On Male Bonding

I never wished to live in a man’s body in order to have gay sex. Anything a gay bottom could do physically I could do just as well in my female form. I’ve had more gay sex than most gay men I know. Even my relationship with David, though physiologically heterosexual, was spiritually homosexual (with S&M as the bridge linking the two). What I desired – and that which I could never attain as a biological female – was male bonding. To be seamlessly stitched into the fabric of the gay male community, the brotherhood I saw my reflection in, would forever be beyond my reach. Susan Sontag went from longing to be Greta Garbo to wanting to “possess” her. She related these feelings to her lesbianism, but her uncommon desires just as easily could have spoken to my gay manhood. I always longed “to be” and “to possess” men in equal proportions.

So when gay men “lust” after straight guys maybe they’re not after sex, but the male bonding freed from the complications of sex (inherent in gay-gay relationships like in hetero female-hetero male relationships). Growing up, gay adolescents are deprived of the innocent, nonsexual camaraderie of the football team, i.e., of necessary male bonding. Even if they play sports, the interaction takes on a different meaning for them than that of their straight counterparts. Perhaps the fetish for butch bodybuilders, manly military men is really a desire to know what it’s like to be a fully integrated part of that heterosexual male world – a holy grail never to be achieved by the inevitable sexualizing of the relationship by the gay man’s genes. (In fact, for me the thrill of being part of the testosterone-driven, hardcore punk scene in the eighties was the access it allowed to the “boys locker room.” It was the first time I’d ever experienced the pleasure of male bonding, being treated as just one of the guys even as I pined for those very same guys.)

Kinky Camp Night

Lisa of CineKink really outdid herself with the kinky campy shorts last night. I fell asleep laughing my ass off!

This music video is a MUST-SEE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mooywzkwL38

(That is, if you’re into cheesy 80s, well...if Toni Basil had sung about spanking instead of "Mickey" this would be it!)

Also loved the film of four deadpan actors sitting around a table doing a David Mamet-like reading of a porn script. Oh, and Santa Claus Pez dispensers screwing is one hard kink to top!

Stay tuned for more Monkey Town midnight movie madness in August.

More Myra!

Calling all wet dreamers...

I've been asked to curate some perverted midnight madness on Thursday July 26th, so please join my co-host Lisa Vandever and me for a night of celluloid debauchery at the fabulous Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

http://www.monkeytownhq.com/contactinfo.html

Lisa will be warming us up with shorts from her famous Cinekink Film Festival

http://cinekink.com/blog/2007/07/take-me-to-monkey-town.html

Followed by a screening of the greatest underrated camp classic of all time, yes - Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckinridge"!!

Mark your calendars. Raquel Welch wielding a strap-on. Need I say more?

The Chick or The Egg

"The New York Times Magazine" recently ran a cover story that blew my mind. It involved websites displaying photos of available college girl cuties and high-end agencies charging outrageous amounts for Asian and Jewish chicks – and all of this perfectly legal! Why? Well, it seems the college kids weren’t selling their bodies metaphorically (which, of course, is prostitution and illegal) but literally, which is, of course, perfectly legal in the Upside-down States of America. The girls just have to sell specific body parts (gametes), call it egg “donation” (never mind that the “donation” requires a payment somewhere between four to fifteen grand for the girl, let alone agency and other assorted costs) and cater to infertile rich white chicks rather than virile rich white guys. Strangely, Peggy Orenstein, the author of “Your Gamete, Myself” didn’t conduct a single interview with an egg giver, just with the hopeful gestational mothers. But then maybe she was afraid some smart Harvard donor would sweep all the excuses and euphemisms, the “altruism” and “gifts of life” aside, so that the plain and simple business transaction – not unlike that of the oldest pre-technological profession in the world – would emerge like a baby chick from its broken egg.

Touching The Holy Grail

I could never write erotic fiction because I don’t do gratuitous sex. I had no choice but to publish my memoir as erotica since in my relationship with David, sex was our means of communication, our common language. I was in the minority of (biological) women in America who had never traded sex for money – or pricey dinners, or an emotional commitment, or a potential marriage with kids, or anything not directly related to the act itself. My having sex always for the sake of the journey, the discovery, is the purest form of intercourse there is. I could never understand how my utter lack of quid pro quo, my wide-eyed innocent approach, could be seen as a form of corruption in society’s eyes.

