Mr. Know-It-All, page 21
All at once, we were peaking full tilt. “I’m tripping balls!” Frankie hollered with a big grin on his face. And he was dead-on. So were Mink and I. Suddenly the seascape before us came alive, rolling, pulsating, hallucinations coming toward you like footage of the ground undulating in an earthquake. Every sparkle of the moon on the water turned into pinwheels and prisms of pop-art beauty. Boats speeding at us suddenly disappeared. The sky lit up: shooting stars, fireworks, colors flashing (mostly red), a planetarium of lunacy beyond compare. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! it hit but none of us was freaked for one second. This stuff was strong, we all realized, maybe stronger than what we had had as teens. Definitely pure. Right out of Timothy Leary’s asshole. No wonder he had his cremated ashes blasted into space. We had exploded too! And amazingly, the waves of hallucinations were hitting all three of us at the exact same time. The strobing colors and throbbing shapes may have been different inside our heads, yet we seemed to “see” the same forms of intense LSD visions together.
Yet we felt calm. In awe. The cinematic hallucinations were straight out of vintage LSD movies such as The Trip, Easy Rider, and Hallucination Generation, only they weren’t cheesy or funny; they were explosive and classic like in Taking Woodstock, which includes the best LSD cinematic scene so far in movie history, in my opinion. In the sixties we said, “Wow!” But this time around it was “Whoa!” We responded with wonder to the exaggerated and chemically altered universe that had us huddling in stunned amazement. This was fucking fun! There’s a clip on YouTube from the fifties where a doctor interviews a research subject hours after she has ingested LSD. “If you can’t see it,” she struggles to explain, reaching out into the air in front of her, “you’ll never know it. I feel sorry for you!” We felt the same.
When we moved back inside my garret-like apartment, our trip got even more intense. The knotty-pine walls and ceilings came alive for me, sliding, pulsing. The little holes in the wood became like a chorus—shining beams of light down on us and singing songs to Frankie and Mink like the Chipmunks (even Alvin came along on LSD!). Every little framed picture on my walls was melting, becoming animated, performing for me. A postcard invitation for an art show, Paul Swan: The Most Beautiful Man in the World, lit up and blinked, begging to be noticed above the others. A recent stunning but blousy self-portrait of Nan Goldin, dressed in a bra, pulling down her slacks over her middle-aged stomach, which I’d clipped from a magazine, winked at me, started pulsating, split into fragments, and began twirling. A photograph of a very young Cy Twombly revolved in its frame, dissolved in and out, and changed from black-and-white into color. The bouquet of lilies on the table grew in size almost comically. All perspective was gone. I felt like The Incredible Shrinking Man happily reunited with Audrey II, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. The fragrance was almost overpowering. Years of smoking cigarettes had erased my sense of smell, and it barely came back when I gave it up decades ago. But on LSD, I was Francine Fishpaw in Polyester, completely overloaded with a superdeveloped sense of smell.
The music I’d played on my first trip still worked well today. Dionne Warwick, I love you! Divine’s lip-synching ghost was happily celebrated and conjured up on the “Once in a Lifetime” cut from Dionne’s Here I Am album. Fellini: your soundtracks are still the perfect accompaniment to LSD—especially the Juliet of the Spirits CD. And, lo and behold, that corny, ridiculous score from Born Free soars again and can trigger endless bouts of hysterical laughter when you’re tripping. The three of us howled so hard singing along that we, too, “roared like a lion,” just like the lyrics. I got “launched,” as Frankie called it when I often started ranting happily about something I feel strongly about when high, and went into a whole acid-induced rap on how Frankie reminded me of Little Ricky Ricardo playing the conga drum on I Love Lucy. Not sure exactly what triggered that nonsensical babble, but it was enough to send me into further bursts of hysterical cackling. If anyone had come over for a visit, they would have thought they’d stumbled into a mental institution. Thank God we didn’t have a guide. They might have brought us down. Or called an ambulance.
