Filth and Consequences: An Introduction

Neal Drinnan

What won’t we gay men do in search of sexual fulfillment? What delicious twist of cosmic fate has cast us in such a compelling and intrepid sexual role? Why are we capable of using sex as an integral component of love as well as using it as a medium to explore other vast and different avenues of interpersonal congress? For some of us the pursuit of sexual expression verges on the ridiculous. In our large cities at least, sex can be procured as readily as a burger and fries (hold the mayo). Our secret fears about illness and the morality of our behavior add color and drama to many of our escapades, and as we were never educated or encouraged in our lifestyle, the adventure becomes an even more frightening and exhilarating one.

I was told as a kid that there was “nothing wrong with sex as long as the man and woman loved each other.” So where did that leave me? It’s all right to fist someone whom you find in a sling as long as they’ve douched first? It’s OK to have sex with a man loitering in a nightclub toilet so long as there isn’t a needy queue for the cubicles? It’s fine to have sex with five different men in a sex club so long as you wash your cock between partners? For these questions and more there are no clear answers—no established etiquette. Of course there are those of us who desire nothing more than a picket fence, a dog, and a loving partner to grow old with in a monogamous relationship punctuated with sweet, ever-diminishing vanilla sex. But I don’t think you’ve picked up this book to read about that—though if you have, you will find among these tales of sexual adventure a number of beautiful love stories about men sharing love and sex in ways that would satisfy the traditional romantic streak in anyone.

There is a history about a group of Franciscan monks in Venice in the sixteenth century who realized that total immersion in the senses had rather the same effect on the spirit as complete asceticism. (The lower chakras are capable of conjuring up the same spirits as the higher ones). They believed that ultimately we are divine beings capable of rising above our physical self, and while this was traditionally achieved through prayer and meditation, it was equally attainable through defiling the body via engrossment in the physical senses. These monks feasted and fornicated themselves into a state of religious delirium by offering their bodies up to every form of sensualism and sensuality to attain the same exalted state reached by spartan Buddhist monks or Carmelite nuns, and when news of their wickedness reached the Vatican, the entire monastery was torched, incinerating all within and extinguishing all evidence of this maverick tradition. There is a moral to this historical tale that informs our behavior still: The libertine has always been in peril of martyrdom, and unless we take the bull by the horns (so to speak) so are we.

Similarly there are avenues of sexual pursuit available to the modern homosexual male that seem to share some of these ancient tenets. The use of stimulants and the pursuit of extreme sensations go beyond any act of simple sex. The awesome extent of penetration some of us allow ourselves is as much about meditating on the physical extremes we are capable of, as it is about the pursuit of a simple orgasm or any expression of love. Indeed anyone who indulges frequently in fist-fucking and S/M will tell you that the sensations they experience take them into another dimension entirely and that dimension by no means precludes love. The act becomes not merely sexual but spiritual. By testing our physical limitations we are broadening our spiritual ones. Now you try explaining that to the guardians of the heterosexual hegemony!

Homosexual men are strange creatures, and I might be biased but I love ’em (well, some of them). Much of our sexual fantasizing has often revolved around gay boys mooning over straight boys, which has more to do with the value of “straightness” in our hetero-world and the emotional baggage we queers have than about the true desirability of the straight man per se; but it pleases me that there are few stories in this collection that dwell on that. Pornographers still make crappy porn that presumes gay men will be that much more excited by a plot if there is some ludicrous charade suggesting the actors are straight, but they never fooled me, and I’ve always been much more enamored of men who know themselves and their desires than those fey fence-sitters who seem to require inordinate amounts of seduction.

Still, each to his own. We are an extraordinarily contradictory bunch. The same boys who screamed at the approach of a rock-hard baseball or cricket ball so often grew up to be seemingly fearless of all the potential perils in an unlit park or a dangerous meat-packing district. The same little boy who was frightened by firecrackers as a child turns out to be fearless when it comes to having anonymous sex with multiple strangers. So many men who never triumphed on the playing field have yet managed to become sexual athletes on their own terms, their achievements only ever truly celebrated in collections like this.

We are the only subculture I know that invests millions of dollars in supporting theme parks in which to exorcise our lusts and fantasies, flocking to lush faux temples and rabbit warrens to pour out our desire for hours at a time. We are definitely the only sector of society that can spend most of our lives cruising with a very real prospect of sexual fulfillment at the end of each evening’s search (if we play our cards right). We go among the people during the day imitating the average, sometimes doing a better job than many of the straight ones, but by our desire we know each other, and as poet Pat Parker once stated, “We Be Something Else....” My view, of course, may not be a popular one. So many gay men slave so earnestly not to “be something else.” They strive to intimidate the heterosexual male with their own hard-won machismo, and in gyms and nightclubs many look for the reflection of a formulaic masculinity in others to match their own—and sometimes they find it. For a moment at least.

I’ve battled for a long time against the idea that love and sex are necessarily synonymous. I don’t know whether I should have, but I have. I can’t deny that love has much to do with the definition of erotica, and what could be more erotic than the sex enjoyed by lovers in the first throes of passion? Especially young lovers, young beautiful lovers with smooth skin, hard youthful cocks, and gently budding pink virginal arseholes ready to be plundered for the first time...but I’m jumping ahead and that scene is way too reminiscent of an oft-played Bruno Gmunder Eastern Bloc sexploitation porn video, so I’ll stop right there!