Nevertheless, I don’t sample men like I used to. Recently, when a friend wondered seriously if I missed being a slut I had to laugh. A slut implies someone who fucks indiscriminately. I was never a slut. I was always specific, calculating in my conquests. I only fucked the men I wanted to be. Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckinridge” – a book beyond parody, an ingenious cocktail of deep philosophy and high camp – contains three quotes that touched me deeply, reflecting my own experience beneath the drag queen bravado.

“…the dilemma’s horn: I have no clear idea as to my ultimate identity once every fantasy has been acted out with living flesh. All that I do know is that I shall be freed of obsession and, in this at least, be like no one else who ever lived.” (Page 168)

“To my astonishment, I have now lost all interest in men. I have simply gone past them, as if I were a new creation, a mutant diverging from original stock to become something quite unlike its former self or any self known to the race.” (Page 196)

“All I know is that I am now entirely fulfilled. I have lived and I have loved to the fullest! I can at last give up sex because anything more would be anticlimax.” (Page 212)

Vidal perfectly describes the feeling one has when he reaches his own Holy Grail, including the sudden flooding of life’s doubt and uncertainty kept at bay for so long by the quest. “To be possessed” by a man means to become him. Sex was my path to manhood, and I unwittingly achieved it through David. Consequently, my main drive for sex, as unwavering as any maternal instinct, had been vanquished.

Recipe For Disaster

Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, whether religious or nationalistic. The Nazis believed it was better to die than to live in a world without National Socialism, much like the ideology behind the suicide bombers of extreme Islam. It’s the belief system of the lazy, not wanting to do the work of living in the gray. To counteract this, words should be used to shed light on truth (which is why I have such a loathing of academia, filled with leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and his ilk who selfishly hide behind words like magicians whose tricks rely on confusing the masses instead of enlightening them) and differences embraced – so taboo in an American culture where Democrats fight to prove they are just as “moral” as Republicans while gays proclaim the same “family values” as straights. Everyone is so busy trying to define themselves on someone else’s terms instead of creating their own truthful terms. Everyone is thinking inside the same claustrophobic box – a recipe that extremists from Hitler to Bin Laden used well.

The Life of The Soul

The Museum of Modern Art once held an Edvard Munch exhibit entitled “The Modern Life of the Soul,” accompanied by a bio-pic by Norwegian director Peter Watkins (employing a filmmaking technique best described as “Lars Von Trier meets the History Channel”) that provided deep insight into the human condition in general as well. In one reenactment a woman involved in the free love society of the time profoundly observed that “one day you wake up to find the person you thought you couldn’t live without is the one holding you back.” I realized that a non-monogamous society could never exist until jealousy was accepted as a part of life, not to be fought off or succumbed to. With a few strokes of his brush Munch cleared away flowerpots, curtains he’d painted already in an effort to obliterate the extraneous. Like eliminating bullshit from one’s life. Munch concentrated on the important details, not the peripherals – the artist drawn to essence like a moth to a flame.

On Hypocrisy

Though porn is not erotica, erotica is porn. Erotica is pornographic poetry. The distancing of erotica from porn rubs me the wrong way, the snobbish implication that the former is somehow socially acceptable and the latter shameful, a notion no doubt dreamed up by puritanical perverted academics wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. (Though it is a shame Anais Nin never won a Nobel for her erotica.) I have no patience for people who refuse to get dirty. I also care less about getting an audience off than in making them think. The media is abuzz lumping the (non) existence of the author JT Leroy with the (non) nonfiction memoir by the bestselling James Frey. Though crucially different cases, it’s interesting to recall that when both stories first broke, those most heartily coming to the writers’ defense were those who had felt most duped, a crass display of narcissism, selfish pride at its most acute. Bruce Benderson and Oprah Winfrey didn’t want to look like chumps – their self-preservation masked as loyalty to a fellow artist. It’s fitting in a day and age when the Bush administration tries to brush off the importance of (not) finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as irrelevant to the ongoing war that the outed James Frey would find nothing wrong in publishing his fiction as fact (at least “JT Leroy” rightly presented “Sarah” as a fairytale). In 21st Century America perception trumps reality every time – a secret much dirtier than the sleaziest porn.