We never once mentioned the possibility of going out. I’m not sure that would even have been possible. The thought of facing the Bear Week celebration in this state of mind was beyond even our perverted imaginations. Just sitting here with Mink and sharing this fabulously fractured night was such a wonderful high. I’m sad for people who don’t have old friends. Audiences have said how they love growing old with Mink on-screen in our movies, and I’m even luckier to do so in real life. Fifty years of rebellion was bringing Mink and me together once again. Plus the fact we could be “bad” influences on young people (Frankie) was kind of nostalgic. We weren’t juvenile delinquents anymore, we were finally mature multiple maniacs.
Frankie and I had had some wild “Friday nights” out carousing in the bars in Provincetown, but this was definitely the best one ever. Frankie looked so beautiful to me tripping, not in a leering or sexual way, just aesthetically; his gestures, his posture, his young body moving about so elegantly on acid. I realized Frankie is just about perfect.
I did forget how to do certain things. I couldn’t clear the table of empty glasses. Frankie couldn’t figure out how to get ice out of the freezer. Mink and Frankie both smoked a little pot during the trip, which surprised me because pot does anything but relax me in normal circumstances. Nobody seemed to see the irony of their using that pipe I’ve had for years, the life-size gold-plated revolver one where you stick the wrong end of the gun in your mouth and light the grass on top and inhale.
I had put off looking in the mirror up until now, but I finally did so and, hey, I looked fine. I had a suntan. Urinating was weird though. Taking out your penis felt like a ridiculous chore you wished you could take a permanent vacation from. We certainly didn’t see God, as Mink had earlier feared, but we did see a renewed, exaggerated universe that proved anything could be out there just waiting to be discovered. Never once did I think of picking up the tape recorder or the legal pads and pens I had laid out to document our trip. I didn’t have to wonder if I’d remember wonder.
“Peaking” lasted about six or seven hours. We sat back outside, and while we were still hallucinating (the moon somehow hovered directly above the Pilgrim Monument, vibrating up and down like a Silly Putty prophylactic before sliding down over the top with ease), we started to come down a little. I realized I hadn’t worried about one thing since the trip started, but I did wonder if the blaring music was now being heard by the neighbors. I also didn’t understand why not one person was on the beach at 3:00 A.M. taking photos of the beauty we saw. Were they blind? Oh, well, it didn’t matter. We were just so happy to be alive and together. Nobody was thinking about being in control. We were so calm. The birds landing on the incoming tide out front seemed to be performing just for us, especially the lone blue heron that morphed into a cartoonlike old man as we watched him trolling for minnows. The nearby sandbar seemed to be in the exact same shape as a whale’s head. Yep, it actually was groovy!
Way in the distance, day started to break, and as we descended back to earth (those speeding-boat hallucinations were the last to go—Mink kept seeing them, too), we relaxed even further. Frankie admitted he had been so nervous about taking this trip that he had been waking up all week every morning in a panic worrying about it. Mink said she purposely hadn’t dwelled on it during the eleven and a half hours it took for her to drive here from Baltimore in summer vacation traffic. If I’d known beforehand how strong our doses were going to be, I would have been worried, but now I felt the way I did when I got the last ride on my cross-country hitchhiking trip a few years back—relieved and content. I had made it. But there was absolutely no reason to ever do it again.
The sun came up. A beautiful morning in Provincetown. The landscape was almost back to normal; the seascape had switched off from the LSD job of entertaining us. Mink felt fine to walk back to Chan’s, and Frankie was clearheaded enough to drive back to Truro. I walked them both out to the street, and thank God, we saw no one—our bug-eyed happiness might have been off-putting to anyone on a “walk of shame” home after a night of wild casual sex. We hugged. We felt safer than ever.