I’ve realized through judging this collection that eroticism is about a lot of things: love, humor, fantasy, fear, domination, fatalism, danger, and even sadness and death. I suppose the French don’t call orgasm le petit mort for nothing, but in the end perhaps the real challenge is eroticizing those things we fear the most. For all the most ambitious safe-sex marketing campaigns that have been undertaken around the world, I’ve yet to see anyone adequately eroticize the donning of a condom. As Australian writer Tony Ayres has said, “Rubber is the ubiquitous interceptor between fantasy and reality.”

One triumph in this collection, however, is Andy Quan’s “Positive,” which proves absolutely the ability love has to conquer fear. It shows a spirit that, if we’d had the courage to harness it as a community fifteen years ago, may have altered the course of the AIDS epidemic much earlier. We are a ways off yet from having the freedom to collate a collection like this without mentioning the A word (or acronym), and even when we don’t, it lurks in the minds and actions of the characters like a wolf in the woods. When you’ve lived through twenty years of the epidemic like me and survived, more through good luck than good judgment, you can’t help but search out the subtexts that relate to AIDS. We’ve all been affected by it whether we are twenty or sixty, but the condom rears its blousy head rarely in these tales. Some writers interrupt the narrative to do the “right thing” and put one on. Some don’t mention it at all, and that silence speaks volumes in terms of certain new fashions in behavioral subversion.

But, hell, listen to me—how dreary and academic I’ve become when just a few pages away you’ll be experiencing all sorts of crazy, pants-packing filth.

Hey, kids—for starters! Howdja like the sound of an LSD-fueled three-way involving Scott Brassart, John Waters, and Divine? It’s especially twisted when the author has to eat a Snickers bar from Divine’s fluro-pink “tuna tunnel” while the film-maker takes him from behind and Mink Stole lies in waiting with a huge rubber strap-on...not your cup of LSD? Well, ponyboys are all the rage in San Francisco, I hear, so perhaps riding around on a gorgeous boy with a harness and horsetail attached to a butt plug might do it for you. Ah yes, the rich are different, and with a stable full of ponyboys there’s always plenty of jousting, and James Williams seems a real emissary of this perky new fashion!

On a different erotic track, Karl Von Uhl takes “the first-time story” to an entirely new level as a seasoned homosexual recalls explicitly (and rapturously) his first fucking at eleven by a much, much older boy; Marshall Moore takes a fetish such as voyeurism into a startling new realm; and “Harder” by Ian Phillips will take you way, way beyond the pain threshold with his extraordinary meditation on S/M.

Perhaps the funniest story of all for me is “I’m a Top” by Otta Coca. This story of an airhead Chelsea gym queen shows that the most outlandish fantasy life can still survive the impossible rents of Manhattan, and that pretty is as pretty does.

As a community that usually has at least a passing acquaintance with pornography, we suffer from a slightly jaded palate. As writers we no longer expect to cut it with “throbbing hard cocks, tight ass-holes, and wild outpourings of jis’.” Pornographers always talk about the “money shot,” but I’m not sure that it continues to have quite the same fiscal value as our desires and practices become increasingly diverse (and some might say perverse).

And several of these stories are about young guys whose lives are really fucked up from abusive childhoods. Abusive childhoods seem to be the perfect backdrop for low self-esteem and freaky sexual behavior in later years. Truth or Fiction? Who can say? But it surely sets the stage for some weird, fucked-up sexual shenanigans. God knows Dennis Cooper’s career survives on a seemingly bottomless pit of such sex-freaks, and it seems his kind of dark sexuality is becoming acceptable in the broader sweep of both American and Australian erotica. And Mel Smith’s “Cocky,” Michael Stamp’s “Chip Off the Old Block,” and J. T. LeRoy’s “Natoma Street” are certainly continuing that tradition.

In a country like the USA where capitalism dictates that everything and everyone is a commodity, eroticism ends up being very much about what fantasies people can afford or whose fantasy you might qualify for. With a feast of cultures to choose from and a dominant Anglo-white male culture controlling the purse strings, the sexual act develops all sorts of levels of symbolism. Will you eat Spanish, Chinese, Italian, African, or Cajun tonight? Will you fuck Spanish, Chinese, Italian, African, or Cajun tonight? For the promiscuous Romeo these choices may occupy similar degrees of space in the mind of an eager consumer. Even a sixteen-year-old street kid is at the economic mercy of affluent men in cars with complicated sexual appetites, and when sex is being bought in some of these stories, it is about very different things than love. It is sometimes about very dark things indeed. Those who’ve never known love, however, seem tend not to miss it and certainly never expect it as they plumb the shadowy depths of the American dream.

The “master and slave” dynamics of many stories is a testament to the ability of some men (and women) to turn their most “politically incorrect” imaginings into fiction, if nothing else.

And, hell, if you can’t be a bit fucked up in your own imagination, where can you be? So enter now this 2002 volume of gay erotica. This book is becoming an important annual chronicle of our own self-discovery. There’ll be places you’d love to be and places you wouldn’t want to visit, though erotica is the great subtext to our lives, and as Wilde himself said, “One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.’” Or would you prefer Federico Garcia Lorca’s “the day we stop resisting our instincts, we’ll have learned how to live.”

Either way, the 2002 collection is all yours. Tuck into it, you dirty sods.