide, windy street in my long black cloak, holding Christophe tight, enveloping him in my flapping theatrical coat. We could do this brazenly, in public, for we were in the then-Gay Capital of the World. Amsterdam had for all purposes overtaken the title from San Francisco some time before; Berlin was still a divided mess, half of it rather homophobic, somewhat racist, a dictatorial backwater; and New York, one of few if not the global city par excellence, was always LGBTQ+ (or, as we would have said then, simply “L&G”) friendly, but not specifically focused on this community in the way that Amsterdam was at that time.

Chris smelled of Kouros, or Antaeus, or some other typical gay male fad fragrance. It was safe. You wore it and everyone knew you were gay in the blasting discos with darkrooms and smoky “coffeeshops” where one could buy hash when it was illegal—around the world, certainly, and even in Amsterdam itself—but tolerated in the Red Light District and the adjacent gay area. I however wore a much more distinct perfume that had hit classy shops just weeks earlier and was perceived by most as overbearing, daring, so unique people did not have the courage to wear it. It was packed in a dark olive-green flask and evoked stepping onto the terrace gazebo of your luxury penthouse flat in the Amazonian jungle. Its name was Iquitos and it was given backing by Alain Delon.

Few people chose it—as I said, it was a daring choice. You needed to think of yourself as exceptional, as mind blowing, as challenging, breaking taboos. You needed to be the scent, not just wear it. 

I was 25 when I got a job at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade. The job was both desired and at the same time shunned in then-Yugoslavia, still vaguely reeling from the loss of the imaginary golden times of a dead, purportedly benevolent dictator Josip Broz, in his time generally known by his nom-de-guerre, Tito. For my mom’s side of the family he was not remotely benevolent: my great-grandfather, a pre-WWII merchant and politician, was in exile when my grandfather, recruited to Broz’s army “to help liberate the country from the Germans,” was sent to the thicket to be killed—it seems he was put in immediate danger because of the fact that his father was in England, with the exiled King. My great-grandmother fought for years to get back their impounded property because it was a part of her dowry and not her refugee husband’s.

I did not like the regime. I wanted to be as far as I could from the site of what had been imposed upon me, just by being born in a place I didn’t feel connected to. I wanted to become myself. Wearing expensive cologne—eau de toilette, in fact, the most concentrated type of fragrance available to men at the time, when eau de parfum was reserved for the most discerning ladies’ stuff—would set me apart olfactorily, not just in the way I looked, spoke, or held myself. There was always a risk of violence for being perceived as gay, and we know even in the relatively democratic U.S., young gay men like Matthew Shepard could be killed simply for existing—how much worse it was in Yugoslavia! I knew I was not immune—still, I wanted to be myself. It was a risky balance, and not one I wore lightly. Iquitos became my way to feel like myself safely.  

The job was a joke almost, shoveling verbal garbage by schmucks in power uttered in Serbian, Slovene, and Macedonian by translating it to English and vice versa. I left Belgrade close to the end of my fixed-term employment on a planned two-week holiday to Copenhagen—which turned into two months of vagabonding from Denmark to Holland to Spain, back to the Gay Mecca, with nothing to hold onto but Christophe and the Iquitos to ground me.   

A woody chypre, rose-soaked orientalist reverie; a hint of mighty tiger’s growl rising from a mere civet’s gland, as alluringly bold as the disinterested and enchanting gaze of the French actor who launched it (although its true creator was the established and daring perfumer Gerard Anthony); and a dash of oakmoss earthiness. An almost eternal mixture of patchouli, sandalwood, and leather, as masculine as a codpiece from darkrooms at the Front City Wall at the Old Side (or Oudezijds Voorburgwal—yes, I did learn Dutch then, and in the years thereafter, seemingly forever entrapped by Amsterdam, a dark venomous spider’s web in the expansive river’s delta). All of it, draped over that elusive floral base, the soul of the scent. 

Iquitos was Amsterdam in September and October that year. Sure, there were other things to do besides the Thermos Night Sauna, a place of recurring erotic rebirth through perfunctory encounters. But it was a place that defines that time for me. The sauna was a crucible of desire, its steam thick with various scents in which my Iquitos stood out and strangers’ lips grazed my wrist, drawn by the primal call—a wordless pact in the dark. Each encounter was a rebirth, Iquitos my shield against Belgrade’s looming shadow.

There were, at times, more lasting hookups, like Christophe, who was four years my junior and from the Occitan part of France. His performative puppy devotion proffered the seductive allure of a would-be lasting arrangement, the bourgeois dream of a person who waits at home for me to arrive from a settled job, albeit in his country, not mine, for then-Yugoslavia was never the place of dreams. Or the cocktail lounges where I’d challenge Wim, a new, sweet barman from Eindhoven or Arnhem or some other much smaller city, to mix me a drink perfectly matching the hue of my jacket that evening, emerald one night, deep orange the next. Wim, who’d become a café owner in the same gay ghetto later on my recurring visits, always delivered, his grin as sharp as Iquitos’s scent trail. 

Iquitos demanded attention. Worn lightly, it purred sophistication; but overapplied, it roared like a smoky tavern at the edge of the world at midnight. It was a bridge between identities—Balkan boy, global wanderer, queer explorer—bottled in a flacon that screamed ’80s newly awoken bravado. It didn’t just linger, it declared. It made me stand out.

By 1993, as Yugoslavia crumbled, I fled, and not to great-grandfather’s England, which refused me a “right of abode,” but to Canada, where I’d worked for their embassy in Belgrade after the American and Burmese (going down the alphabet). In Vancouver, I scoured Lower Mainland’s malls for Iquitos, my lifeline to that Amsterdam freedom, and discovered it was about to be discontinued globally. Canada had none, but across the border in Washington state I found a couple of flasks in dusty shops in a Bellingham shopping mall and a Seattle backstreet. Each spritz revived my sexual spark, making me feel like myself again during Vancouver’s soggy, gray winters. That “moment after the rain in the Amazon jungle” conjured the distant wet earth of not only the Peruvian town I’d never been to but also my much-missed Europe. It evoked a feral instinct, and served as a primal antidote to the dreary numbness of my British Columbian exile. The two border runs were in fact pilgrimages, each bottle a memento of a past I clutched for dear life.

Discontinued, Iquitos became mythic, with vintage bottles now fetching high prices on eBay, collectors and nostalgists hoarding dwindling supplies. I myself hung on to my final flacons, using them sparingly over decades. Today, my last half-full bottle smells different—less mossy, less woody, more floral. Not feminine, but no longer amber-brown sharp, like a memory softened by time. I once thought I had caught its scent on a stranger in Lisbon, a city that replaced Amsterdam in my reveries of a potential place of happiness manifest, and it stopped me in my tracks—a fleeting Kairos moment, a lost world brushing past you on its way out the door. 

Iquitos overwhelmed. It was too bold, too singular to sustain even a niche market. The few of us who wore it were a secret society, our scent a password to nights of abandon. More than a perfume, the scent was a narrative of daring, a challenge to convention. Its discontinuation brought me painfully back to the ache of scarcity I understood in childhood from stories of rationing after WWII.

Last February, in a small town not far from Belgrade, I stumbled into a Turkish chain clothing shop’s perfumery aisle. I froze: an eau de toilette, cheap, yet eerily reminiscent of Iquitos, with hints of rose and leather and moss. I bought four flasks, older and wiser now, knowing that nothing is eternal. Shockingly, already by May, it too was discontinued. At 63, I’m less smitten, less desperate, but those flasks sit on my shelf, a hedge against loss. They lack Iquitos’s depth, but still they spark fleeting joy, like a half-remembered lover’s touch.