I walked back upstairs and sat down, more serene than I’d felt in years. There was no reentry or hangover like I remember from my youth. My back didn’t even hurt much. I was tired but not depleted. I texted my boyfriend that I was fine, and he seemed glad to hear it but not overly concerned. I knew my assistants, Susan and Trish, had mixed feelings about this whole LSD idea. They had researched much of the material in the first part of this chapter and had been tight-lipped about the second part—me actually taking it. I let them know I was home free. “Really glad it was so pure,” Trish texted back. “Glad you didn’t fly off a roof” and “I just hope you don’t experience any aftershock” and “I’m glad you’re OK,” the more traditional Susan responded right away. Pat Moran and her husband, Chuck, were relieved, too, but Pat couldn’t help scolding back, “Hope it’s not a habit.” I didn’t even have to take those “in-case” pills my shrink had given me, and when I told him I was fine, he said he’d like to take LSD again himself! I let my dealers know that they had done a great job and weren’t going to be blamed for any mental meltdowns. “You are going to reinvent the market for LSD,” one half of the team joked. Well, I don’t know about that.
My mom always used to be horrified when she’d read interviews with me in the seventies where I’d say, “LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today.” “Don’t tell young people that!” she’d beg. I’m not. If you didn’t take LSD back then, you’re probably not brave or insane enough to take it today. Why would you? You’re busy with your new designer drugs, virtual reality headsets, and DJ-ing your way into becoming a billionaire. But senior citizens? Yes! You’re stuck. Do what Mr. Know-It-All tells you to do and take LSD now. Be placid on acid. Turn on, don’t yawn! Tune in and win! Drop out and shout out, “I’m proud to take LSD at seventy!” Would my mom from beyond the grave now update her plea? Will I hear her spookily scolding voice whispering in the wind like in a James Purdy novel? Am I having a flashback or did I just hear her plead, “Don’t tell old people that!” with a concerned urgency? It’s too late, Mom, I just did.
ONE-TRACK MIND
OK, if you ever write a book, you must have a dirty chapter. Here’s mine. I feel sorry for young people today because they missed the wild sex years before AIDS ruined everything. The promiscuity that was so widespread and accepted in the sixties and seventies will never come back in the lifetime of anyone who is reading this book no matter how long it stays in print. Yeah, I know about the high-end Eyes Wide Shut–type hetero sex parties that take place in fancy mansions these days, and the young queers are fucking like rabbits again on PrEP medication, but it’s still hard to imagine that it was once normal (at least in my world) to have sex with a different person (sometimes more) every night of the week. Plus you could do it in public.
That’s right, in public. I’ve had sex watching The Blue Angel at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City and made out with a male inside the Crookedest Man’s House in the Enchanted Village children’s theme park outside Baltimore. In a truck that pulled over right inside Manhattan after exiting the Holland Tunnel. In a graveyard, on the beach. On lawns, inside peep shows. In cars. Men’s rooms. Parks. Even in a real dump. All gay men from my generation did the same things, or worse.
The most radical thing you can say these days is “I still love sex!” But you should. A robust sex life does not have to be stopped because of political correctness. You can still be horny, act on it, and not be a pig. The easiest way to position yourself in today’s touchy, not-feely times is to pick a specialty sex act early on. And just like women in Baltimore who still wear the same hairdo they did in high school, no matter what their age, stick with it. You’ll never get anywhere defining yourself sexually in the crowded field of the missionary position. So old hat, so traditional, so your parents. Better to concentrate on another sex act and excel at it.
I’d get specific if I were you. “The first thing I tell a male partner,” a female friend confided to me, is that “they must go down on me. That is nonnegotiable.” She had the right idea. Don’t pussyfoot around, lay down the law. “So what if you can’t get it up,” another woman I know told an impotent male partner, “you’ve got a mouth, don’t you?” Oral sex is the way to go. Choose a side and become an expert. It’s just as challenging to be good at getting oral sex as it is to give it. Shaken not stirred. Eaten in, not out. Soon potential sexual partners will hear of your specialty, and if they are on the other end of the oral stick, your good word of mouth (so to speak) will pay off.
Oral sex should be included in every marriage vow. But not simultaneously. The sixty-nine position has always seemed awkward to me plus vertically discriminating if both parties are not the same height. You can’t concentrate. Please your partner or get pleased. You can dedicate yourself to one oral side like a Democrat or a Republican or go back and forth like an Independent. Even switch sides for a surprise attack.
