The sex instinct

The sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible.

GEORGE ORWELL

Artist: AA Bronson@SLAG through 19 Sept

A constant dilemma

acd378, originally uploaded by haloloop.

By the time I get on the plane, he’s recomposed in my imagination. Now he’s coated with that charge of longing and excitement that makes me say yet again that I love him. This isn’t an illusion, I tell myself, merely the clearer vision of distance. As flawed as our relationship is, I’m living out a basic homosexual dream. Current gay politics have covered up the fact that homosexuality is submission to a constant dilemma. The maleness toward which our sexuality is directed is—culturally at least—defined by heterosexuality. No one admits it anymore, but successful gay couples often play a constant game of switching. Each takes turns playing “the man,” while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity. Those who don’t do this seem to become denatured Bobbsey Twins, unmarried “sisters” living together. I’ve made a different choice, which some would call “unliberated.” Everything attractive about Romulus stems from his heterosexuality, and of course, that’s the very quality that prevents me from possessing him entirely. Well, maybe I’m on a more honest path of homosexual desire.

BRUCE BENDERSON, from The Romanian: Story of an Obsession. New York : Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

Topple

Sex seems capable of creating anarchy, and those who are committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably standing in opposition to it or trying to pretend that it doesn’t even exist.

My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people. Many of its readers might enjoy it much more if it did, but those same readers still might not buy it if such images were in it, because it could no longer present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world—a world not ideal but still good enough—which is the function of the Times to present every day. Nudity somehow implies that anything could happen, but the Times is committed to telling its readers that many things will not happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to think, and although problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers. The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know.

WALLACE SHAWN, from “Writing About Sex” in Essays. Haymarket Books, 2009

Firsts

Everybody loves the first glimpse of naked love

Everybody’s story is the most thrilling in the world

Everybody tells their best friend their tale of the raw behind

First time they discovered an open heart with their pants down.

ALLEN GINSBERG, on the back cover of WADS: True Homosexual Experiences from S.T.H. Writers, Vol. 6, Edited by Boyd McDonald ; San Francisco : Gay Sunshine Press, 1985.

In the wee-wee hours

 

Tom of Finland (circa 1949)

Immured in youth and beauty.

 

Times have changed, and changed radically, but each one of us is still trying to find the same old things: sex, love, and self-respect.

     Sex, love, and self-respect are hard enough to balance in life, period, without having to do it as a person whose biological identity seems at variance with his sexual one. How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives—our family, our society, our upbringing—was a problem a minority, not a majority of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague. Most of us just kept everything in compartments. Most of us led double, triple, quadruple lives, changing costumes as actors do, masking our intelligence, emphasizing our bodies, feeling our fate depended on the shape of our mustache, the size of our dick. But you can juggle the apples of discord only so long. When desire begins to burn off, like morning haze, it leaves the rest of our personalities more visible. “I’ve read all of Proust and Henry James, I just got a promotion at the bank to systems manager,” a friend wrote me in 1977. “So what am I doing at four A.M. in Sheridan Square, hailing a cab with shit on my dick?” Having the time of your life, I would have answered had we both been twenty-one. But we were not, and that was part of the problem: What youth and lust camouflage, age and abstinence bring into relief—the contradictions of being gay.

     … much like Life. Moments of exquisite boredom… are followed by breathless revelation—

     “I was a problem,” said Oscar Wilde, “for which there was no solution.”

 

ANDREW HOLLERAN, from Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and its Aftermath. New York : De Capo Press, 2008.

Sutherland & Malone. Lark. An [unnamed?] aging gay professor. Four characters forever etched in memory from three extraordinary novels that could only have been written by Andrew Holleran. The seventies gay romantic classic on the days of dark disco Dancer from the Dance, the much maligned (for its brutally bleak, unsparing honesty) The Beauty of Men, and his most recent slender masterpiece, Grief. His short stories, In September the Light Changes, a collection also to be relished. These Chronicles first appeared in the NY Native, then collected in the (out-of-print) book Ground Zero, now thankfully reissued and expanded upon. 

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Andrew Holleran

“It’s all about dick.”

(Happy Father’s Day, dads.)

Bastard angel

 
“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not. They all wanted to go to bed with me.”*

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

HAROLD NORSE, from his preface, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

*Okay, maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine anything more “open and wonderfully giving” then someone expressing their want/interest/desire “to go to bed with me.”  Thanks for the memoirs, Harold.

Photo: ChicosVegas

Beauty makes sex sex.

Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.

ANNE CARSON, from the poem, Tango ll, in The Beauty of the Husband.

He has nothing, only un gran aparato. He lives by this.

I like to smell my armpits while I masturbate. The smell of sweat turns me on. It’s dependable sweet-smelling sex.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy

“Go ahead, take it in your mouth.”

That exact moment when lips first reach to meet flesh . . . they part, go from dry to moist and magically begin to make those little motions they were born to make.

I want to please you.
To press your socked feet
to my face and
sniff
pre-cum smears your fingers tug
that tiny trail of hair at your navel
I lick
the arch of your ribcage
nuzzle your armpit
tongue your bicep
buttocks clench, lifts your pelvis

an offering.

(You know exactly what I want)

My eyes beg to please, to adore
to soak your sex straining
through white cotton
sucking on two, then
three fingers, more
locked by your eyes
always reading always checking
for some sign to please

A smile, a caress

an order. Your hands slam
my face into your crotch
rubbing your cock
knowing, knowing what it means
for me to be possessed, to be
yours to be for you, please

please let me.

Do you know how beautiful you are?
How beautiful your cock is?
How you please me? Please
please . . . no, not yet

I just want to see you stroke yourself
to make me wet for you
to make my lips beg, to touch
it to my lips, wet
wet

Do you want it, boy? You want to be my
cocksucker? Take it yeah, suck my cock,
yeah God you feel so good (yeah, god . . .)

Do you know what you do to me?
Do you know how much it means
for you to offer
your sex, your man, your power,
over me, through me, taking me,
demanding me to swallow more, to take it
all and plead
for more . . . please . . .
please . . .

Don’t come yet.
Let me see it. Hold it firm
slap my face, bury my nostrils
balls sopping wet wanting
so much to eat your ass
and have you squirt all over
my face and body, in my
mouth. Put it in my mouth
to gently suck.

Let me sleep with your sex
in my face. Keep it safe, warm,
safe, moist, safe

safe.

Hold my head and let me
feel your tummy breathe.



JEFF KIRBY, from Cock & Soul