Oral sex can then wander into unexplored areas. Shrimping (toe sucking) is safe, you can’t get pregnant, and licking those little piggies as they go wee, wee, wee all the way home adds a certain surreal quality to any mouth adventure. Rimming has always been unmentionable in some circles. But I know a few enthusiasts who swear this is sex at its most intimate. Was Dennis Cooper wrong to write that the asshole can be thought of as “an alternative face”? “That’s why the good Lord placed the anus where it is on your body, so you can’t look at it,” a Christian family doctor explained to me as a teen in the middle of a routine proctology exam. “Then why did he invent mirrors?” I wanted to ask, but I hadn’t yet learned to question authority with quite as much sass as I did later in life.
Militant rimmers are the Jehovah’s Witnesses of anilingus. Always knocking on the door of the asshole but accepting if turned away. Real anal sex with a penis involved is more plundering and fascist, and unless you’re a young person with an eager and energetic asshole, it’s always kind of disgusting. Scat is whack no matter which end of the rear entry you find yourself on. Dingleberries are never erotic, and anyone who shaves his rectum is an asshole, in my book. Butt fucking is messy, uncomfortable at first, awkward, and prone to accidents. Logjams. Mudslides. Gravy. Who wants to put his dick in a squishy turd? Yes, you can take the endless precautions to clean yourself out, but aren’t enemas more appropriate before a colonoscopy than a coupling? Plus aren’t you supposed to wear one of those ugly, wrinkly rubbers that traps cum in that unsightly dam of plastic to protect yourself against AIDS? Yechhh. How do you throw that out without stopping up your toilet? Horrifying your garbageman. A compost pile is disgusting enough without this! I say assholes are for shitting, then cleaning, followed by licking, but never fucking. Accept that and you’ll be a happier, sexier individual.
Autosexuals, the new pro-masturbation militant group, believe you only need yourself to be sexually satisfied. And since you know how to work your own equipment better than anyone else, why have any partners at all? One is not a lonely number to these whackers. They’ve added a new voice to the sexual chorus by reasoning that sex with anyone else makes you unfaithful to yourself.
Texting is the new way to have phone sex, but I still don’t understand the subtleties of this masturbation aid. Is misspelling the new way to be butch? Bad grammar equals rough trade? And Skype? How could anybody send back and forth dirty pictures of each other on this app? Never has there been an uglier camera angle or worse lighting than on Skype.
I may have a one-track mind but I have limits. Water sports are better to imagine than actually do. S&M looks silly at the beach, and besides, young people today refuse to feel guilty over sex. Wearing some ridiculous biker Halloween costume (unless you’re in the Tom of Finland cult) and getting spanked or tied up in public is not on their menu of how to have a good time. Adult babies are beneath contempt, and I’m not marching for these fuckers anywhere. “Feeders” and “gainers” try to make eating disorders sexy, but give me a Boney Maroney any day. Even bears are getting so huge these days. Is fat suddenly the new butch? I pretend to get it but I’m not sure I always do.
Gay bars are vanishing. Some queer historians mourn their passing but not me. It seems like actual progress. Young gay kids don’t want to be ghettoized. They want to hang out with other cool kids of any sexual persuasion of either sex. While I’ve always said I don’t have nostalgia and think what comes tomorrow is way more interesting than what came before, I do think a few of those sex pits from the past deserve to be remembered. Some were so appalling that I get misty-eyed just thinking of them.
Hellfire was my all-time favorite. Built underground around an abandoned old subway platform beneath Ninth Avenue, this dungeon-like sex club was the first to cater to gay and straight perverts alike, mixing together, watching, whacking, blowing, fucking, or just plain voyeuring like happy sex tourists. It was all the rage for a while. A fat woman in a nurse’s outfit and surrounded by enema supplies collected the admission price (and I seem to remember that women were free). The author Jerzy Kosinski seemed to be there every night (until he committed suicide). I even once saw Angela Lansbury checking out the scene. You could be talking to an uptown museum curator about the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and a dick would pop through a glory hole next to you and knock your drink out of your hand. You’d both chuckle, move down the bar to a safer location, and maybe switch the subject to Samuel Beckett. Sharon Niesp and her girlfriend, Cookie, had a fight in Hellfire once and it got physical and one hit the other over the head with a chair. A crowd of masturbators quickly gathered around them, watching the action and jerking off in a frenzy of sexual glee. There was Pop, as we called him, an elderly man who could pass as anybody’s long-lost uncle at a family reunion. Every night he strung himself up in a sling, totally nude, with a dildo up his ass, while he smiled and waved to the bar crowd as if he were perched atop a float in the Easter parade.
Yet we felt calm. In awe. The cinematic hallucinations were straight out of vintage LSD movies such as The Trip, Easy Rider, and Hallucination Generation, only they weren’t cheesy or funny; they were explosive and classic like in Taking Woodstock, which includes the best LSD cinematic scene so far in movie history, in my opinion. In the sixties we said, “Wow!” But this time around it was “Whoa!” We responded with wonder to the exaggerated and chemically altered universe that had us huddling in stunned amazement. This was fucking fun! There’s a clip on YouTube from the fifties where a doctor interviews a research subject hours after she has ingested LSD. “If you can’t see it,” she struggles to explain, reaching out into the air in front of her, “you’ll never know it. I feel sorry for you!” We felt the same.
When we moved back inside my garret-like apartment, our trip got even more intense. The knotty-pine walls and ceilings came alive for me, sliding, pulsing. The little holes in the wood became like a chorus—shining beams of light down on us and singing songs to Frankie and Mink like the Chipmunks (even Alvin came along on LSD!). Every little framed picture on my walls was melting, becoming animated, performing for me. A postcard invitation for an art show, Paul Swan: The Most Beautiful Man in the World, lit up and blinked, begging to be noticed above the others. A recent stunning but blousy self-portrait of Nan Goldin, dressed in a bra, pulling down her slacks over her middle-aged stomach, which I’d clipped from a magazine, winked at me, started pulsating, split into fragments, and began twirling. A photograph of a very young Cy Twombly revolved in its frame, dissolved in and out, and changed from black-and-white into color. The bouquet of lilies on the table grew in size almost comically. All perspective was gone. I felt like The Incredible Shrinking Man happily reunited with Audrey II, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. The fragrance was almost overpowering. Years of smoking cigarettes had erased my sense of smell, and it barely came back when I gave it up decades ago. But on LSD, I was Francine Fishpaw in Polyester, completely overloaded with a superdeveloped sense of smell.
The music I’d played on my first trip still worked well today. Dionne Warwick, I love you! Divine’s lip-synching ghost was happily celebrated and conjured up on the “Once in a Lifetime” cut from Dionne’s Here I Am album. Fellini: your soundtracks are still the perfect accompaniment to LSD—especially the Juliet of the Spirits CD. And, lo and behold, that corny, ridiculous score from Born Free soars again and can trigger endless bouts of hysterical laughter when you’re tripping. The three of us howled so hard singing along that we, too, “roared like a lion,” just like the lyrics. I got “launched,” as Frankie called it when I often started ranting happily about something I feel strongly about when high, and went into a whole acid-induced rap on how Frankie reminded me of Little Ricky Ricardo playing the conga drum on I Love Lucy. Not sure exactly what triggered that nonsensical babble, but it was enough to send me into further bursts of hysterical cackling. If anyone had come over for a visit, they would have thought they’d stumbled into a mental institution. Thank God we didn’t have a guide. They might have brought us down. Or called an ambulance.
We never once mentioned the possibility of going out. I’m not sure that would even have been possible. The thought of facing the Bear Week celebration in this state of mind was beyond even our perverted imaginations. Just sitting here with Mink and sharing this fabulously fractured night was such a wonderful high. I’m sad for people who don’t have old friends. Audiences have said how they love growing old with Mink on-screen in our movies, and I’m even luckier to do so in real life. Fifty years of rebellion was bringing Mink and me together once again. Plus the fact we could be “bad” influences on young people (Frankie) was kind of nostalgic. We weren’t juvenile delinquents anymore, we were finally mature multiple maniacs.
Frankie and I had had some wild “Friday nights” out carousing in the bars in Provincetown, but this was definitely the best one ever. Frankie looked so beautiful to me tripping, not in a leering or sexual way, just aesthetically; his gestures, his posture, his young body moving about so elegantly on acid. I realized Frankie is just about perfect.
I did forget how to do certain things. I couldn’t clear the table of empty glasses. Frankie couldn’t figure out how to get ice out of the freezer. Mink and Frankie both smoked a little pot during the trip, which surprised me because pot does anything but relax me in normal circumstances. Nobody seemed to see the irony of their using that pipe I’ve had for years, the life-size gold-plated revolver one where you stick the wrong end of the gun in your mouth and light the grass on top and inhale.
I had put off looking in the mirror up until now, but I finally did so and, hey, I looked fine. I had a suntan. Urinating was weird though. Taking out your penis felt like a ridiculous chore you wished you could take a permanent vacation from. We certainly didn’t see God, as Mink had earlier feared, but we did see a renewed, exaggerated universe that proved anything could be out there just waiting to be discovered. Never once did I think of picking up the tape recorder or the legal pads and pens I had laid out to document our trip. I didn’t have to wonder if I’d remember wonder.
“Peaking” lasted about six or seven hours. We sat back outside, and while we were still hallucinating (the moon somehow hovered directly above the Pilgrim Monument, vibrating up and down like a Silly Putty prophylactic before sliding down over the top with ease), we started to come down a little. I realized I hadn’t worried about one thing since the trip started, but I did wonder if the blaring music was now being heard by the neighbors. I also didn’t understand why not one person was on the beach at 3:00 A.M. taking photos of the beauty we saw. Were they blind? Oh, well, it didn’t matter. We were just so happy to be alive and together. Nobody was thinking about being in control. We were so calm. The birds landing on the incoming tide out front seemed to be performing just for us, especially the lone blue heron that morphed into a cartoonlike old man as we watched him trolling for minnows. The nearby sandbar seemed to be in the exact same shape as a whale’s head. Yep, it actually was groovy!
Way in the distance, day started to break, and as we descended back to earth (those speeding-boat hallucinations were the last to go—Mink kept seeing them, too), we relaxed even further. Frankie admitted he had been so nervous about taking this trip that he had been waking up all week every morning in a panic worrying about it. Mink said she purposely hadn’t dwelled on it during the eleven and a half hours it took for her to drive here from Baltimore in summer vacation traffic. If I’d known beforehand how strong our doses were going to be, I would have been worried, but now I felt the way I did when I got the last ride on my cross-country hitchhiking trip a few years back—relieved and content. I had made it. But there was absolutely no reason to ever do it again.
The sun came up. A beautiful morning in Provincetown. The landscape was almost back to normal; the seascape had switched off from the LSD job of entertaining us. Mink felt fine to walk back to Chan’s, and Frankie was clearheaded enough to drive back to Truro. I walked them both out to the street, and thank God, we saw no one—our bug-eyed happiness might have been off-putting to anyone on a “walk of shame” home after a night of wild casual sex. We hugged. We felt safer than ever.
I walked back upstairs and sat down, more serene than I’d felt in years. There was no reentry or hangover like I remember from my youth. My back didn’t even hurt much. I was tired but not depleted. I texted my boyfriend that I was fine, and he seemed glad to hear it but not overly concerned. I knew my assistants, Susan and Trish, had mixed feelings about this whole LSD idea. They had researched much of the material in the first part of this chapter and had been tight-lipped about the second part—me actually taking it. I let them know I was home free. “Really glad it was so pure,” Trish texted back. “Glad you didn’t fly off a roof” and “I just hope you don’t experience any aftershock” and “I’m glad you’re OK,” the more traditional Susan responded right away. Pat Moran and her husband, Chuck, were relieved, too, but Pat couldn’t help scolding back, “Hope it’s not a habit.” I didn’t even have to take those “in-case” pills my shrink had given me, and when I told him I was fine, he said he’d like to take LSD again himself! I let my dealers know that they had done a great job and weren’t going to be blamed for any mental meltdowns. “You are going to reinvent the market for LSD,” one half of the team joked. Well, I don’t know about that.
My mom always used to be horrified when she’d read interviews with me in the seventies where I’d say, “LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today.” “Don’t tell young people that!” she’d beg. I’m not. If you didn’t take LSD back then, you’re probably not brave or insane enough to take it today. Why would you? You’re busy with your new designer drugs, virtual reality headsets, and DJ-ing your way into becoming a billionaire. But senior citizens? Yes! You’re stuck. Do what Mr. Know-It-All tells you to do and take LSD now. Be placid on acid. Turn on, don’t yawn! Tune in and win! Drop out and shout out, “I’m proud to take LSD at seventy!” Would my mom from beyond the grave now update her plea? Will I hear her spookily scolding voice whispering in the wind like in a James Purdy novel? Am I having a flashback or did I just hear her plead, “Don’t tell old people that!” with a concerned urgency? It’s too late, Mom, I just did.
ONE-TRACK MIND
OK, if you ever write a book, you must have a dirty chapter. Here’s mine. I feel sorry for young people today because they missed the wild sex years before AIDS ruined everything. The promiscuity that was so widespread and accepted in the sixties and seventies will never come back in the lifetime of anyone who is reading this book no matter how long it stays in print. Yeah, I know about the high-end Eyes Wide Shut–type hetero sex parties that take place in fancy mansions these days, and the young queers are fucking like rabbits again on PrEP medication, but it’s still hard to imagine that it was once normal (at least in my world) to have sex with a different person (sometimes more) every night of the week. Plus you could do it in public.
That’s right, in public. I’ve had sex watching The Blue Angel at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City and made out with a male inside the Crookedest Man’s House in the Enchanted Village children’s theme park outside Baltimore. In a truck that pulled over right inside Manhattan after exiting the Holland Tunnel. In a graveyard, on the beach. On lawns, inside peep shows. In cars. Men’s rooms. Parks. Even in a real dump. All gay men from my generation did the same things, or worse.
The most radical thing you can say these days is “I still love sex!” But you should. A robust sex life does not have to be stopped because of political correctness. You can still be horny, act on it, and not be a pig. The easiest way to position yourself in today’s touchy, not-feely times is to pick a specialty sex act early on. And just like women in Baltimore who still wear the same hairdo they did in high school, no matter what their age, stick with it. You’ll never get anywhere defining yourself sexually in the crowded field of the missionary position. So old hat, so traditional, so your parents. Better to concentrate on another sex act and excel at it.
I’d get specific if I were you. “The first thing I tell a male partner,” a female friend confided to me, is that “they must go down on me. That is nonnegotiable.” She had the right idea. Don’t pussyfoot around, lay down the law. “So what if you can’t get it up,” another woman I know told an impotent male partner, “you’ve got a mouth, don’t you?” Oral sex is the way to go. Choose a side and become an expert. It’s just as challenging to be good at getting oral sex as it is to give it. Shaken not stirred. Eaten in, not out. Soon potential sexual partners will hear of your specialty, and if they are on the other end of the oral stick, your good word of mouth (so to speak) will pay off.
Oral sex should be included in every marriage vow. But not simultaneously. The sixty-nine position has always seemed awkward to me plus vertically discriminating if both parties are not the same height. You can’t concentrate. Please your partner or get pleased. You can dedicate yourself to one oral side like a Democrat or a Republican or go back and forth like an Independent. Even switch sides for a surprise attack.
Oral sex can then wander into unexplored areas. Shrimping (toe sucking) is safe, you can’t get pregnant, and licking those little piggies as they go wee, wee, wee all the way home adds a certain surreal quality to any mouth adventure. Rimming has always been unmentionable in some circles. But I know a few enthusiasts who swear this is sex at its most intimate. Was Dennis Cooper wrong to write that the asshole can be thought of as “an alternative face”? “That’s why the good Lord placed the anus where it is on your body, so you can’t look at it,” a Christian family doctor explained to me as a teen in the middle of a routine proctology exam. “Then why did he invent mirrors?” I wanted to ask, but I hadn’t yet learned to question authority with quite as much sass as I did later in life.
Militant rimmers are the Jehovah’s Witnesses of anilingus. Always knocking on the door of the asshole but accepting if turned away. Real anal sex with a penis involved is more plundering and fascist, and unless you’re a young person with an eager and energetic asshole, it’s always kind of disgusting. Scat is whack no matter which end of the rear entry you find yourself on. Dingleberries are never erotic, and anyone who shaves his rectum is an asshole, in my book. Butt fucking is messy, uncomfortable at first, awkward, and prone to accidents. Logjams. Mudslides. Gravy. Who wants to put his dick in a squishy turd? Yes, you can take the endless precautions to clean yourself out, but aren’t enemas more appropriate before a colonoscopy than a coupling? Plus aren’t you supposed to wear one of those ugly, wrinkly rubbers that traps cum in that unsightly dam of plastic to protect yourself against AIDS? Yechhh. How do you throw that out without stopping up your toilet? Horrifying your garbageman. A compost pile is disgusting enough without this! I say assholes are for shitting, then cleaning, followed by licking, but never fucking. Accept that and you’ll be a happier, sexier individual.
Autosexuals, the new pro-masturbation militant group, believe you only need yourself to be sexually satisfied. And since you know how to work your own equipment better than anyone else, why have any partners at all? One is not a lonely number to these whackers. They’ve added a new voice to the sexual chorus by reasoning that sex with anyone else makes you unfaithful to yourself.
Texting is the new way to have phone sex, but I still don’t understand the subtleties of this masturbation aid. Is misspelling the new way to be butch? Bad grammar equals rough trade? And Skype? How could anybody send back and forth dirty pictures of each other on this app? Never has there been an uglier camera angle or worse lighting than on Skype.
I may have a one-track mind but I have limits. Water sports are better to imagine than actually do. S&M looks silly at the beach, and besides, young people today refuse to feel guilty over sex. Wearing some ridiculous biker Halloween costume (unless you’re in the Tom of Finland cult) and getting spanked or tied up in public is not on their menu of how to have a good time. Adult babies are beneath contempt, and I’m not marching for these fuckers anywhere. “Feeders” and “gainers” try to make eating disorders sexy, but give me a Boney Maroney any day. Even bears are getting so huge these days. Is fat suddenly the new butch? I pretend to get it but I’m not sure I always do.
Gay bars are vanishing. Some queer historians mourn their passing but not me. It seems like actual progress. Young gay kids don’t want to be ghettoized. They want to hang out with other cool kids of any sexual persuasion of either sex. While I’ve always said I don’t have nostalgia and think what comes tomorrow is way more interesting than what came before, I do think a few of those sex pits from the past deserve to be remembered. Some were so appalling that I get misty-eyed just thinking of them.
Hellfire was my all-time favorite. Built underground around an abandoned old subway platform beneath Ninth Avenue, this dungeon-like sex club was the first to cater to gay and straight perverts alike, mixing together, watching, whacking, blowing, fucking, or just plain voyeuring like happy sex tourists. It was all the rage for a while. A fat woman in a nurse’s outfit and surrounded by enema supplies collected the admission price (and I seem to remember that women were free). The author Jerzy Kosinski seemed to be there every night (until he committed suicide). I even once saw Angela Lansbury checking out the scene. You could be talking to an uptown museum curator about the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and a dick would pop through a glory hole next to you and knock your drink out of your hand. You’d both chuckle, move down the bar to a safer location, and maybe switch the subject to Samuel Beckett. Sharon Niesp and her girlfriend, Cookie, had a fight in Hellfire once and it got physical and one hit the other over the head with a chair. A crowd of masturbators quickly gathered around them, watching the action and jerking off in a frenzy of sexual glee. There was Pop, as we called him, an elderly man who could pass as anybody’s long-lost uncle at a family reunion. Every night he strung himself up in a sling, totally nude, with a dildo up his ass, while he smiled and waved to the bar crowd as if he were perched atop a float in the Easter parade.
